Daniel Okrent on Prohibition and His Book, Last Call

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🗓️ 7 June 2010

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

Daniel Okent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. They discuss how the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating beverages came to pass in 1920, what life was like while it was in force, and how the Amendment came to be repealed in 1934. Okrent discusses how Prohibition became entangled with the suffrage movement, the establishment of the income tax, and anti-immigration sentiment. They also discuss the political economy of prohibition, enforcement, and repeal--the quintessential example of bootleggers and baptists.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is June 1st, 2010, and my guest is the writer Daniel O'Crent. His
0:43.8	latest book just out is last call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Dan, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:49.5	Thanks very much. Happy to be here. Your book is a marvelous social history of much more than
0:54.8	prohibition. It's really a portrait of America between 1870 and the 1930s. It's beautifully
1:03.2	paced. It's written with great style. I learned way too many things from the book to talk about
1:08.2	in a single hour, but we'll do the best we can. One of the things I learned was how much
1:13.0	Americans drank in the late 19th century and early 20th. And another thing I learned was
1:18.1	how much passion there was against it. First, talk about the drinking. How much drinking
1:23.9	was there in America in general terms? Well, we were drowning in this stuff. I mean, if you
1:28.0	go back to the beginning of the Republic, 1630, even before the Republic, I should say,
1:33.9	1630, the boat that brings John went through to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had more beer
1:39.6	and its hold than water. So even the Puritans did their share. By 1775, alcohol was so firmly
1:48.0	established in American life that George Washington decreed that every member of the Continental
1:52.5	Army would get a daily ration of four ounces of whiskey. We began to get the government's
1:58.6	dependence upon whiskey in the 1790s when Alexander Hamilton institutes the exercise tax
2:05.0	on whiskey, which he put there because he knew it was a one thing that was being consumed
2:09.3	throughout the young nation. And then it got bad. It's not just that everybody is drinking,
2:16.3	but the quantity goes up horribly. In 1830, which was the peak, or I suppose you could say,
	...

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