Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday June 22, 2010
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LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent
Scribner
ISBN 978 0 7432 7702 0
468 pages
$30
Reviewed by Gary Krist
On Jan. 16, 1920 -- the day before Prohibition became the law of the land -- America's triumphant "drys" were supremely optimistic about the future: "The reign of tears is over," evangelist Billy Sunday told a revival meeting in Norfolk, Va. "Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
But the great landlord Satan needn't have worried. As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in "Last Call," his witty and exhaustive new history of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experiment created nothing like a virtuous teetotaler's paradise. The 18th Amendment, in fact, didn't so much end the country's drinking culture as merely change its ethos, replacing the male-dominated saloon with the sexually integrated speakeasy and turning a public pastime into a surreptitious exercise in cynicism and hypocrisy. "The drys had their law," as Okrent observes, "and the wets would have their liquor." And the bootleggers would have their obscene and blood-soaked profits, blissfully free of state and federal taxes.
The Prohibition era, of course, is not exactly unexamined territory. Writers good and bad have been mining this lode for decades, endlessly rehearsing its familiar tales of tipsy flappers, poisonous bathtub gin and tommy-gun battles on the streets of Chicago and New York. Okrent, a writer best known as the first public editor of the New York Times, certainly doesn't ignore such crowd-pleasing anecdotes. (Really, what self-respecting ironist could resist telling the one about the "sacramental wine" racket run by an alleged rabbi named Patrick Houlihan?) But he brings to his account a breadth of scholarship that allows us to put the shenanigans in proper perspective. And while the book at times barrages the reader with more detail than is truly necessary, Okrent is never tedious for long. He also takes pains to debunk some of the apocrypha that, thanks to the carelessness of less diligent historians, has become part of the accepted lore of the age. A case in point: Everyone "knows" that Joseph Kennedy, father of our 35th president, was a notorious bootlegger, right? Okrent points out that there is absolutely no credible evidence that this is true.
"Last Call" is especially enlightening on the politics of Prohibition. Even as late as 1918, a lot of wets regarded the 18th Amendment as "a dead letter" with virtually no chance of ratification. Enforced temperance, after all, was a highly unpopular concept in many quarters, particularly among city dwellers, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, blacks and an awful lot of native-born white Protestant males. Okrent shows how the dry forces -- led by powerful interest groups like the Anti-Saloon League -- overcame this stiff opposition, cobbling together an unlikely coalition of rural populists, urban progressives, women and nativists (even the KKK), all of whom had their own peculiar reasons for wanting to see the demise of legal alcohol. In the end, aided by a ratification process that gave disproportionate weight to voters in rural states, the drys managed to push their amendment through -- to the incredulity of wets nationwide.
But making a behavior illegal is one thing; making it unpopular is another. Early signs of Prohibition's effectiveness, like the initial declines in alcohol consumption and criminal behavior, proved to be short-lived. And thanks to the ingenuity of America's criminal class, it wasn't long before John Barleycorn was once again on the upswing. By 1926, annual sales of illegal liquor had reached an estimated $3.6 billion -- roughly the size of the entire federal budget. In the cities, meanwhile, few people were even pretending to obey the law. "It cannot be truthfully said that prohibition enforcement has failed in New York," one former Justice department official remarked. "It has not yet been attempted." By the early 1930s, it was the wets who were making the overoptimistic predictions -- about an idyllic future after repeal. The Depression "will fade away like the mists before the noonday sun," one wet congressman opined. "The immorality of the country ... will be a thing of the past."
So just how ill-advised was the Noble Experiment? Some revisionist scholars have lately tried to rehabilitate its reputation, claiming that our sense of the era's rampant crime is a Hollywood distortion and that the reduction in alcohol consumption, while it did erode over time, was in fact significant. Okrent concedes at least the latter point, but he doesn't buy much further into the revisionist line. "In almost every respect imaginable," he concludes, "Prohibition was a failure."
But Okrent does note one final paradox that might warm the hearts of disconsolate drys. After the 21st Amendment reversed the 18th (on Dec. 5, 1933), the anything-goes style of bibulous scofflaws was quickly stymied by a flood of state and local alcohol regulations. These new measures set licensing requirements for sellers and imposed far more enforceable restrictions (like tavern closing hours, age limits and Sunday blue laws) on consumers. The repeal of Prohibition, in other words, "made it harder, not easier, to get a drink."
