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The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State
The War on Alcohol Prohibition and the Rise of the American State Author:Lisa McGirr A groundbreaking history of Prohibition that gives us a new creation story for the powerful twentieth-century American state. Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 when the eighteenth amendment banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide, is often considered a ?noble experiment? that failed, a glamorous story of gangste... more »rs, flappers, and speakeasies. But as Lisa McGirr shows, Prohibition was not simply a curious interlude that left no trace. It was the seedbed for a huge expansion of the federal government, especially in its law-enforcement capacities. A key figure in this expansion was Herbert Hoover, the first president to commit the government to tackling a large-scale social problem: the rampant crime spawned by Prohibition. The war on alcohol, and the expansive state that waged it, laid the groundwork for later wars on crime and drugs. McGirr shows that the activist American state traces its lineage through the right as well as the left, the coercive policies of Hoover as well as the New Deal of FDR. 8 pages of illustrations« less