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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition…
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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (original 2010; edition 2010)

by Daniel Okrent

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1,4114613,029 (4.04)53
Fascinating history. Prohibition was a failure almost from the start and certainly avoided from the start. A perfect example of how good intentions lead to bad laws and unintended consequences that take years to unravel, if they can ever be set right.

I read it with our recent Health care/health insurance regulation law in mind and imagined the terrible and perverse unintended consequence that piece of legislation will have.
  jmcilree | Sep 24, 2010 |
Showing 1-25 of 46 (next | show all)
I started reading this when I was laid low with major allergies, and I don't know if it was the swollen-itchy-red-leaky-crusty eyes or if it was the writing but I just couldn't get through this book.
  blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
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. ( )
  Kimberlyhi | Apr 15, 2023 |
Fairly dry, and more than I needed to know, but it is certainly an interesting subject.

> What was carefully kept out of the criminal code was any specific proscription against drinking or buying alcohol; savvy drys knew that without this enormous carve-out no user would ever testify against his supplier

> in the decade after the arrival of the Eighteenth Amendment, alcohol consumption dropped only 30 percent.

> Joseph P. Kennedy sold off much of the stock from his father’s East Boston liquor business to grateful friends and associates, and cellared several thousands of dollars’ worth of wine in his Brookline house. The wine in Joe Kennedy’s basement was there legally, courtesy of the clause in the Volstead Act that legitimized alcoholic beverages already stored in an individual’s residence as of midnight on January 16.

> San Francisco had officially declared its distaste for Prohibition even before it had started. Back in 1919, the city’s considerate board of supervisors, mindful of the hardship about to be visited upon its citizens, had unanimously repealed the city ordinance banning unlicensed saloons. A judge—a federal judge, in fact—had declined to give a jail sentence to Louis Cordano of Mission Street, who had been convicted of a prohibition violation; among Italians, the judge said, wine “is as necessary as coffee to the average American and tea to the average Englishman.”

> If an inshore runner happened to encounter law enforcement officials waiting for him to pull ashore, he’d toss his cargo overboard in a relatively shallow inlet. This was a nuisance, not a loss. Having first packed the liquor in “hams”—six-bottle burlap bags weighted down with salt for instances like this—the smuggler could return a few days later, after the salt had dissolved, to find his investment bobbing safely on the surface

> American Jews had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment with the near unanimity and absolute vehemence that seized American Catholics. For both groups, it wasn’t simply a matter of protecting the free practice of their respective religions. Like the Catholics, the Jews peered behind the Prohibition banner and saw the white-hooded hatred of the Ku Klux Klan and the foaming xenophobia of the nativist pastors who dominated the Methodist and Baptist churches.

> Much more problematic from a competitive standpoint were the legitimate drugstores that operated by illusion. They sold the same conventional remedies and toilet items they’d always sold and kept a licensed pharmacist stationed behind an elevated counter, but those were mostly for show. These stores made so much money selling liquor that they could keep prices on their other products low enough “to seriously injure the legitimate drug business,” … Proposed that the Prohibition Bureau withhold a medicinal liquor license from any new drugstore until after its first full year of operation. Of course, critics could reasonably point out that such a regulation might provide a very comfortable advantage to a liquor-dispensing druggist who had already been around for a while. … In 1922 Walgreens introduced the milk shake, which family historians have credited with the chain’s next growth spurt. But it’s doubtful that milk shakes alone were responsible for Walgreens rocketing expansion from 20 stores to an astonishing 525 during the 1920s.

> Between 1920 and 1925 American production of legally manufactured industrial alcohol nearly tripled; by 1930 it had doubled once more. Impartial authorities placed the quantity diverted to the bootleg trade at 60 million gallons in a single year. Diluted to 80 proof, that was the equivalent of 150 million gallons, or 750 million fifths, of drinkable liquor. If that seemed like a lot for a nation of 115 million—including infants, children, and abstainers—there was a ready explanation: in a bizarre role reversal, some of it was actually being exported to Canada, where it could be sold at lower prices than that country’s legal, taxed liquor.