Gary Krist is the author of "The White Cascade." His book about Chicago in 1919 will be published next year.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: And the New American Politics
Ronald M. Peters Jr. and Cindy Simon Rosenthal
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978 0 19 538373 7
320 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Norm Ornstein
In the aftermath of Congressional passage of health reform in March, ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi whether she was "the most powerful woman in American history." Sawyer didn't just make up the question in a moment of situational hyperbole; it was being asked or asserted by nonpartisan observers and publications like the Economist, and it reflected not just the historic nature of the health bill and the controversy and contentiousness that framed it, but the larger image of a larger-than-life politician, the first woman speaker of the House in American history.
Few would dispute Pelosi's power, but her role and persona divide Americans. A heroine among hard-core Democrats, she is a figure of derision and distaste to partisan Republicans and a clear target for the unhappiness a whopping majority of Americans feel toward Washington in general and Congress in particular. The resentment was on full display last week when she was jeered during a speech in Washington and had to yell over the protests of health care activists.
We can expect a wave of books about Pelosi; the first to emerge since her health reform triumph is not by journalists, either of the tell-all or political-beat variety, but by two political scientists from the University of Oklahoma. Both Ronald Peters and Cindy Rosenthal are experts on congressional leadership and history; their book is thus more than a biography of Pelosi, and more than an account of her tenure so far as speaker. Peters and Rosenthal try also to put Pelosi into the broader context of contemporary American politics and Congress.
Pelosi's power and fame (and notoriety) did not come solely because of her strong personality; her two Republican predecessors laid the groundwork for her path to extraordinary power and her polarizing persona. Newt Gingrich's short tenure as speaker managed to redefine the office's modern role, centralizing and enhancing power in a fashion not seen since Joe Cannon early in the 20th century, while also helping to amplify the harsh partisan and ideological conflict that dominates congressional politics. If Gingrich was a larger-than-life figure, regularly the subject of cover stories in newsmagazines, his successor Dennis Hastert could have walked down the street in any city except K Street in Washington and Main Street in Aurora, Ill., without being recognized. But Hastert went well beyond Gingrich, creating high firewalls in the House to deny Democrats any significant role while trying to create a parliamentary-style majority and also squeezing out a major role for his own party's rank-and-file members.
The upheavals in politics generated by Gingrich's ascendance to the speakership helped Pelosi to emerge as the Democratic leader. The times called for toughness, a partisan edge and relentlessness -- all of which she had, along with a political savvy instilled from her childhood in a Baltimore political dynasty. These enabled her to rise to the top to do combat with Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert and the other tough, partisan and relentless Republicans. Her ability to organize and build relationships enabled her to win one of the most coveted House seats without any prior elective experience. In the House, she matched her staunch liberalism with her ability to bond with conservative "Blue Dog Democrats," and to seek out a seat on the Appropriations Committee where she could do favors for her colleagues and build support for moving up the leadership ladder. A pivotal moment came when she took on the role of Democratic point person on the House ethics committee to challenge Speaker Gingrich directly on ethical issues.
Peters and Rosenthal deftly describe that background and analyze Pelosi's rise to power, noting her shortcomings while pointing out the qualities -- her "penchant for organizational detail, interpersonal politics, and pragmatism" -- that helped her both reach the top and keep a strong whip hand over a tumultuous and unruly House. The focus on Pelosi's pragmatism will surprise those who think of her as staunchly ideological and rigidly partisan. But the authors emphasize that to attain a majority, she needed to recruit candidates to districts with views sharply divergent from her own (and then protect them from electoral assault); to win legislative victories, she has frequently had to subordinate her own views to find 218 votes.
The authors devote a sizable amount of attention to Pelosi's gender. Their conclusion? She is different from her predecessors in her path to power, the opportunities available to her in her career, her voice and her style of leadership. But she has amassed and used power for political and policy ends in ways that clearly parallel those used by the most powerful speakers before her. "Speaker Nancy Pelosi" is not a breezy read; it has ample anecdotes that take a reader inside the personalities and intrigue in the House, but it also bolsters its points with data and political-sciency analysis. Unlike many scholars, however, the authors write clearly and have a good feel for politics. Anybody who really wants to understand who Pelosi is, how she attained this key post and parlayed it into extraordinary power and influence, and how she manages to operate so successfully in a boiling caldron of partisan and ideological division will come away much better informed after reading this book.
Norm Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes a weekly column called Congress Inside Out for Roll Call, and is the co-author of "The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back On Track."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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