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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


No doubt, Okrent's book is one of the more interesting titles of the last decade. This book was the basis for the Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition as well as a major resource for Bill Bryson in One Summer: America 1927.

It is interesting to watch the rise of Prohibition and how it was linked to women's suffrage. In both cases, they were large minorities fixated on one issue, and they found it beneficial to team up.

How that ball gets rolling is one of the more interesting stories of the book.

Okrent covers a lot of different aspects of Prohibition.

Ironically, Prohibition's change on American culture probably made his more of a nation of drinkers than if it hadn't.

The law was faulty in that there were a lot of exceptions (religious reasons, etc) and it was quite unenforceable. Quite frankly, it ended up being a drain of money for no good purpose.

It is also interesting that the Big Brewers survived and were able to create a monopoly of sorts over the industry for decades. While small brewing companies were forced under.

Interesting to note how companies tried to evolve, and how Coke was influenced by Prohibition. A latter era product was a Grape Juice block that you should definitely not age and add sugar to, otherwise it would become an alcoholic product.

Prohibition survives. In 1928, prohibition was an easy ally for the KKK and others who wanted to target Catholics (and Presidential candidate Al Smith). It was also not a good move for many of the 'wets' who preferred the current state of things to the repeal of the law.

One suspects that Prohibition could have survived longer (certainly a ban on hard liquor), but there were too many factors working against it. Eventually, the great depression causes too much of a temptation in gains from tax revenue (in fact, a couple of interesting parts on taxes through the years). As well as Prohibition leaders dying of old age, being found out as hypocrites, or changing their minds.

It is women who lead the charge against the repeal eventually, as it was women who were the original leaders, which proves you can't paint the sexes with one political brush.

It's a thick book with a bunch of reference notes and the Constitution itself to pad it out. It covers a lot and only a small part is about Al Capone (if you thought that might be the case).

At times it is very *ahem* dry. It has a lot of wonderful research- plenty of anecdotes and trivia- but I have to admit for a pretty fun topic, it gets bogged down often. Credit to Bryson for *ahem* distilling the best parts.

Of course, far be it for me to criticize Okrent- a man with plenty of sports, history and journalism bonafides (New York Times editor, multi award winner, Ken Burns go-to, and inventor of rotisserie baseball). Still, this isn't a light read.

For me, I look at the criminalization of marijuana and see some similarities. Certainly 90s culture is filled with the weed. It's not an exact comparison, but I see similarities.

I would recommend for those who are looking for this level of detail. For most people, I would probably point you to Bryson's book (or Burns' doc) but you probably know your tastes better than I.



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