> Vanity Fair published an instructive article explaining “how to bait your social hook in these trying days of drought”—in other words, how to write an invitation that suggested that lawbreaking would be abided but did not say so outright. One suggestion: add a note telling your guests “Bring your corkscrew.”

> At “21,” at last settled in a building they owned with a name they would keep, they decided to stop paying bribes and invested instead in an elaborate system that made them effectively raidproof. On an alert from the doorkeeper, the bartender could press a button that sent the entire contents of the back bar tumbling down a shaft, past a series of bottle-breaking metal grates, and finally onto a pile of rocks in the basement. Any remaining liquid drained into a sump. All that was left behind were shards of glass and a lingering aroma, but an odor was not admissible evidence.

> A new campaign to block congressional reapportionment after the 1920 census was more urgent: it was designed to protect the dry fortress at that very moment. The dry refusal to allow Congress to recalculate state-by-state representation in the House during the 1920s is one of those political maneuvers in American history so audacious it’s hard to believe it happened. In its disregard for constitutional principle and its blatant political intent, it would almost rank with Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court–packing plan of 1937—that is, if anyone remembered that it even happened

> none of these companies was prepared for the shock that came after barely six months of constitutional Prohibition, when the market for near beer suddenly flattened, then nose-dived.

> One of the nobler aspects of the Volstead Act was its guarantee of the right to a jury trial for anyone charged with a violation. It was a requirement, it soon turned out, that the legal system was incapable of handling. In New York the first four thousand arrests under the Mullan-Gage law (the state version of the Volstead Act that Al Smith soon torpedoed) resulted in fewer than five hundred indictments, which led in turn to only six convictions and not even one jail sentence.

> by 1930 a 150-foot blockade runner equipped with diesel engines, Maxim silencers, shortwave radio, armor plating, and a capacity of 8,000 cases could be had for $100,000. At a gross profit of $1 per bottle, any self-respecting bootlegger could have made back virtually his entire investment on a single run. Just as World War I had accelerated the evolution of airplane technology, the battle between the rumrunners and the Coast Guard provoked the rapid development of powerboat design.

> For the big brewing families—the Pabsts and the Busches, the Millers and the Coorses—Prohibition cleared the field. Of the 1,345 American brewers who had been operating in 1915, a bare 31 were able to turn on their taps within three months of the return of legal beer—primarily the big companies that had kept their doors open producing ice cream or cheese or malt syrup during the dry era. Several hundred firms returned to the business in the ensuing years, but the head start seized by the big breweries triggered a consolidation of the market that would never end. (By 1935 five companies controlled 14 percent of the market; by 1958 their share had reached 31 percent; by 2009 the three survivors owned 80 percent.) ( )
  breic | Mar 27, 2022 |
These days "Prohibition" is basically a synonym for "failure", but less than hundred years ago, preventing "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the US was thought to be a good enough idea to not only pass both houses of Congress, but also all but two of the 48 state legislatures by the fateful year of 1919. Last Call is the story of how the anti-alcohol crusade went from being a fringe rural movement to the unifier of a whole host of widely varying interest groups, from temperance activists to feminists and suffragettes, nativists, populists, evangelicals, socialists, and racists. I was really intrigued by the random endorsements that prohibition picked up (P. T. Barnum?), as it was an issue that cut across so many political lines that almost anyone could hitch their wagon to it. By far the most interesting to me of those political linkages was with female suffrage, as one of the main goals of Prohibition was to prevent men from drinking away their earnings and committing domestic violence; that something as seemingly obvious to a modern reader as granting women the right to vote was linked to the extirpation of alcohol is a reminder of far the political landscape has changed. Even though women ironically turned their backs on Prohibition after the passage of the 19th Amendment (and their discovery that they actually liked the freedom to drink), originally the movements were closely joined. Similarly with the classic liberal/conservative split - back then the progressive movement was gung-ho about Prohibition as a way to improve the lives of the uneducated, largely foreign lower classes, while established interests favored the status quo; whereas now it is liberals who favor laxer alcohol laws and conservatives who prefer restrictions on drinking.

