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Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Paperback – May 31, 2011

by Daniel Okrent (Author)

4.4 827 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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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.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 31, 2011
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.4 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

074327704X
ISBN-13

978-0743277044
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A triumph. Okrent brilliantly captures the one glaring 'whoops!' in our Constitutional history. This entertaining portrait should stimulate fresh thought on the capacity and purpose of free government."

--Taylor Branch

"Daniel Okrent's "Last Call" fills a gaping void in American popular history that has been waiting for years to be filled, by providing a clear, sweeping, detailed and immensely readable account of Prohibition. His book is full of lively stories, incredible characters and fascinating research. It is, at once, great fun to read and solid history, a rare combination." -[trimmed quote still needsapproval]

--Michael Korda, author of "Ulysses S. Grant, ""Ike", and "With Wings Like Eagles"

"Daniel Okrent's" Last Call" is filled with delightful details, colorful characters, and fascinating social insights. And what a great tale! Prohibition may not have been a lot of fun, but this book sure is."

--Walter Isaacson

"Last Call is--I can't help it--a high, an upper, a delicious cocktail of a book, served with a twist or two and plenty of punch."

--Evan Thomas, "Newsweek"

"This is a marvelous and lively social history, one that manages to be both scholarly and exciting. Okrent takes us through a period of American history unlike any other. Fair-minded, insightful, and amused, he has a command of the material that makes the journey rewarding at every sober step of the way. I loved this book."

--Lawrence Wright, author, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11"

“A triumph. Okrent brilliantly captures the one glaring 'whoops!' in our Constitutional history. This entertaining portrait should stimulate fresh thought on the capacity and purpose of free government.”

--Taylor Branch

“Daniel Okrent's "Last Call" fills a gaping void in American popular history that has been waiting for years to be filled, by providing a clear, sweeping, detailed and immensely readable account of Prohibition. His book is full of lively stories, incredible characters and fascinating research. It is, at once, great fun to read and solid history, a rare combination." –[trimmed quote still needsapproval]

—Michael Korda, author of "Ulysses S. Grant, " "Ike", and "With Wings Like Eagles"

“Daniel Okrent's" Last Call" is filled with delightful details, colorful characters, and fascinating social insights. And what a great tale! Prohibition may not have been a lot of fun, but this book sure is.”

—Walter Isaacson

“Last Call is--I can't help it--a high, an upper, a delicious cocktail of a book, served with a twist or two and plenty of punch.”

—Evan Thomas, "Newsweek"

“This is a marvelous and lively social history, one that manages to be both scholarly and exciting. Okrent takes us through a period of American history unlike any other. Fair-minded, insightful, and amused, he has a command of the material that makes the journey rewarding at every sober step of the way. I loved this book.”

--Lawrence Wright, author, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11"

"This is history served the way one likes it, with scholarly authority and literary grace. "Last Call" is a fascinating portrait of an era and a very entertaining tale."

--Tracy Kidder

About the Author

Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was also a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his books include Last Call, The Guarded Gate, and Great Fortune, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; 1st edition (May 31, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 074327704X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743277044
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.4 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #79,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in U.S.Congresses, Senates & Legislative
- #178 in Women in History
- #1,574 in United States History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 827 ratings

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Daniel Okrent

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Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. Among his books, "Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center" was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" was honored by the American Historical Association as 2011's best book of American history. Okrent lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

Learn more at danielokrent.com.

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Ronnie Meek

The Train at the End of the Tunnel

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2011

Verified Purchase

I challenge anyone who does not believe that well written, well researched, history can be every bit as fascinating as the best novels to read Last Call and still hold that position. With a panorama of remarkable characters set against the backdrop of a social issue that makes the current abortion debate seem somewhat milquetoast Daniel Okrent has served up a smashingly good read that both illuminates our national past and present.

