Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Daniel Okrent. New York: Scribner, 2010. The Noble Experiment has - except for fiction and television - more or less faded from public consciousness. Unfortunately, its pernicious legacies of organized crime and, to a lesser extent, disrespect for the law, remain. Okrent not only captures Prohibition's atmosphere, but also explains the events through decades that brought it about. Americans, at least the men, were a hard-drinking lot. It less clear about women, because public drinking excluded them almost entirely. Their drinking was more likely to consist of various tonics marketed for female complaints; not for their high alcohol content. For workers, the post Civil War saloon, financed by brewers and distillers, was a masculine institution, enticing its patrons with free, salty, food that increased thirst. The result was too often disastrous for families, with extensive abuse of women, for whom neither law nor society offered protection. Thus, as reform movements burgeoned during the Nineteenth century, it was natural that alcohol abuse would become a target. First, temperance encouraged moderation; then came pledges for abstinence; finally, came the intrusive demand for prohibition. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (read prohibition, for temperance) became a powerful pressure group, well into the Twentieth century. Most powerful, though, was the Anti-Saloon League. During its heyday, it controlled state legislatures and governors, dominated Congress, and strongly influenced presidents. Okrent correctly calls it the most powerful special interest lobby of all time. The only thing approaching its power today is probably the National Rifle Association, but the NRA has not had the formidable obstacle that faced the ASL, which needed a new amendment. The NRA only had to reinterpret an existing one. Prohibition's bedfellows were strange. Almost entirely white, native born, rural, and Protestant, they ranged from Progressives to the Klan. The unholy (although explicitly Christian) alliance opposed immigrants, cities, Catholics, nonwhites and non-Anglo whites. As World War I drew near, it became explicitly anti-German, since the prominent brewers were German, as were many of the distillers. The WCTU infected school curricula with anti-scientific nonsense regarding the effects of miniscule amounts of alcohol, and the brewers retorted with pernicious nonsense of their own. Turning against their commercial cousins, they condemned distillers as the real villains, but alleged that beer was simply a wholesome food, liquid bread, that could benefit all from toddlers onward. The Eighteenth Amendment authorized prohibition. To enforce it, the Volstead Act came quickly, and took the most extreme form possible, outlawing even beer and light wine (except for sacramental purposes), and defining as intoxicating, anything with over .5% of alcohol. It did exempt fruit juices, such as cider, in order to secure the support of farmers who would not have accepted meddling with their traditions. Okrent associates the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a tax on incomes, with the movement for the Eighteenth. There needed to be a replacement for lost revenue from taxes on alcohol. He documents the extremism of both drys and wets. He vividly portrays the incompetence of the enforcement mechanisms that the Anti-Saloon League controlled, and the escalation in crime that came immediately from the quick and enormous profits that lawbreaking generated. …
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Dec 1, 2012
M Dollinger 
Open Access