Reddit reviews Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

An excellent book you can read on this subject is Last Call by Daniel Okrent. There were a few exemptions to the Volstead Act, one of which was for sacramental wine. As happened with most of the exemptions to the act, an industry sprang up around it. So you had stores that sold sacramental wine. Mainly it was controlled by Rabbis and members of the Jewish faith because they drank wine in the home as opposed to the catholics who drank in church. The rabbis would frequently overstate the number in their congregation as a way to be able to order more wine to sell.

There was also a provision that allowed doctors to prescribe alcohol for various ailments. People would visit the clinic, go to a sham visit with the doctor and get their prescription for the pharmacy. Doctors could schedule a great many visits in one day because the exams were so short. At one point the AMA came out against doctors being able to prescribe alcohol. They reversed themselves very quickly once doctors loss of income from the decision caused many complaints.

I have not read this (yet) but it comes highly recommended from people I trust. The author was also one of the main contributors for Ken Burns' Prohibition.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074327704X

Books that touch on Prohibition but don't focus on it that I have read:

https://www.amazon.com/Drinking-America-Our-Secret-History/dp/B016MXGYPI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305189&sr=1-1&keywords=drinking+in+america+our+secret+history

https://www.amazon.com/Whiskey-Women-Untold-Bourbon-Scotch/dp/B01B3H8960/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305231&sr=1-1&keywords=women+in+whiskey

I have just started this, and I expect a good portion to talk about Speakeasies and Blind Pigs:

https://www.amazon.com/America-Walks-into-Bar-Speakeasies/dp/B00PCQITW8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499305375&sr=1-1&keywords=america+walks+in+a+bar

Speaking for myself - I enjoy being mildly drunk. It makes me cuddly and giggly and happy, and it makes it easier to bond with people emotionally. I have strong vibrant friendships whose original development was substantially assisted by the presence of alcohol.

Which is to say: there are benefits, for some (many) people, even while there are detriments for some (many) people. It's not clear to me that the balance is on the side of the detriments; it's just that the connection there is more obvious.

> We could jack up the prices.

That only works so far.

As prices for legal alcohol increase, you substantially increase the likelihood of a secondary, illegal market developing. There's already a market in illicit cigarettes (it's not uncommon, for example, for people in California to drive to NV to buy trunkloads full of cigarettes at a lower tax rate, and then bring them back into California to sell to their friends). What that price point is varies with time and place, but it definitely exists, and the last thing we want to do is encourage the development of large-scale organized crime gangs devoted to the distribution of cheap illicit alcohol.

> Or we could treat it like smoking and have ads such as "alcohol kills", "second hand alcohol is even worse"

We could. The thing is, though, that so many people drink that this would not be believed.

There's a program in the american schools, or at least there was when I was a kid, to encourage kids to stay off of drugs. It was called DARE ("drug abuse resistance education", i think) when I was in high school. It worked great for a while, but it seriously exaggerated the harm from marijuana use ... which meant that as soon as any of us tried marijuana and discovered the exaggerations, everything they had said became unbelievable. Exaggerated ads about how horrible alcohol is would have the same effect; people who use alcohol regularly, and people who have used it casually and suffered no problems, will see it for a lie, and will respond by distrusting the speaker's word on other things.

May I suggest that you read this book? http://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074327704X

It's a great exploration of the prohibition movement and why (and how) it succeeded as a political program and then failed horribly as a practical policy.

Best book I can give you on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Call-Rise-Fall-Prohibition/dp/074327704X

The thing is... it WASN'T difficult to make, transport, dispense alcohol, and that was a big part of the problem.

Not an answer, just an interesting fact.

The Income Tax was pushed by groups who advocated and campaign for Prohibition. Before Prohibition the US generated a third of its tax revenue off of sales tax from alcohol. The idea of an Income Tax was created to replace the lost revenue that would occur if alcohol was banned. Prohibition was passed because worries about lost revenue were assuaged when the income tax began to generate 66% of federal revenue.

