| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. By Michael A. Lerner. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 351 pp. $28.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02432-8.)

This is a marvelous book, well written and well researched, that offers evidence that there remains room for new work in the long line of Prohibition studies. Michael A. Lerner's emphasizes the centrality of direct political action to both Prohibition and its repeal, and demonstrates the power of lobbying, public relations, and organization. The study is bookended by two of the finest practitioners of the political arts: William H. Anderson of the Anti-Saloon League and Pauline Sabin of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). Dry Manhattan also highlights political failures on both sides. Lerner persuasively argues that success blinded drys to the potential for resistance to Prohibition and that advocates of repeal failed to plan adequately for its enforcement. Likewise, Lerner makes the case that, "Until the late 1920s, a national movement for repeal had failed to materialize because opponents of Prohibition had been unable to do what the drys had done in 1919: build a unified political coalition and get it to the polls" (p. 230). Prohibition may have been a failed experiment, but it did not end merely because of its failures.

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