What do you think?
Rate this book
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.
From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing.
Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever.
Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.
Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible—if long-forgotten—federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.)
It’s a book rich with stories from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent’s narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine; New England fishing communities that gave up fishing for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.
Last Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly told. It stands as the most complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent’s rank as a major American writer.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2010
About the author
Daniel Okrent
16 books74 followersDaniel Okrent's 40-year career has encompassed nearly every form of mass media. In book publishing, he was an editor at Knopf, Viking, and Harcourt. In magazines, he founded the award-winning New England Monthly and was chief editor of the monthly Life. In newspapers, he was the first public editor of the New York Times. On television, he has appeared as an expert commentator on many network shows, and talked more than any other talking head in Ken Burns's Baseball. In film, he was featured in the documentaries Wordplay and Silly Little Game, appeared in a speaking role in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and had what he calls "a mumbling role" in Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax. Online, he headed Time Inc.'s internet efforts in the late 1990's, and has recently given in to the dubious charms of Facebook.
But all that, he says, was either preparation for (or distraction from) what he most wanted to do: write books. Beginning with Nine Innings in 1985, and proceeding through the 2010 publication of Last Call, Okrent has been (wrote novelist Kevin Baker in Publishers Weekly) "one of our most interesting and eclectic writers of nonfiction over the past 25 years." In addition to the books featured on this site, he was also co-author with Steve Wulf of Baseball Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 1987), and author of The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), currently out-of-print.
But all that, he says, was either preparation for (or distraction from) what he most wanted to do: write books. Beginning with Nine Innings in 1985, and proceeding through the 2010 publication of Last Call, Okrent has been (wrote novelist Kevin Baker in Publishers Weekly) "one of our most interesting and eclectic writers of nonfiction over the past 25 years." In addition to the books featured on this site, he was also co-author with Steve Wulf of Baseball Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 1987), and author of The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), currently out-of-print.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 882 reviews
September 4, 2020
“How did it happen? How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World? How did they condemn to extinction what was, at the very moment of its death, the fifth-largest industry in the nation? How did they append to their most sacred document 112 words that knew only one precedent in American history? With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t own slaves, and you couldn’t buy alcohol…”
- Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Erfurt, Germany. Summer 1998. I am on a month-long tour with my high school class. I am in a bar, about to have the first drink of my life. I am 18 years old, a stickler for the rules. But I have found a loophole. The Underage American Tourist in Europe Clause. I lift the drink to my lips. It burns something bad. I do not know what it is, because I am not an all-star in my German class, and am unable to translate the word. It does not matter. I take another sip. And then another. I turn to the girl next to me, and ask her whether she ever wonders about how weird the word wienerschnitzel is. It turns out she has wondered that very thing. Soon we are making out.
My life changed that day.
I was intoxicated after three drinks, and then got lost on the way back to the hostel. The next day I had a headache, of which I was quite proud. Booze, magical booze, allowed me to be the person I wanted to be. My shyness disappeared, my social anxiety put at ease. In a crowd, I suddenly felt emboldened to participate, and to all the things that I'd stored up in my head since birth, from lame pick-up lines to deeply-held beliefs about late-stage capitalism.
I hope it doesn't sound too problematic when I say I love to drink. I think getting responsibly drunk is one of the greatest things ever, though it hurts more now than it used to, and has a vastly diminishing marginal utility. In my experience, it has greased romantic wheels, engendered hilarious debates, and provided the basic ingredient for the game “I Never,” which is the most useful tool devised by God to learn incredible, nasty, surprising, and horrible things about your friends. Long past my high school days, I have come to really enjoy the soothing sip of wine at the end of the day, or a bunch of beers at a baseball game, or a whiskey with a steak.
Of course, I’m not oblivious to the other side of booze. Over the years, in fact, it has taken up equal residence in my mind. As an attorney, I’ve seen many lives destroyed by alcoholism. Personally, I’ve had people close to me get injured, and killed, in situations that were made dangerously lethal by alcohol. Beyond that, drunks are a menace on the roads. Alcohol fuels domestic violence. Imbibing makes it hard to get to work in the morning. Sometimes it causes you to throw up for 24 straight hours. Prolonged usage can damage your liver.
The dark side of alcohol led to the Temperance Movement, which began way back in the 1840s. It was spearheaded by women, and for good reason. Though they didn’t have the right to vote, they were getting tired of pernicious effect that liquor had on their lives: husbands who drank away salaries, then came home in furious tempers.
It’s hard to overstate how much Americans used to drink. Liquor was cheaper than tea, safer than water, and used as currency in many western States during the years of the early republic. In the 1830s, Americans were drinking, per capita, 7 gallons of pure alcohol. Now that’s a lot of Do you have a Band-Aid, because I just scraped my knee falling in love with you.
Like most things in this life, there is a tradeoff in one’s ability to have a drink. More than that, it exemplifies the tension of personal freedom, and how far that freedom extends.
Daniel Okrent’s Last Call is the story of the period in American life – 1920 to 1933 – when the anti-liquor forces won the day. That period, following the ratification of the 18th Amendment is known as Prohibition.
(As Okrent points out, it is one of two Amendments, the other being the 13th Amendment, that serve as checks on individual freedom, rather than checks on governmental power. The difference between the two Amendments, though, is almost startling. One was a actually a monumental act of freedom, while the other allowed for the incredibly broad enforcement of a narrow police power).
Most of my Prohibition knowledge is filtered through gangster movies and gangster television shows. In other words, everything I know about Prohibition can be distilled (word play!) into one sentence: Kevin Costner arrested Al Capone.
Okrent’s story isn’t about that at all. Indeed, if you are looking for gangsters and Tommy-gunplay and Untouchables, you should probably stick to media you have undoubtedly already digested. There are maybe three mentions of Al Capone, two mentions of Eliot Ness, and only brief, passing glimpses at the bloody gang warfare that ensued once legal supply ended, but insistent demand remained high.
Instead, with Last Call, you get a broad yet brief survey of the ascension, execution, and fall of a political movement.
In my opinion, it is the rise of the Prohibition movement that is the most interesting, and the most pertinent to today’s politics. It involved a lot of strange bedfellows willing to come together to do one thing, for different reasons. For instance, you had women, who were on the wrong end of drunken husbands, teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan, who were terrified at the idea of black people and Catholics drinking.
To make Prohibition possible, these disparate minorities cleared some incredible hurdles. First, they had to pass the 17th Amendment, which created the income tax, so that the government could suffer the loss of alcohol-tax revenue. Next, they had to stockpile a “dry” Congress. They did this using minority bloc tactics: in close races, the Temperance Movement would vote as one for the dry candidate, thereby swinging close races. In this manner, they were able to ratify a Constitutional Amendment that a simple majority of Americans was opposed to.
(Though Okrent refuses to make any analogies to the present day, the single-issue voting by temperance supporters is similar to today’s pro-life movement. That is, a single-issue voter will vote for a candidate based on nothing else but that issue, no matter what other qualifications the candidate has. In Nebraska, for instance, I heard a candidate for the Registrar of Deeds claim he was pro-life. Really? I care? Because I just want you to register deeds.)
The middle section of the book, while still interesting, is more familiar territory. It demonstrates that Prohibition was an epic farce, unenforceable from inception. It led to the rise of organized crime, the corruption of both local and federal law enforcement, and trampled civil rights (the War on Alcohol began the evisceration of the 4th and 14th Amendment that the War on Drugs has finished). The best/worst part of it is that the government never had any intention of fully enforcing the Volstead Act (the statutes deemed necessary and proper to execute the 18th Amendment). The Prohibition Bureau was chronically underfunded, its agents were not civil servants, and in the early days, the punishment for violations was laughable. (At first, violators could only be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined. The resulting volume of petty criminals ushered into Federal Courts nearly swamped the system, and gave rise to mass plea bargaining. Okrent tells how some bootleggers hired people to go to court for them, plead guilty, and pay the fine).
The final third of the book tells of Prohibition’s unraveling. It’s not a dramatic story, since Prohibition was never really raveled in the first place. The movement to overturn the 18th Amendment was spearheaded not by brewers and distillers, who’d fought so hard against its ratification, but by the super-rich, who thought they could overturn the 17th Amendment if they first got rid of the 18th. (That is, they could get rid of income taxes if they could replace that shortfall with a liquor tax).
Okrent tells this story in a very brisk, wry manner. Last Call is very fast reading. As a survey, it refuses to get bogged down in sticky details. It jumps around a lot, and relies on illuminating anecdotes rather than long narrative arcs.
The most surprising thing I found was Okrent’s light, balanced touch. It’d be very easy to make fun of men like Wayne Wheeler and William Jennings Bryan, who made abstaining from liquor their life’s work. There is, after all, a breathtaking arrogance involved in inserting your moral view into the lives of untold millions, to the extent that you would amend the Constitution to get your way. Still, Okrent avoids that.
Clearly, Okrent feels that Prohibition was a poor choice. (To quote Jeff Goldblum from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, it was “the worst idea in the history of bad ideas”). Yet he writes without any hint of meanness, or with the intellectual superiority that comes with 90 years of hindsight. He mentions, almost bemusedly, the hypocritical “dries” in Congress, who voted for Prohibition while never abstaining themselves, and he notes, dispassionately, the vindictiveness of later dry laws, which made a third conviction under the Volstead Act an automatic life sentence in prison. Despite this kind of teeth-gnashing hypocrisy, Okrent never lectures or critiques; he just tells his story. Even more impressive – as an act of will, I mean – is how he adamantly refuses to draw any parallels to today’s fight over marijuana legalization.
(As an aside: Prohibition played out in a very strange time, just after the convulsion of World War I, and during the economic horrors of the Great Depression. In other words, just when Americans most needed a drink, it was outlawed).
A sign of Okrent’s fairness is the way he shows Prohibition’s upside. Yeah, sure, there were gangs and assassinations and people dying from poisoned liquor. But Prohibition also decreased the per capita consumption of alcohol, led to a legal drinking age, and so forth. And when I say that per capita consumption of alcohol decreased, I meant that it really decreased. To the extent that you can make a plausible argument that Prohibition – for all the harm done to the Constitution, the proper role of government, and a Nation’s respect for its own laws – really changed people’s behavior – and health – for the better.
Last Call avoids preaching and conclusions. Nevertheless, it leaves you with plenty from which to draw lessons from this ill-fated attempt at the mass regulation of personal behavior. One lesson is that good intentions can make bad laws that have unforeseen consequences. Another lesson is that moderation is key. A final lesson is that if you’re going to exercise a freedom, you should do so responsibly. If you have a drink, you should call a cab or an Uber or a friend or your spouse, or you should just walk home, if you can remember the way, or you should just do what I do, and never leave the house to start with.
Instead, I just pour myself a bottle of $3.00 chardonnay, splash in some club soda and ice, and watch a Ken Burns documentary on the couch. If I’m feeling meta, that documentary might be Ken Burns’ adaptation of Last Call.
- Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Erfurt, Germany. Summer 1998. I am on a month-long tour with my high school class. I am in a bar, about to have the first drink of my life. I am 18 years old, a stickler for the rules. But I have found a loophole. The Underage American Tourist in Europe Clause. I lift the drink to my lips. It burns something bad. I do not know what it is, because I am not an all-star in my German class, and am unable to translate the word. It does not matter. I take another sip. And then another. I turn to the girl next to me, and ask her whether she ever wonders about how weird the word wienerschnitzel is. It turns out she has wondered that very thing. Soon we are making out.
My life changed that day.
I was intoxicated after three drinks, and then got lost on the way back to the hostel. The next day I had a headache, of which I was quite proud. Booze, magical booze, allowed me to be the person I wanted to be. My shyness disappeared, my social anxiety put at ease. In a crowd, I suddenly felt emboldened to participate, and to all the things that I'd stored up in my head since birth, from lame pick-up lines to deeply-held beliefs about late-stage capitalism.
I hope it doesn't sound too problematic when I say I love to drink. I think getting responsibly drunk is one of the greatest things ever, though it hurts more now than it used to, and has a vastly diminishing marginal utility. In my experience, it has greased romantic wheels, engendered hilarious debates, and provided the basic ingredient for the game “I Never,” which is the most useful tool devised by God to learn incredible, nasty, surprising, and horrible things about your friends. Long past my high school days, I have come to really enjoy the soothing sip of wine at the end of the day, or a bunch of beers at a baseball game, or a whiskey with a steak.
Of course, I’m not oblivious to the other side of booze. Over the years, in fact, it has taken up equal residence in my mind. As an attorney, I’ve seen many lives destroyed by alcoholism. Personally, I’ve had people close to me get injured, and killed, in situations that were made dangerously lethal by alcohol. Beyond that, drunks are a menace on the roads. Alcohol fuels domestic violence. Imbibing makes it hard to get to work in the morning. Sometimes it causes you to throw up for 24 straight hours. Prolonged usage can damage your liver.
The dark side of alcohol led to the Temperance Movement, which began way back in the 1840s. It was spearheaded by women, and for good reason. Though they didn’t have the right to vote, they were getting tired of pernicious effect that liquor had on their lives: husbands who drank away salaries, then came home in furious tempers.
It’s hard to overstate how much Americans used to drink. Liquor was cheaper than tea, safer than water, and used as currency in many western States during the years of the early republic. In the 1830s, Americans were drinking, per capita, 7 gallons of pure alcohol. Now that’s a lot of Do you have a Band-Aid, because I just scraped my knee falling in love with you.
Like most things in this life, there is a tradeoff in one’s ability to have a drink. More than that, it exemplifies the tension of personal freedom, and how far that freedom extends.
Daniel Okrent’s Last Call is the story of the period in American life – 1920 to 1933 – when the anti-liquor forces won the day. That period, following the ratification of the 18th Amendment is known as Prohibition.
(As Okrent points out, it is one of two Amendments, the other being the 13th Amendment, that serve as checks on individual freedom, rather than checks on governmental power. The difference between the two Amendments, though, is almost startling. One was a actually a monumental act of freedom, while the other allowed for the incredibly broad enforcement of a narrow police power).
Most of my Prohibition knowledge is filtered through gangster movies and gangster television shows. In other words, everything I know about Prohibition can be distilled (word play!) into one sentence: Kevin Costner arrested Al Capone.
Okrent’s story isn’t about that at all. Indeed, if you are looking for gangsters and Tommy-gunplay and Untouchables, you should probably stick to media you have undoubtedly already digested. There are maybe three mentions of Al Capone, two mentions of Eliot Ness, and only brief, passing glimpses at the bloody gang warfare that ensued once legal supply ended, but insistent demand remained high.
Instead, with Last Call, you get a broad yet brief survey of the ascension, execution, and fall of a political movement.
In my opinion, it is the rise of the Prohibition movement that is the most interesting, and the most pertinent to today’s politics. It involved a lot of strange bedfellows willing to come together to do one thing, for different reasons. For instance, you had women, who were on the wrong end of drunken husbands, teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan, who were terrified at the idea of black people and Catholics drinking.
To make Prohibition possible, these disparate minorities cleared some incredible hurdles. First, they had to pass the 17th Amendment, which created the income tax, so that the government could suffer the loss of alcohol-tax revenue. Next, they had to stockpile a “dry” Congress. They did this using minority bloc tactics: in close races, the Temperance Movement would vote as one for the dry candidate, thereby swinging close races. In this manner, they were able to ratify a Constitutional Amendment that a simple majority of Americans was opposed to.
(Though Okrent refuses to make any analogies to the present day, the single-issue voting by temperance supporters is similar to today’s pro-life movement. That is, a single-issue voter will vote for a candidate based on nothing else but that issue, no matter what other qualifications the candidate has. In Nebraska, for instance, I heard a candidate for the Registrar of Deeds claim he was pro-life. Really? I care? Because I just want you to register deeds.)
The middle section of the book, while still interesting, is more familiar territory. It demonstrates that Prohibition was an epic farce, unenforceable from inception. It led to the rise of organized crime, the corruption of both local and federal law enforcement, and trampled civil rights (the War on Alcohol began the evisceration of the 4th and 14th Amendment that the War on Drugs has finished). The best/worst part of it is that the government never had any intention of fully enforcing the Volstead Act (the statutes deemed necessary and proper to execute the 18th Amendment). The Prohibition Bureau was chronically underfunded, its agents were not civil servants, and in the early days, the punishment for violations was laughable. (At first, violators could only be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined. The resulting volume of petty criminals ushered into Federal Courts nearly swamped the system, and gave rise to mass plea bargaining. Okrent tells how some bootleggers hired people to go to court for them, plead guilty, and pay the fine).
The final third of the book tells of Prohibition’s unraveling. It’s not a dramatic story, since Prohibition was never really raveled in the first place. The movement to overturn the 18th Amendment was spearheaded not by brewers and distillers, who’d fought so hard against its ratification, but by the super-rich, who thought they could overturn the 17th Amendment if they first got rid of the 18th. (That is, they could get rid of income taxes if they could replace that shortfall with a liquor tax).
