Author: John J. Rumbarger Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 9780887067822 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of America's anti-liquor/anti-drug movement from its origins in the late eighteenth century through the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. It examines the role that capitalism played in defining and shaping this reform movement. Rumbarger challenges conventional explanations of the history of this movement and offers compelling counter-arguments to explain the movement's historical development. He successfully links the ethics of business enterprise and those of moral reform of society for the betterment of enterprise. The author reveals how readily economic power is transformed--first into social power and finally into political power in the context of a bourgeois democracy. He shows that the motivation driving this reform movement was not religiosity, but profit, and that anti-liquor capitalists viewed the "human equation" as determinant of America's prospect for creating wealth.
Author: Daniel Okrent Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1439171696 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 506
Book Description
A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages. From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing. Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever. Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax. Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible—if long-forgotten—federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.) It’s a book rich with stories from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent’s narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine; New England fishing communities that gave up fishing for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology. Last Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly told. It stands as the most complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent’s rank as a major American writer.
Author: Ellen NicKenzie Lawson Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 1438448163 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
Uses previously unstudied Coast Guard records for New York City and environs to examine the development of Rum Row and smuggling in New York City during Prohibition. With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, drying up New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nations greatest liquor market. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws focuses on liquor smuggling to tell the story of Prohibition in New York City. Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers. Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York Citys scofflaw populationpatrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubsas well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James Jimmy Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation. Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New Yorks smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
Author: Lisa McGirr Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393248798 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 450
Book Description
“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.
Author: Marc Mappen Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813561167 Category : True Crime Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Master story teller Marc Mappen applies a generational perspective to the gangsters of the Prohibition era—men born in the quarter century span from 1880 to 1905—who came to power with the Eighteenth Amendment. On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in the United States, “outlawing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” A group of young criminals from immigrant backgrounds in cities around the nation stepped forward to disobey the law of the land in order to provide alcohol to thirsty Americans. Today the names of these young men—Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Nucky Johnson—are more familiar than ever, thanks in part to such cable programs as Boardwalk Empire. Here, Mappen strips way the many myths and legends from television and movies to describe the lives these gangsters lived and the battles they fought. Placing their criminal activities within the context of the issues facing the nation, from the Great Depression, government crackdowns, and politics to sexual morality, immigration, and ethnicity, he also recounts what befell this villainous group as the decades unwound. Making use of FBI and other government files, trial transcripts, and the latest scholarship, the book provides a lively narrative of shootouts, car chases, courtroom clashes, wire tapping, and rub-outs in the roaring 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and beyond. Mappen asserts that Prohibition changed organized crime in America. Although their activities were mercenary and violent, and they often sought to kill one another, the Prohibition generation built partnerships, assigned territories, and negotiated treaties, however short lived. They were able to transform the loosely associated gangs of the pre-Prohibition era into sophisticated, complex syndicates. In doing so, they inspired an enduring icon—the gangster—in American popular culture and demonstrated the nation’s ideals of innovation and initiative. View a three minute video of Marc Mappen speaking about Prohibition Gangsters.
Author: Michael A. Lerner Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674040090 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.
Author: John J. Rumbarger
Author: Kristie A. Taylor
Author: Daniel Okrent
Author: Kirkbride Bible Company
Author: Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Author: Lisa McGirr
Author: Mark Thornton
Author: Marc Mappen
Author: National Research Council
Author: Michael A. Lerner