BOOKS AND POP CULTURE TOAST THE ERA OF PROHIBITION

Three soldiers bide their time in a foxhole, waiting for World War I
to end. One of them, played by Humphrey Bogart, explains why
Prohibition won't stop him from making hay in the saloon business.

"It's one thing to pass a law and another to make it work," he
explains. "There will always be guys wanting a drink."

Score one for Bogie. The scene comes from the greatest of all
Prohibition movies, 1939's The Roaring Twenties. Variations of those
words were uttered by countless Americans during a disastrous legal
and social experiment.

"Think about Prohibition for two minutes, and you can't help but say,
'What a weird thing. How the hell did that happen?' " says Daniel
Okrent, author of the lively new history Last Call: The Rise and Fall of
Prohibition.

Enacted 90 years ago last January, repealed 13 years later,
Prohibition is known today mostly through its cultural signifiers:
gangsters with gats, flappers with hats, Eliot Ness and The
Untouchables, the boozy, jazz age literary nihilism of Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. Or, as Okrent put it in a recent phone interview, "Edward
G. Robinson, Tommy guns, screeching ties and Joan Crawford dancing on
the table. That's such a small fraction of what Prohibition actually
was. It ignores the daily life of how Americans lived under
Prohibition."

It also ignores Prohibition's influence on the here and now, in Dallas
and beyond.

As the man said, there will always be guys (and gals) wanting a drink,
but you may not have realized how Prohibition changed the way we
imbibe and talk of imbibing.

Mixed cocktails? Invented to mask the rancid taste of bathtub gin.
Hitting on women in bars? Never happened before the speakeasy, which
made it safe for opposite sexes to mingle after dark. (The songwriter
Alec Wilder gets one of the best quotes in Last Call: "A pretty girl in
a speakeasy was the most beautiful girl in the world.") Call drinks -
where you order your liquor by brand (Dewar's instead of scotch)? That
evolved as a way of making sure you weren't drinking potentially lethal
wood alcohol.

Pop culture reflects our continuing fascination with the era.
Best-selling author Jonathan Eig just released Get Capone: The Secret
Plot That Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster. Historian Lucy
Moore's Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties was published
in the States earlier this year after its 2007 UK release.

On television, HBO's Atlantic City Prohibition saga Boardwalk Empire,
created by Sopranos writer Terrence Winter and executive-produced by
Martin Scorsese (who also directed the pilot), will premiere in the
fall. On the documentary front, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will weigh in
next year with Forbidden Fruit: America During Prohibition. (Like other
Burns films it will feature Okrent, though it was produced independently
of Last Call.)

On the political front, there are the local-option measures you may
have heard about from petitioners outside Kroger, Whole Foods or your
favorite Dallas restaurant. At issue is the right to expand retail
sales of beer and wine and to eliminate the private-club requirement
in effect at many area watering holes. Progress Dallas, the
organization behind the petition, announced Thursday that it had
collected enough signatures to call an election in November. Under
Prohibition, drinking laws were federally legislated. After repeal in
1933, Texas communities could decide whether to go wet or dry. (Dallas
originally voted to go dry before Prohibition, in 1917).

That may not sound as sexy as Joan Crawford dancing on a table, or as
exciting as a gangland battle with Al Capone, but Prohibition was also
a story of backroom bargains and unlikely alliances.

In Last Call, the sex and violence take a back seat to issues such as
taxation (income-tax advocates aligned with Prohibition forces; all
that lost booze tax has to come from somewhere) and coalition-building
(suffragists, Ku Klux Klan members, anti-immigrant groups,
progressives and bootleggers all fought to keep Prohibition going.)

For all the political support behind the ban, it was easier to get
booze during Prohibition than it was afterward.

Law-enforcement agents were about as hard to buy as a drink - which is
to say, not very. By 1930, the Detroit Board of Commerce could
designate bootlegging as the city's second-largest industry. Drinks
could be bought at paint stores or pharmacies. During the 1920s,
Walgreen's, still going strong today, expanded from 20 stores to 525.
"He owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores," Daisy Buchanan says
of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. That's code for "he was a
bootlegger."

"There's this image of furtiveness and passwords and hidden
entranceways," Okrent says. "In fact drinking was very, very public."

Even in Bible Belt Dallas. "Generally speaking, the Roaring '20s could
have gotten its name from Dallas," says Darwin Payne, Southern
Methodist University professor emeritus of communications.

Payne points to a 1929 Collier's article about Dallas during
Prohibition. The reporter, Owen P. White, discovered that he could get
a drink in six different places within a two-block area of downtown
Dallas and uncovered a local protection racket enforced by the Chicago
mob. The subsequent article infuriated Sheriff Hal Hood, who made a
show of pouring 5,000 gallons of illicit hooch into downtown gutters.
Lore has it that the booze caught on fire and torched 20 cars.

The laughable ineffectiveness of Prohibition enforcement is one of the
reasons the era gets referenced regularly in debates about the
government's role in everyday life. "You hear it whenever there's
another movement that would restrict individual freedom: Look how
Prohibition failed," Okrent says. "You can't suppress human appetites,
and though people still try to do it, there's a general recognition of
its impossibility because of the failure of Prohibition."

The war on drugs comes to mind, an expensive endeavor that hasn't come
close to stopping drug use or drug-related violence. Okrent, a
self-described "economic determinist," sees pot activism in economic
terms. "When marijuana is legalized, it will be because of tax
revenue, not because someone believes we ought to have the freedom to
get their own marijuana," he says.

In other words, it's not just about the right to imbibe. Prohibition
was a drinking law, but its tentacles grasped every element of
American life, from finances to politics and even morality.

It had an impact on everything, which is one reason we still can't put
it down.