Okrent tells this story in a very brisk, wry manner. Last Call is very fast reading. As a survey, it refuses to get bogged down in sticky details. It jumps around a lot, and relies on illuminating anecdotes rather than long narrative arcs.
The most surprising thing I found was Okrent’s light, balanced touch. It’d be very easy to make fun of men like Wayne Wheeler and William Jennings Bryan, who made abstaining from liquor their life’s work. There is, after all, a breathtaking arrogance involved in inserting your moral view into the lives of untold millions, to the extent that you would amend the Constitution to get your way. Still, Okrent avoids that.
Clearly, Okrent feels that Prohibition was a poor choice. (To quote Jeff Goldblum from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, it was “the worst idea in the history of bad ideas”). Yet he writes without any hint of meanness, or with the intellectual superiority that comes with 90 years of hindsight. He mentions, almost bemusedly, the hypocritical “dries” in Congress, who voted for Prohibition while never abstaining themselves, and he notes, dispassionately, the vindictiveness of later dry laws, which made a third conviction under the Volstead Act an automatic life sentence in prison. Despite this kind of teeth-gnashing hypocrisy, Okrent never lectures or critiques; he just tells his story. Even more impressive – as an act of will, I mean – is how he adamantly refuses to draw any parallels to today’s fight over marijuana legalization.
(As an aside: Prohibition played out in a very strange time, just after the convulsion of World War I, and during the economic horrors of the Great Depression. In other words, just when Americans most needed a drink, it was outlawed).
A sign of Okrent’s fairness is the way he shows Prohibition’s upside. Yeah, sure, there were gangs and assassinations and people dying from poisoned liquor. But Prohibition also decreased the per capita consumption of alcohol, led to a legal drinking age, and so forth. And when I say that per capita consumption of alcohol decreased, I meant that it really decreased. To the extent that you can make a plausible argument that Prohibition – for all the harm done to the Constitution, the proper role of government, and a Nation’s respect for its own laws – really changed people’s behavior – and health – for the better.
Last Call avoids preaching and conclusions. Nevertheless, it leaves you with plenty from which to draw lessons from this ill-fated attempt at the mass regulation of personal behavior. One lesson is that good intentions can make bad laws that have unforeseen consequences. Another lesson is that moderation is key. A final lesson is that if you’re going to exercise a freedom, you should do so responsibly. If you have a drink, you should call a cab or an Uber or a friend or your spouse, or you should just walk home, if you can remember the way, or you should just do what I do, and never leave the house to start with.
Instead, I just pour myself a bottle of $3.00 chardonnay, splash in some club soda and ice, and watch a Ken Burns documentary on the couch. If I’m feeling meta, that documentary might be Ken Burns’ adaptation of Last Call.
December 5, 2016
The best part of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is Daniel Okrent’s account of the forces which allied with the temperance movement (notably the Ku Klux Klan, proponents of women’s suffrage and evangelical Christians) to ratify the 18th Amendment (Prohibition). These groups don’t necessarily seem like natural allies, but in the context of this patriotic campaign to outlaw the sale of alcohol, they somehow found common interest. They also found a common enemy in the ‘lawless hordes’ of immigrants who were entering the United States.
Demonizing immigrants was in full swing even before ratification and this hostility toward immigrants and ethnic minorities intensified during the 1920s. How Americans circumvented the new law of the land (the middle sections of this book) seemed like familiar territory and wasn’t nearly as compelling. Less discussed was the meteoric rise of organized crime during the Prohibition-era. This would probably be familiar territory for most readers as well, but the explicit connection to the rise of organized crime in this country deserves space in any account of Prohibition’s lasting impact.
There were passing references to gangsters and bootleggers and a mention of crime families in the epilogue, but the question of whether or not Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger received more attention. This was a bit inexplicable to me; that hadn’t seemed like the purpose of the book.
The unraveling and eventual repeal of the 18th Amendment; however, made many of the final sections of the book interesting. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.
Demonizing immigrants was in full swing even before ratification and this hostility toward immigrants and ethnic minorities intensified during the 1920s. How Americans circumvented the new law of the land (the middle sections of this book) seemed like familiar territory and wasn’t nearly as compelling. Less discussed was the meteoric rise of organized crime during the Prohibition-era. This would probably be familiar territory for most readers as well, but the explicit connection to the rise of organized crime in this country deserves space in any account of Prohibition’s lasting impact.
There were passing references to gangsters and bootleggers and a mention of crime families in the epilogue, but the question of whether or not Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger received more attention. This was a bit inexplicable to me; that hadn’t seemed like the purpose of the book.
The unraveling and eventual repeal of the 18th Amendment; however, made many of the final sections of the book interesting. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.
June 24, 2018
4.5 Stars
The 18th Amendment also known as The Volstead Act tried to do something that politicians have been trying to do since the founding of the nation. It tried to legislate morality. Its a fact that before Prohibition Americans drank a lot and new Americans drank even more than most, but the 18th Amendment sought to punish everyone for the personal failings of some and in the process made things worse.
Here's a small list of things(both good and bad)that Prohibition gave us: Organized Crime, The Budweiser Clydesdales, NASCAR, binge drinking, booze cruises, higher income taxes, integrated restaurants(in some towns & cities), ladies night, The Bahamian tourist industry, better built cars, the rise of the soft drink industry, the reemergence of The KKK, the 19th Amendment, and loss of respect for Congress.
As you can see from that list Prohibition had a massive effect on American society, just not that effect its biggest cheerleaders had planned. Prohibition of Alcohol was suppose to end violent crime, keep marriages together and happy, and bring an end to starving children. It accomplished none of those things and it may have actually helped trigger The Great Depression. The U.S. government lost 11 billion dollars in taxation and enforcement of Prohibition laws cost more than 300 million dollars. In the Midwest alcohol provided 1/3 of the good paying jobs and Prohibition put all those people out of work.
Daniel Okrent's The Last Call covers Prohibition in a way that few people have, he introduces you to the different people who spent over a hundred years trying to outlaw alcohol and he spends very little time on the more "glamorous" aspects we all know about like Flappers, Gangsters, and Nightclubs. Instead Okrent shines a light on the strange bedmates that Prohibition created. Prohibition was a bipartisan effort both Republicans and Democrats disingenuously pushed the dry effort. It takes a special cause to unite Progressives, The Klan, Conservatives, Feminist, and Anti-Immigration activists.
As with most things in The United States racism and xenophobia were major factors in the push for Prohibition, originally "The Drys" only wanted to ban Beer, which was mostly made and drank by German immigrants and Wine which was popular among Italian & Irish immigrants. Germans, Italians, and Irish immigrants were the Mexican and Central American immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century. They were accused of bringing crime and disease to America and also stealing jobs that belonged to "Pure Americans". Banning alcohol was seen as a way of making them either leave the country or assimilate. Banning alcohol was also seen as a way to stop the Lynching of African Americans because if you took alcohol away than Black men would stop raping innocent white women and without alcohol Blacks would be less savage.
As we all know Prohibition was a failure and its Repeal was escalated by The Great Depression and election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Prohibition may have ended almost 90 years ago we still live with its effects, here in Kentucky it was still illegal to sale alcohol on Sundays and Election Day that's a law left over from Prohibition. Kentucky and many other states have "Dry" counties or cities. The repeal of Prohibition brought age limits on who can buy alcohol. Sales taxes increased on most products because of the repeal of Prohibition. The F.B.I. was invented after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Government became even more powerful because of Prohibition.
The Last Call is filled with colorful characters and its a great look at American political history.
Recommended to all the history buffs out there.
Popsugar Reading Challenge: A Microhistory.
BookRiot Read Harder Challenge: A book of social science.
Hooked on Books June Read-A-Thon.
Summer Reading Challenge: Read A Book That's Been Sitting On Your GR Shelves For A While.
The 18th Amendment also known as The Volstead Act tried to do something that politicians have been trying to do since the founding of the nation. It tried to legislate morality. Its a fact that before Prohibition Americans drank a lot and new Americans drank even more than most, but the 18th Amendment sought to punish everyone for the personal failings of some and in the process made things worse.
Here's a small list of things(both good and bad)that Prohibition gave us: Organized Crime, The Budweiser Clydesdales, NASCAR, binge drinking, booze cruises, higher income taxes, integrated restaurants(in some towns & cities), ladies night, The Bahamian tourist industry, better built cars, the rise of the soft drink industry, the reemergence of The KKK, the 19th Amendment, and loss of respect for Congress.
As you can see from that list Prohibition had a massive effect on American society, just not that effect its biggest cheerleaders had planned. Prohibition of Alcohol was suppose to end violent crime, keep marriages together and happy, and bring an end to starving children. It accomplished none of those things and it may have actually helped trigger The Great Depression. The U.S. government lost 11 billion dollars in taxation and enforcement of Prohibition laws cost more than 300 million dollars. In the Midwest alcohol provided 1/3 of the good paying jobs and Prohibition put all those people out of work.
Daniel Okrent's The Last Call covers Prohibition in a way that few people have, he introduces you to the different people who spent over a hundred years trying to outlaw alcohol and he spends very little time on the more "glamorous" aspects we all know about like Flappers, Gangsters, and Nightclubs. Instead Okrent shines a light on the strange bedmates that Prohibition created. Prohibition was a bipartisan effort both Republicans and Democrats disingenuously pushed the dry effort. It takes a special cause to unite Progressives, The Klan, Conservatives, Feminist, and Anti-Immigration activists.
As with most things in The United States racism and xenophobia were major factors in the push for Prohibition, originally "The Drys" only wanted to ban Beer, which was mostly made and drank by German immigrants and Wine which was popular among Italian & Irish immigrants. Germans, Italians, and Irish immigrants were the Mexican and Central American immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century. They were accused of bringing crime and disease to America and also stealing jobs that belonged to "Pure Americans". Banning alcohol was seen as a way of making them either leave the country or assimilate. Banning alcohol was also seen as a way to stop the Lynching of African Americans because if you took alcohol away than Black men would stop raping innocent white women and without alcohol Blacks would be less savage.
As we all know Prohibition was a failure and its Repeal was escalated by The Great Depression and election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Prohibition may have ended almost 90 years ago we still live with its effects, here in Kentucky it was still illegal to sale alcohol on Sundays and Election Day that's a law left over from Prohibition. Kentucky and many other states have "Dry" counties or cities. The repeal of Prohibition brought age limits on who can buy alcohol. Sales taxes increased on most products because of the repeal of Prohibition. The F.B.I. was invented after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Government became even more powerful because of Prohibition.
The Last Call is filled with colorful characters and its a great look at American political history.
Recommended to all the history buffs out there.
Popsugar Reading Challenge: A Microhistory.
BookRiot Read Harder Challenge: A book of social science.
Hooked on Books June Read-A-Thon.
Summer Reading Challenge: Read A Book That's Been Sitting On Your GR Shelves For A While.
November 14, 2021
In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure. It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of ill-trained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles. One could rightfully replace our prevailing images of Prohibition—flappers kicking up their heels in nightclubs, say, or lawmen swinging axes at barrels of impounded beer—with different visions: maybe the bloated bodies of the hijacked rumrunners washing up on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, their eyes gouged out and their hands and faces scoured by acid. Or perhaps the crippled men of Wichita, their lives devastated by the nerve-destroying chemicals suspended in a thirty-five-cent bottle of Jake. (page 371)
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent.
This book is an example of a narrow, but deep history. The author leaves “no stone unturned” in examining Prohibition and any issues peripheral to Prohibition. There are few if any other events from the 1920s written here. The stock market crash is barely mentioned.
The first third of the book, the first 100 pages or so, I found rather dull. There is a lot of writing about the people who led the campaign for Prohibition, a movement that started early in the nineteenth century. Some of these people would become famous for their advocacy of the vote for women. The suffrage movement was a direct consequence of the Temperance and Prohibition movement.
There were several points in this first section that need pointing out. The first is the racism employed to sell the Prohibition. The worst of these was the portrayal of blacks as drunk rampaging carnal predators, for example using the ad for “Black Cock Gin”. It also made sure the public knew that the distillers of Liquor were Jews; and, with the anti-German attitude associated with WWI, that the beer brewers were Germans.
It was during this period that the single-issue voter emerged. Voters would decide on a candidate to vote for only if they were for Prohibition. Voting as a block they were able to fill Congress with enough representatives to pass the Eighteenth Amendment banning the sale, production and consumption of intoxicating beverages. The author ends this section with the quote: “the drys had their law, but the wets had their liquor.” (Page 114).
There was never any problem obtaining liquor or beer with the arrival of Prohibition. The Volstead Act which was passed to enforce Prohibition had several exceptions. One was it allowed homemakers to preserve their fruits by making fruit juice such as apple cider. This effectively allowed legalized home winemaking. Another was the production of alcohol for medicinal purposes, which quickly created a market for doctors to write prescriptions for and drug stores to distribute alcohol. Also sacramental wines were allowed which led to a huge market for wine, very little of it used in church services.
The largest source of alcohol came from bootleggers smuggling liquor and beer into the United States. The border with Canada was said to be so wet it was surprising it didn’t bleed off the map. Prohibition led to an economic surge in places that allowed the transport of liquor and beer. One such place was Nassau in the Bahamas, where Scotch from Scotland and Rum from Jamaica could be shipped and transferred to ships that supplied it to the ships anchored of the coast—outside the 3-mile limit.
The makeup of Congress which allowed the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment was also able to delay the reapportionment of congressional districts. This was necessary because after the 1920 census both the increased immigrant population and the movement of the rural population to the cities altered the relative representation of the drys and wets. This was feared as a path to the repeal of Prohibition.
The eventual repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment was led by some of the wealthiest people in the United States. It wasn’t because they were unable to obtain their drink. They saw the smuggling and bootlegging as a business generating billions of untaxed dollars. This was fuel for their efforts to overturn the Sixteenth Amendment which had brought about the Income Tax. If these untaxed dollars could replace the governments financial needs the Income Tax Amendment might be repealed.
You will get a hangover just reading a chapter which describes the type of alcohol being served in some places. The term “blind drunk” was an actual possibility given the unregulated ingredients in some liquors. Cocktails became popular in this period as people mixed the liquor with other beverages to hide the taste of the alcohol.
There were some successes associated with Prohibition. Americans were and are drinking less than they did prior to Prohibition. In addition after the repeal states now had the authority to regulate and enforce their own laws regarding alcohol. This has resulted in age limits, closing hours, and licensing codes.
The failure of Prohibition has frequently been used by marijuana and other drug users as an argument that prohibiting the personal use of some things is useless. This book mentions that there was some excitement with unlawful drinking in certain places during Prohibition. There is an excitement and attraction of unlawful behavior provided by illegal drugs for some young people that would be removed by legalization. One of the lessons from this book seems to be that after repeal there were several positives. The legalization of some drugs for personal use could lead to benefits including increased tax revenues, regulation of substances, perhaps a reduction in some of the drug-related gang violence, and an easing of the burdens on the justice system.
August 10, 2016
Born in the 1840’s the prohibitionist movement was a response to the endemic drunkenness in America. An American then consumed on average three times as much alcohol as an American today! The movement gained significant strength in the late 19th century with the formation of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) and the ASL (Anti-Saloon League). The ASL was politically very effective. Singularly focused it sought out any and all allies even progressives. Thus it helped pass workman’s compensation laws not only in return for support from labor but also to make companies take notice of the cost of drunken workers. The ASL supported the income tax so that the liquor tax would no longer be needed. Most significant was its support for women’s suffrage. The alliance between these two groups was a natural. In the states where women could vote dry candidates got elected. But the prohibition movement also aligned with racists supporting Jim Crow laws playing on fears that liquor inspired violence by blacks against whites. The prohibitionist force was felt in many ways.
The prohibitionists knew they had to strike in 1916. The country’s demographics were rapidly changing. From majority rural in 1910, the U.S. would become majority urban in 1920 and the redistricting would shatter the prohibitionist’s chances. The ASL and allies put everything into the 1916 congressional elections and together they succeeded in electing dry candidates across the nation. In Congress the issue was political, not moral. Almost none of those voting for the 18th amendment prohibiting “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” were abstainers known as “dry-drys”. Most members of Congress voting for prohibition were drinkers. They were “wet-drys”. After passage in Congress, ratification sailed through state legislatures which were not apportioned according to population and heavily favored rural over urban areas. The one person, one vote rule for state legislative districts did not become law until a 1962 Supreme Court decision. The Volstead Act implementing the 18th amendment passed in January 1919 and went into effect in January 1920.
