Prohibition agents should have been Civil Service employees, but they weren’t, because activists wanted to install true believers in those jobs and politicians wanted to hand them out to supporters. You couldn’t have it both ways.
Tag: Prohibition
Prohibition’s Racist Underbelly
How southern prohibition advocates exploited racial divisions to turn the South dry
The Maine Law
Neal Dow was just about single-handedly responsible for the first statewide prohibition law in the country. He was also pretty responsible for its quick demise.
A Brief History of Indian Alcohol Policy
Prohibition, Alcohol as a Weapon, and the Myth of the Drunken Indian
The Whiskey Trust
Another chapter in the whiskey craziness of the Gilded Age
The Three Mile Limit: Booze on Boats
An obscure bit of international maritime law becomes front page news when the Coast Guard takes on rum runners during Prohibition.
The Whiskey Ring
In an era defined by self-interest, most people could just be paid to look the other way.
Liquoring Up the Electorate
Our long national tradition of handing out booze in exchange for votes
Lewis Rosenstiel, Capitalist Champion of America’s ‘Native Spirit’
The post-Prohibition era was very, very good for a very, very small number of people. If you had pushed your way through the 1920s with a toe still dipped in the legal liquor business—by managing, for example, to secure one of the small number of ‘medicinal spirits’ licenses available—you might be one of the lucky […]
When Rockefeller and DuPont Took On Prohibition
May leveler, wealthier, brutally capitalist heads prevail
In the Spirit of the Law 