Legal precedents created during Prohibition have lingered, leaving search-and-seizure law much better defined than limits on police use of force, interrogation practices, or eyewitness identification protocols. An unlawful trunk search is thus guarded against more thoroughly than an unnecessary shooting or a wrongful conviction. Intrusive searches for alcohol during Prohibition destroyed middle-class Americans' faith in police and ushered in a new basis for controlling police conduct. State courts in the 1920s began to exclude perfectly reliable evidence obtained in an illegal search. Then, as Prohibition drew to a close, a presidential commission awakened the public to torture in interrogation rooms, prompting courts to exclude coerced confessions irrespective of whether the technique had produced a reliable statement. Prohibition's scheme lingered long past the Roaring '20s. Racial tensions and police brutality were bigger concerns in the 1960s than illegal searches, yet when the Supreme Court imposed limits on officers' conduct in 1961, searches alone were regulated. Interrogation law during the 1960s, fundamentally reshaped by the Miranda ruling, ensured that suspects who invoked their rights would not be subject to coercive tactics, but did nothing to ensure reliable confessions by those who were questioned. Explicitly recognizing that its decisions excluding evidence had not been well-received, the Court in the 1970s refused to exclude identifications merely because they were made in suggestive lineups. Perhaps a larger project awaits—refocusing our rules of criminal procedure on those concerns from which Prohibition distracted us: conviction accuracy and the use of force by police.

Albany, New York, experienced massive upheaval when the Volstead Act of 1919 established Prohibition. Crime already proliferated in the capital of the Empire State, with rival political machines stooping to corruption and the mob with their heavy-handed powers of persuasion. As it did nationwide, Prohibition in Albany served merely to force alcohol-related commerce underground and lawlessness and violence to the forefront of city activity.

Discusses the prohibition era of early twentieth-century America, including temperance movements, the prohibition amendment, alcoholic beverage profiteers, and the repeal of prohibition.

“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.