While the drys had their law, the wets would still have their liquor. Congress allocated next to nothing for enforcement. Neither did most states. States with large immigrant populations had little use for the law. The law was completely disregarded by many including President Harding. Bootlegging was endemic and booze readily available, particularly in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco. The Volstead Act required a jury trial for anyone charged with a liquor violation. The judicial system had been underfunded before prohibition and courts had no means to deal with the added liquor cases. Where trials did occur, juries rarely convicted.
Huge enterprises were established in Canada to supply America’s thirst. Most notable was Sam Bronfman who became filthy rich and purchased Seagram’s to build his empire. Bronfman and others made deals with British scotch distillers and brought in massive amounts of scotch through the Bahamas and St. Pierre Island off the Newfoundland coast. St. Pierre, a French territory, was also used to stage Canadian liquor both for shipment to the US and back to Canada to avoid domestic taxes. Mother ships were anchored outside the three mile limit up and down the US Coast. Known as “Rum Row”, they served as floating warehouses. Liquor also came across from Canada all along the border. Notable were the innumerable small boats constantly crossing the Detroit River labeled the “Mosquito Fleet.” Equally effective were the trains legally transshipping huge quantities of liquor from Canada to Mexico that entered Mexico with their cargo mysteriously gone.
Alcohol reached parched throats many other ways. An exception to alcohol production in the Volstead Act was made in favor of Congress’ rural constituents. Farmers were allowed to ferment fruit juice. Every farmer had his own supply and most made a few extra dollars at cider stands that dotted the countryside. An adjustment was made to allow people to make wine in their home. Markets in some urban areas were nothing but purple. This provision along with the exception for sacramental wine saved California’s grape growers. The prices for their crops skyrocketed. Many pastors, priests and rabbis “shared” with their suddenly enlarged “congregations”. Many, now suddenly called to “religious” leadership, started new “congregations”. And there were medical exceptions. Doctors, pharmacists and even veterinarians wrote prescriptions for bourbon, gin, scotch or the liquor of your choice. Take three swigs of Old Grand Dad and call me in the morning. Fido should just take two. Pharmacists stocked large supplies and many dispensed without a prescription. The brewers, not to be left out, sold the malt syrup and yeast for home brew which was very popular.
Prohibition accelerated the social change that was enveloping America after WWI. Women had not been allowed in saloons, but were welcome in speakeasies. The term “powder room” originated when speakeasies added women’s bathroom facilities. In addition to wearing shorter skirts and bobbed hair, women started drinking publicly. Men without a flask or bottle had a tough time getting a date. A new type of party became popular where men and women mingled, danced and drank sans dinner. Of course, the new fast life was primarily in cities. Despite conspicuous consumption in places like New York and Detroit, alcohol consumption for the nation as a whole did decline during prohibition as many in rural America honored the law.
The drys kept up the political fight. Prohibition was largely championed by Anglo Saxon Protestant Americans. Recognizing the impact of changing demographics, the drys sought to limit the influence of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and other ethnic Americans. In 1924 the drys got new immigration quotas. These limited immigrants to 2% of their American ethnic population based on the 1890 census. Back then these groups comprised a much smaller part of the populace. The drys also tried to do away with redistricting which would disenfranchise millions in the cities where anti-prohibition ethnic groups lived. This effort fortunately failed.
The 1928 presidential election emboldened the drys. Al Smith’s crushing defeat was largely due to the anti-Catholic vote. But drys mistakenly took the election as a mandate for getting tougher on prohibition violators. The Jones Act quickly followed easily passing in Congress. It made Volstead Act violators felons subject to five years sentences and large fines. The Jones Law made even the pettiest violators felons including mere observers to illegal drink sales who failed to report them to authorities. People were taken aback by the idea that someone purchasing a jug of cider or even a glass of wine could be locked up for five years.
The connection between increasing gang violence and prohibition was not lost on the public. Pre-prohibition neighborhood gangs became sophisticated enterprises. To eliminate wasteful competition the gangs carved up territories and even set up ways to adjudicate disputes. Prohibition brought on the start of nationwide crime syndicates. The notorious Al Capone, a murderous thug, tried to craft a glamorous and sympathetic image claiming “Public service is my motto.” And when the depression started he even opened a soup kitchen for the poor serving 5,000 on Thanksgiving.
The final straw was the depression. The Republicans, largely dry, were blamed. This enabled Democratic wet candidates to win in the 1930 election. Many business people had opposed prohibition from the beginning. The powerful Pierre DuPont and many other businessmen opposed any form of government regulation. They also saw alcohol taxes as a way to get rid of income and corporate taxes. The falling tax revenues of the depression made funding government a dire problem. This resulted in cutbacks in already skinny enforcement budgets. At the same time came an increasing number of revelations of government corruption and dry political leaders who really were avid drinkers. In 1932 FDR and the Democrats ran on repeal. The 21st Amendment repealing the 18th quickly passed Congress after his election. By December of that year the 36th state, Utah, ratified the amendment and America celebrated.
Okrent offers a well-researched history of a period that goes much deeper than the gangster, flapper image we see in movies. He details the politics. We see the same forces and divides that are at work today even though the issue of prohibition is far behind us. Race and cultural differences played fundamental roles. Okrent describes the powerful men and women who rose and fell with the prohibition movement. Most of them now are no more than a footnote in history. Last Call is a great read that brings to life a time of dramatic change.
The prohibitionists knew they had to strike in 1916. The country’s demographics were rapidly changing. From majority rural in 1910, the U.S. would become majority urban in 1920 and the redistricting would shatter the prohibitionist’s chances. The ASL and allies put everything into the 1916 congressional elections and together they succeeded in electing dry candidates across the nation. In Congress the issue was political, not moral. Almost none of those voting for the 18th amendment prohibiting “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” were abstainers known as “dry-drys”. Most members of Congress voting for prohibition were drinkers. They were “wet-drys”. After passage in Congress, ratification sailed through state legislatures which were not apportioned according to population and heavily favored rural over urban areas. The one person, one vote rule for state legislative districts did not become law until a 1962 Supreme Court decision. The Volstead Act implementing the 18th amendment passed in January 1919 and went into effect in January 1920.
While the drys had their law, the wets would still have their liquor. Congress allocated next to nothing for enforcement. Neither did most states. States with large immigrant populations had little use for the law. The law was completely disregarded by many including President Harding. Bootlegging was endemic and booze readily available, particularly in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco. The Volstead Act required a jury trial for anyone charged with a liquor violation. The judicial system had been underfunded before prohibition and courts had no means to deal with the added liquor cases. Where trials did occur, juries rarely convicted.
Huge enterprises were established in Canada to supply America’s thirst. Most notable was Sam Bronfman who became filthy rich and purchased Seagram’s to build his empire. Bronfman and others made deals with British scotch distillers and brought in massive amounts of scotch through the Bahamas and St. Pierre Island off the Newfoundland coast. St. Pierre, a French territory, was also used to stage Canadian liquor both for shipment to the US and back to Canada to avoid domestic taxes. Mother ships were anchored outside the three mile limit up and down the US Coast. Known as “Rum Row”, they served as floating warehouses. Liquor also came across from Canada all along the border. Notable were the innumerable small boats constantly crossing the Detroit River labeled the “Mosquito Fleet.” Equally effective were the trains legally transshipping huge quantities of liquor from Canada to Mexico that entered Mexico with their cargo mysteriously gone.
Alcohol reached parched throats many other ways. An exception to alcohol production in the Volstead Act was made in favor of Congress’ rural constituents. Farmers were allowed to ferment fruit juice. Every farmer had his own supply and most made a few extra dollars at cider stands that dotted the countryside. An adjustment was made to allow people to make wine in their home. Markets in some urban areas were nothing but purple. This provision along with the exception for sacramental wine saved California’s grape growers. The prices for their crops skyrocketed. Many pastors, priests and rabbis “shared” with their suddenly enlarged “congregations”. Many, now suddenly called to “religious” leadership, started new “congregations”. And there were medical exceptions. Doctors, pharmacists and even veterinarians wrote prescriptions for bourbon, gin, scotch or the liquor of your choice. Take three swigs of Old Grand Dad and call me in the morning. Fido should just take two. Pharmacists stocked large supplies and many dispensed without a prescription. The brewers, not to be left out, sold the malt syrup and yeast for home brew which was very popular.
Prohibition accelerated the social change that was enveloping America after WWI. Women had not been allowed in saloons, but were welcome in speakeasies. The term “powder room” originated when speakeasies added women’s bathroom facilities. In addition to wearing shorter skirts and bobbed hair, women started drinking publicly. Men without a flask or bottle had a tough time getting a date. A new type of party became popular where men and women mingled, danced and drank sans dinner. Of course, the new fast life was primarily in cities. Despite conspicuous consumption in places like New York and Detroit, alcohol consumption for the nation as a whole did decline during prohibition as many in rural America honored the law.
The drys kept up the political fight. Prohibition was largely championed by Anglo Saxon Protestant Americans. Recognizing the impact of changing demographics, the drys sought to limit the influence of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and other ethnic Americans. In 1924 the drys got new immigration quotas. These limited immigrants to 2% of their American ethnic population based on the 1890 census. Back then these groups comprised a much smaller part of the populace. The drys also tried to do away with redistricting which would disenfranchise millions in the cities where anti-prohibition ethnic groups lived. This effort fortunately failed.
The 1928 presidential election emboldened the drys. Al Smith’s crushing defeat was largely due to the anti-Catholic vote. But drys mistakenly took the election as a mandate for getting tougher on prohibition violators. The Jones Act quickly followed easily passing in Congress. It made Volstead Act violators felons subject to five years sentences and large fines. The Jones Law made even the pettiest violators felons including mere observers to illegal drink sales who failed to report them to authorities. People were taken aback by the idea that someone purchasing a jug of cider or even a glass of wine could be locked up for five years.
The connection between increasing gang violence and prohibition was not lost on the public. Pre-prohibition neighborhood gangs became sophisticated enterprises. To eliminate wasteful competition the gangs carved up territories and even set up ways to adjudicate disputes. Prohibition brought on the start of nationwide crime syndicates. The notorious Al Capone, a murderous thug, tried to craft a glamorous and sympathetic image claiming “Public service is my motto.” And when the depression started he even opened a soup kitchen for the poor serving 5,000 on Thanksgiving.
The final straw was the depression. The Republicans, largely dry, were blamed. This enabled Democratic wet candidates to win in the 1930 election. Many business people had opposed prohibition from the beginning. The powerful Pierre DuPont and many other businessmen opposed any form of government regulation. They also saw alcohol taxes as a way to get rid of income and corporate taxes. The falling tax revenues of the depression made funding government a dire problem. This resulted in cutbacks in already skinny enforcement budgets. At the same time came an increasing number of revelations of government corruption and dry political leaders who really were avid drinkers. In 1932 FDR and the Democrats ran on repeal. The 21st Amendment repealing the 18th quickly passed Congress after his election. By December of that year the 36th state, Utah, ratified the amendment and America celebrated.
Okrent offers a well-researched history of a period that goes much deeper than the gangster, flapper image we see in movies. He details the politics. We see the same forces and divides that are at work today even though the issue of prohibition is far behind us. Race and cultural differences played fundamental roles. Okrent describes the powerful men and women who rose and fell with the prohibition movement. Most of them now are no more than a footnote in history. Last Call is a great read that brings to life a time of dramatic change.
May 28, 2020
The Last Call is a brilliant history of the disastrous 18th amendment to the US Constitution.
In almost every imaginable aspect, the Prohibition was a failure, a big ooops as Daniel Okrent called it in his book. It deprived the government of revenue and limited individual rights. It was responsible for the making of organized crime in the country. It fostered bribery, hypocrisy, and official corruption. With its poisonous, bootleg alcohol, it murdered and injured thousands.
In his work, Danile Okrent addresses the effect of the Volstead Act on the public and its reaction to it. He also explores the gangster boom the Prohibition triggered, effectively stripping it of its romantic facade.
The main focus of the study, however, is the politics of the Prohibition era. Banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic drinks, the 18th amendment was pushed through one of the most remarkable pressure-group campaigns. The fight over liquor underscored the deeper social and ethic antagonisms dividing the country.
Finding an ardent supporter in the reactionary, extremely racist Ku Klux Klan, the Prohibition’s cause was extremely reinforced, quickly going far beyond the original idea of the Dry politicians to prohibit beer, drunk by German immigrants. The hostile attitude towards immigrants, who were accused of bringing along bad influence, committing crimes, and depriving the “100% Americans” of jobs, was widespread, and the ban of intoxicating beverages was deemed a way of driving the “non-pure Americans” (“drunkards”) out of the country. Interestingly, the Prohibition also made strange bedfellows – the KKK found itself fighting alongside women suffragettes and progressives; liberals such as Al Smith joined forces with conservative plutocrats.
Besides politics, The Last Call also offers a whole set of well-sketched figures and innumerable interesting details about the bootleggers, “alcohol for medical purposes” (also known as Jack Daniel’s, excellent taste), “alchemists”, who could effortlessly turn any antifreeze or perfume into a potable liquor (sometimes tragically unsuccessfully), and all the other ingenious means of coping with the Volstead Act the Americans devised.
Another curious aspect of the 18th Amendment is that as a direct result of its fourteen years reign, America actually drank less. And it continued to drink less for decades afterwards. In the surprisingly slow rise of post-Volstead-Act drinking laid the main irony of the Repeal. During Prohibition, the States were so awash with booze, the politicians had to discuss how to stop Americans from generously trickling down their abundant cheap liquor to its friendly neighbor, Canada, the border of which was so wet, it was a miracle it didn’t wash off the map. However, the 21st Amendment made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. Repeal established a series of state-by-state codes, regulations, and enforcement procedures. Just as Prohibition did not prohibit, legalizing drink did not make alcohol fully available.
I cannot give Danile Okrent’s outstanding work enough stars. The Last Call is meticulously detailed, very insightful, tinged with humor, and absolutely compelling from the first to the last page. A must-read for all history buffs.
In almost every imaginable aspect, the Prohibition was a failure, a big ooops as Daniel Okrent called it in his book. It deprived the government of revenue and limited individual rights. It was responsible for the making of organized crime in the country. It fostered bribery, hypocrisy, and official corruption. With its poisonous, bootleg alcohol, it murdered and injured thousands.
In his work, Danile Okrent addresses the effect of the Volstead Act on the public and its reaction to it. He also explores the gangster boom the Prohibition triggered, effectively stripping it of its romantic facade.
The main focus of the study, however, is the politics of the Prohibition era. Banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic drinks, the 18th amendment was pushed through one of the most remarkable pressure-group campaigns. The fight over liquor underscored the deeper social and ethic antagonisms dividing the country.
Finding an ardent supporter in the reactionary, extremely racist Ku Klux Klan, the Prohibition’s cause was extremely reinforced, quickly going far beyond the original idea of the Dry politicians to prohibit beer, drunk by German immigrants. The hostile attitude towards immigrants, who were accused of bringing along bad influence, committing crimes, and depriving the “100% Americans” of jobs, was widespread, and the ban of intoxicating beverages was deemed a way of driving the “non-pure Americans” (“drunkards”) out of the country. Interestingly, the Prohibition also made strange bedfellows – the KKK found itself fighting alongside women suffragettes and progressives; liberals such as Al Smith joined forces with conservative plutocrats.
Besides politics, The Last Call also offers a whole set of well-sketched figures and innumerable interesting details about the bootleggers, “alcohol for medical purposes” (also known as Jack Daniel’s, excellent taste), “alchemists”, who could effortlessly turn any antifreeze or perfume into a potable liquor (sometimes tragically unsuccessfully), and all the other ingenious means of coping with the Volstead Act the Americans devised.
Another curious aspect of the 18th Amendment is that as a direct result of its fourteen years reign, America actually drank less. And it continued to drink less for decades afterwards. In the surprisingly slow rise of post-Volstead-Act drinking laid the main irony of the Repeal. During Prohibition, the States were so awash with booze, the politicians had to discuss how to stop Americans from generously trickling down their abundant cheap liquor to its friendly neighbor, Canada, the border of which was so wet, it was a miracle it didn’t wash off the map. However, the 21st Amendment made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. Repeal established a series of state-by-state codes, regulations, and enforcement procedures. Just as Prohibition did not prohibit, legalizing drink did not make alcohol fully available.
I cannot give Danile Okrent’s outstanding work enough stars. The Last Call is meticulously detailed, very insightful, tinged with humor, and absolutely compelling from the first to the last page. A must-read for all history buffs.
November 24, 2015
Five stars all the way. An entertaining, provocative, highly readable account of one of America's stranger political and social experiments--and one that has important modern day resonance and lessons.
Daniel Okrent weaves a brilliant tapestry of the many threads that brought the 18th Amendment into being. But this is not [AHEM!] a dry read. It's full of lively, often astonishing characters like the indomitable Carrie Nation who carried a hammer around, smashed up saloon after saloon and launched a women-led movement for temperance.
