Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
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About this ebook
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.
Daniel Okrent
Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was also a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his books include Last Call, The Guarded Gate, and Great Fortune, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.
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Reviews for Last Call
47 ratings32 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A really good history with much detail about the 14 years of prohibition, from the beginning to the end. What an interesting time in America ! I learned a lot from reading this book on this interesting topic.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely fascinating history of the events leading up to America's failed experiment with denying residents legal access to alcohol. The author delves into all the political, social, and economic forces that played a role in the passage of the 18th Amendment and its repeal via passage of the 21st Amendment less than a decade and a half later.The book is filled with anecdotes that illustrate the turbulent nature of this period.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting and very detailed history of the 18th amendment and how it affected US culture and a whole lot of other things.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent narrative history of Prohibition in the United States, starting from the first stirrings in the 1840s through the end in the 1930s. As you might imagine, covering this period of time introduces many characters and situations to keep track of, but Okrent makes it manageable by focusing each section and chapter on some specific aspect or event. His style is lively and entertaining without being trivial or frivolous. Some folks might be put off a bit by some of his quirkiness, for instance at one point he compares one personality to someone in "The Simpsons" TV cartoon show. He also jokes how the unique spelling of "drys" defeats the best efforts of Spell Check. I think most readers will find the quirks a nice counterpoint to some of the more serious discussions in the book. I think "Last Call" is the best general history of Prohibition I've ever read, entertaining yet quite thorough and informative.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A solidly researched, well written book about the rise and fall of prohibition. It's the story of how a small minority could force its will on the majority by influencing the outcome of a very few key Congressional races. Although the author takes pains to avoid comparing that era to today, any reader who's at all aware of our current political landscape will make the connection. I particularly like the author's focus on the key players in both the 18th amendment and its repeal -- most are not household names but very interesting nonetheless. The excesses in enforcement of the Volstead Act are chilling. This book goes way beyond Eliot Ness -- who, as it turns out, was a very minor player. A companion book to a new PBS documentary by Ken Burns. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I read this, or rather listened to it, as it was this month's selection of my book club. I used the 2x speed on my iPhone and knocked out most of it on a drive to and from Columbus.
The book is a history of Prohibition in America. Why it happened, how it happened, who the major players were, who gained from it, who lost out, and why it didn't succeed. I expected it to be much drier than it turned out to be. It was chockfull of fun facts and interesting anecdotes. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great book - well written account of all that was going on. Will my grandchildren remember today's times as engrossingly as I revel in Grandpa's days.My only question; which will never be answered; Did grandpa wash out the bathtub before they made gin?Well worth the read - extremely enjoyable!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When I stumbled across a review of Okrent's book this past summer I knew I had to read it. A book featuring the 1920s, politics, speakeasies, and gangsters? It hit upon several of my interest points.This book is an incredible narrative of the history of the 18th Amendment. This book is dense and reads like a text book. Its full of rich details. But it was missing something. Maybe its because I've been reading biographies lately that I wished that the author had chosen to focus on a couple characters and told the story through their perspectives. I found it difficult at times to keep everyone straight which I probably why I finally finished reading this only after several false starts during the past six months.That being said, I did enjoy this book and would recommend it to anyone looking for more information about Prohibition.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Excellent perspective on the alcohol industry; how prohibition basically invented the mob in America; and the ingenuity of Americans in the face of the loss of something they really, really want.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a fascinating exploration of how the U.S. came to ban the use of alcohol, and then later repeal the ban. What amazed me was how little has changed in American politics; the ploys that the "drys" used to pass the Eighteenth Amendment are still in use today. Wayne Wheeler, without whom it probably wouldn't have passed, is the spiritual father of Karl Rove, and in his day was just as powerful - maybe more. The split between the "drys" (mostly white, rural, evangelical Protestant) and the "wets" (mainly urban, with all that implies) is still with us; they just aren't arguing about booze any more. The power of that minority in the 1920's was astounding - the "drys" managed to delay the 1920 census for almost 8 years, because they knew that the redistricting would give more representation to the growing cities, and erode the political power of the less populated rural states. The name Bronfman will never look the same to me again; read and learn why. Did you ever wonder why we pay income tax? It's in here. The initial income tax act in 1913 was trivial compared to this. Without the "drys" it's entirely possible that women wouldn't have gotten the vote in 1920; they put their power behind women's suffrage because they knew women would vote to ban alcohol. If you have any taste for history at all, you must read this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wonderful account of a wild chapter of American history - literally. Prohibition happened less than100 years ago. Okrent chronicles how it all happened, brilliantly! I can't wait for the Ken Burns series this fall!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read 73 pages of this book and did not have the time to go any further before the library needed it back. It is really good, but just more detailed than I could take in. The lessons of prohibition still resonate today and the colorful story of its rise and fall is fascinating. The book jacket mentions a PBS documentary. I think I am going to watch that for the abbreviated version.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daniel Okrent's Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is not an easy read. However, it is well worth the effort and the reader will be rewarded with a new perspective on an era of American history that shaped many of today's institutions. The diifculty with Last Call is not with Okrent's style or writing expertise but rather the breadth of the prohibition subject and his thorough treatment. The implementation of national prohibition, its enforcement and then repeal touched the entire nation (and international relations) cutting across economic segments for almost 14 years. It is still the only constitutional amendment (18th) to be repealed (21st).Last Call is an enlightening account of how a small fringe organization (ASL, Anti-Saloon League) led by a savvy political operative (Wayne Wheeler) orchestrated a masterful prohibition strategy. The ASL strategy of targeting key congressional districts with vulnerable incumbents, alone, would not have swung the country. However, in politics timing is everything, Wayne Wheeler and the ASL happened on the scene at the right time to capitalize on historic changes sweeping the country.For example, Wheeler expertly aligned the ASL with growing women's suffrage movement. The 19th amendment was passed a year after prohibition. Further, the ASL was aided in the early campaigns against the large brewers (Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, and Schlitz) by anti-German (and later anti-immigarant) sentiments from WWI. Finally, the nation's demographics were changing. Rural population was in dramatic decline as the cities grew at an unprecedented rate driven greatly by immigration. In summary, the confluence of all these forces makes for quite a compelling story.Of course, the story only gets more interesting once prohibition takes affect in early 1919. For the next decade, battles between "wets" and "drys" were waged on the streets and US borders across the country. Again, it was a confluence of events that brought an end to prohibition. In 1927 the ASL lost its commanding force when Wayne Wheeler died. Of course, prohibition was the law by constitution amendment and no amendment had ever been repealed. But, gradually there was a recognition that prohibition was doing more harm than good. Large crime organizations were created and financed by the massive illegal trade. Millions of ordinary citizens were becoming criminals for simply wanting an easily obtained drink. The final death knell for prohibition was the stock market crash and economic depression. Prohibition and the 16th amendment had revolutionized government finances. Gone were excise taxes on alcohol to be replaced by income taxes. But, with the depression income tax revenue dropped precipitously and the Government needed all the revenue sources it could find. To put the financial implications in perspective, in 1929 "Canadian revenue liquor export tax revenues accounted for 20 percent of all Canadian revenue collections, both federal and provisional." This represented twice as much as Canadian income taxes. Of course these revenues were coming from the pockets of American consumers in the purchase price of the illegally imported (but legally exported from Canada) alcohol.Last Call is necessary reading for anyone that wishes to be knowledgeable on the 20th century history of the US and the major forces that have shaped our country.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was way more interesting than I first thought it would be when I bought it. Although it is about one of my favorite subjects, I feared that it would be drab and boring recollection of facts. I am very pleased to say that the author did a fabulous job of intertwining facts with anecdotes of the day, along with pictures of real advising and people involved.
The book starts with a look at how the prohibition movement got started, the political parties that favored it, how it managed to make its way through the amendment process, and then some of the best parts of the book: how enforcement of the law was almost completely nil. Even with very little enforcement, the courts at all levels were bogged down with prohibition cases. The book discusses how while prohibition cut down the amount of drinking we did as a nation as a whole, if you wanted to drink, you would easily find a way. Finally the book went into the reasons it was finally repealed.
