Book Review: 'Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition'

Cover design by Rex Boronelli. (C) 2010 Last Laugh, Inc. and Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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 the 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. - The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which became the law of the land in January of 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." – Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

In May of 2011, five months before PBS aired the premiere of Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Simon & Schuster’s imprint Scribner’s published Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by journalist/historian Daniel Okrent.

Okrent, a former editor at Time and Life magazine and The New York Times’ first public editor, chose to write Last Call almost while his friends Ken Burns and Lynn Novick were about to pick their next film project. As Okrent recalls in the Acknowledgments section of the book:

For years, Ken had been saying, “Let’s make a film together.” Knowing about as much as filmmaking as I do about molecular physics, I had chronically met his cheerful encouragement with an exaggerated rolling of the eyes. This time, though, when I told him I was working on a history of Prohibition, Ken dropped the imperative and moved directly to the declarative: “That’s it,” he said, extending his hand to clinch the deal. “That’s our film.”

As it turned out – as it should have turned out – Ken and his associate (and my dear friend) Lynn Novick made their own film, and I wrote my own book. But along the way, the exchange of ideas research, and sources enhanced both projects to such a degree that they can be considered first cousins. My book is better for the input and reactions of Ken, Lynn, Geoffrey Ward, and Sarah Botstein; I hope they’ll be able to say as much about whatever I’ve been able to contribute to their forthcoming film.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition covers the 100-year struggle of America's temperance movement and the Anti-Saloon League to cure most of the country's social and moral ills by making the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages in the United States illegal. The draconian solution chosen by the ASL's leader, Wayne B. Wheeler, and a coalition of women, rural Protestant whites, and progressives who were aware that alcohol contributed to many problems in American society: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that made Prohibition the law of the land.  

Supporters of what eventually became the 18th Amendment (aka the Volstead Act, named after Michigan Congressman Andrew Volstead) - the "drys" - clashed with Americans who saw Prohibition as a threat to personal freedoms that were enshrined in the same Constitution. The "wets," as they would come to be called, were aware of the ills of excessive drinking (broken homes, spousal abuse, lost productivity, and, in the Age of the Automobile, injuries, deaths, and financial cost of accidents caused by drunk drivers). Yet they thought that Prohibition was an intrusion by the government into the private lives of law-abiding and responsible Americans who enjoyed the occasional drink.

In Last Call, Okrent points out  how badly things worked out for the Dry movement and the entire nation.  Prohibition did, at first, have some positive results because most Americans knew that alcohol abuse was a social problem that needed to be addressed.  Many individuals, even those who were drinkers, tried to obey the law as a matter of good citizenship.  As a result, there was a reduction of alcohol-related car accidents, and public drunkenness arrests went down sharply within the first 12 months of the Prohibition era.

However, the law had many loopholes and was not enforced seriously or even fairly.  The manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was forbidden, yet the consumption of it was not even mentioned in the Volstead Act.  Some states which had ratified it – including Michigan - did nothing to enforce it and even repealed prohibition laws within their own constitutions, and the Federal government only fielded a handful of Prohibition agents to shut down illegal distilleries and speakeasies, arrest bootleggers and prosecute gangsters who built huge criminal empires made possible by America’s unquenchable thirst for forbidden beverages – beer, whiskey, gin and wine, for the most part.

The book is divided into four parts:

• Part One: The Struggle (seven chapters)
• Part Two: The Flood (seven chapters)
• Part Three: The War of the Wet and the Dry (four chapters)
• Part Four: The Beginning of the End, The End, and After (three chapters)

Additionally, Okrent includes an Epilogue, an Acknowledgments section, an Appendix that contains the complete text of the Constitution, plus the usual back-of-the-book matter that non-fiction books have. 

A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the US 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. - From the publisher's web page for Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

My Take

Although Last Call is not an official "companion book" to PBS' three-part documentary series Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Daniel Okrent's magnificent history was a major wellspring of facts and sources for the film, and Okrent appears in the series as one of the interviewees. He is also listed as the project's senior consultant. 

I enjoyed the documentary when I bought the Blu-ray set in the fall of 2011; other than watching Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, I had not been too keen on the Prohibition era, but I wanted to how Ken Burns would depict it. So some time after it aired on PBS, I ordered the home media edition and watched it with my mom, who despite the onset of dementia, could still enjoy documentaries. 

One of the things I liked most about Prohibition was Okrent's erudite-yet-folksy way of commenting on various subjects, including the clash between Wets and Drys during the run-up to the ratification and the 14-year period in which Prohibition was enshrined in the law of the land. He was factual, yet he injected a homespun humor and wit that made him seem like a guy with whom you want to drink a beer and talk about anything.

Well, Last Call reflects Okrent's onscreen persona to a tee.

Check out the vivid imagery and the easy flow of Okrent's description of the eve of day when Prohibition reigned supreme in the U.S.:

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."

Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is a highly enjoyable and informative work. It is well-written, carefully researched, and highly entertaining. Its cast of characters is full of names that should be familiar to anyone who attended history classes in high school, including Frances Willard, Billy Sunday, Carrie Nation, William Jennings Bryan, Al Capone, and Andrew Mellon.

But the book also delves into the life and careers of people that many Americans living today have forgotten, such as the ASL's once-feared leader and chief tactician, Wayne B. Wheeler, who was described by a critic as "the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States" for his ability to control legislators in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during the successful campaign to push the 18th Amendment through Congress before ratification in 1919.

Last Call  is one of those history books that doesn't make the reader go "Ugh! This is a dull and uninvolving textbook." It is a joy to read, full of fascinating vignettes and personality profiles about people on both sides of the Prohibition struggle. Like Burns and Novick's Prohibition, Last Call examines a strange period in which America went temporarily insane and forgot its basic principles.

It also lays bare the ever-present tensions between ethnic and national groups, the wide philosophical gap between Americans who live in the big metro areas and the rural communities of the Deep South and the Midwest, and the conflicting visions for the present and future that continue to divide the nation. Prohibition, after all, was a symptom of White Protestant America's traditional reluctance to accept immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere, a characteristic that continues today in the Age of Trump.

If you want to better understand the contradictory nature of the American character, history books and documentaries are a good starting place from which to start. Daniel Okrent's Last Call is a must-read book about an era which continues to resonate eighty years after the rise and fall of Prohibition.