The fight against alcohol abuse became intertwined with women's demands for suffrage since "the most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related. They wanted the saloons closed down...They wanted the right to own property and to shield their families' financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children...To change the laws they needed to vote."
The desperate plight of women and children trapped by the law and drunken husbands and fathers soon became linked in the public mind with growing resentment of 'big business' interests.
An emerging Progressive movement fostered by journalists and photographers and social activists like Jacob A. Riis raised awareness of the true cost of alcohol abuse, especially among the poorest.
While women led the progressive movement, passing the 18th Amendment needed a broader coalition. Wayne B. Wheeler was the political genius who made it happen. Wheeler invented single-interest politicking. Between 1901 and his death in 1927, Wheeler and his Anti Saloon League would make or break political fortunes, push strange bed-fellows together and capitalize on growing anti-immigrant and anti-German sentiment to make Prohibition the law of the land.
The progressives were hampered by conscience and the breadth of their concerns. Wheeler had no such scruples and readily enlisted allies as unsavory as the Ku Klux Klan whose agenda in those days was dominated by fear of immigrants, Catholics and Jews, as well as blacks.
But in the end it took America's entry into World War I against Germany to turn Prohibition and 'voting dry' into a patriotic duty.
That Prohibition failed pretty much from day one was, perhaps, inevitable given under-funding for enforcement coupled with American, Canadian and British ingenuity. The loopholes to be exploited were big enough to drive trucks through (and plenty of entrepreneurs did just that).
The Bronfmans were among the many Canadians who cashed in big time on Prohibition America's thirst. 'Rum running has provided a tidy bit toward Canada's favorable balance of trade,' said one financial newspaper. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury noted "'You cannot keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line.'...The U.S. Canada border was so wet it's a wonder it didn't bleed off the maps."
Prohibition's end was just as fascinating as its beginning. Widespread social change was at the core and among the most powerful changes were those that affected the women who had once demanded Temperance. With enfranchisement of women came legal protections that gave them rights to divorce and property ownership. World War I's labor shortages had given women a taste for the satisfaction and independence of earning a paycheck. And more than a few daring flappers joined men at the speakeasy table and acquired somewhat less respectable tastes.
Despite its 1933 repeal, the 18th Amendment left an enduring legacy. Never again would Americans drink quite so much, so freely or so dangerously; alcohol would be regulated more effectively than it had been banned; it was harder in some ways to get a drink after repeal and wags recalled, with a certain wistfulness, "...the days of Prohibition when you could get a drink on Sundays."
Other more hardened legacies are still with us: prohibitions on cocaine, opium and marijuana all date from the same era and are only now being seriously re-examined. The era saw a vast expansion in state and federal powers: income tax, wiretapping, expanded search and seizure, J.Edgard Hoover and the FBI were the long shadows of Prohibition. Few voices questioned the expansion. One was Justice Louis Brandeis who, in his dissenting opinion on a Federal wiretapping case, argued against "invasions of individual security" and articulated a constitutional "right to be let alone"--words invoked by the majority half a century later in the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade that liberalized U.S. abortion law.
For students of American social and political history--or anyone who loves great story telling--this is a must read. To see more quotes and great pictures click through to the updates.
Daniel Okrent weaves a brilliant tapestry of the many threads that brought the 18th Amendment into being. But this is not [AHEM!] a dry read. It's full of lively, often astonishing characters like the indomitable Carrie Nation who carried a hammer around, smashed up saloon after saloon and launched a women-led movement for temperance.
The fight against alcohol abuse became intertwined with women's demands for suffrage since "the most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related. They wanted the saloons closed down...They wanted the right to own property and to shield their families' financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children...To change the laws they needed to vote."
The desperate plight of women and children trapped by the law and drunken husbands and fathers soon became linked in the public mind with growing resentment of 'big business' interests.
An emerging Progressive movement fostered by journalists and photographers and social activists like Jacob A. Riis raised awareness of the true cost of alcohol abuse, especially among the poorest.
While women led the progressive movement, passing the 18th Amendment needed a broader coalition. Wayne B. Wheeler was the political genius who made it happen. Wheeler invented single-interest politicking. Between 1901 and his death in 1927, Wheeler and his Anti Saloon League would make or break political fortunes, push strange bed-fellows together and capitalize on growing anti-immigrant and anti-German sentiment to make Prohibition the law of the land.
The progressives were hampered by conscience and the breadth of their concerns. Wheeler had no such scruples and readily enlisted allies as unsavory as the Ku Klux Klan whose agenda in those days was dominated by fear of immigrants, Catholics and Jews, as well as blacks.
But in the end it took America's entry into World War I against Germany to turn Prohibition and 'voting dry' into a patriotic duty.
That Prohibition failed pretty much from day one was, perhaps, inevitable given under-funding for enforcement coupled with American, Canadian and British ingenuity. The loopholes to be exploited were big enough to drive trucks through (and plenty of entrepreneurs did just that).
The Bronfmans were among the many Canadians who cashed in big time on Prohibition America's thirst. 'Rum running has provided a tidy bit toward Canada's favorable balance of trade,' said one financial newspaper. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury noted "'You cannot keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line.'...The U.S. Canada border was so wet it's a wonder it didn't bleed off the maps."
Prohibition's end was just as fascinating as its beginning. Widespread social change was at the core and among the most powerful changes were those that affected the women who had once demanded Temperance. With enfranchisement of women came legal protections that gave them rights to divorce and property ownership. World War I's labor shortages had given women a taste for the satisfaction and independence of earning a paycheck. And more than a few daring flappers joined men at the speakeasy table and acquired somewhat less respectable tastes.
Despite its 1933 repeal, the 18th Amendment left an enduring legacy. Never again would Americans drink quite so much, so freely or so dangerously; alcohol would be regulated more effectively than it had been banned; it was harder in some ways to get a drink after repeal and wags recalled, with a certain wistfulness, "...the days of Prohibition when you could get a drink on Sundays."
Other more hardened legacies are still with us: prohibitions on cocaine, opium and marijuana all date from the same era and are only now being seriously re-examined. The era saw a vast expansion in state and federal powers: income tax, wiretapping, expanded search and seizure, J.Edgard Hoover and the FBI were the long shadows of Prohibition. Few voices questioned the expansion. One was Justice Louis Brandeis who, in his dissenting opinion on a Federal wiretapping case, argued against "invasions of individual security" and articulated a constitutional "right to be let alone"--words invoked by the majority half a century later in the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade that liberalized U.S. abortion law.
For students of American social and political history--or anyone who loves great story telling--this is a must read. To see more quotes and great pictures click through to the updates.
January 23, 2021
See my (drunk) review on Booktube.
August 13, 2022
To many alive today, prohibition is best remembered as depicted in movies of Al Capone and Eliot Ness. Well, there's a lot more to it than that. There was a long history leading up to the era, and then bringing it to an end is an interesting story too.
I found the history of alcohol consumption in the U.S. to be of particular interest. See the following link to a graph showing the history of U.S. Alcohol Consumption:
LINK: U.S. Alcohol Consumption
After looking at the above graph one might wonder if our founding fathers were drunk. Up until 1839 Americans were drinking about three times the alcohol that is currently consumed per capita. This book suggests that the primary reason for the drop off after 1839 was the shift to drinking beer rather than distilled liquor due largely to German immigrants, and to the beginning of the Washingtonian Movement (proponents of temperance but not necessarily prohibition).
Another reason for high alcohol consumption then was cheap prices and abundant supply for distilled liquors. The abundant supply was caused by the farmers out west (beyond the Appalachian Mountain Range) having plenty of grain but nobody to sell it to. There was no economical way to transport the grain to eastern markets at a time before canals, developed roads and river boats. Converting a wagon load of grain into a couple jugs of liquor made shipment of a marketable product back east much more feasible. Thus there was a surplus of liquor which resulted in low prices.
Those of you who remember your American history lessons will recall President Washington's problems with the Whiskey Rebellion. That was caused by the Federal Government taxing the whiskey being brought over the mountains from the west. Alexander Hamilton justified the whiskey tax as being fair because it was a commodity that was purchased by almost everybody.
It took an incredible confluence of interests to permit the passage of the 18th Amendment. Many today may forget that it was not just a law, it was actually a part of the Constitution. Getting an amendment added to the Constitution is not an easy thing to do. Then once it's passed, getting the amendment removed is just as difficult as passage was in the first place. This books tells the history of how this all happened.
Some things I learned from this book:
1. Reapportionment as called for in the Constitution following each census did not take place following the 1920 Census until 1929. Why the delay? Everyone knew that reapportionment was going to reduce the influence of western rural states that just happened to be the strongest supporters of Prohibition.
2. Prohibition supporters included some strange bed-fellows ranging from northern progressives to the Klu Klux Klan. (The Klu Klux Klan had significant growth of members in the northern states during this era because of its anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant positions.)
3. If you were a supporter of Prohibition in 1920 you most likely were White Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in a rural part of the country.
4. If you were opposed to Prohibition in 1920 you were likely to be Catholic, of Irish or Italian ancestry, a first or second generation immigrant, and living in an urban area.
5. The Prohibition movement was a significant cause for the initiation of the income tax in the United States. It was needed to make up the difference from the lost revenue from taxing booze.
The failure of prohibition is perhaps an indication of the folly of trying to legislate morality against the will of a large portion of the population. There are still plenty of people around who still want to do it today in other ways.
The following link is to an excerpt that discusses American intoxication in the early 1800s. It's taken from another book.
https://mailchi.mp/delanceyplace.com/...
I found the history of alcohol consumption in the U.S. to be of particular interest. See the following link to a graph showing the history of U.S. Alcohol Consumption:
LINK: U.S. Alcohol Consumption
After looking at the above graph one might wonder if our founding fathers were drunk. Up until 1839 Americans were drinking about three times the alcohol that is currently consumed per capita. This book suggests that the primary reason for the drop off after 1839 was the shift to drinking beer rather than distilled liquor due largely to German immigrants, and to the beginning of the Washingtonian Movement (proponents of temperance but not necessarily prohibition).
Another reason for high alcohol consumption then was cheap prices and abundant supply for distilled liquors. The abundant supply was caused by the farmers out west (beyond the Appalachian Mountain Range) having plenty of grain but nobody to sell it to. There was no economical way to transport the grain to eastern markets at a time before canals, developed roads and river boats. Converting a wagon load of grain into a couple jugs of liquor made shipment of a marketable product back east much more feasible. Thus there was a surplus of liquor which resulted in low prices.
Those of you who remember your American history lessons will recall President Washington's problems with the Whiskey Rebellion. That was caused by the Federal Government taxing the whiskey being brought over the mountains from the west. Alexander Hamilton justified the whiskey tax as being fair because it was a commodity that was purchased by almost everybody.
It took an incredible confluence of interests to permit the passage of the 18th Amendment. Many today may forget that it was not just a law, it was actually a part of the Constitution. Getting an amendment added to the Constitution is not an easy thing to do. Then once it's passed, getting the amendment removed is just as difficult as passage was in the first place. This books tells the history of how this all happened.
Some things I learned from this book:
1. Reapportionment as called for in the Constitution following each census did not take place following the 1920 Census until 1929. Why the delay? Everyone knew that reapportionment was going to reduce the influence of western rural states that just happened to be the strongest supporters of Prohibition.
2. Prohibition supporters included some strange bed-fellows ranging from northern progressives to the Klu Klux Klan. (The Klu Klux Klan had significant growth of members in the northern states during this era because of its anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant positions.)
3. If you were a supporter of Prohibition in 1920 you most likely were White Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in a rural part of the country.
4. If you were opposed to Prohibition in 1920 you were likely to be Catholic, of Irish or Italian ancestry, a first or second generation immigrant, and living in an urban area.
5. The Prohibition movement was a significant cause for the initiation of the income tax in the United States. It was needed to make up the difference from the lost revenue from taxing booze.
The failure of prohibition is perhaps an indication of the folly of trying to legislate morality against the will of a large portion of the population. There are still plenty of people around who still want to do it today in other ways.
The following link is to an excerpt that discusses American intoxication in the early 1800s. It's taken from another book.
https://mailchi.mp/delanceyplace.com/...
October 29, 2014
The 18th Amendment to the American Constitution was, as the author says, one of the great "ooops" in our history. The"noble experiment" of prohibition was anything but noble and the author reveals the rise and fall of dry America in all its ugly hypocrisy. This is an all-encompassing work that was several years in the making and his attention to detail and immaculate research are impressive.
The political maneuvering and the influence of pressure groups such as the Anti-Saloon League,the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Ku Klux Klan are without precedent and are a sad commentary on the disregard for the rights of private citizens as protected by this same Constitution that they sought to change for their own ends. Okrent follows the careers of some very colorful characters on both sides of the question and is fair-minded in his narrative. It is a social history that will hold your attention from beginning to end and you will learn some little known facts about the era which will amuse as well as disturb. Highly recommended.
The political maneuvering and the influence of pressure groups such as the Anti-Saloon League,the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Ku Klux Klan are without precedent and are a sad commentary on the disregard for the rights of private citizens as protected by this same Constitution that they sought to change for their own ends. Okrent follows the careers of some very colorful characters on both sides of the question and is fair-minded in his narrative. It is a social history that will hold your attention from beginning to end and you will learn some little known facts about the era which will amuse as well as disturb. Highly recommended.
October 27, 2021
Before Prohibition, the nation consumed three times the quantity of alcohol per capita than it does today. Youza! And while the Temperance movement was a powerful force to help ratify the 18th Amendment, the real momentum came from populist passions that were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic.
The 18th Amendment unleashed powerful criminal elements to circumvent the law. The wettest city was Detroit, strategically located across the river from Canada. The city’s notorious Purple Gang was reputed to be more vicious than Al Capone’s Chicago operation. Enforcement varied widely between regions and social classes. It worked best when targeted at the working-class poor.
The temperance leaders campaigned successfully for the federal income tax to replace the alcohol taxes that accounted for one-third of all federal revenue at the time. And the belief that women would be more supportive of Prohibition, the temperance leaders also strongly supported women’s suffrage. Enjoy Okrent’s well-researched account of this period.
The 18th Amendment unleashed powerful criminal elements to circumvent the law. The wettest city was Detroit, strategically located across the river from Canada. The city’s notorious Purple Gang was reputed to be more vicious than Al Capone’s Chicago operation. Enforcement varied widely between regions and social classes. It worked best when targeted at the working-class poor.
The temperance leaders campaigned successfully for the federal income tax to replace the alcohol taxes that accounted for one-third of all federal revenue at the time. And the belief that women would be more supportive of Prohibition, the temperance leaders also strongly supported women’s suffrage. Enjoy Okrent’s well-researched account of this period.
December 30, 2010
A really interesting history of the part of prohibition we usually don't hear about it. Most prohibition documentaries/histories focus on the "What happened" rather than the "How it got this way" - which is the particular province that Okrent narrates. It's full of windbags, stump speakers, racists, politicos, and marginal figures who used temperance and the adjective "dry" to secure a national stage and temporary power. Most tellingly, as Okrent ironically notes, popular history whitewashed over the triumph, which led to one of only two amendments that GIVES power to the government, and only remembers the tragically ridiculously horrible outcome to this equally moral and political imperative.
Okrent is a good writer, and his style is suited for this kind of narrative, but I feel like I could have watched a good documentary about this, as opposed to reading a 350 page book. Still, it's a candid panoramic of an America that amazingly existed when my Grandmother was alive. Both America and its weird proclamations and weirder principles seem a way-distant remove from the one we live in today, but Okrent notes the surprising similarities as well as the obvious disparities.
Okrent is a good writer, and his style is suited for this kind of narrative, but I feel like I could have watched a good documentary about this, as opposed to reading a 350 page book. Still, it's a candid panoramic of an America that amazingly existed when my Grandmother was alive. Both America and its weird proclamations and weirder principles seem a way-distant remove from the one we live in today, but Okrent notes the surprising similarities as well as the obvious disparities.
June 6, 2016
The good news? Prohibition helps women get the right to vote. The bad news? The rise of “saloon economics,” racism and anti-immigration thrive, and people were poisoned by The Jake. Also, we've got some serious inaccuracies in our “Prohibition mythology,” including Malory's take on the lawfulness of Joe Kennedy's lucrative spirits-importation business, which was actually the beneficiary of a nuance in the Volstead Act (I'm sure it will come to a shock to everyone that the rich fared better than the poor).
September 22, 2022
This is a non-fic about the Prohibition in the USA, which also covers time both before and after that period. I read it as a part of monthly reading for September 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.
When one thinks about the prohibition, at least if they haven’t studied it before, there is a number of well-known stuff: speakeasies, bootleggers, Al Capone. This book mentions them all, but its focus is elsewhere and this makes the book interesting and educational.
