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Prohibition in New York City
Harvard University Press
March 2007
On Sale: March 15, 2007
360 pages
ISBN: 067402432X
EAN: 9780674024328
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction
In 1919, the United States embarked on the country's boldest
attempt at moral and social reform: Prohibition. The 18th
Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture,
transportation, and sale of alcohol around the country. This
"noble experiment," as President Hoover called it, was
intended to usher in a healthier, more moral, and more
efficient society. Nowhere was such reform needed more,
proponents argued, than in New York City--and nowhere did
Prohibition fail more spectacularly. Dry Manhattan is the
first major work on Prohibition in nearly a quarter century,
and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most
vibrant city. Though New Yorkers were cautiously optimistic at first,
Prohibition quickly degenerated into a deeply felt clash of
cultures that utterly transformed life in the city.
Impossible to enforce, the ban created vibrant new markets
for illegal alcohol, spawned corruption and crime, fostered
an exhilarating culture of speakeasies and nightclubs, and
exposed the nation's deep prejudices. Writ large, the
conflict over Prohibition, Michael Lerner demonstrates, was
about much more than the freedom to drink. It was a battle
between competing visions of the United States, pitting wets
against drys, immigrants against old stock Americans,
Catholics and Jews against Protestants, and proponents of
personal liberty against advocates of societal reform. In his evocative history, Lerner reveals Prohibition to be
the defining issue of the era, the first major "culture war"
of the twentieth century, and a harbinger of the social and
moral debates that divide America even today.
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