By Daniel Okrent
Publisher: Author
ISBN – 10: 0743277023
We in aviation are blessed with a professional culture that makes drinking on the job far less tolerated by our peers than is the case in some other professions. It is rare indeed to find an intoxicated pilot or air traffic controller on the job. Sadly, a drinking problem at home is less of a rarity…
Nonetheless, a book about the Prohibition, especially one as well and entertainingly written as Daniel Okrent’s Last Call is something we aviation types will find as interesting as the rest of the population. Prohibition, the law banning alcohol in the United States was ratified in 1919 and it stayed in effect until 1933 when it was finally repealed. It is perhaps a lesser known fact that early on Americans were prolific drinkers and this included prominent figures like John Adams and James Medison. But even everyday people consumed alcohol at an alarming rate.
You can of course approach a problem like this in several ways. You can try to educate people, you can try to scare them or… you can take away the substance causing the problem. To be sure, the US government went overboard and elevated the banning of alcohol to the level of the Constitution!
Over the years human society has shown over and over again that banning something usually has the opposite effect from what was intended. Something very similar had happened as the result of Prohibition. Casual drinkers did not feel that they were criminals while criminals felt that it was their duty to cater to the casual (and less casual) drinkers… While overall alcohol consumption did drop in those years, the magnitude of the problem did not diminish at all. There was one clear winner: the Mafia who wisely invested in all kinds of novel ways to circumvent this law.
Not that getting the law passed was an easy matter. Wayne R. Wheeler was the man who labored incessantly to hammer together a coalition of supporters (composed of the most unlikely bed-fellows) which was able in the end to make Prohibition reality.
Of course, as had been shown many times before and hence, prohibiting something without education (or proper scaring…) will not work and in the end, the prohibition law was repealed without the problem having been solved at all.
Okrent;s book is a fascinating and vibrant window on this crazy time of American history, filled with precise recreations of the kind of characters that roamed the streets of American cities at the time. Some of those characters managed to amass a huge fortune that exists to this day.
A great aspect of this book is that Prohibition, while the real substance of the work, is actually only a frame for the excellent storytelling that brings out all the exciting detail in a way rarely seen. Highly recommended.