Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Hardcover – May 11, 2010

I've said it before, and I'll say it here, too, reporters write the best books, and Daniel Okrent is an old newspaperman. He has written a book of substance about America, and whereas an academic might've made a three-volume series out of the same material, Okrent condenses it all into a mere 375 pages. That's why a few reviewers here have complained that the book is somehow difficult. It's not, but they, apparently, aren't used to books where one must not skip one paragraph. Each page here is crammed with narrative and facts, some of which are amusing and some appalling, but it's all meat and no Hamburger Helper. Although there are a few errors of grammar and fact (see Note 1 under Comments below), a staggering amount of research has gone into this book.I've said it before, and I'll say it here, too, the American history we are taught in school is of little value. How does it profit us to know the sequence of presidents? What if George Washington or John Tyler had never been born? Would the United States be any different today? Is there a history textbook that explains what the USA fundamentally is? I have not seen one. More than any history I've read, "Last Call" examines the fabric of our society and shows us, for better or worse, exactly what makes the USA the painfully schizophrenic nation it is. Much more than merely a chronicle of the thirteen awful years the 18th Amendment was in effect, "Last Call" disturbingly evokes comparisons to America here and now, because the nation hasn't changed significantly over the years, if it's changed at all.The first revelation that one walks away with from "Last Call" is that Prohibition was not about prohibition. That's right; rather than a battle against the evils of the devil's cup, Prohibition was a battle between different segments of the population. A large portion of our population (perhaps as much as 50% overall, but higher in the South and West) is mired in tribalism, and these people, united under the sheets of the Ku Klux Klan, hate anyone who is different from them. They of course hate the Negroes, and they hate the Mexicans, and obviously they hate all the immigrants, but in years past, the WASPs especially hated the Catholics (papists) and the Jews. "Last Call" reminds us that, in the 1920s the KKK was not so much a racist group as it was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish group, and in 1915, when Georgians were given a choice between lynching a Negro and a Jew, they chose to hang the Jew (Leo Frank). Frances Willard, an ur-feminist and founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union called the immigrants, even those who'd earned citizenship, "the infidel foreign population." As the great Fred Reed once wrote, "Next to sex, the strongest human instinct seems to be to form groups and hate other groups."But "hate" is an overly-broad term in this case. Envy is more accurate, and Prohibition was partially the result of the envy of rural America's churls toward them-thar city-fellers who, with their $5-a-day, were having a better time of things than the country folk. "Last Call" makes it clear that Prohibition was only tangentially related to drinking, because it was "Prohibition for you, not for me" (a phrase which pops-up several times throughout the book), and the rural oafs were allowed to keep fermenting their hard cider. The immigrants may have arrived dressed in rags and penniless, but they proved more industrious and clever than the native White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and soon prospered. More important, the immigrants brought with them the fine brewing and distilling skills of Europe, so in addition to higher wages, the immigrants also enjoyed better beverages, and the nativist churls were naturally envious of these pleasures. "Last Call" spends several pages discussing the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which kept new Europeans out, but as for the Europeans who were already here, the best blow the WASPs could deliver was to deprive them of their superior beverages. Once again, Prohibition was not about drinking, because once the Volstead Act was in force, the nativist churls were keen to peddle their ghastly brews: white lightning, peruna, squirrel whiskey (which Okrent gets wrong -- see note 1 below), and spoiled apple juice. It was a victory for the nativists to drag the Europeans down to their level.After reading so many of Okrent's accounts of "dry" politicians (especially the Klan members) who were themselves drunkards, moonshiners, or in the pay of bootleggers, it doesn't take a seer, a professor or an analyst to recognize that the very same thing is happening in the present day. No one intelligent enough to be a professional politician today (which, admittedly, is setting the bar somewhat low) genuinely cares about abortion, flag-burning, prayer in schools, the location of mosques, or gay marriage, but just as with the rum demon, those are merely bugaboos, phony issues they employ to keep the rabble alarmed and thus clamorous to be led to safety. The moralists who walk among us are no less and no more hypocritical than they were in 1918. That's another lesson to be gained from this book.It is also amusing to reflect on the fact that it was the very ancestors of today's populist Tea Party coterie who first advocated the idea of a federal income tax. On page 56 we learn that an income tax provision had been inserted into a tariff bill by William Jennings Bryan, who was that era's equivalent of Sarah Palin -- a failed politician who got rich by going around making banal speeches to simple people. Today, the same group is bellyaching about the tax they started. Ummm, mmmm, hmmm.Now, for all you righteous blue-state stalwarts -- the enlightened minority -- it is my gleeful duty to inform you that in the other nostril, one detects the faint but acrid fragrance of libertarianism on Okrent's pages, as he dwells at length on the other major social force which worked to impose Prohibition. One might refer to this group as liberal do-gooders or progressive reformers, but the most precise epithet is *feminists.