It was an interesting read about a time in our nations history that really shaped us a nation--it built up and funded the mob in many cities, helped people amass large fortunes through bootlegging, and really openly defy the constitution. Pretty interesting stuff! - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very interesting examination of the rise and repeal of Prohibition, of life during the dry years and of the long and short term impacts of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Prohibition movement on contemporary politics and society.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have not previously read a full book about Prohibition, only sections in books devoted to more general topics, so I should not have been surprised at how much I learned from it. Instead, I was continually amazed at the many fascinating aspects of this complex time in history so vividly and wittily related in this work.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An interesting history of Prohibition. I learned a lot, but got tired of reading it by the end.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My great-grandfather was a bootlegger. He didn't start out as one, of course--he learned his trade as an electrician in Parma, Italy, but according to my grandfather (who was understandably rather bitter at being dumped off, after his mother died in childbirth, at the local monastery to be raised by the holy brothers) there was always something a bit shiftless about him even after he started a new life in Canada and the United States. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good one. After commencing his new profession in the waters between Windsor, Canada and Detroit--the famous "City on a Still"--wettest of the many prohibition defying cities--beating, according to author Daniel Okrent, such booze-loving towns as Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco-the gunplay-and "probies"-became too intense for the casual criminal and he moved his operations to Vancouver. Even that semi-rural area, whose low population density never attracted the same amount of interest for criminals and the federal government alike-proved to be too much for the amateur he remained. He was caught by prohibition agents, despite scuttling his boat and making a run for it--and promptly deported. All of this--the start in the thirsty East--the ignominious end in laid-back West where highly organized criminal operations never gained a real foothold--the swift deportation as the US government used any excuse to get rid of immigrants--turned out to be a perfect template laid out in "Last Call". I just didn't realize it until this summer, when I both read the book and talked to my mother and her youngest sister about their grandfather's activites. (Any attempt to bring the subject up with my now-deceased grandfather invariably produced atypical agitation--even vitriol-as the passing of the years did nothing to mitigate my grandfather's annoyance with his own father).
For you see, my grandfather's life--indeed the fate our our entire family--got caught up with my great-grandfather's decision to run a bit of Seagrams through the San Juan Islands. My great-grandfather was refused entry back to Italy--Mussolini was in the middle of his big purge of home-grown organized crime and wasn't exactly interested in importing criminals. The French, however, were more sanguine. He settled in Cannes, where he remained through the outbreak of the war. Times were hard in Vichy France; my great-grandfather wrote a letter to his son in Canada pleading for money. My grandfather did the duitiful thing, stuffed some bills in an envelope, and as he was busy that day--gave the letter to his cousin and business partner to mail the letter in the United States, as the US was still neutral. (Back then, the border was more a slightly interesting concept than something most people paid attention to, and people flitted back and forth all the time). The cousin did mail the letter-except he forgot to mail it in the US and instead mailed it in Canada. My grandfather was promptly hauled in by the Canadian government, which wanted to know why he was aiding and abbetting the enemy.
My grandfather never got over his arrest. One of my mother's favorite anecdotes is the story of her father, white-faced and trembling, returning after his grilling by authorities and burning every communist magazine and tract in the house.(Parma is a very red part of Italy.) Anyway, my grandfather was finished with his adopted country from that moment. He insisted, until Alzheimer's overtook him, that his real reason for leaving was his inability to handle for any longer the quaint Canadian habit of leaving dead bodies in storage until the spring thaw, but the rest of the family knew better. He began plotting his escape. After the war, he moved to Southern California, despite my grandmother's protests, and set himself up as an electrician/glassblower, where he did his part to make the Southland the neoned tacky glory it was in the 50's and 60's.
All this is just a long-winded way of saying I have more than a normal interest in American Prohibition, and view it as the reason why I was born a Californian, or indeed why I was born at all. Of course, for all of us, there are a million causalities as to why we are here on earth, and if anything, I should point a finger at the idiotic cousin WHO COULD'T FOLLOW THE SIMPLEST INSTRUCTIONS. But this is my narration, and I'm sticking to my story. I like a grand historical spin.
But back to the book I'm supposed to be reviewing. It's wonderful. Yes, it could seem that I don't have the clearest perspective, but honestly, it is a great read, and an essential one for anyone who is interested in American history. I admit that I am a bit low-brow, and would have preferred a few more "Chicago typewriters" (tommy-guns) in the tale, but I know, as much as I like a bit of "Boardwalk Empire" sleaze, that the story of how the United States sort-of swore off booze for a dozen years has just as much to do with sweeping sociological movements and legislation. Daniel Okrent entertainingly explains how United States has always been awash with alcohol, and how there has always been an opposition to all that drinking, and how the anti-saloon movement started to gain force after the Great Awakening. I was the most annoying person while I was reading this book, prone to shooting out random tidbits of trivia whenenver anyone wandered within earshot. Did you know the Clan was dry-and pro suffrage? Did you know that plea-bargaining started as the government was overwhelmed by all the cases in the docket? Did you know that the federal income tax really started as a way of recouping projected lost revenue? Did you know that all the said lost revenue by illegal bootlegging was equal to the ENTIRE federal government budget--including the military--in 1926? Did you know....and so on. Everyone in the household was relieved when I finished the book.
All of this could have been as dry as some of the midwestern counties which actually OBEYED the Volstead act, but Okrent is a witty writer, and a master of the trenchant character sketch. On the axe wielding Carry Nation: "Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd nation was six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache." Or Calvin Coolidge's idea of governing "...it was if he viewed government as a vestigial organ of the body politic." And there are many amusing anecdotes along the way, from the time of the colonial distilleries, to the repealing of the Volstead act (which ironically helped to make many municipalities drier than they had been previously).
A fun read. For those who yearn for more than a bit of Al Capone-type action and are impatient with legislative maneuvering, 4 stars. For political wonks and those who are here on the planet thanks to American Prohibition, 5 Stars. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is not the first book on Prohibition I read, but certainly it's the best so far.
It covers basically every possible aspect of Prohibition, from the way the movement started in the XIX century, to how it ended and why.
I like the first part particularly. It detailed the social, ethnic and even religious reasons why the idea of a legal prohibition of alcohol became acceptable in the United States. Many were against it from the beginning, because they thought a federal law should not regulate the personal life of citizens, but the majority finally had they way because of a tightly knotted array of reasons that spanned from social issues like actual abuse of alcohol, to (true or imagined) issues concerning race and immigrants (this part was new to me and particularly enlightening), to politics, religion and economics. I had never realised before how complex the situation was, but here it was detailed clearly, with a lot of documentation and a crisp style that made it easy to read.
The central part was the hardest for me. It goes into a lot of details about every conceivable aspect of Prohibition, from the sacramental wine, to bootlegging, to the involvement of politics and low enforcement. Some of this was already known to me, some was new, but - personally - I found it too detailed and too much of everything. There wasn't a focus, and it seemed to me as if the matter was all over the place. I did find the information interesting, but I think I'd absorbed it more easily and effectively if I'd had less of it, but more focused.
The last part was back on track. It detailed the reasons why Prohibition was finally repealed. There wasn't anything particularly new here (not as much as in the first part), but the narration followed a line, and it was easy to read and understand.
This is certainly a precious source of information for anyone interested in Prohibition in particular, and American history in general. It is well-informed and rich and generally well-written. It does focus on facts more than people and I think this is a weakness of the book. Some important protagonists of Prohibition are merely mentioned in short parts of chapters and I wouldn't even knew who they were had I not read other books on the matter. That is something to complain about, but for the rest, I found it invaluable. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an extremely readable, interesting, and fascinating history book. It tells the story of Prohibition, from the first dry movements, to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, life in the "roaring Twenties", and finally, to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. While there's plenty of sensational material for Okrent to work with, he never lets gossip or emotion overtake the story, which is interesting enough on its own. He presents people and stories from both the "wet" and the "dry" side with respect. A fascinating read, especially if you've got any interest in American politics... the Temperance movement, whether you agree with their goals or not, was a clear predecessor to every lobbying campaign that was to follow. Fans of clear, concise, and interesting historical nonfiction will enjoy this, as I did. Highly recommended. Four and a half stars.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Last Call is the best history of Prohibition that I have read. If you have any interest in American History you need to read Last Call.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well done review of the Prohibition thought processes and detailing of the various ways in which society dealt with the banning of their very favorite pastime.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An absolutely fascinating and entertaining account of how the 18th Amendment came to be, of how astonishingly unsuccessful it was, and of how the 21st Amendment came to be. This is all going to be covered in Ken Burns' documentary this fall, but this book will undoubtedly be its perfect companion. Did you know that alcohol consumption actually decreased after Repeal?