When the Depression hit, the amount of revenue generated by the income tax dropped and the government needed to generate more revenue. This drop in income tax revenue was one of the many reasons Prohibition was repealed.

For an interesting read on Prohibition I highly recommend Last Call.

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I'm a fan of time-travel, and history, and I was completely sucked into it. She's got a number of books in the same universe- some comedic, some very dramatic, but The Doomsday Book is my favourite.

If you're at all interested in high fantasy, I'd recommend either Tigana or The Fionovar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. You either love his prose style or hate it, but if you love it, it will definitely take you away.

If you like SF and haven't read them, I'd try either Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, or David Brin's Uplift Series (I'd skip Sundiver until later, and start with Startide Rising.)

If you're looking for more light-hearted/quirky, I'd try Christopher Moore- either Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal , or The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. If you're into a mix of horror/sf/comedy, try John Dies at the End. They're not deep, but they're fun.

Non-fiction- if you haven't read it yet, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air is very difficult to put down. If you're travelling with someone who doesn't mind you looking up every few pages and saying "did you know this, this is awesome, wow-how interesting", I'd go for Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants or Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life. They're all very informative, fun, interesting books, but they're even better if you can share them while you're reading them.

That doesn't sound quite right.

Prohibition movements pre-date WWI and WWII and had much more to do with religious temperance groups (specifically among Protestants and particularly among Methodists) than any anti-German sentiment. If you enjoy the subject, I highly recommend Ken Burn's Prohibition series as well as Daniel Okrent's "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition."

Oh, my. I just read a great book about Prohibition, and how involved in banning liquor the suffragettes were. Women likely wouldn't have earned the right to vote if it weren't for all their hard work in passing the 18th amendment. And if it weren't for Prohibition, most women would never have started hanging out in pubs at all, b/c it was suddenly so illicit and exciting to do it. Win-win!

Anybody interested in the prohibition should read Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition which has a lot of fun facts like this one, along with some excellent information regarding the political machine that allowed a very vocal minority to get this kind of legislation passed.

Historian here: I recommend simply finding good books on topics or periods that interest you. Textbooks are dull and by design shallow. Most people will enjoy (and benefit) from reading more in-depth studies of a topic they are passionately interested in, at least as a starting point. For example, if you are interested in the 1920s I'd highly recommend Daniel Orkrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition as a fascinating and quick read that will leave you wanting to learn more about the 1920s.

So what interests you?

Once you have some topics lined up, go to /r/askhistorians and ask for suggestions.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call is a delightful and readable history of Prohibition which spends a great deal of time discussing this very issue. In addition to the manufacture of 'sacramental wine' as others have discussed, many vintners, having torn up their precious vintages, were forced to replant quickly as soon as they realized that Prohibition wasn't reeeeally going to be enforced. This resulted in the extraordinary spread of alicante bouschet, a very hardy type of wine grape that could survive export to the East Coast, where the grapes would be bin on at auction houses (where it was sold as "table grapes"). Alicante grows fast and furious, so vintners could replenish their harvest quickly. After Prohibition ended, they were left with essentially an entire state of Two Buck Chuck quality grapes and were forced to buy graftings from the few vineyards which had maintained their original vines for sacramental wine production.

Second this, and for a really fascinating further read on this, strongly suggest Last Call by Daniel Okrent.

You are wrong about your history. There was a purely bible thumping aspect to prohibition, but the much larger basis for its support was the progressive movement. And there was a great deal more overlap between nativists, evangelical protestants, and Progressives than you seem to believe. Progressivism was and is very much based in America's puritanical tradition. You should read about things before you talk about them.

I haven't read any Dawkins, but Daniel Okrent did a great job with Last Call. (I'm also a huge Dubner/Freakonomics fan.) I'm always very hesitant about authors reading their own work, and I'm pleasantly surprised when it great.

Prohibition and the 18th Amendment loom so large in my mind. They story of how it came into being and the net effect that linger to this day just seem to loom over my mind. Stupid Last Call