First of all, it starts long before the eighteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States was ratified on January 16, 1919, with early attempts to control the trade, which ended up with the creation of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the driving force of the amendment. It united cardinally different people – members of KKK (who said “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol,”) to suffragists (who called for more rights for women exactly because a drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain (the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and, most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as “syphilis of the innocent”—venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons), progressives (assuming alcohol as the root of poverty), populists (whose ranks also included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Even Industrial Workers of the World believed liquor was the enemy of the working classes, a poison poured into their lives by capitalist exploiters intent on weakening them, distributed leaflets cautioning workers that they “can’t fight booze and the boss at the same time.”
The ASL used the majority voting system of the USA, it played on the margins, aware that if it could control, say, one-tenth of the voters in any close race, it could determine the outcome. The ASL had no problem supporting a Republican today and a Democrat tomorrow, so long as the candidates were faithful on the only issue the league cared about.
There is a lot of mostly new for me stuff on exceptions to the rule: making alcohol for one’s own use was legal, only the sale was prohibited (formally to help farmers who made cider); wine for religious practices (mostly Catholics and Jews) and medical treatments. It is hilarious that in 1917, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) had permanently ousted alcohol from the approved pharmacopoeia, passing a unanimous resolution asserting that its “use in therapeutics . . . has no scientific value.” But in 1922 the AMA revealed an extraordinary coincidence: the booming prescription trade had been accompanied by a dawning realization among America’s physicians that alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating twenty-seven separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snakebite, lactation problems, and old age. Consequently, the association declared, any regulation of the medicinal use of liquor was “a serious interference with the practice of medicine.”
There are a lot more interesting facts and the book is well-written, showing many facets of the story. Recommended.
When one thinks about the prohibition, at least if they haven’t studied it before, there is a number of well-known stuff: speakeasies, bootleggers, Al Capone. This book mentions them all, but its focus is elsewhere and this makes the book interesting and educational.
First of all, it starts long before the eighteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States was ratified on January 16, 1919, with early attempts to control the trade, which ended up with the creation of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the driving force of the amendment. It united cardinally different people – members of KKK (who said “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol,”) to suffragists (who called for more rights for women exactly because a drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain (the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and, most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as “syphilis of the innocent”—venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons), progressives (assuming alcohol as the root of poverty), populists (whose ranks also included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Even Industrial Workers of the World believed liquor was the enemy of the working classes, a poison poured into their lives by capitalist exploiters intent on weakening them, distributed leaflets cautioning workers that they “can’t fight booze and the boss at the same time.”
The ASL used the majority voting system of the USA, it played on the margins, aware that if it could control, say, one-tenth of the voters in any close race, it could determine the outcome. The ASL had no problem supporting a Republican today and a Democrat tomorrow, so long as the candidates were faithful on the only issue the league cared about.
There is a lot of mostly new for me stuff on exceptions to the rule: making alcohol for one’s own use was legal, only the sale was prohibited (formally to help farmers who made cider); wine for religious practices (mostly Catholics and Jews) and medical treatments. It is hilarious that in 1917, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) had permanently ousted alcohol from the approved pharmacopoeia, passing a unanimous resolution asserting that its “use in therapeutics . . . has no scientific value.” But in 1922 the AMA revealed an extraordinary coincidence: the booming prescription trade had been accompanied by a dawning realization among America’s physicians that alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating twenty-seven separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snakebite, lactation problems, and old age. Consequently, the association declared, any regulation of the medicinal use of liquor was “a serious interference with the practice of medicine.”
There are a lot more interesting facts and the book is well-written, showing many facets of the story. Recommended.
April 25, 2014
In the late 1920s, the leadership of the city of Philadelphia announced efforts to combat police corruption by moving police officers suspected of accepting bribes to new precincts away from their bootlegging cronies. Out of 4200 officers on the force, 3800 were transferred--only 1 cop in 10 was considered honest by the city of Philadelphia. The Coast Guard invested millions in designing faster ships; some factories doubled their profits by selling equivalent ships to bootleggers. In Williamson County, IL ('Bloody Williamson' in the newspapers of the day), local political leaders decided to combat police corruption by turning to the largest dry grassroots organization in the nation--the Ku Klux Klan. Klan members, deputized by the Bureau of Prohibition, carried out a years long war on corrupt cops and the bootleggers who paid their salaries, with poor immigrant families caught in the middle.
In all of American history, Prohibition may well be the most absurd--middle class Protestant reformers, a large proportion of which could not even vote (being women), successfully prohibited the fifth largest industry in America at the time, an industry that, through excise taxes, had traditionally provided a substantial faction of federal revenue. Support from drys proved decisive in securing the progressive income tax (to replace revenue), gaining the vote for women (who were presumptive Prohibition supporters), securing workers compensation laws (so that employers would prevent workers from drinking on the job) and drastically restricting immigration (who were largely Catholic wets).
The coalition behind Prohibition included radical labor organization and the Klan, Democrats and Republicans. It was generally speaking an outgrowth of native-born Protestant reformism, and gained substantially from nativism (hence the Klan support); for Catholic immigrants, saloons were places to find a job, to cash a check, to buy a meal and rent a room. Many machine politicians were saloon-owners, including scion Patrick Kennedy of Boston. And the predominance of Germans in the brewing industry became particularly problematic during the hysteria surrounding World War I. It was also a way for women to speak (in a way limited by the conservatism of the time) about the realities of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other ills that were exacerbated by alcohol.
But few Americans were passionate drys. The genius behind Prohibition was a political organizer named Wayne Wheeler, leader of the Anti-Saloon League, who realized early the power of a dedicated minority that will reliably turn out to vote on a single issue. The ability to reliably deliver ten to twenty percent of the vote created a voting majority large enough to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Wheeler would personally sit in Congress to observe critical votes to make his presence felt. And most significantly, Wheeler was willing to embrace the 'wet-drys', the Congressmen and Senators who voted dry and drank like wets.
As a result, Congress supported Prohibition while short-changing Prohibition enforcement: no new jails were built, no new judgeships created, and Prohibition agents were offered a tiny salary only attractive because of the opportunity to accept bribes. In a dynamic reminiscent of the war on drugs, federal prosecutors were encouraged to post high arrest and conviction rates, forcing an assembly line approach to low-level offenders that distracted from pursuit of the real bootleggers. And because bootlegging was a victimless crime, law enforcement increasingly made use of intrusive surveillance. Traditional Fourth Amendment protections were substantially watered down, including a 1927 case saying that the police did not need a warrant to tap a phone conversation. And with the rich and powerful able to break the law without consequence (drinks did not stop at the White House with Prohibition), a general contempt inevitably set in that helped spark the law's collapse as quickly as it had been enacted.
Daniel Okrent's telling of the story is strikingly modern in a lot of ways; and he is a wildly entertaining storyteller that wrote a popular history without seeming to skimp on the complexity of the social forces involved or focus overly much on heroic individuals. And the Prohibition story is very contemporary--the parallels to the war on drugs are obvious (and even a bit of a cliche), but the political machinations of the ASL are also very reminiscent of powerful lobbies like AIPAC or the NRA. Last Call felt very fresh to me, and nearly every other page had an astounding or infuriating fact to me.
In all of American history, Prohibition may well be the most absurd--middle class Protestant reformers, a large proportion of which could not even vote (being women), successfully prohibited the fifth largest industry in America at the time, an industry that, through excise taxes, had traditionally provided a substantial faction of federal revenue. Support from drys proved decisive in securing the progressive income tax (to replace revenue), gaining the vote for women (who were presumptive Prohibition supporters), securing workers compensation laws (so that employers would prevent workers from drinking on the job) and drastically restricting immigration (who were largely Catholic wets).
The coalition behind Prohibition included radical labor organization and the Klan, Democrats and Republicans. It was generally speaking an outgrowth of native-born Protestant reformism, and gained substantially from nativism (hence the Klan support); for Catholic immigrants, saloons were places to find a job, to cash a check, to buy a meal and rent a room. Many machine politicians were saloon-owners, including scion Patrick Kennedy of Boston. And the predominance of Germans in the brewing industry became particularly problematic during the hysteria surrounding World War I. It was also a way for women to speak (in a way limited by the conservatism of the time) about the realities of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other ills that were exacerbated by alcohol.
But few Americans were passionate drys. The genius behind Prohibition was a political organizer named Wayne Wheeler, leader of the Anti-Saloon League, who realized early the power of a dedicated minority that will reliably turn out to vote on a single issue. The ability to reliably deliver ten to twenty percent of the vote created a voting majority large enough to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Wheeler would personally sit in Congress to observe critical votes to make his presence felt. And most significantly, Wheeler was willing to embrace the 'wet-drys', the Congressmen and Senators who voted dry and drank like wets.
As a result, Congress supported Prohibition while short-changing Prohibition enforcement: no new jails were built, no new judgeships created, and Prohibition agents were offered a tiny salary only attractive because of the opportunity to accept bribes. In a dynamic reminiscent of the war on drugs, federal prosecutors were encouraged to post high arrest and conviction rates, forcing an assembly line approach to low-level offenders that distracted from pursuit of the real bootleggers. And because bootlegging was a victimless crime, law enforcement increasingly made use of intrusive surveillance. Traditional Fourth Amendment protections were substantially watered down, including a 1927 case saying that the police did not need a warrant to tap a phone conversation. And with the rich and powerful able to break the law without consequence (drinks did not stop at the White House with Prohibition), a general contempt inevitably set in that helped spark the law's collapse as quickly as it had been enacted.
Daniel Okrent's telling of the story is strikingly modern in a lot of ways; and he is a wildly entertaining storyteller that wrote a popular history without seeming to skimp on the complexity of the social forces involved or focus overly much on heroic individuals. And the Prohibition story is very contemporary--the parallels to the war on drugs are obvious (and even a bit of a cliche), but the political machinations of the ASL are also very reminiscent of powerful lobbies like AIPAC or the NRA. Last Call felt very fresh to me, and nearly every other page had an astounding or infuriating fact to me.
January 20, 2012
This is a fascinating glimpse into American history, of which I was largely ignorant - well worth a read. I had no idea prohibition lasted 14 years! My only criticism is the author spent way too much time on the politics of prohibition - that could have been cut by half.
The bottom line of prohibition is that is was a massive failure. It singlehandedly created organized crime, cost the government lots of money in lost taxes and enforcement, and failed to stop pretty much anyone from drinking.
It did have some upside though. Americans had a drinking problem and definitely drank less overall during prohibition, and even afterwards. But more importantly prohibition helped transform American culture. Prohibition coincided with massive immigration and population growth, which all happened in the cities. It was really a battle between urban culture and rural culture. It particularly didn't make sense in urban culture, and people rebelled, giving us "the roaring 20's". Prohibition helped us go from a stay at home culture to one where it was acceptable to go out and consume liquor.
Prohibition gave us income tax. The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), which was the organization that pushed prohibition through, pushed income tax through first because the government couldn't approve prohibition without finding an alternate source of revenue for the massive amount of tax money (30% of federal revenue) it made on liquor.
Many businesses got their starts in prohibition. Walgreens went from 20 to 525 stores during prohibition, because of the legal loophole that medicinal liquor was allowed, so drugstores were a major source of liquor sales. Coca Cola saw sales triple. The entire ecosystem of Nassau and the Bahamas was created. Sam Bronfman, the largest bootlegger in Canada, turned his operation into a legitimate business afterwards, owning many major liquor brands under the Seagrams brand.
The major failing of prohibition, and the reason it was eventually repealed, was the organized crime. Al Capone was the poster boy, but all the major mafia families got their start bootlegging, then got organized, then went on to bigger and better criminal activities. Yes it gave us Las Vegas, but it wasn't a good thing. If anything, this is the argument for the legalization of Marijuana (though there are other factors there).
In the end I think that prohibition was a bad idea because it was the government trying to tell Americans how to live. Individuals have to take responsibility for themselves.
The bottom line of prohibition is that is was a massive failure. It singlehandedly created organized crime, cost the government lots of money in lost taxes and enforcement, and failed to stop pretty much anyone from drinking.
It did have some upside though. Americans had a drinking problem and definitely drank less overall during prohibition, and even afterwards. But more importantly prohibition helped transform American culture. Prohibition coincided with massive immigration and population growth, which all happened in the cities. It was really a battle between urban culture and rural culture. It particularly didn't make sense in urban culture, and people rebelled, giving us "the roaring 20's". Prohibition helped us go from a stay at home culture to one where it was acceptable to go out and consume liquor.
Prohibition gave us income tax. The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), which was the organization that pushed prohibition through, pushed income tax through first because the government couldn't approve prohibition without finding an alternate source of revenue for the massive amount of tax money (30% of federal revenue) it made on liquor.
Many businesses got their starts in prohibition. Walgreens went from 20 to 525 stores during prohibition, because of the legal loophole that medicinal liquor was allowed, so drugstores were a major source of liquor sales. Coca Cola saw sales triple. The entire ecosystem of Nassau and the Bahamas was created. Sam Bronfman, the largest bootlegger in Canada, turned his operation into a legitimate business afterwards, owning many major liquor brands under the Seagrams brand.
The major failing of prohibition, and the reason it was eventually repealed, was the organized crime. Al Capone was the poster boy, but all the major mafia families got their start bootlegging, then got organized, then went on to bigger and better criminal activities. Yes it gave us Las Vegas, but it wasn't a good thing. If anything, this is the argument for the legalization of Marijuana (though there are other factors there).
In the end I think that prohibition was a bad idea because it was the government trying to tell Americans how to live. Individuals have to take responsibility for themselves.
March 13, 2020
If you're at all interested in Prohibition and 1920's America, Last Call is a must read. It's fascinating to know all that it gave rise to further down the line, as well as its connections to women's suffrage.
July 17, 2013
"In 1920 could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing the single subject of intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal sydicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas? As interpreted by the Supreme Court and as understood by Congress, Prohibition would also lead indirectly to the eventual guarantee of the American woman's right to abortion and simultaneously dash that same woman's hope for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?"
In-depth, well-researched, and very readable - I think this book would be appreciated by both hardcore Prohibition scholars, and newcomers like me. As Okrent says in his introduction, the book has two main goals: examine how the Eighteenth Amendment was created, passed, and then repealed (the first Constitutional amendment to ever be repealed); and its effects on numerous and far-reaching aspects of American culture. Prohibition was more than an amendment; it represented a huge turning point in both the political and the everyday landscape of the United States. Okrent's book follows the trajectory of the Prohibition movement, beginning with the first significant push by the temperance movement in the late 1800's, ending with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. In between, we meet the major players of both the "wet" and the "dry" movements and see their various political manoeuverings, the ways life changed under Prohibition, and how bootleggers operated and the creative ways they circumvented the law. This was probably the most fun for me, and where I learned the most. For instance, something I learned from this book: home brewing was still legal under Prohibition, alcohol could be sold for "medicinal purposes", and wine could still be legally produced for religious purposes (which led to a huge boom in grape farming in California and, hilariously, fake rabbis popping up all over the country and claiming that they needed barrels of wine for their nonexistent temple services). Also, the famous claim that Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger is debunked here - although Kennedy sold alcohol during Prohibition, loopholes in the Eighteenth Amendment allowed him to do so within the confines of the law.
One last thing, and this is more of a caveat than a criticism: this book is focused primarily on the political aspects of Prohibition, instead of the more sensationalist elements, such as mobsters and speakeasies. Of course, that was what really interested me - I wanted to read more about speakeasies and how they operated, the rise of mob culture, and generally how Prohibition affected the average American. Not that the political stuff isn't interesting, of course, and Okrent does oblige us by tossing in some anecdotes about bootleggers or Al Capone every few chapters, but for the most part, he's concerned mainly with showing us the political maneouvers that created, maintained, and ultimately destroyed Prohibition. Interesting stuff, sure, but if you're looking for a lighthearted flapper-filled romp through speakeasies, look elsewhere.
Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?"
In-depth, well-researched, and very readable - I think this book would be appreciated by both hardcore Prohibition scholars, and newcomers like me. As Okrent says in his introduction, the book has two main goals: examine how the Eighteenth Amendment was created, passed, and then repealed (the first Constitutional amendment to ever be repealed); and its effects on numerous and far-reaching aspects of American culture. Prohibition was more than an amendment; it represented a huge turning point in both the political and the everyday landscape of the United States. Okrent's book follows the trajectory of the Prohibition movement, beginning with the first significant push by the temperance movement in the late 1800's, ending with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. In between, we meet the major players of both the "wet" and the "dry" movements and see their various political manoeuverings, the ways life changed under Prohibition, and how bootleggers operated and the creative ways they circumvented the law. This was probably the most fun for me, and where I learned the most. For instance, something I learned from this book: home brewing was still legal under Prohibition, alcohol could be sold for "medicinal purposes", and wine could still be legally produced for religious purposes (which led to a huge boom in grape farming in California and, hilariously, fake rabbis popping up all over the country and claiming that they needed barrels of wine for their nonexistent temple services). Also, the famous claim that Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger is debunked here - although Kennedy sold alcohol during Prohibition, loopholes in the Eighteenth Amendment allowed him to do so within the confines of the law.
