MICHAEL A. LERNER. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2007. Pp. 351. $28.95

Abstract

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.