Browsing by Autor "Thomas R. Pegram"

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Hoodwinked: The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Prohibition Enforcement
(Cambridge University Press, 2008) Thomas R. Pegram
The relationship between the Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan in support of national prohibition has been a source of controversy since the 1920s. Both the ASL and the KKK acted to enforce prohibition, the ASL through legal and political means, the KKK through grassroots political pressure and extralegal vigilante methods. Wet observers and, more recently, historians of the Klan movement claimed that the ASL cooperated with the Invisible Empire in direct enforcement of dry laws. ASL activists and prohibition historians, in turn, denied league involvement with the intolerant, occasionally violent, dry vigilantism of the Klan and instead stressed the nonpartisan bureaucratic operations of the ASL. The actual ambivalent relationship reflected shortcomings in the dry regime and in the two organizations. Ineffective enforcement pushed some ASL officials into informal ties with local Klans, while the league tolerated pro-Klan sentiments among some leaders. But extensive and persistent cooperation was not apparent.
MICHAEL A. LERNER. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. 351. $28.95
(Oxford University Press, 2008) Thomas R. Pegram
This book is not only a finely grained study of New York City as the chief bastion of wet resistance to the Eighteenth Amendment; it is the best history of prohibition enforcement in an urban environment yet written. Michael A. Lerner has a discerning eye for the effective anecdote (he opens with the mayor of Berlin innocently asking on a 1929 visit to Gotham when the prohibition law—already in force for nearly a decade—would take effect) and a gift for compelling historical prose. These qualities have already drawn popular interest to the book. Historians will be impressed by the thorough research supporting the smooth, if sometimes glib, narrative. Grounding his analysis in municipal archival sources such as the district attorney scrapbooks and magistrates reports, manuscript investigations and social surveys from the Committee of Fourteen and the Social Science Research Council, memoirs, and newspaper sources ranging from Variety to the Amsterdam News, Lerner provides a street-level view of the policing, politics, and culture of prohibition in New York. He is particularly thorough in laying bare the tensions between the understaffed, corruption-prone, and sometimes brutal federal Prohibition Bureau and a city police force unenthusiastic about prohibition enforcement. In turn, the police, compelled by the Mullan-Gage state law to crack down on prohibition violators, were undercut by judges and city officials hostile to prohibition until city representatives in Albany forced the repeal of Mullan-Gage in 1923. Lerner also provides a richly-textured analysis of New York's speakeasy and nightclub culture. He reveals ethnic and working-class drinking and club life, the festive climate of high-end nightclubs such as Texas A. Guinan's 300 Club, and the interracial encounters of Harlem nightlife. Supplementing studies by Lewis A. Erenberg, George Chauncey, and Kathy Peiss with extensive primary research, Lerner examines the transformative possibilities for recreational, sexual, gendered, and racial change embedded in speakeasy culture, as well as the persistence of exploitation, especially notable in the white practice of “slumming” in Harlem clubs.