One last thing, and this is more of a caveat than a criticism: this book is focused primarily on the political aspects of Prohibition, instead of the more sensationalist elements, such as mobsters and speakeasies. Of course, that was what really interested me - I wanted to read more about speakeasies and how they operated, the rise of mob culture, and generally how Prohibition affected the average American. Not that the political stuff isn't interesting, of course, and Okrent does oblige us by tossing in some anecdotes about bootleggers or Al Capone every few chapters, but for the most part, he's concerned mainly with showing us the political maneouvers that created, maintained, and ultimately destroyed Prohibition. Interesting stuff, sure, but if you're looking for a lighthearted flapper-filled romp through speakeasies, look elsewhere.
July 6, 2010
Required reading for anyone interested in abolishing the disastrous War on Drugs that's corrupted the American justice system (and, on a lesser note, made hypocrites of us all) for over a quarter of a century. Last Call is informative and entertaining. Even an old American history geek like me learned something new: almost entirely due to the phenomenal political skills of one man, Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, such wildly different groups as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Ku Klux Klan came together to achieve a single goal--passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Perhaps those of us who believe in the full legalization, regulation and taxation of all drugs should take note: we need to find our own Wayne Wheeler to beat back the considerable opposition of the military-industrial complex, the drug cartels, the private prison industry, spineless politicians, and snooping moralists.
Perhaps those of us who believe in the full legalization, regulation and taxation of all drugs should take note: we need to find our own Wayne Wheeler to beat back the considerable opposition of the military-industrial complex, the drug cartels, the private prison industry, spineless politicians, and snooping moralists.
Read
June 17, 2023How egregious proposed public policy can become codified in both federal law and the United States Constitution and then be surprisingly reversed in just fourteen years is a remarkable story. Fortunately, Mr. Okrent is up to the task as both gifted author and researcher, detailing the Eighteenth Amendment’s journey to passage and then the many unintended consequences that followed. Prohibition does not occupy much mindshare in today’s public commentary; it should because there are several important lessons from that experience, the most important for me being the appalling, rotten hypocrisy of it all.
Religious movements have long attempted to influence American politics with some success. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded by Frances Willard in 1874 was one important contributor to the prohibition movement. Yet it was the Anti-Saloon League founded in 1893 by Reverend Howard Hyde Russell that proved to be the most powerful factor in delivering Prohibition unto this nation. The ASL was at its most potent under Wayne Wheeler who first joined when he finished law school in 1898. Wheeler rose to lead the ASL from 1904 until 1927 with a single purpose, from which only death could part him. He is probably the most significant American ever to fall into complete obscurity. His influence extended past the Eighteenth Amendment to the congressional enabling legislation that followed, the Volstead Act of 1919, and then into continued efforts to improve enforcement and resist repeal. One ASL colleague noted that Wheeler
While individual states had experimented with prohibition beginning in the 1850s, it likely would not have occurred at the national level but for a confluence of events; the same is true of its repeal. Prohibition forces aligned with those supporting the Sixteenth Amendment, passed in 1913 (federal income tax), and the Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920 (women’s right to vote). The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919 and became effective one year later in 1920. Since substantial tax revenues were had through the sale of alcohol, the Sixteenth Amendment was a necessary precondition, a fiscal offset, to the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment. Additional momentum for passage came from the public hostility toward German-Americans following America’s entry into the First World War, a group that had significant investments in the brewery trade.
Though the negative effects of Prohibition were obvious immediately, it took some years for an effective political movement to form for repeal. While Wayne Wheeler’s death helped, even though his influence had finally been on the wane near his end, it was the Depression that created the impetus, even the urgency, for reform. The promise of job creation combined with future tax revenues brought passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in Congress and its ratification in 1933 with an unanticipated swiftness. Approval was a statement both on how deeply the Depression affected our country and on our profound thirst for alcohol.
Throughout this book, I expected to see much written of Joseph Kennedy’s bootlegging, the illicit business that gave rise to the family fortune. Mr. Okrent left the explanation for his final chapter. There apparently is no evidence that Joseph Kennedy was ever a bootlegger . . . none, zero . . . ever. The popular myth arose decades following repeal when his son happened upon the national political stage, no doubt a coincidence having nothing to do with his Irish Catholic heritage.
Mr. Okrent summarized succinctly what this unfortunate experience meant for this nation:
Religious movements have long attempted to influence American politics with some success. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded by Frances Willard in 1874 was one important contributor to the prohibition movement. Yet it was the Anti-Saloon League founded in 1893 by Reverend Howard Hyde Russell that proved to be the most powerful factor in delivering Prohibition unto this nation. The ASL was at its most potent under Wayne Wheeler who first joined when he finished law school in 1898. Wheeler rose to lead the ASL from 1904 until 1927 with a single purpose, from which only death could part him. He is probably the most significant American ever to fall into complete obscurity. His influence extended past the Eighteenth Amendment to the congressional enabling legislation that followed, the Volstead Act of 1919, and then into continued efforts to improve enforcement and resist repeal. One ASL colleague noted that Wheeler
'controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents . . . , directed legislation for the most important elective state and federal offices, held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic Parties, distributed more patronage than any dozen other men, supervised a federal bureau from the outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.'Living in an era alongside the likes of Fords, Rockefellers and du Ponts, that’s saying something. We still remember those titans of industry, and even another unrelenting supporter of Prohibition, William Jennings Bryan, but of Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. . . .
While individual states had experimented with prohibition beginning in the 1850s, it likely would not have occurred at the national level but for a confluence of events; the same is true of its repeal. Prohibition forces aligned with those supporting the Sixteenth Amendment, passed in 1913 (federal income tax), and the Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920 (women’s right to vote). The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919 and became effective one year later in 1920. Since substantial tax revenues were had through the sale of alcohol, the Sixteenth Amendment was a necessary precondition, a fiscal offset, to the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment. Additional momentum for passage came from the public hostility toward German-Americans following America’s entry into the First World War, a group that had significant investments in the brewery trade.
Though the negative effects of Prohibition were obvious immediately, it took some years for an effective political movement to form for repeal. While Wayne Wheeler’s death helped, even though his influence had finally been on the wane near his end, it was the Depression that created the impetus, even the urgency, for reform. The promise of job creation combined with future tax revenues brought passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in Congress and its ratification in 1933 with an unanticipated swiftness. Approval was a statement both on how deeply the Depression affected our country and on our profound thirst for alcohol.
Throughout this book, I expected to see much written of Joseph Kennedy’s bootlegging, the illicit business that gave rise to the family fortune. Mr. Okrent left the explanation for his final chapter. There apparently is no evidence that Joseph Kennedy was ever a bootlegger . . . none, zero . . . ever. The popular myth arose decades following repeal when his son happened upon the national political stage, no doubt a coincidence having nothing to do with his Irish Catholic heritage.
Mr. Okrent summarized succinctly what this unfortunate experience meant for this nation:
In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure. It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of ill-trained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by the unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles.He also noted that Prohibition did affect overall alcohol consumption, a substantial per capita reduction that lasted for several decades, so it wasn’t all for naught. But for that effect, this ordeal strikes me as a regrettable example of something that a government operating for the welfare of all should never undertake and that we, the people, should be ever vigilant against those misguided voices that would lead us down similarly harmful paths in the future.
November 8, 2022
I figured that there would be some politics associated with Prohibition, But I never imagined that would be so MUCH political gaming surrounding Prohibition. I was surprised to learn about so many "institutions" that came about due to the struggle to obtain alcohol and the exemptions in the amendment. The proliferation of means to work the loopholes in the amendment were fascinating - who knew that people could drink so much ecclesiastical wine - as just one example. Then of course there were the bootleggers and the very porous border between the U.S. and Canada. Fortunes were made because of Prohibition, but the parties never truly stopped - they just moved.
October 8, 2022
Daniel Okrent likens the rise and fall of Prohibition to being like a fever that climbs and eventually burns out.
To my feminist mind, any discussion of the rise of Prohibition should include better descriptions of overworked housewives sending out young children to call out fathers to come out of the bar and to give his pay to mother, should include descriptions of the Salvation Army where.women were important partners in encouraging men to put down drink. The writing of Okrent falls a little short here to my liking.
Yet his writing shines in the descriptions of how language is used in the rise and fall of Prohibition. The florid rhetoric of the late 19th century and early 20th century and the personalities such as William Jennings Bryan who enjoyed speechifying gave major impetus to the fever of Prohibition. The arguments that showed how effective Prohibition was/how ineffective Prohibition, both arguments unsubstantiated by data encouraged the fall of the fever that was Prohibition.
These unsubstantiated arguments we often call "doublespeak" or "political rhetoric," but what they seem more to be is sophism which in a nutshell is presenting arguments that are convenient, appropriate to this time time and place, are not proven. Rhetoricians often understand rhetoric and sophisticated as be opposing language arts.
During the time of the rise and fall of Prohibition, most Americans did not finish high school, if they attended at all. According to files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf :
When I started reading this book, I wanted more feminist concerns to be addressed. After reading the book and pondering on it some, I see how right Okrent was to focus on the use of language. It is the stuff our American democracy and its people have always relied on for decision-making.
To my feminist mind, any discussion of the rise of Prohibition should include better descriptions of overworked housewives sending out young children to call out fathers to come out of the bar and to give his pay to mother, should include descriptions of the Salvation Army where.women were important partners in encouraging men to put down drink. The writing of Okrent falls a little short here to my liking.
Yet his writing shines in the descriptions of how language is used in the rise and fall of Prohibition. The florid rhetoric of the late 19th century and early 20th century and the personalities such as William Jennings Bryan who enjoyed speechifying gave major impetus to the fever of Prohibition. The arguments that showed how effective Prohibition was/how ineffective Prohibition, both arguments unsubstantiated by data encouraged the fall of the fever that was Prohibition.
These unsubstantiated arguments we often call "doublespeak" or "political rhetoric," but what they seem more to be is sophism which in a nutshell is presenting arguments that are convenient, appropriate to this time time and place, are not proven. Rhetoricians often understand rhetoric and sophisticated as be opposing language arts.
During the time of the rise and fall of Prohibition, most Americans did not finish high school, if they attended at all. According to files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf :
High school attendance did not become commonplace until the 20th century. In 1910, just 14% of Americans aged 25 and older had completed high school. As recently as 1970, the high school completion rate was only 55%. In 2017, 90% of Americans aged 25 and older had a high school degree.How could Americans know what to think of Prohibition. At some point, it all became too complicated and Americans washed their hands of it all.
When I started reading this book, I wanted more feminist concerns to be addressed. After reading the book and pondering on it some, I see how right Okrent was to focus on the use of language. It is the stuff our American democracy and its people have always relied on for decision-making.
March 10, 2013
When Wayne B. Wheeler died in 1927, an obituary in the Washington Post stated, “No other private citizen of the United States has left such an impress upon national history.” Wayne who? Well, Mr. Willard was for a decade the chief lobbyist for the Anti-Saloon League and, indeed, politicians quaked whenever this small, unprepossessing man entered the room.
But Wheeler is not the only prohibition-era titan to have utterly vanished from our national memory. There was Frances Willard, “immortal founder” of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; there was Mabel Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General for Prohibition Enforcement, whom Daniel Okrent in this fascinating new history calls “without question the most powerful woman in the nation.” And there was Izzy Einstein, star prohibition agent who made over four thousand bootlegger arrests. (Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame was a pipsqueak.)
Okrent, in lively ironic prose, presents a detailed analysis of the interplay of class, ethnicity, and religion that made, and then unmade, the eighteenth amendment to Constitution. The reader will learn why German brewers and Jewish distillers failed to unite against the forces of temperance. And why prohibition was supported simultaneously by northern progressives and the Ku Klux Klan. The book is filled with jaw-dropping facts. How, for example, the loophole which allowed for the production and sale of sacramental wine to Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis was turned into a gigantic swindle. And one could go on and on. For anyone with an interest in American history Last Call is a must read.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
But Wheeler is not the only prohibition-era titan to have utterly vanished from our national memory. There was Frances Willard, “immortal founder” of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; there was Mabel Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General for Prohibition Enforcement, whom Daniel Okrent in this fascinating new history calls “without question the most powerful woman in the nation.” And there was Izzy Einstein, star prohibition agent who made over four thousand bootlegger arrests. (Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame was a pipsqueak.)
Okrent, in lively ironic prose, presents a detailed analysis of the interplay of class, ethnicity, and religion that made, and then unmade, the eighteenth amendment to Constitution. The reader will learn why German brewers and Jewish distillers failed to unite against the forces of temperance. And why prohibition was supported simultaneously by northern progressives and the Ku Klux Klan. The book is filled with jaw-dropping facts. How, for example, the loophole which allowed for the production and sale of sacramental wine to Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis was turned into a gigantic swindle. And one could go on and on. For anyone with an interest in American history Last Call is a must read.
[Reproduced with permission from The Historical Novels Review]
February 27, 2022
Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition provides a spiffy recounting of the period between 1919 and 1933 when alcohol was illegal, in one of America’s stranger and less-successful social experience. Okrent (The Guarded Gate) chronicles the rise of the Prohibition movement, an odd consortium of groups with seemingly clashing agendas: Christian fundamentalists and progressive reformers; suffragettes and Klansmen; activists bemoaning alcohol’s effect on poor families and anti-immigrant bigots - who opposed alcohol consumption for their own, discreet reasons. After decades of agitation (Wayne Wheeler, the Anti-Saloon League’s aggressive chief spokesman, provides a template for future activists of all stripe), the 18th Amendment passes in 1919, forcing the Federal outlaw. The experiment almost immediately failed, Okrent shows, for reasons obvious and oft-rehearsed: the wealthy and well-connected easily skirted the law while poor and middle class consumers turned to moonshine and bootleg hootch; politicians, bureaucrats and enforcement officials were indifferent when not corrupt; organized crime filled the vacuum when companies could no longer legally distribute beer. It’s easy enough to view Prohibition as a simple failure - and certainly, it’s hard to frame it as a success - but Okrent provides a nuanced examination of the forces that made it seem, for a moment in time, that outlawing alcohol was a worthy experiment. Prohibition did help society in some regards: alcohol consumption plummeted massively, and remained lower than before even after the 18th Amendment’s repeal; relatively mild beer and wine came to replace hard spirits as a staple, achieving some goals of the reformers. But more baleful elements of Prohibition also made their impact: fostering government corruption, from the Harding Administration’s “Ohio Gang” to Big Bill Thompson’s Capone-backed regime in Chicago, the arrival of evangelism in politics and the revival of nativist bigotry, the consolidation of the Mafia into a national syndicate that took decades to unravel. Okrent’s book provides an insightful, fun and thought-provoking look into this messiest of periods.
August 8, 2020
This amusing and informative history was written around the same time Ken Burns was making his documentary on the subject. It is not, however, wed to Burns' exposition and, of course, like most books, covers much more material--and that in an engaging manner.
It appears that the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution was predicated upon several factors: (1) real concern about alcohol and alcoholism, (2) votes for women--on the presumption that they'd disproportionately support the law, (3) racism--against Germans, the brewers, and Jews, the distillers, (4) the institution of the income tax--to replace liquor tax revenues, (5) the efficacy of the single-issue campaign of the Anti-Salon League, (6) class--as the rich could easily circumvent the laws, (7) the inability of brewers and distillers to form a united front. Subsequently, prohibition was overturned because (1) it simply didn't take hold, not having been popular to begin with, (2) it make a mockery of the law, (3) capitalist interests believed the restored liquor taxes would allow for the abolition of the income and inheritance taxes. In the end, the real beneficiaries of prohibition were the criminals who benefited from it.
This book traces the prohibition movement from its inception, follows the progress of its legal instantiations and enforcements, federally and locally, describes the movements leading to its repeal after about fourteen years, and, in a sort of appendix, defends Joseph Kennedy from the unproven allegations that he was a bootlegger.
It appears that the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution was predicated upon several factors: (1) real concern about alcohol and alcoholism, (2) votes for women--on the presumption that they'd disproportionately support the law, (3) racism--against Germans, the brewers, and Jews, the distillers, (4) the institution of the income tax--to replace liquor tax revenues, (5) the efficacy of the single-issue campaign of the Anti-Salon League, (6) class--as the rich could easily circumvent the laws, (7) the inability of brewers and distillers to form a united front. Subsequently, prohibition was overturned because (1) it simply didn't take hold, not having been popular to begin with, (2) it make a mockery of the law, (3) capitalist interests believed the restored liquor taxes would allow for the abolition of the income and inheritance taxes. In the end, the real beneficiaries of prohibition were the criminals who benefited from it.