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A wonderful piece of nonfiction. Okrent covers the forces that caused prohibition and the how they ultimately unraveled. Skillfully written including the time to personalize the personalities of this broad story.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a stupendously fascinating account of the18th Amendment and its fall. It is filled with amazing amounts of incidents attendant on the adoption, existence, and end of Prohibition. Even though I read have other books on the same subject (Deliver Us From Evil on 6 Apr 1995, and Prohibition 13 Years That Changed America on 5 Feb 1999), I found this book vastly informative especially in regard to the means used to sell the 18th Amendment to the country and the pitiful story of the events which finally doomed it (even though Senator Sheppard said it is more likely that a hummingbird will fly to Mars with the Washington AMonument on its tail than that the 18th amendement would ever be repealed). .
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Truly a remarkable book. Okrent has such a command of the personalities and movements involved. Did you all know that the suffragettes and the KKK both supported Prohibition? If you like social history, this book is a must-read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful book on how Prohibition came about (and how it fell apart). The politics was absolutely fascinating and frightening. Truly do humans repeat history over and over again.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a very good book about Prohibition. It charts its roots in the 19th century and how it was passed through a series of unlikely alliances. It does a great job showing how poorly it was enforced, through lack of will and lack of money. And it shows that it was repealed because of how poorly it was enforced, how rich people wanted it removed so they could repeal income tax, and bringing the booze industry back into the legal world would help the economy and government finances after they had been hit by the Depression.This is written to a mass audience, citing few sources but using tons of entertaining stories. Even with that, it keeps an informative narrative that stay true to its title. It does trace the rise and fall of Prohibition. I don't think I would use it as a sole textbook for a class on the era, but I would love to use parts of it to spice up the class. And I would definitely recommend it to friends whether they are historians or not.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The story of temperance, prohibition and its eventual repeal comes alive in Daniel Okrent's brilliant examination of the era. The book's sharp wit and choice prose makes it clear early on that Last Call is more than just another history lesson. The best parts are the sprinkled bits of ironic humor, deadpanned and perfectly understated, which never fail to delight. I also appreciate the author's frequent use of period-specific quotes, allowing the who's who of Prohibition to speak for themselves.There's no escaping America's long fascination with booze and how it punctuates our history. We are a nation of unapologetic drinkers. We are also a nation of fervent religious convictions (abstinence included) so it was only a matter of time before opposing forces collided. Given that temperance and prohibition are saturated with tales of moral grandstanding, political manipulation, opportunism, greed and hypocrisy, it's arguable that this sums up America's past better than we would care to admit.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Generally 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.
Book preview
Last Call - Daniel Okrent
Praise for Last Call
Named One of the Year’s 10 Best
by The Wall Street Journal
This is a great book: witty and graceful, balanced and deep. It is captivating social history told in a narrative that races along like a Bimini rumrunner angling into a south Florida bay.
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
A remarkably original account of the Prohibition era, a fourteen-year orgy of lawbreaking that permanently transformed American social life . . . A narrative delight.
—The New York Times Book Review
Okrent’s dazzling history leaves us with one whiskey-sharp insight above all others: The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature.
—Slate
"As Daniel Okrent shows in Last Call, his superb history of the Prohibition era, obtaining a drink with a lot more kick than a bottle of pop wasn’t at all difficult. . . . Fortunes were made by taking advantage of exemptions for ‘medicinal’ alcohol, for hard cider made by farmers from fermented fruit, and for sacramental wine used in religious services. And that was just the legal stuff."
—The Wall Street Journal
"Last Call is a potentially, um, dry story, but Okrent is a born storyteller. In his hands, the prodigiously researched narrative, rife with tales of corruption, adventure, and backstabbing, flies like fiction."
—Entertainment Weekly
This book is an extraordinary accomplishment, both scholarly and readable.
—Barron’s
Okrent fills a vast canvas with captivating characters, from the hatchet-wielding saloon buster Carry Nation (‘six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache’) to Canadian bootlegger Sam Bronfman, whose audacious smuggling laid the foundations of a billion-dollar family fortune.
—Time
The movement to repeal Prohibition was a vexed and convoluted affair itself, well explained here; but before taking it up, Okrent brings us through the wild years of Prohibition. He describes in entertaining detail the ingenious casuistry and lucrative operations that arose out of the law.
—The Boston Globe
It’s a stunningly thorough, well-researched, and often unforgiving glimpse into one of the most bizarre social experiments ever conducted . . . an illuminating tour de force, and a great addition to the bookshelves of both casual readers and historical enthusiasts alike.
—San Francisco Book Review
"Last Call is the most persuasive and best-documented explanation as to why and how America decided to ban alcohol. . . . This is sure to be one of the year’s best American history books."
—BusinessWeek
Daniel Okrent’s remarkable new history of Prohibition . . . explains with clarity and gusto how ‘a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes’ led to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment.
—The Christian Science Monitor
"Brilliantly researched . . . Last Call is fun, fascinating, and as effervescent as champagne."
—People
Okrent makes this complex and detailed story into a page-turning read. . . . He has fashioned a work of popular history at its best, the kind that teaches us something new on every page while keeping us thoroughly entertained.
—The Courier-Journal
Okrent, a journalist-scholar with a novelistic sense of narrative, goes through Prohibition’s influence on language, literature, the media, the judiciary system.
—The Miami Herald
We all know how the story ends, but the historical play-by-play, with all its sensational headlines and criminal ingenuity, is something to be savored.
—Oxford American
"If you are interested in American history, and especially if you enjoy expressing your liberty with a drink now and then, Last Call is top-shelf reading."
—Wine Spectator
"As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in Last Call, his witty and exhaustive new history of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experiment created nothing like a virtuous teetotaler’s paradise. ‘The drys had their law,’ as Okrent observes, ‘and the wets would have their liquor.’ "
—The Washington Post
Okrent draws the reader in with creative storytelling and something new (and actually useful) on every page.
—Newsweek
"A remarkable exploration of the era and the movements that led to one of the nation’s biggest mistakes . . . Last Call does what great history should: acts as a window to the past that opens to a greater understanding of our present."
—Forbes.com
"Last Call makes for rowdy, riveting reading about the characters who got us into Prohibition, and those who dragged us out."
—The Plain Dealer
An assiduously researched, well-written, and continually eye-opening work on what has actually been a neglected subject.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Okrent’s style is bracing and wry, his research is vast and impressive, and his insight is penetrating.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This sprightly written and thoroughly annotated work is recommended for both the general reader, to whom it is directed, and the scholar.
—Library Journal
Okrent asks and answers some important questions in this fascinating exploration of a failed social experiment.
—Booklist
Belongs on the shelves of every serious student of the U.S. in the twentieth century.
