Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a wonderful history of the forces that led to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act in the 20s, and then the forces that led to their eventual demise. It’s decently paced, mixing personalities and facts, in an attempt to explain how it was that a country that loved to drink so much ever forbade itself from doing so.
Some of the best bits have to do with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. While we tend to think of the “Dries” as monolithic, instead they represented a remarkably diverse coalition, each with its own reasons for wanting Prohibition — the religious temperance movement, tycoons who wanted less inebriated workers, progressives who saw it as a way to uplift the poor, nativists who saw booze as an immigrant (Italian and Irish) problem, populists, suffragettes, the Klan … all of them pulled together and focused by some key individuals and organizations.
An interesting bit of trivia: the Dries were responsible for the federal income tax, as it was the only way to wean Washington off of the excise taxes from alcohol, which made up a huge percentage of federal income.
Ironically, it was the prospect of getting rid of the federal income tax that organized some of the country’s richest men to eventually bring down Prohibition (taxes did drop a bit, but never went away). They were joined by civil libertarians appalled by how intrusive the government had become in trying to (futilely) enforce the law, pragmatists that saw the law was not only not working but actually leading to higher crime rates, and by a public tired of the whole charade and outraged by legal overeaching by the Dries.
It’s a fascinating story, and a lot of fun to listen to; the audiobook is narrated by the author, and he does a fine job of it. It’s an informative and fun look at an era most people don’t know a lot about aside from a few iconic memes (flappers, speakeasies, mobsters with tommy guns) and at social and political changes in American life that reverberate down to today.
I may have to add that one to the stack!
Good to know we have not done anything that self-destructive since. Must have really learned our lesson.
Yeah. The parallels (in process, not just in outcome) are … noteworthy.
One of the things I particularly liked (and possibly even loved) were some of the unexpected little gems such as the way alcoholic beverages were marketed to a pre-prohibition public, the background information on some of the beer barons and distillers and how they rode out the ‘dry’ spell. Of particular interest was the way in which the ordinary lives of the american people were changed. New products appeared on store shelves and near beers appeared (but had to be carefully marketed to avoid violation of the specific terms spelled out legally). Home winemaking became more popular. I also appreciated the extreme footnoting and indexing which referred back to specific portions of the ammendment and its execution.