Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise And Fall Of Prohibition

The 18th Amendment is a moment in the early 20th century that often is passed by unrecognized for the important failure that it was. Leading up to the Volstead Act, the U.S. needed someway of taking the tax income earned through alcohol, leading to income tax, during prohibition the influences for many pop culture icons like Al Capone or Izzy Einstein emerged, and afterwards, drinking declined. Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition details this rich history surrounding the Eighteenth Amendment including, the time leading up, what occurred during both socially and politically, and the aftermath. Orkrent is not kind to prohibition, he finds it to be a colossal failure, seeing a spike in crime apart from drinking, a split in political ideology, as well as an incoherent, divided government trying to execute this amendment. Okrent’s belief seems to be throughout the book is that, although
For instance, it seems as though Okrent never has anything positive to say about the Drys, he never applauds their political successes, nor does he look at the potential goods that prohibition could have given us. He really tries to paint the picture that all prohibitionists were religious nuts, all without outright calling them religious lunatics. Even when looking at the Epilogue, where he looks back at prohibition to see what came from it, the only that the only good thing that prohibition brought, according to Okrent, was that it lessened the amount we drink. Another issue from the book is the success of the bootleggers. I get this feeling that Okrent only really showed the success stories, non of the failures, such as the Bronfams, but we don’t see those importing from Canada who were either caught or did not make any money. In this book, there seems to be only positive things to say about the