—Foreign Affairs
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authorContents
authorPrologue January 16, 1920
PART I
THE STRUGGLE
Chapter 1: Thunderous Drums and Protestant Nuns
Chapter 2: The Rising of Liquid Bread
Chapter 3: The Most Remarkable Movement
Chapter 4: Open Fire on the Enemy
Chapter 5: Triumphant Failure
Chapter 6: Dry-Drys, Wet-Drys, and Hyphens
Chapter 7: From Magna Carta to Volstead
PART II
THE FLOOD
Chapter 8: Starting Line
Chapter 9: A Fabulous Sweepstakes
Chapter 10: Leaks in the Dotted Line
Chapter 11: The Great Whiskey Way
Chapter 12: Blessed Be the Fruit of the Vine
Chapter 13: The Alcohol That Got Away
Chapter 14: The Way We Drank
PART III
THE WAR OF THE WET AND THE DRY
Chapter 15: Open Wounds
Chapter 16: Escaped on Payment of Money
Chapter 17: Crime Pays
Chapter 18: The Phony Referendum
PART IV
THE BEGINNING OF THE END, THE END, AND AFTER
Chapter 19: Outrageous Excess
Chapter 20: The Hummingbird That Went to Mars
Chapter 21: Afterlives, and the Missing Man
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: The Constitution of the United States of America
Photographs
Notes
Sources
Index
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)
authorTHE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
Ratified January 16, 1919
Section 1.
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2.
The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
Prologue
authorJanuary 16, 1920
THE STREETS OF San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before transporting their contents would become illegal. The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways with haggard faces and glittering eyes.
Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year’s Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city’s hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons. It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of bottled sunshine
liberated from cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places.
Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness.
San Franciscans could hardly have been surprised. Like the rest of the nation, they’d had a year’s warning that the moment the calendar flipped to January 17, Americans would only be able to own whatever alcoholic beverages had been in their homes the day before. In fact, Americans had had several decades’ warning, decades during which a popular movement like none the nation had ever seen—a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes—had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose.
Up in the Napa Valley to the north of San Francisco, where grape growers had been ripping out their vines and planting fruit trees, an editor wrote, What was a few years ago deemed the impossible has happened.
To the south, Ken Lilly—president of the Stanford University student body, star of its baseball team, candidate for the U.S. Olympic track team—was driving with two classmates through the late-night streets of San Jose when his car crashed into a telephone pole. Lilly and one of his buddies were badly hurt, but they would recover. The forty-gallon barrel of wine they’d been transporting would not. Its disgorged contents turned the street red.
Across the country on that last day before the taps ran dry, Gold’s Liquor Store placed wicker baskets filled with its remaining inventory on a New York City sidewalk; a sign read Every bottle, $1.
Down the street, Bat Masterson, a sixty-six-year-old relic of the Wild West now playing out the string as a sportswriter in New York, observed the first night of constitutional Prohibition sitting alone in his favorite bar, glumly contemplating a cup of tea. Under the headline GOODBYE, OLD PAL!, the American Chicle Company ran newspaper ads featuring an illustration of a martini glass and suggesting the consolation of a Chiclet, with its exhilarating flavor that tingles the taste.
In Detroit that same night, federal officers shut down two illegal stills (an act that would become common in the years ahead) and reported that their operators had offered bribes (which would become even more common). In northern Maine, a paper in New Brunswick reported, Canadian liquor in quantities from one gallon to a truckload is being hidden in the northern woods and distributed by automobile, sled and iceboat, on snowshoes and on skis.
At the Metropolitan Club in Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt spent the evening drinking champagne with other members of the Harvard class of 1904.
There were of course those who welcomed the day. The crusaders who had struggled for decades to place Prohibition in the Constitution celebrated with rallies and prayer sessions and ritual interments of effigies representing John Barleycorn, the symbolic proxy for alcohol’s evils. No one marked the day as fervently as evangelist Billy Sunday, who conducted a revival meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday’s enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. The reign of tears is over,
Sunday proclaimed. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.
A similarly grandiose note was sounded by the Anti-Saloon League, the mightiest pressure group in the nation’s history. No other organization had ever changed the Constitution through a sustained political campaign; now, on the day of its final triumph, the ASL declared that at one minute past midnight . . . a new nation will be born.
In a way, editorialists at the militantly anti-Prohibition New York World perceived the advent of a new nation, too. After 12 o’clock tonight,
the World said, the Government of the United States as established by the Constitution and maintained for nearly 131 years will cease to exist.
Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane may have provided the most accurate view of the United States of America on the edge of this new epoch. The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse,
Lane wrote in his diary on January 19. . . . Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut off; and all goes merry as a dance in hell!
♦ ♦ ♦
How did it happen? How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World? How did they condemn to extinction what was, at the very moment of its death, the fifth-largest industry in the nation? How did they append to their most sacred document 112 words that knew only one precedent in American history? With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t own slaves, and you couldn’t buy alcohol.
Few realized that Prohibition’s birth and development were much more complicated than that. In truth, January 16, 1920, signified a series of innovations and alterations revolutionary in their impact. The alcoholic miasma enveloping much of the nation in the nineteenth century had inspired a movement of men and women who created a template for political activism that was still being followed a century later. To accomplish their ends they had also abetted the creation of a radical new system of federal taxation, lashed their domestic goals to the conduct of a foreign war, and carried universal suffrage to the brink of passage. In the years ahead, their accomplishments would take the nation through a sequence of curves and switchbacks that would force the rewriting of the fundamental contract between citizen and government, accelerate a recalibration of the social relationship between men and women, and initiate a historic realignment of political parties.
In 1920 could anyone have believed that the Eighteenth Amendment, ostensibly addressing the single subject of intoxicating beverages, would set off an avalanche of change in areas as diverse as international trade, speedboat design, tourism practices, soft-drink marketing, and the English language itself? Or that it would provoke the establishment of the first nationwide criminal syndicate, the idea of home dinner parties, the deep engagement of women in political issues other than suffrage, and the creation of Las Vegas? As interpreted by the Supreme Court and as understood by Congress, Prohibition would also lead indirectly to the eventual guarantee of the American woman’s right to abortion and simultaneously dash that same woman’s hope for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Prohibition changed the way we live, and it fundamentally redefined the role of the federal government. How the hell did it happen?
PART I
THE STRUGGLE
authorIf 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
Chapter 1
Thunderous Drums and Protestant Nuns
authorAMERICA 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. In 1839 an English traveler marveled at the role liquor played in American life: I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink,
wrote Frederick Marryat in A Diary in America. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.
To Americans reading Captain Marryat’s book, this would not have been news. The national taste for alcohol (or—a safer bet—for the effects of alcohol) dated back to the Puritans, whose various modes of purity did not include abstinence. The ship that brought John Winthrop to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 had more than ten thousand gallons of wine in its hold and carried three times as much beer as water. When the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin first compiled a list of terms for drunk,
in 1722, he came up with 19 examples; fifteen years later, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he could cite 228 (including juicy,
thawed,
and had a thump over the head with Sampson’s jawbone
). By 1763 rum was pouring out of 159 commercial distilleries in New England alone, and by the 1820s liquor was so plentiful and so freely available, it was less expensive than tea.
In the early days of the Republic drinking was as intimately woven into the social fabric as family or church. In the apt phrase of historian W. J. Rorabaugh, Americans drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn.
Out in the countryside most farmers kept a barrel of hard cider by the door for family and anyone who might drop by. In rural Ohio and Indiana the seed scattered by John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed
—produced apples that were inedible but, when fermented, very drinkable. Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year,
wrote food historian Michael Pollan. In the cities it was widely understood that common workers would fail to come to work on Mondays, staying home to wrestle with the echoes and aftershocks of a weekend binge. By 1830 the tolling of a town bell at 11 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. marked grog-time.
Soldiers in the U.S. Army had been receiving four ounces of whiskey as part of their daily ration since 1782; George Washington himself said the benefits arising from moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in all Armies, and are not to be disputed.
Drink seeped through the lives of the propertied classes as well. George Clinton, governor of New York from 1777 to 1795, once honored the French ambassador with a dinner for 120 guests who together drank 135 bottles of Madeira, 36 bottles of port, 60 bottles of English beer, and 30 large cups of rum punch.
Washington kept a still on his farm, John Adams began each day with a tankard of hard cider, and Thomas Jefferson’s fondness for drink extended beyond his renowned collection of wines to encompass rye whiskey made from his own crops. James Madison consumed a pint of whiskey daily.