Okrent has a bunch of great biographical detail on the major architects and forebears of Prohibition, many of whom are almost forgotten these days: Carrie Nation, axe-wielding radical of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; Wayne Wheeler of the ultra-powerful Anti-Saloon League; Andrew Volstead, of the infamous Volstead Act; Morris Shepard, author of the 18th Amendment. It's almost impressive, in a way, that these people were able to impose official sobriety in a country where the average person drank 7 gallons of pure alcohol per year (a stunning amount that is three times higher than the average today). They used all the tactics of any good interest group, like acquiring influence with legislators through various means, getting religious groups to sign off on their cause, distributing propaganda to children, wrapping themselves in the flag, and disparaging the patriotism of those who disagreed. Additionally, they tried to embed Prohibition in American society with larger strategies of varying degrees of reprehensibility: first, introducing a permanent income tax to offset the enormous revenue losses Prohibition represented (excise taxes on liquor made up 20 to 40% of federal revenue); second, refusing to reapportion Congressional seats in accordance with the 1920 Census to limit the influence of undoubtedly pro-alcohol Representatives from the cities, and eventually capping the total number of Representatives with the unprecedented Reapportionment Act of 1929; third, changing the makeup of the cities by passing immigration restrictions designed to limit the immigration of unfriendly Catholic or Jewish or non-WASP foreigners. The political angle is important: big-city saloons were vital political bases back then, and even after Prohibition connections to alcohol continued to provide wealth and power (fun fact: Joseph P. Kennedy is smeared as a bootlegger despite no evidence, but many families like the Bronfmans of the Seagrams brand did indeed illicitly make buckets of money).

Though Okrent doesn't really push the connection, the obvious modern parallel to Prohibition is the War on Drugs. Unfortunately there are problems with the analogy that make it seem like drug criminalization will last for much longer yet. First, drug use does not have the same long tradition in American society that drinking does. While a huge percentage of the US has taken one drug or another, drug use has never been legal and widely practiced in the same way that drinking was before Prohibition, so legalization is not seen as a natural "default state" the way that the pre-Prohibition status quo was. Second, while drugs like marijuana are huge cash crops, and the trade in other drugs like cocaine is billions per year, drugs aren't as central economically as alcohol was; few expect legalized and taxed drugs to make up more than a small revenue stream for any level of government. Third, there isn't really a large natural drug-using constituency in the US in the same way as Catholics or Jews with sacramental wine (Rastafarians are a tiny minority), so debate has to take place at a level of abstraction rather than at the visceral level of ethnicity, religion, and nativism. None of that changes the morality or sensibility of legalization, but it makes the debate slower. As Okrent's book shows, high-minded reform efforts don't always make final sense, and what makes sense often has nothing to do with good motives. While perhaps the one success of Prohibition was that it did indeed reduce the amount that people drank, the side-effects on society were nearly intolerable; yet Prohibition endured for over a decade, and was only ended due to the worst economic crisis in world history. We certainly haven't seen the last of these crusades. ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
Generally very solid examination of, as the title says, the rise and fall of Prohibition in the United States. Very sound choice of illustrations, and to my mind pretty insightful analysis of what went wrong and why. Only an occasional outburst of snottiness takes away from giving this five stars. Generally recommended. ( )
  EricCostello | Dec 26, 2020 |
Okrent tells the a story that only occurred less than a century ago, but which shows how much some things have changed--and how much some things have not. Many of the "heroes" of prohibition are entirely forgotten. And the story of prohibition might make for valuable consideration by proponents of modern-day social causes, on both sides of today's national divide. There are strange bedfellows, crooked politicians, intelligent gangsters, clueless optimists, ur-NASCAR drivers, wily pragmatists, muckraking journalists, and many other crazy characters. Oh, and cunning, opportunistic Canadians just waiting to take advantage of the USA. ;-) ( )
  ckadams5 | Jun 19, 2019 |
Okrent tells the a story that only occurred less than a century ago, but which shows how much some things have changed--and how much some things have not. Many of the "heroes" of prohibition are entirely forgotten. And the story of prohibition might make for valuable consideration by proponents of modern-day social causes, on both sides of today's national divide. There are strange bedfellows, crooked politicians, intelligent gangsters, clueless optimists, ur-NASCAR drivers, wily pragmatists, muckraking journalists, and many other crazy characters. Oh, and cunning, opportunistic Canadians just waiting to take advantage of the USA. ;-) ( )
  ckadams5 | Jun 19, 2019 |
A really good history with much detail about the 14 years of prohibition, from the beginning to the end. What an interesting time in America ! I learned a lot from reading this book on this interesting topic. ( )
  loraineo | Jan 12, 2019 |
Okrent presents a fascinating and thorough breakdown of the causes, practice (and lack thereof), and conclusion of fourteen years of Prohibition in America. The dreamy goal of the Anti Saloon League and other sponsors of the "dry" way of life thought that banning booze would elevate the American worker, end poverty, and perhaps even civilize uncouth immigrants who so favored the drink. The xenophobic reasons for the Volstead Act were quite clear--this was intended as a blow to the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and in the south, against blacks who, it was claimed, became maniac rapists because of gin. The white wimmin must be kept safe, right?

