Reviews for American World Policies

The average rating for American World Policies based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-09 00:00:00 Karen C. Traugh "How did it happen? How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions upon millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World? How did they condemn to extinction what was, at the very moment of its death, the fifth-largest industry in the nation? How did they append to their most sacred document 112 words that knew only one precedent in American history? With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn't own slaves, and you couldn't buy alcohol…" - Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Erfurt, Germany. Summer 1998. I am on a month-long tour with my high school class. I am in a bar, about to have the first drink of my life. I am 18 years old, a stickler for the rules. But I have found a loophole. The Underage American Tourist in Europe Clause. I lift the drink to my lips. It burns something bad. I do not know what it is, because I am not an all-star in my German class, and am unable to translate the word. It does not matter. I take another sip. And then another. I turn to the girl next to me, and ask her whether she ever wonders about how weird the word wienerschnitzel is. It turns out she has wondered that very thing. Soon we are making out. My life changed that day. I was intoxicated after three drinks, and then got lost on the way back to the hostel. The next day I had a headache, of which I was quite proud. Booze, magical booze, allowed me to be the person I wanted to be. My shyness disappeared, my social anxiety put at ease. In a crowd, I suddenly felt emboldened to participate, and to all the things that I'd stored up in my head since birth, from lame pick-up lines to deeply-held beliefs about late-stage capitalism. I hope it doesn't sound too problematic when I say I love to drink. I think getting responsibly drunk is one of the greatest things ever, though it hurts more now than it used to, and has a vastly diminishing marginal utility. In my experience, it has greased romantic wheels, engendered hilarious debates, and provided the basic ingredient for the game "I Never," which is the most useful tool devised by God to learn incredible, nasty, surprising, and horrible things about your friends. Long past my high school days, I have come to really enjoy the soothing sip of wine at the end of the day, or a bunch of beers at a baseball game, or a whiskey with a steak. Of course, I'm not oblivious to the other side of booze. Over the years, in fact, it has taken up equal residence in my mind. As an attorney, I've seen many lives destroyed by alcoholism. Personally, I've had people close to me get injured, and killed, in situations that were made dangerously lethal by alcohol. Beyond that, drunks are a menace on the roads. Alcohol fuels domestic violence. Imbibing makes it hard to get to work in the morning. Sometimes it causes you to throw up for 24 straight hours. Prolonged usage can damage your liver. The dark side of alcohol led to the Temperance Movement, which began way back in the 1840s. It was spearheaded by women, and for good reason. Though they didn't have the right to vote, they were getting tired of pernicious effect that liquor had on their lives: husbands who drank away salaries, then came home in furious tempers. It's hard to overstate how much Americans used to drink. Liquor was cheaper than tea, safer than water, and used as currency in many western States during the years of the early republic. In the 1830s, Americans were drinking, per capita, 7 gallons of pure alcohol. Now that's a lot of Do you have a Band-Aid, because I just scraped my knee falling in love with you. Like most things in this life, there is a tradeoff in one's ability to have a drink. More than that, it exemplifies the tension of personal freedom, and how far that freedom extends. Daniel Okrent's Last Call is the story of the period in American life - 1920 to 1933 - when the anti-liquor forces won the day. That period, following the ratification of the 18th Amendment is known as Prohibition. (As Okrent points out, it is one of two Amendments, the other being the 13th Amendment, that serve as checks on individual freedom, rather than checks on governmental power. The difference between the two Amendments, though, is almost startling. One was a actually a monumental act of freedom, while the other allowed for the incredibly broad enforcement of a narrow police power). Most of my Prohibition knowledge is filtered through gangster movies and gangster television shows. In other words, everything I know about Prohibition can be distilled (word play!) into one sentence: Kevin Costner arrested Al Capone. Okrent's story isn't about that at all. Indeed, if you are looking for gangsters and Tommy-gunplay and Untouchables, you should probably stick to media you have undoubtedly already digested. There are maybe three mentions of Al Capone, two mentions of Eliot Ness, and only brief, passing glimpses at the bloody gang warfare that ensued once legal supply ended, but insistent demand remained high. Instead, with Last Call, you get a broad yet brief survey of the ascension, execution, and fall of a political movement. In my opinion, it is the rise of the Prohibition movement that is the most interesting, and the most pertinent to today's politics. It involved a lot of strange bedfellows willing to come together to do one thing, for different reasons. For instance, you had women, who were on the wrong end of drunken husbands, teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan, who were terrified at the idea of black people and Catholics drinking. To make Prohibition possible, these disparate minorities cleared some incredible hurdles. First, they had to pass the 17th Amendment, which created the income tax, so that the government could suffer the loss of alcohol-tax revenue. Next, they had to stockpile a "dry" Congress. They did this using minority bloc tactics: in close races, the Temperance Movement would vote as one for the dry candidate, thereby swinging close races. In this manner, they were able to ratify a Constitutional Amendment that a simple majority of Americans was opposed to. (Though Okrent refuses to make any analogies to the present day, the single-issue voting by temperance supporters is similar to today's pro-life movement. That is, a single-issue voter will vote for a candidate based on nothing else but that issue, no matter what other qualifications the candidate has. In Nebraska, for instance, I