This book traces the prohibition movement from its inception, follows the progress of its legal instantiations and enforcements, federally and locally, describes the movements leading to its repeal after about fourteen years, and, in a sort of appendix, defends Joseph Kennedy from the unproven allegations that he was a bootlegger.
April 11, 2022
Prohibition is often remembered as a joke, a foolish, puritanical attempt to keep Americans from drinking liquor. Some also credit the "Noble Experiment" with giving organized crime a foothold in American society it once could only have dreamed of. Al Capone could not have become so famous without speakeasies either. Okrent wants to develop a more complete understanding of Prohibition and all the fascinating people and events from that era. His research is voluminous and well-organized; he brings out the varying motivations that drove reformers, ministers and politicians to first ban booze and then welcome it back. As I say, his research is impeccable. If only I could like it more. As with many writers of fascinating nonfiction books, Okrent does not know where to cut. There's enough material for three or four books. If that path had been chosen, this series of books would be a gripping read that would leave people awaiting the publication of each succeeding volume. As a single, overstuffed book, three and a half stars.
February 8, 2015
Last Call is a great introduction to America’s experiment with alcohol prohibition and a highly superior substitute for the Hollywood education that was my prior reference point. Mr. Okrent does a great job of introducing us to the cast of characters that influenced legislation, policy and enforcement, as well as the special interest groups that played such a large role in both the rise and fall of prohibition.
Though the anecdotes regarding bootleggers and rum runners are entertaining, the formation and disintegration of political alliances surrounding the alcohol issue were especially fascinating. From the unlikely partnership that gathered under the umbrella of the Anti-Saloon League to pass the 18th amendment that brought together the likes Protestants, Progressives, Klansmen, Nativists and Suffragettes, to the crime bosses that often sided with “dry” forces after passage to sustain the law (but not the enforcement).
Mr. Okrent also explains how government revenue was in the forefront of both the adoption and repeal. The initiation of the income tax under the 17th amendment becomes the key prerequisite to passage of the 18th because it replaces alcohol excise tax revenue. Repeal efforts align the “wets” with the most affluent in the nation as they seek a means to avoid high income taxation. As income tax revenue dries up during the Great Depression, the final barriers to repeal fall.
Overall, Last Call is an enlightening journey through territory that has renewed relevance due to the marijuana legalization conversations of today.
Though the anecdotes regarding bootleggers and rum runners are entertaining, the formation and disintegration of political alliances surrounding the alcohol issue were especially fascinating. From the unlikely partnership that gathered under the umbrella of the Anti-Saloon League to pass the 18th amendment that brought together the likes Protestants, Progressives, Klansmen, Nativists and Suffragettes, to the crime bosses that often sided with “dry” forces after passage to sustain the law (but not the enforcement).
Mr. Okrent also explains how government revenue was in the forefront of both the adoption and repeal. The initiation of the income tax under the 17th amendment becomes the key prerequisite to passage of the 18th because it replaces alcohol excise tax revenue. Repeal efforts align the “wets” with the most affluent in the nation as they seek a means to avoid high income taxation. As income tax revenue dries up during the Great Depression, the final barriers to repeal fall.
Overall, Last Call is an enlightening journey through territory that has renewed relevance due to the marijuana legalization conversations of today.
July 6, 2010
Wonderful, funny, informative and surprising. Okrent shows you the connections between prohibition and the institution of the income tax, between prohibition and women's suffrage and between the end of prohibition and the income tax. He explains with abundant and interesting examples why and how prohibition failed and why drinking sometimes increased during prohibition and decreased after it was repealed. And through all this historical education, Okrent manages to be funny as when, in discussing the amendment's exemption of alcohol used for "sacramental" purposes, he writes, "There were rabbis who dealt in sacramental champagne, sacramental creme de menthe, sacramental brandy, and various other liquors." I highly recommend it.
February 23, 2019
At a social function for work last month, I bumped into a retired Anheuser-Busch distributer. We struck up a conversation and when he found out my family hailed from Clinton County, IL he regaled me with stories about how he used to fulfill his monthly sales quota in a single week from that county alone. All the German-Americans that settled the area apparently really loved their beer. Whenever we visited my grandparents there in the summer, it was not uncommon for my grandfather to be nursing a Budweiser in that classic red and white can, brewed right across the river in nearby St. Louis. So as I listened to the audiobook, I found it really interesting to hear how similar communities, those with a cultural acceptance of alcohol (Germans, Irish, Italians, Catholics, Jews, etc), responded to the most significant social experiment in American political history. The stories of how these communities inventively circumvented the law (in spirit if not in letter) were pretty entertaining.
Beyond that though, the author really provides some great insight into the circumstances and context surrounding Prohibition that is much more complex than I previously imagined. I think most people think of Prohibition in very simplified terms: “this is what happens when religious zealots gain power” or “another failed attempts at social engineering by progressives”). But there really wasn’t a single, simple narrative. The political movement that pushed Prohibition really included a large number of groups (women and suffragists, progressives, conservative religious denominations, xenophobes and racists, the wealthy elite, etc) and a bizarre convergence of their interests. Together they forged a political movement unlike any seen to that date, becoming a model to be followed by political activists that would come after them.
It is hard to imagine what life would be like if Prohibition had never occurred. It really did change everything: from women gaining the right to vote, to the advent of organized crime, to the destruction of heretofore sacrosanct social mores (like women not drinking in public with men). Many of the things we simply take for granted would be totally different today. Overall, this is a first-rate account of Prohibition and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the subject. 4 Stars.
What follows are my notes on the book:
Alcohol was the fifth largest industry in the nation at the time prohibition was enacted. Prohibition redrafted the relationship between citizens and their government. It modeled a new form of political activism that is still used to this day, the ramifications going well beyond the banning of alcohol: everything from the development of organized crime to speed boat design to women in politics.
Kansas was the first state to pass its own prohibition law…several other states followed. This led to a fracturing and re-organization of political parties. Republicans anchored on anti-slavery, found itself split over the issue. Every state that passed a prohibition law, including bone dry Kansas, would eventually repeal it. Immigrant communities, especially German and Irish, all but revolted against this attack on their heritage and freedoms.
Frances Willard became President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She wholeheartedly embraced women’s suffrage in part because women’s votes were needed to pass the prohibition of alcohol. She built a zealous army to push this cause all over the country. Mary Hunt was another key player in the WCTU. Her seal of approval was sought after by text book publishers, so much so that she was basically running an extortion racket, demanding fees for her endorsement. Her “scientific” education against alcohol was blatantly false propaganda and regularly wrong.
Saloons were everywhere; usually one per 100 people in most large cities (when you subtract out women and children, the ratio was even more skewed). Many local saloons were funded and operated by making deals to exclusively sell one brand beer. Taxes on beer were implemented during the Civil War, but like most taxes they were not rescinded when the war was over. Overtime, the objections of brewers and distillers to taxation diminished because they recognized that government reliance on that revenue helped protect them against prohibitionist. Nearly a third of revenues came from alcohol taxes.
As the WCTU became a cult of personality after the death of Willard, it became more marginalized and the Anti-Saloon League became the most prominent organization in the country. The Anti-Saloon League was a single issue organization (much like the modern-day NRA). They didn’t care about the Gold Standard, crime, or anything that might detract from their single-minded focus on alcohol. This gave them incredible flexibility and dramatically increased their relative power in the political arena, compared to organizations like the Prohibition Party that adopted all kinds of contentious ideas (like socialism) that meant they always performed abysmally in polls and elections. They could tip the balance by marshaling vast armies of self-righteous Baptists and Methodists in close elections. And that was before Wayne Wheeler took over the reins. Wheeler was perhaps the most influential person in the country; he strongly influenced 2 presidents and 6 Congresses.
The “wets” in favor of alcohol were nowhere near as cohesive and organized. Brewers and distillers tried to distance themselves from one another: distillers looking to lesson pressure by closing the huge number of breweries, while the brewers believed that getting rid of hard liquor in favor of their less intoxicating beer and light wine would appease the prohibitionist.
Five distinct groups made up the anti-alcohol coalition: racist, progressives, suffragists, nativists, and populists/socialists:
1) Southerners didn’t really join the cause until after the Civil War because it was frequently associated with abolition. The widespread propoganda/caricature of blacks as rapists fueled by liquor, brought white Southerners into the prohibitionist camp.
2) Progressives, such as theater Roosevelt, we’re disgusted with the political corruption and alcohol’s roll in it. Many New York alderman in Albany owned saloons and used alcohol to secure votes. There was a racial element to this as well. Many New England progressives viewed immigrants as victims who couldn’t improve their lot in life because they wasted their income on alcohol. Prohibitionists were very effective at using pressure to bring large employers into their camp. They passed multiple laws including a ban on alcohol sales on Sunday. This only spawned inventive alternatives including hotels that sold alcohol in private rooms, or with meals (another side effect being a corresponding rise in prostitution at these establishments).
Tariffs, one of the most hotly debated issue of the era, accounted for 70% of all revenues. Alcohol taxes accounted for 70% of internal taxes and 30% of all revenues. In light of this, prohibition might have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle for the government. To lessen the loss of government revenue and remove this obstacle, progressives promoted the income tax. Southerners and Westerners were highly supportive of the income tax which penalized New York State more than any other. For them it was the way to strike back for Reconstruction.
3) Suffragists. In states where women had the vote, they voted overwhelmingly for dry candidates. The ASL broke its single issue pledge and came out in favor of women’s suffrage, recognizing they needed their support if they had any chance of passing Prohibition. Brewers, like Adolphus Busch, promoted all sorts of arguments against suffrage (most of which only contributed to their own downfall).
4) Nativists. Many of the “dries” were very xenophobic against Italians and Germans. US entry into World War I compounded that xenophobia as Woodrow Wilson ramped up propaganda, clamped down on free speech, and looked for opportunity to jail subversive or anti-American elements.
5) Populists. [I apparently didn’t write down notes on this group]
Wheeler was a master tactician. He included terminology in the proposed amendment that gave the impression that people would still be able to brew their own beverages for personal consumption. As the dries gained more leverage and power they striped that language out. Regional debate over compensation to brewers and distillers raged. Warren Harding worked with Wayne Wheeler to introduce some new innovations to the proposed amendment. Specifically, the delay of one year for the law to go into effect after ratification, giving time for the alcohol interests to repurpose their facilities, bypassing the need to compensate them. Also he introduced the innovation of a seven year time limit for states to ratify.
The use of executive power during WWI reduced the shock that would come with constitutional prohibition. Foods Czar Herbert Hoover reduced the amount of grain permitted to go to distillers, executive orders were issued prohibiting the sale of alcohol to soldiers, and a big debate ensued over the morality of the use of grain for intoxicating liquor while our soldiers fought hungry and Belgians starved.
Wheeler fanned the flames of anti-German hysteria and married that passion to his own cause. Ratification of the 18th Amendment proceeded quickly, in large part because of malapportioned representation in state assemblies. Rural voters in many states often held much more clout in state politics. Where many dry amendments or laws were defeated by referendum, legislatures in the same states approved the amendment.
From the moment of submission, it only took 394 days to meet the approval of 36 state legislatures. That alcohol had not disappeared from states with their own laws, should have been a warning sign to the nation as a whole. Production and sale would shift to the criminal class it and would not be subject to taxation at the state or federal level creating a very powerful and incentive business model for those willing to take the risk.
The Volstead Act would be used to work out all the details not covered in such a short amendment. The ASL had already seized control of both houses of Congress. Wheeler just had to keep the president in line as well. Harding moved his stock of alcohol, purchased before the amendment went into effect, to the White House. He was known to drink liberally with this cabinet members & poker buddies (including those responsible for enforcement). Wheeler couldn’t bend Harding to ASL orthodoxy and he appointed Mellon (who had a low opinion of the Volstead Act) to Treasury, the department charged with enforcement. He did however select Roy Haynes of Ohio as the chief enforcement officer which Wheeler approved of.
To combat the flood of alcohol coming in across the Atlantic and the boats parked 3 miles offshore with their supplies, the United States changed the definition of international waters from 3 to 12 miles out. Boom towns in the Caribbean, Canada, and French island of Saint Pierre grew rich off of the import duties and taxes on the vast quantities of alcohol flooding into the United States. In California harvests boomed as the demand for grapes skyrocketed in eastern cities and western mining towns. It was so large that many Napa growers couldn’t get their grapes to their customers because railroads were running past capacity. In 1917 when wine was legal, Americans consumed 70M gallons. By 1925 they were consuming 150M gallons of just the homemade stuff.
Catholic and Jewish congregations exploited the legal exemption for “sacramental” wine. Doctors were permitted to prescribe alcohol for medicinal purposes and found themselves with a new income stream. In just a few years, the production of industrial alcohol tripled (and then doubled again).
For the first time, women drank in mixed company. Speakeasies sprang up everywhere. Pauline Sabin would become the Wayne Wheeler of the repeal movement. She believed prohibition simply inscribed hypocrisy as the key characteristic of American life. Where women never drink before, now they were everywhere. People expected more alcohol at parties then before Prohibition.
Calvin Coolidge was almost the exact opposite of his predecessor. Firmly committed to limited government and staying out of people’s business, he actually slashed the budget for enforcement. To maintain their congressional majority, the Dries blocked re-apportionment for an entire decade, passed the Immigration Restriction Act, and other measures to keep Wet-supporting immigrants in urban strongholds from gaining more power in government! Brewers across the country remained open by selling beverages with malt syrup, which are perfectly legal but would become alcohol after the customer bought them.
Because the Volstead act required a trial by jury, most jurisdictions were overwhelmed with the number of arrests and cases. The extremely small fraction that did make it to trial often failed to convict because juries did not think punishment fit the crime. Corruption was incredibly rampant in the underfunded enforcement apparatus. The legal system wasn’t expanded to handle so many cases. In many states prohibition violations so overwhelmed the court system the more serious crimes were not being prosecuted.
Violence actually did increase; it wasn’t a Hollywood invention. As Clarence Darrow articulated, alcohol was outside the law so there was no legal avenue for people to redress grievances, so they defaulted to shooting. The one area where government expenditures for enforcement increased was in the Coast Guard. However, this proved to be fruitless as the boat specifications were made public to contractors bidding on the contract. Many of the same companies built ships for both the rum runners and the Coast Guard, only the rumrunners knew and exceeded government specs. Despite an increase of 4000 Coast Guardsmen, their pay was so paltry that it was often pointless to be honest.
Despite his personal opposition to probation, Chief Justice William Howard Taft presided over several Supreme Court decision decisions that weakened the Bill of Rights and granted more power to the Federal government to enforce Prohibition. Following Wayne Wheeler’s death, the ASL fractured into factions (one promoting education and advocacy and the other stronger enforcement). The election of Herbert Hoover over openly wet Al Smith was seen by the Dries as a major victory, but it would prove pyrrhic. Swept in the office on the promise of continued Republican prosperity, everything soon fell apart within months.
Famous bootleggers like Al Capone financially supported Wet mayors and governors (to weaken enforcement) and Dry legislatures (to keep the profitable prohibition laws in place). This kept their bootlegging business model profitable and kept down competition from legitimate business.
Anti-Catholic prejudice turned five solid democratic states into Republican victories for Hoover. Ominously for the Dry cause, in the same states, wet measures passed by similar margins. With Hoover’s election, the ASL took it as a mandate that didn’t exist. They pressured the passage of draconian enforcement laws that alienated the masses and made a mockery of enforcement. It was the worst mistake the ASL ever made. Unlike Coolidge who barely lifted a finger to procure funds for enforcement, Hoover was both an engineer and a progressive that thought there was a logical solution to every problem. He tried to do something about it and failed miserably.
In 1929, Congress finally passed reapportionment, which ended the overrepresentation of rural states. Hoover fired chief enforcement officer Mabel Willebrandt, showing he did not owe his election to the ASL. The stock market crash and wide disdain for the Republican Party and declining respect for government further undermined Prohibition. As Hoover tried to balance the budget, enforcement expenditures were slashed.
When the new Congress was seated they re-looked at the definitions and legalized the sale of beer that was 3% alcohol content. Momentum continue to build. Roosevelt won his landslide election. Using similar tactics to those years 13 years ago, Congress passed the language for the 21st amendment saying they were simply giving the states a chance to decide. Unlike the 18th amendment, they did not require state legislatures to respond, only state conventions allowing more flexibility for states. Utah became the 36 state to support repeal. Anheuser-Busch bought their famous Clydesdales for marketing purposes to deliver beer including to the White House.