The failure of Prohibition is well documented, and these days, celebrated. Drunkenness and night revels only increased. Small-time criminals developed the business acumen to found gangster corporations. The actual end of the bill came about, not just because of the public failure of it all, but because of the Great Depression. The federal government not only could not afford to enforce the law, but they desperately needed the tax money brought in by alcohol.

I read this book for research needs, and I found loads of good information. I would have liked a little more emphasis on Southern California, but that's pure selfishness on my part; there's no denying that New York, Chicago, and Detroit offered more dynamic settings to ficus on the drinking aspect of the Roaring Twenties. ( )
  ladycato | Sep 25, 2018 |
A great book - well written account of all that was going on. Will my grandchildren remember today's times as engrossingly as I revel in Grandpa's days.
My only question; which will never be answered; Did grandpa wash out the bathtub before they made gin?
Well worth the read - extremely enjoyable! ( )
  busterrll | Feb 9, 2017 |
This is not the first book on Prohibition I read, but certainly it's the best so far.
It covers basically every possible aspect of Prohibition, from the way the movement started in the XIX century, to how it ended and why.

I like the first part particularly. It detailed the social, ethnic and even religious reasons why the idea of a legal prohibition of alcohol became acceptable in the United States. Many were against it from the beginning, because they thought a federal law should not regulate the personal life of citizens, but the majority finally had they way because of a tightly knotted array of reasons that spanned from social issues like actual abuse of alcohol, to (true or imagined) issues concerning race and immigrants (this part was new to me and particularly enlightening), to politics, religion and economics. I had never realised before how complex the situation was, but here it was detailed clearly, with a lot of documentation and a crisp style that made it easy to read.

The central part was the hardest for me. It goes into a lot of details about every conceivable aspect of Prohibition, from the sacramental wine, to bootlegging, to the involvement of politics and low enforcement. Some of this was already known to me, some was new, but - personally - I found it too detailed and too much of everything. There wasn't a focus, and it seemed to me as if the matter was all over the place. I did find the information interesting, but I think I'd absorbed it more easily and effectively if I'd had less of it, but more focused.

The last part was back on track. It detailed the reasons why Prohibition was finally repealed. There wasn't anything particularly new here (not as much as in the first part), but the narration followed a line, and it was easy to read and understand.