Prohibition was not something that arose overnight. The battle that led to the enactment of the eighteenth amendment took place over at least a half a century. On the surface it seemed a marvelous social experiment. Imagine a place where there was no alcoholism, no drunkenness with its attendant evils of crime, poverty and abuse. This was the drive behind Prohibition. When it was finally enacted it seemed that the dream had come true. A golden age was dawning. In fact, the dream had simply become a nightmare. The light at the end of the tunnel was a train.

There are several powerful lessons to be reaped from this look at our past. One of the most striking, and curiously encouraging, was the realization that both sides of this issue were totally willing to lie, cheat, and steal in order to advance their cause. The reason I found this somewhat "encouraging" is because I was of the opinion that we had grown worse in our national character in this regard over the last few decades. It seems that we have in fact always been this bad. You might expect this from the "wets" who represented the vested interest of the liquor industry, but it seems that the fanaticism of the "drys" led them to believe that almost anything was justified in pursuit of their envisioned utopia. (This should have been a red flag regarding the results they ultimately achieved.)

Another lesson that stands out is that when it comes to social engineering the results of our meddling are rarely what we expect. The same applies to the economy of things. When Prohibition was passed some of the vineyards in the Napa Valley rushed to uproot their grapes and plant other crops. Of what value would grapes be with wine virtually illegal? Ah, but there is a huge gap between virtually illegal and completely illegal. People were still allowed to produce their own wine for home consumption but you can't make wine at home without grapes. Grapes that sold for under $10 per ton some ten years earlier peaked at over $300 per ton during Prohibition. A lot of grapes had to be replanted. Likewise, the expected fall in criminal activity following the enactment of Prohibition seriously failed to materialize. Just the opposite occurred. With the advent of Prohibition there was suddenly serious money to be made in criminal activity. Every increase in enforcement activity forced organized crime to become more organized. It could strongly be argued that National Crime Syndicates owe their start directly to Prohibition.

Most people would point to Viet Nam as the first war the USA ever lost. Militarily speaking that is likely true. But Prohibition was where we lost our dream, or at least where the dark behind the dream could no longer be hidden. We created a great land of freedom and opportunity and even though other cultures paid the price for our "opportunity" we could ignore them since their stories weren't really told. We had the slavery issue, but we fought a great heroic war that brought "freedom" to the slaves and even though it would take another hundred years for them to share in our opportunities we could overlook that and sing the praises of our Civil War heroes. Then we finally enacted Prohibition and nothing could stop our glorious social momentum; nothing except a train wreck. And while Okrent gives a quite balanced appraisal to the players and motives on both sides of Prohibition, even he has to concede that the light at the end of the tunnel... was indeed a train.

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Ira E. Stoll

Explains the Income Tax

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2010

Verified Purchase

Daniel Okrent's lively new history of Prohibition is a colorful narrative that conveys what life was life under the federal ban on alcohol. It also includes a lot of policy substance.

Mr. Okrent's tale of how Prohibition and its repeal were intertwined with tax policy is fascinating and will be unfamiliar even to many of those who think they know a lot about taxes already.

"By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg - 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall," he writes. "Given that you couldn't collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes."

"When the income tax was finally legalized, it was the industrialized East that yielded before it: 44 percent of the revenue collected came from New York State alone. It was not a coincidence that eight of the first nine legislatures to have ratified the amendment (starting with Alabama, where the vote was unanimous in both houses) were in southern or border states," he writes, calling the constitutional amendment creating the income tax a way for "many of the racially motivated prohibitionists of the South" to "avenge Reconstruction by striking back at the economic and political imperialists of the North."

If the imposition of the income tax went hand in hand with Prohibition, so the effort to repeal Prohibition went along with opposition to the income tax. Mr. Okrent writes that the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment included some of the richest men in the country. In 1926 it won the attention of Pierre S. du Pont.