By 1810 the number of distilleries in the young nation had increased fivefold, to more than fourteen thousand, in less than two decades. By 1830 American adults were guzzling, per capita, a staggering seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. Staggering
is the appropriate word for the consequences of this sort of drinking. In modern terms those seven gallons are the equivalent of 1.7 bottles of a standard 80-proof liquor¹ per person, per week—nearly 90 bottles a year for every adult in the nation, even with abstainers (and there were millions of them) factored in. Once again figuring per capita, multiply the amount Americans drink today by three and you’ll have an idea of what much of the nineteenth century was like.
Another way: listen to thirty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln summarizing domestic life in Sangamon County, Illinois. We found intoxicating liquor used by everybody, repudiated by nobody,
he told a temperance meeting in 1842. It commonly entered into the first draught of an infant, and the last thought of the dying man.
It was, he said, the devastator.
♦ ♦ ♦
TEMPERANCE
: WHEN LINCOLN SPOKE, the word’s meaning was very different from what it would soon become. For decades it had meant moderation, both in quantity and in variety. The first prominent American temperance advocate, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, encouraged the whiskey-riddled to consider a transitional beverage: wine mixed with opium or laudanum. This was the same Rush—respected scientist, signer of the Declaration of Independence, friend to Jefferson and Adams—who insisted he knew of a drunk who had made the mistake of belching near an open flame and was suddenly destroyed.
By 1830 those seven gallons of pure alcohol per capita had confirmed the earlier fears of Harvard literature professor George Ticknor, who in 1821 had told Thomas Jefferson that if the consumption of liquor continued at its current rate, we should be hardly better than a nation of sots.
Moderation itself was called into question. Just before he took up the cause of abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison—whose alcoholic father had abandoned his family when William was thirteen—published a journal that bore the slogan Moderate Drinking Is the Downhill Road to Intemperance and Drunkenness.
General Lewis Cass, appointed secretary of war by Andrew Jackson, eliminated the soldiers’ entire whiskey ration and forbade the consumption of alcoholic beverages at all army forts and bases. Cass was able to do this only because of the improvement in water quality, for among the reasons the whiskey ration had persisted was the foul water supply at many military installations.
At roughly the same time, the nation’s first large-scale expression of antialcohol sentiment had begun to take shape. The Washingtonian Movement, as it became known, arose out of a Baltimore barroom in 1840, when six habitual drinkers pledged their commitment to total abstinence. In some ways they couldn’t have been more dissimilar from the prohibitionists who would follow them. They advocated no changes in the law; they refused to pin blame for their circumstances on tavern operators or distillers; they asked habitual drinkers only to sign a pledge of abstinence. In the same speech in which he condemned the ubiquity of alcoholic beverages, Abraham Lincoln (who thought mandatory prohibition a very bad idea) praised the Washingtonian reliance on persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion. . . . Those whom they desire to convince and persuade are their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons.
The movement’s tactics may not have included any elements of compulsion, but the Washingtonian methodology was not entirely as unassuming as Lincoln might have believed. In the grand American tradition, Washingtonian evangelists poured out a lot of sulfurous rhetoric to lure something between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand men out of the dungeon of inebriety. Snap your burning chains, ye denizens of the pit,
John Bartholomew Gough urged his listeners, and come up sheeted in the fire, dripping with the flames of hell, and with your trumpet tongues testify against the damnation of drink!
Certainly the most successful of Washingtonian platform speakers, Gough was a reformed drinker (and, conveniently, a reformed stage actor as well) who in 1843 alone addressed 383 different audiences and the next year achieved national prominence when he drew twenty thousand potential converts to a single event on Boston Common to bear witness to his zeal.
The year after that, Gough took part in another grand American tradition when he backslid so spectacularly it became a minor national scandal. He was found in a brothel near Broadway and Canal streets in lower Manhattan, in relative repose following a six-day bender. Gough later claimed he had been drugged, that the drugging had led him to a round of drinking, and that at one point I saw a woman dressed in black [and] I either accosted her, or she accosted me.
By all accounts he remained totally abstinent thereafter, and by the time he stopped lecturing thirty-four years later Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city’s main thoroughfares in his honor—out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.
♦ ♦ ♦
RECALLING THE NASCENT temperance movement in the 1840s, one of its most devoted adherents would salute the work of the Washingtonians. They had changed many lives, he said, through their mission of peace and love.
But, he added, we also saw that large numbers who were saved by these means, fell back again to a lower position than ever, because the tempter was permitted to live and throw out his seductive toils. Our watchword now was, Prohibition!
The exclamation point was entirely characteristic of Phineas Taylor Barnum; the taut, one-word epithet that preceded it, bearing its declaratory capital P, represented something new. Prohibition—the legislated imposition of teetotalism on the unwilling—was an idea that had been lurking beneath the earnest pieties of the temperance movement and was transformed in the late 1840s into a rallying cry. Barnum may have been the nation’s best-known convert to the cause, a relentless proselytizer who used his protean promotional skills to persuade men to take the same pledge he had. At his American Museum in New York City, Barnum drew in crowds eager to gawk at his collection of gipsies, albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs [and] caricatures of phrenology,
but that was only the beginning of the show: he also did all he could to direct them to the museum’s theater, for presentations of moral plays in a moral manner.
One of these, The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, was an overripe melodrama that drew as many as three thousand people to a single performance.² The lead character’s extravagant case of the DTs in the fourth act was an especially popular scene.
Barnum was among hundreds of thousands of Americans who turned toward prohibitionism because, he wrote, Neal Dow (may God bless him!) had opened our eyes.
A prosperous businessman from Portland, Maine, Dow had first made his mark on the public life of his hometown in 1827 when, at the age of twenty-four, he somehow persuaded the volunteer fire department to ban alcohol at its musters. Perhaps the firemen had become chagrined at their most disgraceful exhibitions of drunkenness
at these burlesque occasions
(even as they enjoyed them enormously). Just as likely, they were moved (or intimidated, or flabbergasted) by the cauterizing fire of Neal Dow’s passion.
Dow came by his reformist ardor naturally and lived by it wholly. His father was a prominent abolitionist; his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a man of great physical and mental vigor
memorably (and prophetically) named Hate-Evil Hall. In his thirties, by now head of his family’s successful tannery, Dow led a group of Portland employers who chose to deny their workers their daily eleveners
—grog time. Elected mayor in 1851, he immediately persuaded the Maine legislature to enact the nation’s first statewide prohibitory law, mandating fines for those convicted of selling liquor and imprisonment for those engaged in its manufacture.
The Maine Law, as it came to be known, enabled the antiliquor forces who had been stirred by the Washingtonians to use this template to pass similar laws in a dozen other states. Just as his cause became a national movement, so Dow became a national celebrity, admired not just by Barnum but by many other prominent men. Some embraced him with almost unseemly fervor. The education reformer Horace Mann called Dow the moral Columbus
and apparently did not blush when he equated the significance of the Maine Law with the invention of printing.
This was no longer a movement; it had become a fever.
Which meant, of course, that it could not last. Republican politicians, fearing that prohibitionism was divisive and might weaken the unity that had formed in the young party around the slavery issue, began to tiptoe around it. In Portland, unrest broke out in 1855 among Irish immigrants who despised Dow and his law; after an angry crowd of three thousand had gathered on the night of June 2, one man was killed and seven wounded by militiamen who had been ordered to quell the riot. By the end of the decade states that had enacted versions of the Maine Law had repealed them—Maine included.
♦ ♦ ♦
THE OPPOSITION OF Portland’s Irish community could have been seen as an augury. For the next three-quarters of a century, immigrant hostility to the temperance movement and prohibitory laws was unabating and unbounded by nationality. The patterns of European immigration were represented in the ranks of those most vehemently opposed to legal strictures on alcohol: first the Irish, then the Germans, and, closer to the end of the century, the Italians, the Greeks, the southern European Slavs, and the eastern European Jews. But the word ranks
suggests a level of organization that did not exist among the immigrant populations in whose lives wine or beer were so thoroughly embedded. Only the German-American brewers showed an interest in concentrated action, when they united in response to the imposition of a beer tax during the Civil War.