This is certainly a precious source of information for anyone interested in Prohibition in particular, and American history in general. It is well-informed and rich and generally well-written. It does focus on facts more than people and I think this is a weakness of the book. Some important protagonists of Prohibition are merely mentioned in short parts of chapters and I wouldn't even knew who they were had I not read other books on the matter. That is something to complain about, but for the rest, I found it invaluable. ( )
  JazzFeathers | Jul 27, 2016 |
An entertaining, albeit overly detailed, history of prohibition. Prohibition had a lot of ramifications that I had never imagined. ( )
  M_Clark | Apr 26, 2016 |
An interesting history of Prohibition. I learned a lot, but got tired of reading it by the end. ( )
  klburnside | Aug 11, 2015 |
Well done review of the Prohibition thought processes and detailing of the various ways in which society dealt with the banning of their very favorite pastime. ( )
  cyclops1771 | Nov 13, 2014 |
This book was way more interesting than I first thought it would be when I bought it. Although it is about one of my favorite subjects, I feared that it would be drab and boring recollection of facts. I am very pleased to say that the author did a fabulous job of intertwining facts with anecdotes of the day, along with pictures of real advising and people involved.

The book starts with a look at how the prohibition movement got started, the political parties that favored it, how it managed to make its way through the amendment process, and then some of the best parts of the book: how enforcement of the law was almost completely nil. Even with very little enforcement, the courts at all levels were bogged down with prohibition cases. The book discusses how while prohibition cut down the amount of drinking we did as a nation as a whole, if you wanted to drink, you would easily find a way. Finally the book went into the reasons it was finally repealed.

It was an interesting read about a time in our nations history that really shaped us a nation--it built up and funded the mob in many cities, helped people amass large fortunes through bootlegging, and really openly defy the constitution. Pretty interesting stuff! ( )
  csweder | Jul 8, 2014 |
Very interesting examination of the rise and repeal of Prohibition, of life during the dry years and of the long and short term impacts of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Prohibition movement on contemporary politics and society. ( )
  nmele | Apr 30, 2014 |
This is a very good book about Prohibition. It charts its roots in the 19th century and how it was passed through a series of unlikely alliances. It does a great job showing how poorly it was enforced, through lack of will and lack of money. And it shows that it was repealed because of how poorly it was enforced, how rich people wanted it removed so they could repeal income tax, and bringing the booze industry back into the legal world would help the economy and government finances after they had been hit by the Depression.

This is written to a mass audience, citing few sources but using tons of entertaining stories. Even with that, it keeps an informative narrative that stay true to its title. It does trace the rise and fall of Prohibition. I don't think I would use it as a sole textbook for a class on the era, but I would love to use parts of it to spice up the class. And I would definitely recommend it to friends whether they are historians or not. ( )
  Scapegoats | Feb 13, 2014 |
My great-grandfather was a bootlegger. He didn't start out as one, of course--he learned his trade as an electrician in Parma, Italy, but according to my grandfather (who was understandably rather bitter at being dumped off, after his mother died in childbirth, at the local monastery to be raised by the holy brothers) there was always something a bit shiftless about him even after he started a new life in Canada and the United States. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good one. After commencing his new profession in the waters between Windsor, Canada and Detroit--the famous "City on a Still"--wettest of the many prohibition defying cities--beating, according to author Daniel Okrent, such booze-loving towns as Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco-the gunplay-and "probies"-became too intense for the casual criminal and he moved his operations to Vancouver. Even that semi-rural area, whose low population density never attracted the same amount of interest for criminals and the federal government alike-proved to be too much for the amateur he remained. He was caught by prohibition agents, despite scuttling his boat and making a run for it--and promptly deported. All of this--the start in the thirsty East--the ignominious end in laid-back West where highly organized criminal operations never gained a real foothold--the swift deportation as the US government used any excuse to get rid of immigrants--turned out to be a perfect template laid out in "Last Call". I just didn't realize it until this summer, when I both read the book and talked to my mother and her youngest sister about their grandfather's activites. (Any attempt to bring the subject up with my now-deceased grandfather invariably produced atypical agitation--even vitriol-as the passing of the years did nothing to mitigate my grandfather's annoyance with his own father).

