Forbidden Whiskey In The 1920's

Forbidden Whiskey In the early 1920’s, America began a new era. The decade gave us the Jazz age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and social reforms. The most impactful reform of the period was the 18th amendment. The amendment banned the sale, transport, and making of alcohol. The ban is why the 1920’s is also known as The Prohibition Era. Prohibition opened the door for many people to rise to power through corruption, murder, and bootlegging, which all is portrayed in The Whiskey Baron. Bootlegging was a huge business that made a lot of people very wealthy during The Golden Age. Bootlegging is the making, distribution, and selling of illegal alcohol (Figure 1). “Given the pervasive lawlessness during Prohibition, bootlegging was omnipresent. The operations varied in size, from an intricate network of bootlegging middlemen and local suppliers to the bootlegging king” (bootlegging). In The Whiskey Baron the top two suppliers are Aunt Lou and Larthan Tull. Aunt Lou lived in Charlotte and took over her father’s business when he passed away. “She didn’t know the first thing about making decent shine, but she

Sheriff Chambers suffered and injury as a teenager that left him in lots of pain and “unknown to most of the county, he was prone to buy a bottle of Larthan’s Whiskey once every few months and he would take a nip some evenings when the pain was bad enough” (Sealy 17). A lot law enforcement officers were on the payroll of the big bootleggers during the 1920’s. “Many enforcement agents received monthly retainers (some receiving $300,000 a month) to look the other way… The corruption among agents was so prevalent that President Warren G. Harding commented on it in his State of the Union address in 1922” (Bootlegging). Bribing state officials wasn’t the only other crime that increased during this period, the homicide rate began to