Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (review)

Michael Lerner's Dry Manhattan deftly connects the political history of prohibition with the personalities who supported and disparaged the Dry cause. Lerner tells a familiar story of prohibition's unintended consequences, tracing the arc of New York City prohibition history from the Anti-Saloon League (the first modern political action committee) to the repeal in the early 1930's. Temperance activists faced an uphill battle in Tammany Hall's New York City, but the relentless lobbying of William Anderson created a political opening for New York prohibition. Pro-prohibition forces, giddy with their defeat of Tammany Hall, failed to anticipate the enormous difficulty in enforcing a ban on liquor. Chronically underpaid prohibition agents and police made lucrative arrangements within the city's underground alcohol economy, and they quickly began to resemble the bootleggers and racketeers they were entrusted to stop.

Lerner details the failed attempts by Albany lawmakers and city leaders to stem illegal drinking and liquor sales. A plan to padlock offending speakeasies pushed the liquor traffickers to be more resourceful. The Mullan-Gage Law increased penalties for Volstead Act violations, but it clogged the court docket and angered the New York judiciary. Although the law empowered police to pursue violators of prohibition, it drained their resources and caused them to lose further public credibility. Instead portraying the history of prohibition as a grand fight between Wets and Drys Lerner carefully depicts different players at cross-cutting purposes.

The strongest chapters in the book document the shifting cultural climate of prohibition. Lerner's discussion of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, friends and writers who took their first drink after the passage of national prohibition, highlights the larger cultural contradiction created by prohibition. Benchley became a fixture at popular New York speakeasies, while Parker threw famous cocktail parties at the Algonquin Hotel with Irving Berlin and Tallulah Bankhead. The illegality surrounding the drinking culture of New York City conferred classiness to it, and drinking became a mark of social status in 1920's Manhattan. Pre-prohibition drinking holes lacked urban sophistication, but post-prohibition nightclubs defined it. Lerner is masterful in describing prohibition's cultural blowback.

New York's prohibition years overlapped with a rapidly changing social environment for women and African Americans. Dry Manhattan acknowledges the role of women's groups in fomenting temperance activism, but thoroughly demonstrates that New York women represented a range of opinion on the liquor question. From Texas Guinan, the brash hostess who made thousands of dollars defying state liquor laws at her midtown nightclubs, to the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, women's opposition to prohibition marked their sophistication as much as bobbed hair and jazz. Prohibition also affected the city's racial politics. In Harlem, prohibition intersected with the politics of respectability; so-called Black Victorians blamed their community for the failure of prohibition, while others noted collusion between white supremacist ideology and temperance activism. By the end of the decade, whites managed to wrest financial control over Harlem nightlife, and some establishments, like The Plantation Club, catered to racist fantasies with slave-era decorations and "mammy" hostesses.

Chapters on the anti-immigrant impulses in the prohibition movement, women's involvement in temperance and prohibition, and a chapter on rent parties and the "Hooch Joints in Harlem" are the liveliest in Dry Manhattan, but they also underscore a weakness in the book's organization. Dry Manhattan is comprehensive, but I would have liked Lerner to step back from his narrative to comment on the linkages among race, class, gender, immigration, and New York politics instead of sequestering these topics in separate chapters. Overall, Dry Manhattan stands as an important contribution to the study of early 20th century American culture, and Lerner's book should find an eager readership among students of American history, political science, American studies, and sociology.