After 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.

More than 10 years ago, federal officials boldly claimed that they would create a 'drug-free America by 1995.' To reach that objective, Congress spent billions on police, prosecutors, drug courts, and prisons. Despite millions of arrests and countless seizures, America is not drug free. Illegal drugs are as readily available today as ever before. Drug prohibition has proven to be a costly failure. Like alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition has created more problems than it has solved.

The place of cannabis in global drug prohibition is in crisis, opening up new directions for socially engaged cannabis research. The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research invites readers to explore new landscapes of cannabis research under conditions of legalization with, not after, prohibition: "post-prohibition." The chapters are organized into five multidisciplinary sections: Governance, Public Health, Markets and Society, Ecology and the Environment, and Culture and Social Change. Case studies from the United States, Uruguay, Morocco, and the United Kingdom show readers alternative ways of thinking about human–cannabis relationships that move beyond questions of legality and illegality. Representing a cross-section of cannabis scholarship, the contributors provide readers with critical perspectives on legalization that are not based upon orthodoxies of prohibition. While legalization signals a global shift in the legitimacy of cannabis research, this collection identifies openings for academics, policy makers, and the public interested in ending the drug war, as well as a way to address broader social problems evident in the age of neoliberal governance within which prohibition has been entangled.

Although Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, voters used the democratic process to ban alcohol from 1920 to 1933. This bizarre episode, which uniquely involved two constitutional amendments, has often been humorously recalled, frequently satirized, and usually condemned. Themore interesting questions, however, are how and why Prohibition came about, how Prohibition worked (and failed to work), and how Prohibition gave way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol. This book answers these questions, presenting a brief and elegant overview of the Prohibition era.During the 1920s alcohol prices rose, quality declined, and consumption dropped. Since beer was too bulky to hide and largely disappeared, drinkers swallowed mixed drinks made with moonshine or mediocre imported liquor. The all-male saloon gave way to the speakeasy, where men and women drank, ate,and danced to jazz.This book illustrates how public support for prohibition collapsed due to gangster violence and the need for local, state, and federal government alcohol revenue during the Great Depression. As public opinion turned against prohibition, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to repeal prohibition in1932. Legal, taxed beer came in April 1933, and the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified in December 1933. After 1933, state alcohol control boards adopted strong regulations, whose legacies continue to influence American drinking habits.With his unparalleled historical knowledge and expertise in American drinking patterns, W. J. Rorabaugh provides an elegant and accessible synthesis of one of the most important topics in US history, showing how a powerful socio-political movement can shift emphasis over time.

“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

Does drug prohibition work? There are many governments, police forces, jailers and drug testers who say it does. Prohibition is the favoured choice in dealing with intoxicants in the world today. But how well does it stand up to the test of history - in particular, our own history in British Columbia? The province has seen two harsh liquor prohibitions: first on its Native population from 1854 to 1962, and second, on the entire population, during the 1917-1921 period.Sobering Dilemmaexamines both, touching on the province's longtime fondness for alcohol and the social conditions which encouraged toleration of heavy drinking. The prohibition movement reached its peak during the 1916 "Purity election" which combined a provincial election with twin referendums on women's suffrage and alcohol prohibition. The liquor referendum results were shamelessly manipulated by both sides, but prohibition was finally imposed in October 1917.Douglas Hamilton has examined the classified files of the Provincial Police at BC Archives and shows how British Columbia's experiment with prohibition soon degenerated into a hopeless morass of corruption, scandal, favouritism, class conflict, freelance informants, bureaucratic ineptitude, and racism.

Committee Serial No. 5.