* All of the feminists of that day were, without exception, rabidly in favor of Prohibition, and the entire miasma began with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in Evanston, Illinois in 1873. As noted above, the feminists were also bigoted and hostile toward immigrants. The WCTU did not accept Jews, Catholics, women of color, or women who had not been born in any English-speaking land, and Okrent reports at length on how the feminists were closely allied with the Klan (which is not surprising, seeing as how the Klan controlled the state governments of Illinois and Indiana during the first third of the twentieth century). The woman who first broke through the Glass Ceiling and occupied the highest position in the federal government at that time was Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt, who is quoted as saying, "I have no objection to people dressing up in sheets, if they enjoy that sort of thing."Once again, Prohibition was not about drinking, it was about control. Women drank. They weren't allowed into saloons, and no woman would ever enter a liquor store, so they drank elixirs such as  Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound,  which, according to Okrent, was 41 proof. In fact,  Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound,  is still popular among women, and it is sold at this very site, where women have posted testimonials to its efficacy and salubrity.  See for yourself.  Prior to the Harrison Act, women also ingested patent medicines containing tincture of opium (laudanum) and cocaine. What feminists instead wanted to control was the behavior of men, and you can imagine the choice a workingman faced after the end of a 12-hour shift in a foundry or in front of a blast furnace. He could either go home to the uxorious environment of his coked-out wife, squalling kids and likely his in-laws, or he could enter the beautiful environment of a handsomely-appointed saloon with good free food, male camaraderie, and an upright piano playing the tunes of the old country. In such a situation, which would he be likely to choose? Wouldn't you?This is what the feminists sought to stop, and the organization which was most effective in making Prohibition the law was, significantly, the Anti-Saloon League. The only reason women were given the right to vote was that the bosses of the Anti-Saloon League knew very well that every White Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman who voted would vote to support Prohibition, and the WCTU confirmed this with the statement, "As long as the Nineteenth Amendment stands, the eighteenth will stand also!"(pg.341)Of course, the feminists have attempted similar acts of control in recent times. During the apogee of feminism in the 1980s, there was an uproar created by feminists, again in chorus with the puritan clergy, against pornography or even billboards depicting high-paid models. Such things were said to enslave women and cause violence against women, and so they should be prohibited. However, pornography that appealed to women was instead called "erotica" and that was perfectly acceptable. Once again, it was prohibition for you and not for me.These are the same people who recently made it illegal to smoke in bars -- people who never go to neighborhood bars but have decided the laws as to what can go on in bars (laws which, in my town, have been roundly ignored). In my county, they have also banned topless lap-dancing. But here I should stop, because just mentioning all of this book's parallels to the present day would take another 375 pages to catalogue. Similarities to the risible and perpetual War On Drugs are too obvious to mention. There is, however, one point Okrent neglects to mention, and that is whenever scoundrels attempt to assert control, they always propose an amendment to the Constitution. They were successful with the Eighteenth Amendment, but luckily they failed with the more recently proposed amendments against flag burning, for mandatory prayer in schools, and the feminists' Equal Rights Amendment. I thus propose one additional amendment: *The U.S. Constitution is good enough as it is. Further amendments are hereby prohibited forever.*At the moment, almost finished with a second reading of "Last Call," I'm trying to decide if this is the finest book I have ever read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm often wildly enthusiastic books I've just finished. It's certainly the finest chronicle of America's coming-of-age, better than William Manchester's two-volume  The Glory and the Dream, A Narrative History of America 1932-1972,  better because "Last Call" explains more.For all our national bawling about freedom this and freedom that, the citizens of the United States actually enjoy less freedom than anyone else in Christendom, and "Last Call" illustrates why. America is not The Land of the Free, it is a land inhabited by busybodies, snouters, moralists, the religiously insane, and whenever these forces join in common cause, the result is a country in which, in the words of the late Wm. S. Burroughs, "Noooobody is allowed to mind their own business."