For you see, my grandfather's life--indeed the fate our our entire family--got caught up with my great-grandfather's decision to run a bit of Seagrams through the San Juan Islands. My great-grandfather was refused entry back to Italy--Mussolini was in the middle of his big purge of home-grown organized crime and wasn't exactly interested in importing criminals. The French, however, were more sanguine. He settled in Cannes, where he remained through the outbreak of the war. Times were hard in Vichy France; my great-grandfather wrote a letter to his son in Canada pleading for money. My grandfather did the duitiful thing, stuffed some bills in an envelope, and as he was busy that day--gave the letter to his cousin and business partner to mail the letter in the United States, as the US was still neutral. (Back then, the border was more a slightly interesting concept than something most people paid attention to, and people flitted back and forth all the time). The cousin did mail the letter-except he forgot to mail it in the US and instead mailed it in Canada. My grandfather was promptly hauled in by the Canadian government, which wanted to know why he was aiding and abbetting the enemy.

My grandfather never got over his arrest. One of my mother's favorite anecdotes is the story of her father, white-faced and trembling, returning after his grilling by authorities and burning every communist magazine and tract in the house.(Parma is a very red part of Italy.) Anyway, my grandfather was finished with his adopted country from that moment. He insisted, until Alzheimer's overtook him, that his real reason for leaving was his inability to handle for any longer the quaint Canadian habit of leaving dead bodies in storage until the spring thaw, but the rest of the family knew better. He began plotting his escape. After the war, he moved to Southern California, despite my grandmother's protests, and set himself up as an electrician/glassblower, where he did his part to make the Southland the neoned tacky glory it was in the 50's and 60's.

All this is just a long-winded way of saying I have more than a normal interest in American Prohibition, and view it as the reason why I was born a Californian, or indeed why I was born at all. Of course, for all of us, there are a million causalities as to why we are here on earth, and if anything, I should point a finger at the idiotic cousin WHO COULD'T FOLLOW THE SIMPLEST INSTRUCTIONS. But this is my narration, and I'm sticking to my story. I like a grand historical spin.

But back to the book I'm supposed to be reviewing. It's wonderful. Yes, it could seem that I don't have the clearest perspective, but honestly, it is a great read, and an essential one for anyone who is interested in American history. I admit that I am a bit low-brow, and would have preferred a few more "Chicago typewriters" (tommy-guns) in the tale, but I know, as much as I like a bit of "Boardwalk Empire" sleaze, that the story of how the United States sort-of swore off booze for a dozen years has just as much to do with sweeping sociological movements and legislation. Daniel Okrent entertainingly explains how United States has always been awash with alcohol, and how there has always been an opposition to all that drinking, and how the anti-saloon movement started to gain force after the Great Awakening. I was the most annoying person while I was reading this book, prone to shooting out random tidbits of trivia whenenver anyone wandered within earshot. Did you know the Clan was dry-and pro suffrage? Did you know that plea-bargaining started as the government was overwhelmed by all the cases in the docket? Did you know that the federal income tax really started as a way of recouping projected lost revenue? Did you know that all the said lost revenue by illegal bootlegging was equal to the ENTIRE federal government budget--including the military--in 1926? Did you know....and so on. Everyone in the household was relieved when I finished the book.

All of this could have been as dry as some of the midwestern counties which actually OBEYED the Volstead act, but Okrent is a witty writer, and a master of the trenchant character sketch. On the axe wielding Carry Nation: "Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd nation was six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache." Or Calvin Coolidge's idea of governing "...it was if he viewed government as a vestigial organ of the body politic." And there are many amusing anecdotes along the way, from the time of the colonial distilleries, to the repealing of the Volstead act (which ironically helped to make many municipalities drier than they had been previously).

