Bootleg Nation

At one minute past midnight on January 17, 1920, the United States did something no modern nation had ever tried: it abolished its own liquor trade by constitutional amendment. The saloons went dark, the breweries fell silent, and a country of drinkers was ordered, overnight, to become dry.

It did not work. Within weeks the first illegal whiskey was moving through Chicago; within a year an entire shadow economy had risen to supply a thirst the law could not touch. E.B Cohen tells the whole sweep of that extraordinary experiment in one gripping volume — from the temperance sermons of the early republic and the income-tax accident that made a ban affordable, to Rum Row and the Detroit River, the bathtub gin and the poisoned industrial alcohol that killed ten thousand people, the speakeasy that finally let women drink in public, and the gangsters who turned a moral crusade into a river of gold.

Here is Wayne Wheeler, the blind lawyer who bent Congress to his will; Al Capone, who made a hundred million dollars a year and died with a ruined mind; Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who reorganized crime into a corporation with a board of directors; and Pauline Sabin, the socialite who mobilized a million women to undo what the temperance women had built. Here too are the chemists, the Coast Guard, the crooked cops, and the ordinary Americans who simply wanted a drink.

Even-handed, vivid, and unflinching, Bootleg Nation is the definitive single-volume story of how America tried to legislate virtue, accidentally invented the modern gangster, and learned a lesson about law and desire that it is still arguing over a century later.