Ignoble Experiment

Last Call
The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
by Daniel Okrent
Scribner, 480 pp., $30

Contraband beer being dumped into the streets (1925)

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The dawn of the 20th century was an exciting time in the alcohol trade. Distilleries, many Jewish-owned, poured forth millions of gallons of liquor. Breweries headed by enterprising Germans with names such as Busch, Pabst, and Ruppert did booming business. Vineyards tended by Italians and others thrived from Virginia to Missouri to California, and the quality of their wine made Europe fret. Consumers had more choices than ever.

Then came Prohibition. In December 1917, Congress passed a resolution proposing to amend the Constitution to ban the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” A little over a year later, 36 states had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, and the ban took effect on January 16, 1920.

Prohibition is often thought of as a sudden American freak-out, a bit of craziness imposed by a fanatical few fundamentalists. Not true. Prohibition was an international phenomenon. Lloyd George attacked drink relentlessly, famously declaring in 1915 that Britain was “fighting Germans, Austrians and Drink, and as far as I can see the greatest of these foes is Drink.” Great Britain, Canada, Norway, Russia, and Sweden all enacted anti-drink measures. And as Daniel Okrent shows in this garrulously readable volume, Prohibition was a long time coming in the United States. Agitation had begun in localities and states a century earlier.

He writes: “By 1830 American adults were guzzling, per capita, a staggering seven gallons of pure alcohol a year,” the equivalent of 1.7 bottles of hooch per week. The alcohol industry did itself no favors; it peddled whiskey as a cure for every conceivable illness and sold beer as a health tonic for mothers and children. Unscrupulous booze barons bought off newsmen and politicians.