But even a group as powerful, wealthy, and self-interested as the United States Brewers’ Association met its match in the foe who would engage it for nearly half a century: women. Specifically, women of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon stock, most of them living in the small cities and towns of the Northeast and Midwest. They were led into battle by a middle-aged housewife whose first assault took place in her hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1873, inspired by a man famous for his advocacy of abstinence, chastity, gymnastics, health food, loose clothing, and the rights of women.
When Dr. Dioclesian Lewis showed up in town, he could usually count on drawing an audience. Dio, as he was called (except when he was called beautiful bran-eating Dio
), was no doctor—his MD was an honorary one granted by a college of homeopathy—but he was many other things: educator, physical culturist, health food advocate, bestselling author, and one of the more compelling platform speakers of the day, a large, robust man profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own ideas and the uselessness of all others.
He was also the inventor of the beanbag.
On December 22, 1873, Lewis’s lecture caravan stopped in Hillsboro, a town of five thousand about fifty miles east of Cincinnati. That evening he spoke about Our Girls
(the title of one of his recent books); the next, he gave a free lecture on the subject of alcohol. In it he urged the women of Hillsboro to use the power of prayer to rid the town of its saloons—not by calling down the wrath of God, but by praying for the liquor sellers, and if possible praying with them.
The next morning seventy-five Hillsboro women emerged in an orderly two-by-two column from a meeting at the Presbyterian church, taller ones in the rear, shorter in front, and at their head Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson. She was the daughter of an Ohio governor, the wife of a well-known judge, a mother of eight. She had never spoken in public before, much less led a demonstration of any kind. Inside the church, chosen by the others as their leader, she had been so strangled by nerves that she had been unable to speak until the men, temperance advocates though they were, had left the room. She was fifty-seven, a devout Methodist. As she left the sanctuary of the church and emerged into the bitter, windy cold, she led the women in singing the sixteenth-century German hymn Give to the Wind Thy Fears,
translated by John Wesley himself.
On that Christmas Eve and for ten days after, Thompson led her band to Hillsboro’s saloons, its hotels, and its drugstores (many of which sold liquor by the glass). At each one they would fall to their knees and pray for the soul of the owner. The women worked in six-hour shifts, running relays from their homes to the next establishment on the list, praying, singing, reading from the Bible, and generally creating the largest stir in the town, said a Cincinnati newspaper, since news of the attack on Fort Sumter twelve years before. If they were allowed inside, they would kneel on a sawdust floor that had been befouled by years of spilled drinks and the expectorations of men who had missed, or never tried for, the spittoon; if not, they would remain outside, hunched for hours against the winter cold. At William Smith’s drugstore, the proprietor joined them in prayer and vowed never to sell liquor again. Outside another saloon, they knelt in reproachful humility while the customers leaned against the building, hands in their pockets, unmoved by the devout spectacle before them.
The events in Hillsboro launched the Crusade, a squall that would sweep across the Midwest, into New York State, and on to New England with the force of a tropical storm. In eleven days Thompson and her sisters persuaded the proprietors of nine of the town’s thirteen drinking places to close their doors. Down the road in Washington Court House, the gutters ran with liquor decanted by repentant saloonkeepers. As the Crusade spread from Ohio into Indiana in January and February 1874, federal liquor tax collections were off by more than $300,000 in just two revenue districts. In more than 110 cities and towns, every establishment selling liquor yielded to the hurricane set loose by Eliza Thompson.
But hurricanes don’t last, and within a few months this one was spent. Some saloons remained closed; many did not. This is not to say that the sacred ardor of the women had been spent in vain. If nothing else, in many towns the saloon operator was ever after marked as an outcast, a pariah. Andrew Sinclair, in Era of Excess, cites the playwright Sherwood Anderson recalling how the saloonkeeper in the northern Ohio town where Anderson was raised walked silently with bent head. His wife and children were seldom seen. They lived an isolated life.
♦ ♦ ♦
ELIZA THOMPSON WAS blessed with devoted successors who, flushed with reverence, would always refer to her as Mother Thompson. But she herself had been fortunate in her predecessors—a group of women in upstate New York who had begun to agitate against alcohol at about the time of the Washingtonians and would provide a direct link to the women who eventually carried Thompson’s crusade forward. One of these women was a schoolteacher named Susan B. Anthony. Another, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a journalist’s wife. Within a very few years they were joined by Lucy Stone and Amelia Bloomer, two more women whose names, like Anthony’s and Stanton’s, still resonate today for reasons seemingly far removed from the purported evils of booze.
In fact the rise of the suffrage movement was a direct consequence of the widespread Prohibition sentiment. Before she began to campaign for women’s rights, Amelia Bloomer found her voice as an agitator in a temperance publication called The Water Bucket. Lucy Stone began publishing The Lily, which would become an early and important outlet for suffragists, because, she wrote, Intemperance is the great foe to [woman’s] peace and happiness. . . . Surely she has a right to wield the pen for its suppression.
And Susan B. Anthony, who as a teenager feared for the future of the Republic because its leader, Martin Van Buren, had a taste for all-debasing wine,
was virtually shoved into the suffrage movement by men who believed the temperance battle was theirs to lead.
Anthony had given her first public speech in 1849, to a group called the Daughters of Temperance. The Sons were less accommodating. In 1852 she was not allowed to address an Albany meeting of the Sons of Temperance specifically because she was a woman. The sisters,
said the group’s chairman, were there not to speak but to listen and learn.
The same year, at a New York State Temperance Society meeting in Syracuse, the same result. In 1853 it happened again, at a World Temperance Society convention in New York City (where Amelia Bloomer was given the boot as well). Finally Anthony cast her lot with Stanton (who had declared alcohol The Unclean Thing
) and proceeded to give half a century’s labors to the cause of suffrage.
One could make the argument that without the liquor evil,
as it was commonly known to those who most despised it, the suffrage movement would not have drawn the talents and energies of these gifted women. Had there been a Prohibition amendment in America in 1800,
wrote the critic Gilbert Seldes in 1928, when the actual Prohibition amendment was very much on the national mind, the suffragists might have remained for another century a scattered group of intellectual cranks.
Seldes arrived at this provocative conclusion because he believed that the most urgent reasons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related: They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families’ financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote.
But the changed laws, and the universal vote, were decades away. Not even the efforts of the women who banded together in the 1840s to threaten sexual abstinence if their husbands could not achieve alcohol abstinence could keep liquor from continuing to permeate the national fabric. More and more, roadside taverns that had provided the traveler with dining table and bedroom as well as the companionship (and the cruelty) of the bottle found their clientele in nearby towns and farms. These were men seeking release from the drudgery of their lives, but in too many instances they found as well a means of escape, even if temporary, from the responsibilities of home and family. The quantity of liquor served in these places was as great as the quality was not, unless the quality you sought was the one that put you on the shortest route to oblivion.
A drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain, but many rural and small-town women also had to endure the associated ravages born of the early saloon: the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and, most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as syphilis of the innocent
—venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons. Saloons were dark and nasty places, and to the wives of the men inside, they were satanic.
♦ ♦ ♦
TWENTY YEARS AFTER Mother Thompson’s Crusade had subsided, her most important follower was generous with credit. Thompson, said Frances Willard, caught the universal ear and set the key of that mighty orchestra, organized with so much toil and hardship, in which the tender and exalted strain of the Crusade violin still soared aloft, but upborne now by the clanging cornets of science, the deep trombones of legislation, and the thunderous drums of politics and parties.
That was one way of putting it. Another would have been Mother Thompson’s Crusade launched the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
But Frances Willard was no more likely to utter so declarative a sentence than she was to walk into a saloon and chug a double rye. At thirty-five Willard was among the small group of women who in 1874 founded the WCTU; at forty she took control of the organization, and for the rest of her eventful life she was field general, propagandist, chief theoretician, and nearly a deity to a 250,000-member army—undoubtedly, the nation’s most effective political action group in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Willard’s rhapsodic prose style apparently inspired others as well. To one of her most ardent admirers, Hannah Whitall Smith, Willard (who was always known to her family and friends as Frank
) was the embodiment of all that is lovely, and good, and womanly, and strong, and noble, and tender in human nature.