What did the Ku Klux Klan, the women's suffrage movement, William Jennings Bryan, Henry Ford, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Eleanor Roosevelt all have in common? They all favored passage of the 18th Amendment, which criminalized the sale of alcoholic beverages.It is now nearly universally concluded that the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was one of the worst fiascos ever foisted upon our country; moreover, that it was brought about solely by fundamentalist Christians.The last part is a myth (and to be fair, heavy drinking was a problem in the late 19th-early 20th century). If not, then why would the above groups, who differed on so many other issues and in other respects would find each other repugnant, favor the policy of prohibition? And then, just 15 years later, how did the 18th Amendment become the only one in our nation's history to be repealed? Attached to that, why did the American populace so heavily reverse itself on this issue?All of these questions demonstrate what a fascinating piece of history prohibition was. And author Daniel Okrent provides the answers in his wonderful book, "Last Call."Okrent begins by telling the story of how prohibition got started: beginning in the mid-19th century, various church movements and organizations began to lobby for it, albeit with little success.It wasn't until the turn of the century that the movement really began to pick up steam. This was largely due to the fact that those who favored temperance got organized. Supporters also latched onto an anti-immigrant backlash: most turn-of-the-century immigrants were Irish and German, and were heavy beer drinkers. Additionally, there were brazen appeals to racism.Once it became law, however, Okrent notes that enforcement was much easier said than done, for a number of reasons:First, two of the presidents who were in office during this era (Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge) were ambivalent at best about enforcing it. As for Warren Harding, who died in office in 1923, some in his cabinet members were involved in bootlegging. So were many other politicians at this time.Second, there were loopholes in the law. For instance, there was a religious exemption for Orthodox Jews; coincidentally, this era saw a large conversion rate to that religion.Third, just as many opponents of prohibition (most notably former president William H. Taft and essayist H.L. Mencken) rightly predicted, criminal elements would prosper because of it. Okrent records that immediately before the 18th Amendment took effect, Mencken sold his car and used the proceeds to purchase massive amounts of adult beverages.Fourth, many Canadians started wineries and breweries, smuggled their goods over the borders, and made large fortunes.Fifth, all of this led to greater corruption in politics. This could be subtle, as when police stationed at the docks would fine bootleggers, who merely counted those fines as part of their production costs. But the corruption could also be overt, as when gangsters such as Al Capone and Meyer Lansky virtually controlled local law enforcement.So then, what killed prohibition? Okrent gives a number of factors:First, the aforementioned mob bosses were rightly seen as the direct result of the 18th Amendment. There is little chance that such flamboyant criminals (especially Capone) would have been nearly so successful (and brazenly so) without a nationwide anti-alcohol policy. As this era wore on, more and more people came to that conclusion.Second, activists like Pauline Sabin began to see the deleterious effects of prohibition. Once a supporter of the 18th Amendment, Sabin especially made it fashionable for women to be politically active in this cause.Third, publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst tired of prohibition. In the late 1920s, he instructed his newspaper editors to flout the hypocrisy of dry politicians when they were caught with alcohol. This was done to marvelous affect, and helped to reverse public opinion on this policy.Fourth, when Herbert Hoover was elected president in 1928, he badly misread his mandate: instead of focusing solely on the fact that he was elected to continue the economic policies of his predecessors, he thought it was because prohibition was more popular than it actually was. In his inaugural address, he devoted much heated rhetoric on why anti-liquor laws needed to be tougher, when in fact Americans were tiring of it.All of that to say, when the stock market crashed in October 1929, the perception that Hoover was out of touch with the nation was magnified even more. So when 1932 rolled around with no end in sight to the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt acutely read the public mood, and ran on a platform of repeal (though he had a history of waffling on this issue)."Last Call" captures each of these episodes well, which makes it such a compelling read.Additionally, there are some interesting anecdotes; for instance, Okrent also makes a compelling case that contrary to popular myth, Joseph Kennedy was not involved in bootlegging at all; that such claims only came about in 1960 when his son ran for president.All told, "Last Call" should go down as one of the best volumes written on this subject. If I do have one criticism, it is this: there is a very heavy reliance upon quotations from that era. While this is helpful in some respects, it makes Okrent's prose a little too choppy.That once criticism aside, however, I highly recommend "Last Call."

A rollicking ride through the most absurd and ridiculous law to ever be passed in the Western world. The years of America’s Prohibition amendment and the attempt to legislate morals are extensively examined and documented in this most excellent book, overtaken only really by the outstanding Ken Burns documentary ‘Prohibition’ which used much of the material in this book. The time period of the 18th Constitutional Amendment is a fascinating era of US history which saw the biggest and most infamous organised crime gangs and figures rise to prominence. Where the law was widely and uncontrollably flouted by so many and the absurdity of its nature fully exposed. Prohibition was an experiment in Government and Religious attempts to impose morals and sobriety on a whole nation, which failed and will never be repeated. A great read and highly recommended.

The slow legal mechanics and all the cast of senators et al make this more interesting in terms of usa politics and personalities of the era which manage to overshadow the actual prohibition and the prohibition flouting which might have been a racier read..scholarly and educational and some skilled writing

Great read

Extremely well researched and well written.

Excellent - witty and informative