Beyond that though, the author really provides some great insight into the circumstances and context surrounding Prohibition that is much more complex than I previously imagined. I think most people think of Prohibition in very simplified terms: “this is what happens when religious zealots gain power” or “another failed attempts at social engineering by progressives”). But there really wasn’t a single, simple narrative. The political movement that pushed Prohibition really included a large number of groups (women and suffragists, progressives, conservative religious denominations, xenophobes and racists, the wealthy elite, etc) and a bizarre convergence of their interests. Together they forged a political movement unlike any seen to that date, becoming a model to be followed by political activists that would come after them.
It is hard to imagine what life would be like if Prohibition had never occurred. It really did change everything: from women gaining the right to vote, to the advent of organized crime, to the destruction of heretofore sacrosanct social mores (like women not drinking in public with men). Many of the things we simply take for granted would be totally different today. Overall, this is a first-rate account of Prohibition and I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the subject. 4 Stars.
What follows are my notes on the book:
Alcohol was the fifth largest industry in the nation at the time prohibition was enacted. Prohibition redrafted the relationship between citizens and their government. It modeled a new form of political activism that is still used to this day, the ramifications going well beyond the banning of alcohol: everything from the development of organized crime to speed boat design to women in politics.
Kansas was the first state to pass its own prohibition law…several other states followed. This led to a fracturing and re-organization of political parties. Republicans anchored on anti-slavery, found itself split over the issue. Every state that passed a prohibition law, including bone dry Kansas, would eventually repeal it. Immigrant communities, especially German and Irish, all but revolted against this attack on their heritage and freedoms.
Frances Willard became President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She wholeheartedly embraced women’s suffrage in part because women’s votes were needed to pass the prohibition of alcohol. She built a zealous army to push this cause all over the country. Mary Hunt was another key player in the WCTU. Her seal of approval was sought after by text book publishers, so much so that she was basically running an extortion racket, demanding fees for her endorsement. Her “scientific” education against alcohol was blatantly false propaganda and regularly wrong.
Saloons were everywhere; usually one per 100 people in most large cities (when you subtract out women and children, the ratio was even more skewed). Many local saloons were funded and operated by making deals to exclusively sell one brand beer. Taxes on beer were implemented during the Civil War, but like most taxes they were not rescinded when the war was over. Overtime, the objections of brewers and distillers to taxation diminished because they recognized that government reliance on that revenue helped protect them against prohibitionist. Nearly a third of revenues came from alcohol taxes.
As the WCTU became a cult of personality after the death of Willard, it became more marginalized and the Anti-Saloon League became the most prominent organization in the country. The Anti-Saloon League was a single issue organization (much like the modern-day NRA). They didn’t care about the Gold Standard, crime, or anything that might detract from their single-minded focus on alcohol. This gave them incredible flexibility and dramatically increased their relative power in the political arena, compared to organizations like the Prohibition Party that adopted all kinds of contentious ideas (like socialism) that meant they always performed abysmally in polls and elections. They could tip the balance by marshaling vast armies of self-righteous Baptists and Methodists in close elections. And that was before Wayne Wheeler took over the reins. Wheeler was perhaps the most influential person in the country; he strongly influenced 2 presidents and 6 Congresses.
The “wets” in favor of alcohol were nowhere near as cohesive and organized. Brewers and distillers tried to distance themselves from one another: distillers looking to lesson pressure by closing the huge number of breweries, while the brewers believed that getting rid of hard liquor in favor of their less intoxicating beer and light wine would appease the prohibitionist.
Five distinct groups made up the anti-alcohol coalition: racist, progressives, suffragists, nativists, and populists/socialists:
1) Southerners didn’t really join the cause until after the Civil War because it was frequently associated with abolition. The widespread propoganda/caricature of blacks as rapists fueled by liquor, brought white Southerners into the prohibitionist camp.
2) Progressives, such as theater Roosevelt, we’re disgusted with the political corruption and alcohol’s roll in it. Many New York alderman in Albany owned saloons and used alcohol to secure votes. There was a racial element to this as well. Many New England progressives viewed immigrants as victims who couldn’t improve their lot in life because they wasted their income on alcohol. Prohibitionists were very effective at using pressure to bring large employers into their camp. They passed multiple laws including a ban on alcohol sales on Sunday. This only spawned inventive alternatives including hotels that sold alcohol in private rooms, or with meals (another side effect being a corresponding rise in prostitution at these establishments).
Tariffs, one of the most hotly debated issue of the era, accounted for 70% of all revenues. Alcohol taxes accounted for 70% of internal taxes and 30% of all revenues. In light of this, prohibition might have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle for the government. To lessen the loss of government revenue and remove this obstacle, progressives promoted the income tax. Southerners and Westerners were highly supportive of the income tax which penalized New York State more than any other. For them it was the way to strike back for Reconstruction.
3) Suffragists. In states where women had the vote, they voted overwhelmingly for dry candidates. The ASL broke its single issue pledge and came out in favor of women’s suffrage, recognizing they needed their support if they had any chance of passing Prohibition. Brewers, like Adolphus Busch, promoted all sorts of arguments against suffrage (most of which only contributed to their own downfall).
4) Nativists. Many of the “dries” were very xenophobic against Italians and Germans. US entry into World War I compounded that xenophobia as Woodrow Wilson ramped up propaganda, clamped down on free speech, and looked for opportunity to jail subversive or anti-American elements.
5) Populists. [I apparently didn’t write down notes on this group]
Wheeler was a master tactician. He included terminology in the proposed amendment that gave the impression that people would still be able to brew their own beverages for personal consumption. As the dries gained more leverage and power they striped that language out. Regional debate over compensation to brewers and distillers raged. Warren Harding worked with Wayne Wheeler to introduce some new innovations to the proposed amendment. Specifically, the delay of one year for the law to go into effect after ratification, giving time for the alcohol interests to repurpose their facilities, bypassing the need to compensate them. Also he introduced the innovation of a seven year time limit for states to ratify.
The use of executive power during WWI reduced the shock that would come with constitutional prohibition. Foods Czar Herbert Hoover reduced the amount of grain permitted to go to distillers, executive orders were issued prohibiting the sale of alcohol to soldiers, and a big debate ensued over the morality of the use of grain for intoxicating liquor while our soldiers fought hungry and Belgians starved.
Wheeler fanned the flames of anti-German hysteria and married that passion to his own cause. Ratification of the 18th Amendment proceeded quickly, in large part because of malapportioned representation in state assemblies. Rural voters in many states often held much more clout in state politics. Where many dry amendments or laws were defeated by referendum, legislatures in the same states approved the amendment.
From the moment of submission, it only took 394 days to meet the approval of 36 state legislatures. That alcohol had not disappeared from states with their own laws, should have been a warning sign to the nation as a whole. Production and sale would shift to the criminal class it and would not be subject to taxation at the state or federal level creating a very powerful and incentive business model for those willing to take the risk.
The Volstead Act would be used to work out all the details not covered in such a short amendment. The ASL had already seized control of both houses of Congress. Wheeler just had to keep the president in line as well. Harding moved his stock of alcohol, purchased before the amendment went into effect, to the White House. He was known to drink liberally with this cabinet members & poker buddies (including those responsible for enforcement). Wheeler couldn’t bend Harding to ASL orthodoxy and he appointed Mellon (who had a low opinion of the Volstead Act) to Treasury, the department charged with enforcement. He did however select Roy Haynes of Ohio as the chief enforcement officer which Wheeler approved of.
To combat the flood of alcohol coming in across the Atlantic and the boats parked 3 miles offshore with their supplies, the United States changed the definition of international waters from 3 to 12 miles out. Boom towns in the Caribbean, Canada, and French island of Saint Pierre grew rich off of the import duties and taxes on the vast quantities of alcohol flooding into the United States. In California harvests boomed as the demand for grapes skyrocketed in eastern cities and western mining towns. It was so large that many Napa growers couldn’t get their grapes to their customers because railroads were running past capacity. In 1917 when wine was legal, Americans consumed 70M gallons. By 1925 they were consuming 150M gallons of just the homemade stuff.
Catholic and Jewish congregations exploited the legal exemption for “sacramental” wine. Doctors were permitted to prescribe alcohol for medicinal purposes and found themselves with a new income stream. In just a few years, the production of industrial alcohol tripled (and then doubled again).
For the first time, women drank in mixed company. Speakeasies sprang up everywhere. Pauline Sabin would become the Wayne Wheeler of the repeal movement. She believed prohibition simply inscribed hypocrisy as the key characteristic of American life. Where women never drink before, now they were everywhere. People expected more alcohol at parties then before Prohibition.
Calvin Coolidge was almost the exact opposite of his predecessor. Firmly committed to limited government and staying out of people’s business, he actually slashed the budget for enforcement. To maintain their congressional majority, the Dries blocked re-apportionment for an entire decade, passed the Immigration Restriction Act, and other measures to keep Wet-supporting immigrants in urban strongholds from gaining more power in government! Brewers across the country remained open by selling beverages with malt syrup, which are perfectly legal but would become alcohol after the customer bought them.
Because the Volstead act required a trial by jury, most jurisdictions were overwhelmed with the number of arrests and cases. The extremely small fraction that did make it to trial often failed to convict because juries did not think punishment fit the crime. Corruption was incredibly rampant in the underfunded enforcement apparatus. The legal system wasn’t expanded to handle so many cases. In many states prohibition violations so overwhelmed the court system the more serious crimes were not being prosecuted.
Violence actually did increase; it wasn’t a Hollywood invention. As Clarence Darrow articulated, alcohol was outside the law so there was no legal avenue for people to redress grievances, so they defaulted to shooting. The one area where government expenditures for enforcement increased was in the Coast Guard. However, this proved to be fruitless as the boat specifications were made public to contractors bidding on the contract. Many of the same companies built ships for both the rum runners and the Coast Guard, only the rumrunners knew and exceeded government specs. Despite an increase of 4000 Coast Guardsmen, their pay was so paltry that it was often pointless to be honest.
Despite his personal opposition to probation, Chief Justice William Howard Taft presided over several Supreme Court decision decisions that weakened the Bill of Rights and granted more power to the Federal government to enforce Prohibition. Following Wayne Wheeler’s death, the ASL fractured into factions (one promoting education and advocacy and the other stronger enforcement). The election of Herbert Hoover over openly wet Al Smith was seen by the Dries as a major victory, but it would prove pyrrhic. Swept in the office on the promise of continued Republican prosperity, everything soon fell apart within months.
Famous bootleggers like Al Capone financially supported Wet mayors and governors (to weaken enforcement) and Dry legislatures (to keep the profitable prohibition laws in place). This kept their bootlegging business model profitable and kept down competition from legitimate business.
Anti-Catholic prejudice turned five solid democratic states into Republican victories for Hoover. Ominously for the Dry cause, in the same states, wet measures passed by similar margins. With Hoover’s election, the ASL took it as a mandate that didn’t exist. They pressured the passage of draconian enforcement laws that alienated the masses and made a mockery of enforcement. It was the worst mistake the ASL ever made. Unlike Coolidge who barely lifted a finger to procure funds for enforcement, Hoover was both an engineer and a progressive that thought there was a logical solution to every problem. He tried to do something about it and failed miserably.
In 1929, Congress finally passed reapportionment, which ended the overrepresentation of rural states. Hoover fired chief enforcement officer Mabel Willebrandt, showing he did not owe his election to the ASL. The stock market crash and wide disdain for the Republican Party and declining respect for government further undermined Prohibition. As Hoover tried to balance the budget, enforcement expenditures were slashed.
When the new Congress was seated they re-looked at the definitions and legalized the sale of beer that was 3% alcohol content. Momentum continue to build. Roosevelt won his landslide election. Using similar tactics to those years 13 years ago, Congress passed the language for the 21st amendment saying they were simply giving the states a chance to decide. Unlike the 18th amendment, they did not require state legislatures to respond, only state conventions allowing more flexibility for states. Utah became the 36 state to support repeal. Anheuser-Busch bought their famous Clydesdales for marketing purposes to deliver beer including to the White House.
May 12, 2020
No doubt, Okrent's book is one of the more interesting titles of the last decade. This book was the basis for the Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition as well as a major resource for Bill Bryson in One Summer: America 1927.
It is interesting to watch the rise of Prohibition and how it was linked to women's suffrage. In both cases, they were large minorities fixated on one issue, and they found it beneficial to team up.
How that ball gets rolling is one of the more interesting stories of the book.
Okrent covers a lot of different aspects of Prohibition.
Ironically, Prohibition's change on American culture probably made his more of a nation of drinkers than if it hadn't.
The law was faulty in that there were a lot of exceptions (religious reasons, etc) and it was quite unenforceable. Quite frankly, it ended up being a drain of money for no good purpose.
It is also interesting that the Big Brewers survived and were able to create a monopoly of sorts over the industry for decades. While small brewing companies were forced under.
Interesting to note how companies tried to evolve, and how Coke was influenced by Prohibition. A latter era product was a Grape Juice block that you should definitely not age and add sugar to, otherwise it would become an alcoholic product.
Prohibition survives. In 1928, prohibition was an easy ally for the KKK and others who wanted to target Catholics (and Presidential candidate Al Smith). It was also not a good move for many of the 'wets' who preferred the current state of things to the repeal of the law.
One suspects that Prohibition could have survived longer (certainly a ban on hard liquor), but there were too many factors working against it. Eventually, the great depression causes too much of a temptation in gains from tax revenue (in fact, a couple of interesting parts on taxes through the years). As well as Prohibition leaders dying of old age, being found out as hypocrites, or changing their minds.
It is women who lead the charge against the repeal eventually, as it was women who were the original leaders, which proves you can't paint the sexes with one political brush.
It's a thick book with a bunch of reference notes and the Constitution itself to pad it out. It covers a lot and only a small part is about Al Capone (if you thought that might be the case).
At times it is very *ahem* dry. It has a lot of wonderful research- plenty of anecdotes and trivia- but I have to admit for a pretty fun topic, it gets bogged down often. Credit to Bryson for *ahem* distilling the best parts.
Of course, far be it for me to criticize Okrent- a man with plenty of sports, history and journalism bonafides (New York Times editor, multi award winner, Ken Burns go-to, and inventor of rotisserie baseball). Still, this isn't a light read.
For me, I look at the criminalization of marijuana and see some similarities. Certainly 90s culture is filled with the weed. It's not an exact comparison, but I see similarities.
I would recommend for those who are looking for this level of detail. For most people, I would probably point you to Bryson's book (or Burns' doc) but you probably know your tastes better than I.
It is interesting to watch the rise of Prohibition and how it was linked to women's suffrage. In both cases, they were large minorities fixated on one issue, and they found it beneficial to team up.
How that ball gets rolling is one of the more interesting stories of the book.
Okrent covers a lot of different aspects of Prohibition.
Ironically, Prohibition's change on American culture probably made his more of a nation of drinkers than if it hadn't.
The law was faulty in that there were a lot of exceptions (religious reasons, etc) and it was quite unenforceable. Quite frankly, it ended up being a drain of money for no good purpose.
It is also interesting that the Big Brewers survived and were able to create a monopoly of sorts over the industry for decades. While small brewing companies were forced under.
Interesting to note how companies tried to evolve, and how Coke was influenced by Prohibition. A latter era product was a Grape Juice block that you should definitely not age and add sugar to, otherwise it would become an alcoholic product.
Prohibition survives. In 1928, prohibition was an easy ally for the KKK and others who wanted to target Catholics (and Presidential candidate Al Smith). It was also not a good move for many of the 'wets' who preferred the current state of things to the repeal of the law.
One suspects that Prohibition could have survived longer (certainly a ban on hard liquor), but there were too many factors working against it. Eventually, the great depression causes too much of a temptation in gains from tax revenue (in fact, a couple of interesting parts on taxes through the years). As well as Prohibition leaders dying of old age, being found out as hypocrites, or changing their minds.
It is women who lead the charge against the repeal eventually, as it was women who were the original leaders, which proves you can't paint the sexes with one political brush.
It's a thick book with a bunch of reference notes and the Constitution itself to pad it out. It covers a lot and only a small part is about Al Capone (if you thought that might be the case).
At times it is very *ahem* dry. It has a lot of wonderful research- plenty of anecdotes and trivia- but I have to admit for a pretty fun topic, it gets bogged down often. Credit to Bryson for *ahem* distilling the best parts.
Of course, far be it for me to criticize Okrent- a man with plenty of sports, history and journalism bonafides (New York Times editor, multi award winner, Ken Burns go-to, and inventor of rotisserie baseball). Still, this isn't a light read.
For me, I look at the criminalization of marijuana and see some similarities. Certainly 90s culture is filled with the weed. It's not an exact comparison, but I see similarities.
I would recommend for those who are looking for this level of detail. For most people, I would probably point you to Bryson's book (or Burns' doc) but you probably know your tastes better than I.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 882 reviews