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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 2011)

by Daniel Okrent

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1,4114613,029 (4.04)53
Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.
Member:JZP
Title:Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Authors:Daniel Okrent
Info:Scribner (2011), Paperback, 480 pages
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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent (2010)

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Showing 1-5 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 |
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Epigraph
Dedication
For my sister, Judith Simon,
and in memory of absent friends:
Robert N. Nylen (1944-2008)
Richard Seaver (1926-2009)
Henry Z Steinway (1915-2008)
First words
(Prologue) The streets of San Francisco were jammed.
America had been awash in drink almost from the start - wading hip-deep in it, swimming in it, at various times in its history nearly drowning in it.
Quotations
If a family or a nation is sober, nature in its normal course will cause them to rise to a higher civilization. If a family or a nation, on the other hand, is debauched by liquor, it must decline and ultimately perish.
- Richmond P Hobson, in the U.S. House of Representatives, December 22, 1914
The prohibitionists say that the liquor issue is as dead as slavery. The wet people say that liquor can be obtained anywhere. You'd think they'd both be satisfied.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in the Miami Herald, October 7, 1920
The thing that sticks out clearly now is that for years our politics promises to be thoroughly saturated with this wet and dry stuff. It will warp the whole political fabric, prevent clear thinking - even by those who are capable of thinking clearly - and hide the merits of the men who run for office in a fog of feeling.
- Frank Kent, Baltimore Sun, quoted in an Anti-Saloon League reprint, circa 1922
As was said before upon a memorable occasion when the very incarnation of morality was about to be sacrificed, 'What thou doest, do quickly.' - Malcolm C. Tarver, a Georgia dry, in the House of Representatives, December 5, 1932
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Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.

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