Author: Timothy LynchPublisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 9781882577941
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
More than 10 years ago, federal officials boldly claimed that they would create a drug-fee America by 1995.
After Prohibition
Author: Timothy LynchPublisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 9781882577941
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
More than 10 years ago, federal officials boldly claimed that they would create a drug-fee America by 1995.
Prohibition
Author: W. J. RorabaughPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190689935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Book Description
Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, but from 1920 to 1933 the country went dry. After decades of pressure from rural Protestants such as the hatchet-wielding Carry A. Nation and organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League, the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Bolstered by the Volstead Act, this amendment made Prohibition law: alcohol could no longer be produced, imported, transported, or sold. This bizarre episode is often humorously recalled, frequently satirized, and usually condemned. The more interesting questions, however, are how and why Prohibition came about, how Prohibition worked (and failed to work), and how Prohibition gave way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol. This book answers these questions, presenting a brief and elegant overview of the Prohibition era and its legacy. During the 1920s alcohol prices rose, quality declined, and consumption dropped. The black market thrived, filling the pockets of mobsters and bootleggers. Since beer was too bulky to hide and largely disappeared, drinkers sipped cocktails made with moonshine or poor-grade imported liquor. The all-male saloon gave way to the speakeasy, where together men and women drank, smoked, and danced to jazz. After the onset of the Great Depression, support for Prohibition collapsed because of the rise in gangster violence and the need for revenue at local, state, and federal levels. As public opinion turned, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to repeal Prohibition in 1932. The legalization of beer came in April 1933, followed by the Twenty-first Amendment's repeal of the Eighteenth that December. State alcohol control boards soon adopted strong regulations, and their legacies continue to influence American drinking habits. Soon after, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The alcohol problem had shifted from being a moral issue during the nineteenth century to a social, cultural, and political one during the campaign for Prohibition, and finally, to a therapeutic one involving individuals. As drinking returned to pre-Prohibition levels, a Neo-Prohibition emerged, led by groups such as Mothers against Drunk Driving, and ultimately resulted in a higher legal drinking age and other legislative measures. With his unparalleled expertise regarding American drinking patterns, W. J. Rorabaugh provides an accessible synthesis of one of the most important topics in US history, a topic that remains relevant today amidst rising concerns over binge-drinking and alcohol culture on college campuses.
Alcohol and Public Policy
Author: National Research CouncilPublisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309031494
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 478
Book Description
Last Call
Author: Daniel OkrentPublisher: 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.
Alcoholism in America
Author: Sarah W. TracyPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801891671
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
Despite the lack of medical consensus regarding alcoholism as a disease, many people readily accept the concept of addiction as a clinical as well as a social disorder. An alcoholic is a victim of social circumstance and genetic destiny. Although one might imagine that this dual approach is a reflection of today's enlightened and sympathetic society, historian Sarah Tracy discovers that efforts to medicalize alcoholism are anything but new. Alcoholism in America tells the story of physicians, politicians, court officials, and families struggling to address the danger of excessive alcohol consumption at the turn of the century. Beginning with the formation of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates in 1870 and concluding with the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, this study examines the effect of the disease concept on individual drinkers and their families and friends, as well as the ongoing battle between policymakers and the professional medical community for jurisdiction over alcohol problems. Tracy captures the complexity of the political, professional, and social negotiations that have characterized the alcoholism field both yesterday and today. Tracy weaves American medical history, social history, and the sociology of knowledge into a narrative that probes the connections among reform movements, social welfare policy, the specialization of medicine, and the social construction of disease. Her insights will engage all those interested in America's historic and current battles with addiction.
Prohibition in Washington, D.C.
Author: Garrett PeckPublisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1614230897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
Even in the city where the Eighteenth Amendment was passed, the party went on—a history of bootleggers and speakeasies in the nation’s capital. Despite the passage of the Volstead Act, it was estimated that in 1929, bootleggers brought twenty-two thousand gallons of whiskey, moonshine, and other spirits into Washington, DC’s speakeasies—every week. The bathtub gin-swilling capital dwellers made the most of Prohibition. This rollicking history brims with stories of vice—topped off with vintage cocktail recipes and garnished with a walking tour of former speakeasies. Discover an underground city ruled not by organized crime but by amateur bootleggers, where publicly teetotaling congressmen could get a stiff drink behind House office doors and the African American community of U Street was humming with a new sound called jazz. Includes photos!
Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era
Author: J. Anne FunderburgPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786479612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430
Book Description
This work is an accurate, wide-ranging, and entertaining account of the illegal liquor traffic during the Prohibition Era (1920 to 1933). Based on FBI files, legal documents, old newspapers and other sources, it offers a coast-to-coast survey of Volstead crime--outrageous stories of America's most notorious liquor lords, including Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. Readers will find the lesser known Volstead outlaws to be as fascinating as their more famous counterparts. The riveting tales of Max Hassel, Waxy Gordon, Roy Olmstead, the Purple Gang, the Havre Bunch, and the Capitol Hill Bootlegger will be new to most readers. Likewise, the exploits of women bootleggers and flying bootleggers are unknown to most Americans. Books about Prohibition usually note that Canadian liquor exporters abetted the U.S. bootleggers, but they fail to go into detail. Bootleggers and Beer Barons examines the major cross-border routes for smuggling liquor from Canada into the U.S.: Quebec to Vermont and New York, Ontario to Michigan, Saskatchewan to Montana, and British Columbia to Washington.
The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
Author: Lisa McGirrPublisher: 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.
American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition
Author: Kenneth D. RosePublisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814774660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Rose (history, California State U.) analyzes the political mechanisms used to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol. What makes the work unique is his emphasis on the role of women's organizations in both prohibition and repeal, and how the arguments used by women's organizations to promote the Eighteenth Amendment in 1923 were used by opponents to repeal it in 1933--specifically, the idea of "home protection," which was a socialist feminist ideology held by both groups. The author is dedicated to recovering the history of politically conservative women who have been traditionally ignored or dismissed in other historical studies. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Bootleg
Author: Karen BlumenthalPublisher: Flash Point
ISBN: 1466801581
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
It began with the best of intentions. Worried about the effects of alcohol on American families, mothers and civic leaders started a movement to outlaw drinking in public places. Over time, their protests, petitions, and activism paid off—when a Constitional Amendment banning the sale and consumption of alcohol was ratified, it was hailed as the end of public drunkenness, alcoholism, and a host of other social ills related to booze. Instead, it began a decade of lawlessness, when children smuggled (and drank) illegal alcohol, the most upright citizens casually broke the law, and a host of notorious gangsters entered the public eye. Filled with period art and photographs, anecdotes, and portraits of unique characters from the era, this fascinating book looks at the rise and fall of the disastrous social experiment known as Prohibition. Bootleg is a 2011 Kirkus Best Teen Books of the Year title. One of School Library Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011. YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist in 2012.