Drys, wets,
murder and myth

The Roaring Twenties are re-examined from vastly
different perspectives in two enthralling books

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

A few very simple icons conjure up Prohibition-era America: the jazz, the flapper, the speakeasy, the gangster. And why not? The decade in which the so-called Noble Experiment thrived retains its allure as a fun, fast-paced time, when banter was snappy, the music groundbreaking and spats de rigueur.

As Daniel Okrent explains in his meticulously researched, immensely entertaining and often quite funny Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Scribner, HC, 468 pp, $34.99), the driving catalysts behind the country’s 14-year ban on booze are familiar figures: the pious, do-gooding activist, the white, xenophobic rural and the hypocritical politician too frightened to stand up to them. The opponents, the wets, were largely middle- or upper-class sophisticates and their co-city dwelling, often immigrant working class, both of whom enjoyed and could handle their liquor. And between the successful organizing and lobbying of the temperance advocates and the unquenchable thirst of pretty much everybody else came the bootleggers and the rise of Commission.

But rather than delivering yet another summary of the rise of organized crime in the U.S.—a well-known if still fascinating story—Last Call goes deep into the politics and personalities that loomed over that strange period, painting vivid portraits of the Prohibition’s biggest advocates and its foes.

According to Okrent, both Prohibition and Repeal had advocates as disparate as the country’s population, and in both political parties. The Prohibition presidents—Harding, Coolidge and Hoover—were all Republicans, and all nominal drys. But Repeal’s biggest boosters were two disillusioned Republicans angry at their party’s continued adherence to the dry cause: Pauline Sabin, an elegant New York socialite, and Pierre du Pont, an industrialist opposed to Prohibition chiefly because it deprived the federal government of taxes—a shortfall the feds recouped by taxing income, especially on the fantastically wealthy like du Pont. It was the joint efforts of these two staunch and immensely competent anti-Prohibitionists, combined with the gross ineptitude and corruption that pervaded the justice system, as well as the federal government’s desperate need for cash in the early years of the Great Depression, that finally derailed the Prohibition. It had been a colossal failure in practice, but in mythmaking, nothing else has come close.

Which brings us to Cicero, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago, and the unlikely heart of a criminal empire almost as expansive as the ego of the man running it. Of all of Prohibition’s characters, Alphonse Capone may be the most enduring. His story—like Okrent’s, one of a rise, reign and fall—is told in Jonathan Eig’s gripping if misleadingly titled Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster (Simon and Schuster, HC, 468 pp, $36).

There wasn’t much secret in the federal government’s war on the original Scarface. Indeed, Eig provides a close-quarters account of the U.S. government’s attempt to capture Capone, led in Chicago not by the publicity hound Eliot Ness and his dozen Untouchables but by a bookish, prim U.S. District Attorney, George E. Q. Johnson.

The first half is an enthralling portrait of the gangster as a young man. Capone was born in 1899, meaning he was only 27 when he became the effective boss of Chicago, and 33 when he was convicted of tax evasion. In between, Eig describes a gangster in top form, running the city’s booze, gambling and rackets, dispatching his enemies with the help of Tommy guns (often recounted in a satisfyingly graphic manner) and presiding over an enormous payroll that included most of Chicago’s cops, judges and politicians. But Eig does not just retell Capone’s story. Relying on fresh research, he argues that the most notorious crime pegged on Capone, the St. Valentine Day’s Massacre, may not have been his work at all. And he paints a vivid portrait of the fallen gangster’s last days as he suffered from syphilis, driving him insane and ultimately into the grave.

Get Capone may be a lighter read than Okrent’s weightier, broader book, with shorter chapters and bigger characters, but combined, the two offer brilliant insight into a dazzling age.