The Revenue Act of 1916, Mr. Okrent writes, had taken "three swings at the du Pont family's wealth: doubling the income tax rates on those in the highest brackets, creating the nation's first peacetime inheritance tax, and assessing a 12.5 percent levy on the profits of munitions manufacturers."

Du Pont wrote a friend that with repeal of Prohibition, "the revenue of the government would be increased sufficiently to warrant the abolition of the income tax and corporation tax."

The Great Depression reduced federal revenue from the income and capital gains taxes to the point where alcohol tax revenue was again desired. But it turned out to be in addition to the other taxes, rather than instead of it. Du Pont, in victory, realized his error. The Prohibition repeal effort he had been so involved with, he said, should have been directed instead at the 16th Amendment, the one establishing the income tax, which "could have been repealed with the expenditure of less time and trouble than was required for the abolition of its little brother."

Another area in which Mr. Okrent's book is strong is religion - particularly, the Jewish involvement in illegal liquor distribution and sales. His focus is the Bronfman family of Canada, where liquor was legal. He says that part of the explanation for the prevalence of Jews in the alcoholic beverage business is that other fields were closed to them.

One of the rum-running ships that plied the waters off Canada was named the Mazel Tov. Another set of smuggling boats, on the Detroit River, was known as "the Little Jewish Navy."

There are other aspects of Mr. Okrent's tale that will be relevant to today's readers.

Think there's a revolving door now between Congress and the corporate lobbyists' headquarters on K Street? Mr. Okrent reports that the assistant attorney general in charge of Prohibition enforcement left and became a paid lawyer-lobbyist for Fruit Industries, which, with her help, received a $20 million loan from the Federal Farm Board to help launch its home winemaking business. A former director of the Prohibition Bureau became the head of the liquor manufacturer's trade association, Mr. Okrent says.

And readers who want to "repeal" ObamaCare may be heartened by Mr. Okrent's account of the repeal of Prohibition. When the Senate voted in February 1933 to repeal Prohibition, "of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work."

There are a lot of different characters to keep track of in this somewhat sprawling account, many of them obscure to today's readers. But I found it worth it to gain the understanding of this episode, which still shapes the tax bills of Americans, if not their drinking habits.

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KDT

Best general history of US Prohibition that U have read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2023

Verified Purchase

Very readable general history of that strange episode and all its unintended consequences and absurdities. Well recommended if you want to know more about Prohibition including, nor least, those who profited from it and those who were corrupted by it! Best of such accounts that i have read.

Miguel Fontan Dominguez

Un tema extremadamente interesante

Reviewed in Spain on September 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

Estoy leyéndolo en este momento y lo encuentro muy ilustrativo. Tenía una idea muy superficial de la Prohibición y la Ley Seca en los Estados Unidos y resulta fascinante leer la historia del movimiento prohibicionista. Aún es algo pronto para dar una opinión más en profundidad, pero lo que llevo leído es fascinante. Lo recomiendo sin duda.

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Matthew Benson

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Reviewed in Australia on October 24, 2023

Verified Purchase

Interesting read about a period of prohibition movement in America

Amazon Customer

A great read -- who says history is dull?

Reviewed in Canada on November 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

This the second copy of this book I've bought (my other one went walkabout). However, I don't begrudge the cost, because when my friend finishes reading it, I'll be able to read it again. Its subject is fascinating and the author's approach is thorough. His pages are full of interesting descriptions and his writing is engaging angle often humourous.

Davide Berti - Cuneo

Interesting not only about Prohibition but to understand American society and politics.

Reviewed in Italy on January 16, 2017

Verified Purchase

Detailed book on an historical phenomenon, that of Prohibition in the 1920s, that we all have heard of but never in detail. Here you find an analysis of the drinking habits of Americans across XIX and XX centuries, the social problems related to drunkness, American associations that fought for Prohibition, the raising of organized crime and the traffics of alchoolic beverages, the loss of political consent on Prohibition and its demise. Interesting not only about this phenomenon but to understand American society and politics.

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