READ THIS: LAST CALL The Rise and Fall of Prohibition By Daniel Okrent
What would Whom You Know be without our Champagne Wishes column? We are so glad that we did not live through Prohibition, and mysteriously it seems that the Deegan family was not without alcohol during those years, but no one is telling Peachy how because either a) they're not here to talk about it or b) they know she's writing about it. In the decade after the 18th Amendment, alcohol consumption only fell by 30%... The Deegan girls that you see to the right sitting happily at a Manhattan bar are doing this in the 1940's, well after Prohibition. They look like they're also pretty glad it ended...From Gatsby's drug stores to The Stork Club, many references and stories in Last Call will delight and entertain you.
We quote on p. 205 Okrent who quotes Fitzgerald, Peachy's favorite author:
"Three years before The Great Gatsby, in The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald introduced Gloria Patch, who 'drinks excessively, drives recklessly' [Whom You Know is against drinking and driving of course.] and 'declares brazenly, "I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me."'"
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibion by Daniel Okrent is a scholarly history of what led to Prohibition, and what led to the end of it. Extremely well-written, it is full of interesting tidbits on everything you ever wanted to know about how we can enjoy alcohol responsibly in America today. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Ratified January 16, 1919 really changed the course of American history. Not only did it have social consequences, but it affected international trade, tourism practices, soda marketing, and much more.
We were surprised to learn how much alcohol was being consumed prior to Prohibition: by 1830 American adults were guzzling per capita seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. In modern terms, this means 90 bottles a year for every adult in a nation. By 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of beer and by 1890 annual consumption was 855 million gallons. (During the four-decade span while the population tripled, that population's capacity for beer increased by a factor of 24. p. 26) Though we do enjoy our Champagne Wishes, we do not drink excessively at Whom You Know. We were shocked to learn that Currier and Ives' Washington's Farewell to the Officers of His Army was censored to remove the wine! And of course this event depicted took place in Manhattan at Fraunces' Tavern in 1783. The photography included in this work is a great accompaniment to the verbiage.
We were not shocked to see that some ancestors of our Movers and Shakers were mentioned...Mover and Shaker Sascha Rothchild's grandfather Charlie Berns started the 21 Club. Peachy Deegan's grandfather who was in World War II in the Pacific knew Jack Kriendler then, the other founder of the 21 Club back in the days of Bougainville, New Zealand, Guadacanal and Guam. Upcoming Mover and Shaker Jennifer Dixon's ancestor Thomas Dixon influenced the country through his literature at the time. However, from our perspective, Charlie Berns is the guy who is the grandfather of the author of the critically acclaimed How To Get Divorced by 30 and Thomas Dixon is the ancestor of one of the girls that is in the forefront of fashion today-be sure to check out Hunter Dixon at Saks. We read about a lot of our friends in this book, which also included the Gallo dynasty. In Escalon, Joseph Gallo and his grapes made great progress while his teenaged sons Ernest and Julio stenciled the rooster: you know we've recommended many Gallo wines, among our favorites are the William Hill Chardonnay and MacMurray Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast. In fact, Peachy Deegan is looking forward to seeing Kate MacMurray next week!
In Last Call you'll learn the origin of a speakeasy, encounter massive legislative tales that are told with great interest, and see how Prohibition affected women and the women's movement. The 1920's brought the Charleston, and Okrent tells us of a speakeasy on West 52nd street that hnng a sign outside over its entrance:
"Through These Portals the Most Beautiful Girls in the World Pass OUT."
From Harding to Coolidge, American history was changed drastically by Prohibition and its repeal. It's the only amendment that was ever repealed. Whom You Know highly recommends Last Call by Daniel Okrent! And we recommend reading it with your favorite drink by your side as you turn the pages.
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This spring, Scribner will proudly publish Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Okrent’s definitive history of Prohibition, LAST CALL (Scribner; May 2010; $30.00 hardcover). Beginning with the liquor-soaked country that the U.S. was in the 19th century, Okrent explains three things: how Prohibition happened, what life under Prohibition was like, and what it did to the country -- both during its reign and after. Okrent will also be featured in a prominent documentary on Prohibition, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and scheduled for broadcast in 2011.
The book is overflowing with detailed portraits of the period’s notable personalities (including Sam Bronfman, H.L. Mencken, Pierre du Pont, and Billy Sunday, among many others) and stories from nearly every part of the country: smoky Manhattan speakeasies, Californian vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine, Chicago warehouses piled with smuggled Canadian whiskey, New England coastal towns that harbored bootlegging fleets of powerful speed boats armed with machine guns, and the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.
Okrent’s years of research – through dozens of archives and hundreds of primary sources – equipped him to reveal the creativity and lengths Americans took to preserve their great pastime, from exploiting medicinal and religious loopholes in the law to learning how to make their own (occasionally poisonous and often unpalatable) alcoholic beverages. Few people know that Prohibition gave rise to our current use of mixers with liquor, the nature of our search and seizure laws, Caribbean tourism, the first national crime syndicates, and the prominence of Coca-Cola. Furthermore, Okrent illustrates how Prohibition intersected with innumerable other elements of American history, including World War I, the advent of the income tax, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the rights of women, and the question of individual privacy.
Brilliant and authoritative, LAST CALL is surely the most revealing and highly entertaining history of America’s most puzzling era.
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. In 2009, Okrent served as the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The author of four previous books, he lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent. They have two children.
TITLE: LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
AUTHOR: Daniel Okrent
PUBLICATION DATE: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7702-0
PRICE: $30.00 hardcover
ABOUT SCRIBNER
Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., part of the CBS Corporation. Simon & Schuster is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic and multi-media formats. Its divisions include the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.
