Description

Easton Press leather edition of Andrew Sinclair's "The Era of Prohibition," one of the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN HISTORY series, published in 1986. Bound in hunter green leather, the book has paper end leaves, hubbed spine, satin book marker, acid-free paper, gold gilt on three edges---in near FINE condition---except for a 'crimped book press' on title pages. COLLECTOR'S NOTES is included. Andrew Annandale Sinclair, who lived from 1935-2019, was a British novelist, historian, biographer, "a writer of extraordinary fluency and copiousness." Born in Oxford, Sinclair was educated at ETON COLLEGE, and TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE where he studied history and received his BA and Ph.D. degrees. From 1959-61, he was a Harkness Fellow at HARVARD. For fourteen years, from January 1920 until December 1933, the manufacture, transport, and sale of virtually all forms of "potable alcohol" were illegal throughout the United States. Promoted and passed in the sincere belief that it would cure all of America's ills, instead, Prohibition became a cancer that nothing short of repeal would cure. Gangsters, speak-easies, crooked cops, bootleggers and bathtub gin became symbols of moral-minded, law-abiding America's quick conversion to a nation of willing law-breakers. AL CAPONE mixed with the country club set on Chicago's Lake-Shore Drive. Leading politicians damned drink in public, while privately they drank damn well. Corruption was epidemic. The Prohibitionist movement exploded when the 1910 census revealed that 40% of all Americans lived in cities. The cause became a crusade. Churches invaded the political arena as they never had before. No politician could favor alcohol and be elected. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, America was too preoccupied with survival to even remember the passionate debate which had inflamed it for decades. The Women's Christian Temperance Union put pressure on Senator Harding in 1924---but Harding drank whiskey and played poker while serving in the U.S. Senate----along with a host of other Senators. Calvin Coolidge wrote: "In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial." Coolidge did as little as possible and therefore made few mistakes. The "drys" had early set up methods of swinging newspaper to their side in the debates. Sinclair wrote: "Resistance to the drys was contagious. Once their bandwagon to victory began to stall, the voices of the wets grew bolder. And once the wets had copied the methods of the Anti-Saloon League, they too had a club to brandish in the faces of members of Congress." Sinclair concluded that "Prohibition sought to regulate human morality and human habits. But the trouble with moral legislation is that is does not keep to the limits set by reasonable and respectable men. Obsessed by their impossible mission, the drys forgot their duty of mercy and charity towards society in the zealous pursuit of the drinking sinner." 480 pages, including an index. I offer combined shipping.