To another, the historian and U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge, Willard managed to be both the Bismarck of the forces of righteousness in modern society
and the greatest organizer of sweetness and light that ever blessed mankind.
The woman who educed such adoration was raised on a farm in Janesville, Wisconsin. At sixteen, she asked her parents to sign a pledge she had pasted in the family Bible. Fashioned as a series of rhyming couplets, the oath began, A pledge we make, no wine to take / Nor brandy red that turns the head.
Several couplets later it concluded with So here we pledge perpetual hate / To all that can intoxicate.
When Willard moved to Evanston, Illinois, with her parents a few years later, she found herself in what she would call a Methodist heaven.
The new college that dominated the town (the predecessor of Northwestern University) had been established, its founders said, in the interests of sanctified learning.
This mission was abetted by a legal proscription against the sale of alcoholic beverages within four miles of its campus and buttressed by the creation of a similarly liquor-loathing women’s school that soon opened nearby. Willard graduated from North Western Female College as valedictorian, became president a decade later, and assumed the position of dean of women at the university when the two schools merged in 1873.
But 1874 was the year of the Crusade, and on a trip east Willard found herself on her knees in Sheffner’s Saloon, on Market Street in Pittsburgh, singing Rock of Ages.
Taking measure of the crowd of unwashed, unkempt, hard-looking drinking men
arrayed behind her, filling every corner and extending out into the street,
Willard wrote, I was conscious that perhaps never in my life, save beside my sister Mary’s dying bed, had I prayed as truly as I did then.
A week later she was back in Chicago, about to walk away from her academic career so she could give her life to the temperance cause.
Forging a new alloy out of the moral commitment of Eliza Thompson and the feminist fire of Susan B. Anthony, Willard very explicitly made temperance a woman’s issue—and women’s issues, she argued, could not be resolved if authority was left solely in the hands of men. She had further come to believe that encouraging temperance was no longer enough. Only some form of legal prohibition could crush the liquor demon, and no such prohibition would ever be enacted without the votes of women. In 1876 she stunned a WCTU audience into silence when she made the case that women should have the right to vote on matters relating to liquor. Only three years later, her commitment to suffrage enabled her to unseat the WCTU’s founding president, the antisuffragist Annie Wittenmyer. Susan B. Anthony would soon begin to appear at WCTU conventions, and Willard installed Lucy Anthony, Susan’s niece, as head of the WCTU lecture bureau. The merging of Anthony’s campaign and Willard’s brought a critical realignment among the era’s feminist activists: the WCTU had acquired a very specific goal, and the suffrage movement had acquired an army.
I have cared very little about food, indeed, very little about anything,
Willard once said, except the matter in hand.
This dedication to her cause was magnified by her astonishing productivity. She began each day with a devotional reading, and then immediately after breakfast, whether at home in Evanston or on one of her cross-country speaking tours, she would charge into eight hours of dictation to her stenographer. She traveled constantly, in one year addressing audiences in every state and territorial capital except Boise and Phoenix. In 1881, accompanied by her secretary and lifelong companion, Anna Gordon, she went south to organize WCTU chapters in states where women’s political activity was even less welcome than it was in much of the north. She also traveled abroad (having founded the World WCTU in 1883), particularly to England, and numbered among her friends and supporters such fellow enemies of alcohol as Leo Tolstoy and the British philanthropist Lady Henry Somerset. Books poured out of her: polemics, memoirs, political manuals. She did step away from the temperance campaign long enough to publish A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (As nearly as I can make out, reducing the problem to actual figures, it took me about three months, with an average of fifteen minutes’ practice daily, to learn, first, to pedal; second, to turn; third, to dismount; and fourth, to mount independently this most mysterious animal
). But even in her homeliest concerns, Willard rarely wandered far from the cause. She called her pet dog Hibbie, a diminutive for the name she had originally bestowed on him: Prohibition.
Willard’s army marched behind two concepts. The first, Home Protection,
seemed perfectly anodyne. But beneath its surface blandness lay a subtle variation on the themes of the Crusade, repackaged for a more urgent purpose: by insisting that the elimination of alcoholic beverages was necessary for the health, welfare, and safety of the American family, the women of the WCTU were now praying not for the sinner, but for those sinned against. The images Home Protection evoked (and that its propagandists used shamelessly) were the weeping mother, the children in threadbare clothes, the banker at the door with repossession papers. The moral crusade was now a practical one as well.
Willard’s second principle, which blossomed as her fame and influence grew, was Do Everything.
Perceiving that the energies of the WCTU could be harnessed for broader purposes, Willard urged her followers to agitate for a set of goals that stretched far beyond the liquor issue but harmonized with the effort to improve the lives of others. Her Protestant nuns
(as Willard sometimes called her followers) campaigned for suffrage, of course, but also for prison reform, free kindergartens, and vocational schools. After reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in 1889, Willard declared herself a Christian socialist
and broadened the WCTU’s agenda once again, agitating for the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, and government ownership of utilities, railroads, factories, and (she was nothing if not eclectic) theaters. Along the way she also took up the causes of vegetarianism, cremation, less restrictive women’s clothing, and something she called the White Life for Two
—a program cloaked in euphemism,
wrote Catherine Gilbert Murdock in Domesticating Drink, that endorsed alcohol-free, tobacco-free, lust-free marriages.
As exceptional as Willard was, her determination to connect Prohibition to other reforms was neither original with her nor uncommon. In its first national campaign, in 1872, the Prohibition Party endorsed universal suffrage, public education, and the elimination of the electoral college, and would soon take up a range of issues reaching from federal control of interstate commerce to forest conservation. Dio Lewis was a harvesting machine of causes and campaigns. At the moment he took the abstinence pledge in 1845, Frederick Douglass had said, if we could but make the world sober, we would have no slavery,
partly because all great reforms go together.
The great abolitionist Wendell Phillips—who said he was also a temperance man of nearly 40 years’ standing
—may have been speaking for Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Neal Dow, and all the others who had labored for both temperance and abolition when he argued that the defeat of slavery proved that government action was an appropriate weapon in the battle against moral wrongs.
In fact, Phillips may have been speaking for anyone who had managed to cross the gulf between persuasion and compulsion, between the traditional meaning of temperance and the new meaning of prohibition. Or, decked out in its permanent capital P, Prohibition—not just a word but a declaration, an apotheosis.
♦ ♦ ♦
COMMEMORATING THE CENTENNIAL of American independence in 1876, the Manhattan lithography shop of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives reissued a popular item Currier had first published in 1848, Washington’s Farewell to the Officers of His Army. The great general stands in the exact center of the print, his associates arrayed around him, his tricorne hat on a stout table by his side. Washington is in full dress uniform; his right hand, fingers curled into a fist, rests on his breastbone. He looks to be making an emphatic gesture, but the officers in the picture seem lost in thought. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It did, however, when Currier first published a version of the image twenty-eight years earlier. In that version there’s no hat on the table; a decanter and some wineglasses occupy that spot. Nor is Washington making that peculiar fist. His fingers are extended, the better to grip the glass of wine he’s holding. He’s apparently delivering a heartfelt toast to the officers, whose considered expressions convey both their sadness and their humility.
The original image makes historical sense. Washington’s fondness for Madeira found expression in the postprandial bottle (and accompanying bowl of hickory nuts) he shared with his guests almost nightly. At the event depicted—his valedictory at Fraunces’ Tavern, in 1783—he had opened the emotional proceedings by pouring himself a glass of wine and inviting his officers to join him. Currier and Ives were businessmen, however, and business required them to oblige the temperance agitators who objected so vociferously to the original image. It was easy enough to obliterate the decanter and glasses by drawing in the hat; chopping off Washington’s own goblet, as well as the top two joints of his fingers, may have required a little more skill, but presumably it was worth the effort. That this self-censorship occurred as early as 1876, when the WCTU and its allies were only beginning to develop their strength and their strategy, suggests the degree to which aggressive actions would soon replace the prayerful entreaties of Mother Thompson—not least because they worked.
