prohibition

Project Twenty: The Jazz Age
$24.98
As an English teacher trying to illustrate the historical context of Gatsby, this documentary is excellent. Fred Allen's tongue-in-cheek narration may be difficult for some students, but the issues relevant to the book are obvious and treated appropriately. It is also a fast and quick screening in classes--the first few chapters are all that are needed, up to when the documentary shifts to the expatriates abroad in Paris.

The Prohibition Era: Temperance in the United States (Milestones in American History)
$35.00
With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920, the United States became a 'dry' nation. For the next 13 years, a period now known as Prohibition, the amendment forbade Americans from manufacturing, selling, or transporting alcoholic beverages until its repeal in 1933. In 1920, Prohibition's supporters had confidently looked forward to a bright new era of stronger families, lower crime rates, and increased industrial productivity.Yet, their great social experiment was to prove virtually impossible to enforce. Consequently, although per capita alcohol consumption among Americans declined between 1920 and 1933, tens of millions of citizens, including an unprecedented number of women, imbibed regularly throughout the Prohibition years, swilling gallons of 'bootleg' liquor smuggled in from abroad or concocted in illegal stills. "The Prohibition Era" examines the social, political, and economic factors that led to the banning of alcohol and its eventual reinstatement as a legal beverage.

Prohibition
$11.98

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City
$17.95
The prohibitionists knew what they were up against in denying alcohol to Americans, but they also knew they would have no greater difficulty in enforcing sobriety than when they tried to do so in New York City. New Yorkers, it was said, spent literally one million dollars a day on booze in 1913, more than the nation spent on the salaries of public school teachers. They drank it up at over three times the rate of the national average. So prohibitionists paid special attention to New York City, and actually moved it into the "dry" column for the 18th Amendment to be passed in 1919. After that, New York City was one of the spurs to making prohibition unfashionable, and ridiculous, pass���, and then obsolete. The story of prohibition's rise and fall in Gotham is told in _Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City_ (Harvard University Press) by Michael A. Lerner, a New Yorker well acquainted with the realms of the city involved in drinking and the ethnic groups it still harbors, many of whom had a special interest in keeping the city dry or wet. Lerner makes a convincing case that as we consider popular depictions of the "Roaring Twenties," we are likely to find amusing the governmental attempts to keep America from drinking, but there was more to it than just the prohibition of booze. Prohibition defined how much the government might try to reform its citizens, and it defined the politics of the times. There is no understanding, for instance, how New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt became president without taking prohibition into account. Lerner's book, a well referenced and compellingly written account of a national mistake, fittingly concentrates on New York, for Prohibition failed there in a spectacular fashion because of the cultural makeup of the city, and its attitude toward being told what to do.

William H. Anderson was the Anti-Saloon League's man in Maryland, and in 1914 he was reassigned to New York City, with much public fanfare, for he was the fellow that aimed to make the city dry. Anderson was able to use prejudice against Jews, Catholics, and Germans to enlist interest in Prohibition, and World War I helped his cause. It worked, in the short term. Anderson was skillful at aggressive lobbying, and wrote that his success was from "outguessing and outgeneraling the foe... hard hitting and merciless fighting." It was an admission that he wasn't taking part in what was supposed to be a national push toward moral reform. Indeed, his anti-Catholic remarks were linked to his other diatribes supporting the Ku Klux Klan, diatribes which brought the Anti-Saloon League into public scorn. It was even worse when he was indicted for doctoring the League's finances, and then imprisoned for forgery. Drinking New Yorkers must have snickered at Anderson's fall; they had been disrespecting his efforts since Prohibition began. Prohibition created an atmosphere of bribery and corruption, and policemen were forced to monitor drinking rather than more serious crimes, so the cost of policing went up, not down as the drys had promised it would. Those who wanted to drink just did so in new ways, and New Yorkers enjoyed the novelty. There was a pleasant game of hide-and-seek as drinkers found new speakeasies, which might be hidden in cellars or atop skyscrapers. Some were bare-bones establishments that passed out liquor until the law closed them up and they moved to the next empty basement; some were glittering nightclubs. Drinking was a cornerstone of the "pleasure ethic" of 1920s New York, and bootleggers were eager to supply to gentlemen and socialites whatever was in fashion. New Yorkers who didn't drink had a new reason to begin. Lerner tells the story of humorist Robert Benchley, a teetotaler before Prohibition, who went to a speakeasy and ordered a cocktail, proclaiming, "Let's find out what all the fuss is about." Where the Women's Christian Temperance Union had insisted that women would spearhead the dry movement, the flappers and the other women of New York took to the new adventure of covert speakeasy drinking, and some establishments specialized in sweet, colorful women's cocktails. Pauline Sabin, a wealthy New Yorker who had supported Prohibition until she saw the horrors of its unintended consequences, founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. Lerner credits her, and former governor Al Smith, as doing the most to bring about Prohibition's end.

The drys had worked hard to get the Prohibition amendment passed, but the work was all power plays and had little to do with a national democratic urge toward reform; this was the chief reason that once the amendment was enacted, the dries could do little but stammer indignantly as New Yorkers ignored it. Their other difficulty was that the dries knew all about the problems connected with alcohol but failed to understand any of the problems connected with its prohibition. Other New Yorkers could see those problems easily, and there was a general dismay that the federal government would try to regulate the private lives of its citizens (I wonder if New Yorkers had a general personality that was more liable to feel this indignation than other Americans did?). Lerner has filled his book with colorful characters and stories, and it is a good reminder of the hazards of governmental attempts to improve individual moral behavior.