How Prohibition Turned American Writers Into Drinkers
Flavorwire: How Prohibition Turned American Writers Into Drinkers
4 comments:
Deb
said...
This was John O'Hara's contention: that Americans not only became avid boozers as a result of Prohibition but they also became very cynical about law and law enforcement.
Cheever would be wrong about Prohibition turning Americans into avid boozers; alcohol consumption was a huge problem during the early industrialization of the economy (William Rorabaugh's book, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, is amazingly detailed about the amount of alcohol consumed then--something on the order of 20 gallons of alcohol--not beer or whiskey, but the alcohol in the beer or whiskey) *per capita*--including non drinkers (at current alcohol levels, that would be 50 gallons of whiskey per year, or more than a pint a day). (Whiskey underlay a lot of early US history, including the attempted secession of western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia because of federal taxes on alcohol.) Daniel Okrent's book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, is an excellent summary of the forces leading up to Prohibition and to its collapse as a social policy. (Sorry; I'm an academic...)
4 comments:
This was John O'Hara's contention: that Americans not only became avid boozers as a result of Prohibition but they also became very cynical about law and law enforcement.
It's a good point.
Tom Dardis wrote an interesting book, THE THIRSTY MUSE: ALCOHOL AND THE AMERICAN WRITER, which is in much the same vein as the article.
Cheever would be wrong about Prohibition turning Americans into avid boozers; alcohol consumption was a huge problem during the early industrialization of the economy (William Rorabaugh's book, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, is amazingly detailed about the amount of alcohol consumed then--something on the order of 20 gallons of alcohol--not beer or whiskey, but the alcohol in the beer or whiskey) *per capita*--including non drinkers (at current alcohol levels, that would be 50 gallons of whiskey per year, or more than a pint a day). (Whiskey underlay a lot of early US history, including the attempted secession of western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia because of federal taxes on alcohol.) Daniel Okrent's book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, is an excellent summary of the forces leading up to Prohibition and to its collapse as a social policy. (Sorry; I'm an academic...)
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