This became clear in the dazzling career of a former chemistry teacher from Massachusetts named Mary Hanchett Hunt, who became one of the most influential women in the country through her religiously inspired temperance work, even if her tactics proved to be not so holy. In her late forties, stirred by what she described as a great hunger to do more for the Master,
she left behind her position as the leader of the Hyde Park Ladies Sewing Society to become as influential an agitator as the Prohibition movement would ever know. According to William Jennings Bryan, the campaign she led did more than any other one thing
to bring the Eighteenth Amendment into being. In Hunt, the coercion Wendell Phillips had celebrated found its agent.
Hunt believed it her mission to reach the nation’s children, to saturate them in facts—as she perceived them—that would make young people despise alcohol as much as she did. Invited by Frances Willard to speak at the WCTU convention in 1879, she enlisted the union’s battalions in an assault on the nation’s school boards, which she intended to put in a state of siege.
Through them, she said, a program of Scientific Temperance Instruction
could be introduced into every American classroom. But Hunt was not prepared to entrust school boards alone with this grave responsibility. It is our duty not to take the word of some school official,
she declared, but to visit the school and carefully and wisely ascertain for ourselves if the study is faithfully pursued by all pupils.
With Willard’s support, at least in the early stages, Hunt sought to have two or more monitors from every single WCTU chapter lay siege to their own local boards. Lest anyone underestimate the audacity of what she was trying to accomplish, she borrowed from the educational taxonomy and called these local enforcers superintendents.
In 1881 she began to aim higher. Having persuaded the WCTU to commit itself to legally mandated temperance instruction, Hunt targeted the state legislatures. She took control of as many of these campaigns as possible, in some instances moving to the capital of a particular state to direct petition drives and demonstrations, while simultaneously handling legislators with such skill—and such effect—that she acquired the epithet Queen of the Lobby.
Vermont, in 1882, was the first state to pass a compulsory temperance education law; the crucial New York legislature capitulated in 1884; the next year Pennsylvania went a step further, tying state funding to local compliance with the statute’s provisions, among them mandatory temperance examinations for all new teachers. Hunt had a falling-out with Willard around this time, but her juggernaut no longer required Willard’s personal sanction. In 1886 Hunt took her caravan to Congress, which promptly passed a law requiring Scientific Temperance Instruction in the public schools of all federal territories and in the military academies as well. By 1901, when the population of the entire nation was still less than eighty million, compulsory temperance education was on the books of every state in the nation, and thereby in the thrice-weekly lessons of twenty-two million American children and teenagers.
What many of these millions received in the name of Scientific Temperance Instruction
was somewhat different from what the three words implied. The second one was arguably accurate, but what Hunt called scientific
was purely propaganda, and what she considered instruction
was in fact intimidation. Students were force-fed a stew of mythology (the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy
), remonstration (persons should not take a stimulant before bathing
), and terror (when alcohol passes down the throat it burns off the skin, leaving it bare and burning
). These specific insights,
as embarrassing as they were even to the WCTU leadership, were not spontaneously generated; they entered the curricula of an estimated 50 percent of all American public schools in textbooks bearing the one imprimatur most valuable to any publisher: the approval of Mary Hunt.
The textbook endorsement program was an arm of the prodigious operation Hunt had assembled in her home on Trull Street in Boston. In one room Hunt created the Scientific Temperance Museum (among its prized artifacts: pens governors had used to sign temperance education bills into law). In the Correspondence Room as many as five secretaries handled her mail and managed her punishing schedule. But only Hunt could attach her signed endorsement to a textbook’s copyright page, and publishers and authors who sought it had to survive her grueling interrogations. Professor Charles H. Stowell of the University of Michigan Medical School, the author of a series of health and anatomy books, spent more than a year negotiating word-by-word changes with Hunt before she agreed to sign off on A Healthy Body, a volume Stowell and his publisher, Silver, Burdett & Company, intended for students in the intermediate grades. Unlike those authors of unscientific and unpedagogical
books who did not seek her seal of approval, Stowell generally had no issue with Hunt’s authority; he was a stalwart antiliquor man himself, and in his textbook for high school students he described alcohol as a narcotic poison [with] the power to deaden or paralyze the brain.
He drew the line only when Hunt insisted on inserting in one of his books the claim that a single drink of liquor seriously affected one’s vision.
Stowell thereby showed more steel than the scholar who told a committee investigating Hunt’s work that "I have studied physiology and I do not wish you to suppose that I have fallen so low as to believe all those things I have put into those books. But it was Hunt’s way of doing business, not her editorial standards, that led Stowell’s publishers to fall out with her. In 1891 she informed the firm, which was ready to publish one of Stowell’s books, of the
utter impossibility of meeting their schedule. She couldn’t possibly provide an endorsement for at least six weeks, she said—unless, that is, the publisher picked up the tab for Emma L. Benedict,
my Literary Assistant, whom Hunt was taking to Atlantic City
for a couple of days rest between engagements."
The record doesn’t reveal the reaction inside the offices of Silver, Burdett to this mild ransom demand. But a few days by the seaside weren’t so costly, and soon the firm ponied up the money. The company’s compliant posture stiffened, though, when Hunt presented its officers with what could only be called a shakedown. When Stowell’s next volume was completed late that same year, Hunt once again stalled, and this time she wasn’t coy about her intentions: she wanted to be paid for her endorsement. Did you think I was doing this work for nothing?
she asked. O. S. Cook, Stowell’s editor, told Hunt that his firm had come to plainly understand that you demand a definite arrangement as to compensation, before you will indorse the books.
When she requested a meeting to discuss the matter, the firm made its final response: Our position is clearly known to you. Any further discussion would undoubtedly prove fruitless.
It was true that Hunt never accepted a salary from the WCTU in the twenty-seven years that she patrolled America’s classrooms, and it was also true that she and her supporters repeatedly denied that she received or expected payment from publishers. The chairman of her advisory board, the Reverend A. H. Plumb, condemned these unjust charges
before a New York state senate committee in 1895 and two years later insisted that the rumor that Hunt demanded a 3 percent royalty on textbooks she endorsed was a calumny spread by Silver, Burdett.
But in 1906, a few months after her death—around the same time the WCTU, with genuine relief, converted the remnants of her operation into a rather benign clearinghouse for alcohol information
—associates learned something distressing about Mary Hunt. For years she had maintained a bank account in the name of something she called the Scientific Temperance Association (her WCTU work had been conducted through her Department of Scientific Instruction). Into this account she had deposited royalties on endorsed books published by A. S. Barnes & Company and Ginn & Company—money intended in whole or in part for the maintenance of the work at 23 Trull St.
But those words shouldn’t serve as an epitaph for Mary Hunt. Something she had said in a congressional hearing back in 1886, before twenty-two million schoolchildren in a given year were administered their three-times-a-week serving of temperance education, is more appropriate: The day is surely coming,
she had told the congressmen, when from the schoolhouses all over the land will come trained haters of alcohol to pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon.
And would they ever.
¹ Historians, demographers, and economists derive liquor consumption statistics from various data, including manufacturing records, tax receipts, and, provocatively, deaths by cirrhosis.
² Some sources assert that The Drunkard was the most commercially successful American play until Uncle Tom’s Cabin surpassed it a few years later. It remained a staple of the temperance movement through much of the nineteenth century, eventually disappearing from view until 1964, when it was transformed into an unlikely (and short-lived) musical by the twenty-one-year-old Barry Manilow.
Chapter 2
The Rising of Liquid Bread
authorCARRY AMELIA MOORE GLOYD NATION was six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache. Her mother believed herself to be Queen Victoria. Her first husband was a rotten drunk. Her religious passions led her to sit on her organ bench and talk to Christ, my constant companion,
playing a musical accompaniment as the conversation proceeded. She once described herself as a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,
and she applauded the assassination of William O. McKinley, a whey-faced tool of Republican thieves, rummies, and devils.