heard a candidate for the Registrar of Deeds claim he was pro-life. Really? I care? Because I just want you to register deeds.) The middle section of the book, while still interesting, is more familiar territory. It demonstrates that Prohibition was an epic farce, unenforceable from inception. It led to the rise of organized crime, the corruption of both local and federal law enforcement, and trampled civil rights (the War on Alcohol began the evisceration of the 4th and 14th Amendment that the War on Drugs has finished). The best/worst part of it is that the government never had any intention of fully enforcing the Volstead Act (the statutes deemed necessary and proper to execute the 18th Amendment). The Prohibition Bureau was chronically underfunded, its agents were not civil servants, and in the early days, the punishment for violations was laughable. (At first, violators could only be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined. The resulting volume of petty criminals ushered into Federal Courts nearly swamped the system, and gave rise to mass plea bargaining. Okrent tells how some bootleggers hired people to go to court for them, plead guilty, and pay the fine). The final third of the book tells of Prohibition's unraveling. It's not a dramatic story, since Prohibition was never really raveled in the first place. The movement to overturn the 18th Amendment was spearheaded not by brewers and distillers, who'd fought so hard against its ratification, but by the super-rich, who thought they could overturn the 17th Amendment if they first got rid of the 18th. (That is, they could get rid of income taxes if they could replace that shortfall with a liquor tax). Okrent tells this story in a very brisk, wry manner. Last Call is very fast reading. As a survey, it refuses to get bogged down in sticky details. It jumps around a lot, and relies on illuminating anecdotes rather than long narrative arcs. The most surprising thing I found was Okrent's light, balanced touch. It'd be very easy to make fun of men like Wayne Wheeler and William Jennings Bryan, who made abstaining from liquor their life's work. There is, after all, a breathtaking arrogance involved in inserting your moral view into the lives of untold millions, to the extent that you would amend the Constitution to get your way. Still, Okrent avoids that. Clearly, Okrent feels that Prohibition was a poor choice. (To quote Jeff Goldblum from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, it was "the worst idea in the history of bad ideas"). Yet he writes without any hint of meanness, or with the intellectual superiority that comes with 90 years of hindsight. He mentions, almost bemusedly, the hypocritical "dries" in Congress, who voted for Prohibition while never abstaining themselves, and he notes, dispassionately, the vindictiveness of later dry laws, which made a third conviction under the Volstead Act an automatic life sentence in prison. Despite this kind of teeth-gnashing hypocrisy, Okrent never lectures or critiques; he just tells his story. Even more impressive - as an act of will, I mean - is how he adamantly refuses to draw any parallels to today's fight over marijuana legalization. (As an aside: Prohibition played out in a very strange time, just after the convulsion of World War I, and during the economic horrors of the Great Depression. In other words, just when Americans most needed a drink, it was outlawed). A sign of Okrent's fairness is the way he shows Prohibition's upside. Yeah, sure, there were gangs and assassinations and people dying from poisoned liquor. But Prohibition also decreased the per capita consumption of alcohol, led to a legal drinking age, and so forth. And when I say that per capita consumption of alcohol decreased, I meant that it really decreased. To the extent that you can make a plausible argument that Prohibition - for all the harm done to the Constitution, the proper role of government, and a Nation's respect for its own laws - really changed people's behavior - and health - for the better. Last Call avoids preaching and conclusions. Nevertheless, it leaves you with plenty from which to draw lessons from this ill-fated attempt at the mass regulation of personal behavior. One lesson is that good intentions can make bad laws that have unforeseen consequences. Another lesson is that moderation is key. A final lesson is that if you're going to exercise a freedom, you should do so responsibly. If you have a drink, you should call a cab or an Uber or a friend or your spouse, or you should just walk home, if you can remember the way, or you should just do what I do, and never leave the house to start with. Instead, I just pour myself a bottle of $3.00 chardonnay, splash in some club soda and ice, and watch a Ken Burns documentary on the couch. If I'm feeling meta, that documentary might be Ken Burns' adaptation of Last Call.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-05 00:00:00 Alena Peterson The best part of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is Daniel Okrent's account of the forces which allied with the temperance movement (notably the Ku Klux Klan, proponents of women's suffrage and evangelical Christians) to ratify the 18th Amendment (Prohibition). These groups don't necessarily seem like natural allies, but in the context of this patriotic campaign to outlaw the sale of alcohol, they somehow found common interest. They also found a common enemy in the 'lawless hordes' of immigrants who were entering the United States. Demonizing immigrants was in full swing even before ratification and this hostility toward immigrants and ethnic minorities intensified during the 1920s. How Americans circumvented the new law of the land (the middle sections of this book) seemed like familiar territory and wasn't nearly as compelling. Less discussed was the meteoric rise of organized crime during the Prohibition-era. This would probably be familiar territory for most readers as well, but the explicit connection to the rise of organized crime in this country deserves space in any account of Prohibition's lasting impact. There were passing references to gangsters and bootleggers and a mention of crime families in the epilogue, but the question of whether or not Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger received more attention. This was a bit inexplicable to me; that hadn't seemed like the purpose of the book. The unraveling and eventual repeal of the 18th Amendment; however, made many of the final sections of the book interesting. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.