A fun read. For those who yearn for more than a bit of Al Capone-type action and are impatient with legislative maneuvering, 4 stars. For political wonks and those who are here on the planet thanks to American Prohibition, 5 Stars. ( )
  gaeta1 | Nov 9, 2013 |
Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment, was such a strange time in American history; it is hard to believe it really happened. Liquor was part of American life since the Pilgrims, but in the 1840s there was a change of heart the resulted in outlawing all “intoxicating liquors.” This was supposed to be a panacea that would result in a better country where men took better care of their families and became more responsible citizens. The actual outcome, however, was far from what the reformers had hoped for.

The trajectory to enacting Prohibition wove together many themes from this time period. Women were the strongest advocates of temperance and Prohibition, and the suffrage movement arose from these. With a rise in immigration in the late 1890s, the country’s alcohol consumption also rose, further fuelling xenophobia and racism. Coalitions arose around the temperance movement that included racists, progressives, suffragists, populists, and nativists. Each of these groups used the Prohibition movement to advance their own ideologies. Immigrants and blacks were used as scapegoats and examples of how alcohol consumption could ruin lives and threaten the order of the land.

Once Prohibition became law with the help of legislative malapportionment that allowed rural areas to dominate the political process, criminality began almost immediately. Rich Americans purchased entire liquor stores’ stocks and stored them in their basements, and liquor crossed the border from Canada on day one. It didn’t help that enforcement of the law was poor due to lack of funding and corruption within local and federal offices was rampant.

Speakeasies sprang up all over the country, and in the 1920s drinking in novels and films became common. New inventions emerged around alcohol, such as house parties, brand name booze, inter-gender and inter-racial drinking, liquor tourism, and liquor made from low-grade products that poisoned, maimed, blinded, and killed. While the rich certainly drank more than the poor, everyone drank more than before Prohibition.

Prohibition resulted in the most hypocritical time in American history. As it became more and more apparent that enforcement levels were never going to be as high as was needed, that police and politicians were either not interested in enforcing the law, not equipped to, or were drinkers themselves, and that nontaxable money was being made hand over fist by gangsters and other criminals, sentiment to repeal Prohibition was rising. By the time of the Jones Law’s mandatory minimum sentences, the number of people against Prohibition was at the apex.

In the late 1920s, business leaders and high society ladies began to campaign for repeal of Prohibition while groups that supported Prohibition, such as influential lobbying arms, rapidly lost power, tenacity, and influence. In February 1933, the Senate voted for repeal 63-23 and the House 289-121. “Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work” (p. 352).

Prohibition lasted 13 years, 10 months, and 19 days. The only success it had was in convincing Americans to drink less. The Eighteenth Amendment was an utter failure that created institutionalized hypocrisy, caused criminality and corruption, and made it easier than ever to get a drink.
  Carlie | Oct 11, 2013 |
Last Call is the best history of Prohibition that I have read. If you have any interest in American History you need to read Last Call. ( )
  Philip100 | Sep 6, 2013 |
Interesting and very detailed history of the 18th amendment and how it affected US culture and a whole lot of other things. ( )
  doonienc | Apr 27, 2013 |
I read this, or rather listened to it, as it was this month's selection of my book club. I used the 2x speed on my iPhone and knocked out most of it on a drive to and from Columbus.

The book is a history of Prohibition in America. Why it happened, how it happened, who the major players were, who gained from it, who lost out, and why it didn't succeed. I expected it to be much drier than it turned out to be. It was chockfull of fun facts and interesting anecdotes. ( )
  EricKibler | Apr 6, 2013 |
or wait for the PBS special by Burns!
  lindap69 | Apr 5, 2013 |
I've read the book, now bring on the Ken Burns miniseries. -cg
  Carissa.Green | Mar 31, 2013 |
A wonderful piece of nonfiction. Okrent covers the forces that caused prohibition and the how they ultimately unraveled. Skillfully written including the time to personalize the personalities of this broad story. ( )
  yeremenko | Dec 12, 2012 |
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