December 8, 2007
Soviet Westerns Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:10 PM EST Arts & Letters Daily today links to a diverting piece from The New Statesman by the journalist and filmmaker Lucy Ash, “Wild, Wild East,” about the fascination Soviet leaders had for American Westerns. The piece quotes Orson Welles claiming that Stalin was a great fan of John Wayne but was so disturbed by Wayne’s anti-Communism that he sent KGB assassins after him. This seems unlikely, not least because the KGB was founded in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, but it is a diverting anecdote, and no doubt deeply gratified Wayne. Ash also reports that Leonid Brezhnev was a passionate admirer of Chuck Connors, the star of the TV series The Rifleman, an enthusiasm I have read about in several other places. Ash claims that Connors presented Brezhnev with twin Colt .45s, after which Brezhnev permitted The Rifleman to be broadcast on Soviet TV. Ash writes that enthusiasm for our Westerns inspired the Soviet Union to try to develop an indigenous capacity, quoting Russians as claiming that the best of these is The White Sun of the Desert, which I intend to check out. The movie’s hero is a demobilized Red Army soldier caught in a showdown between a Red Army cavalry unit and Muslim counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, with the arch-villain a Muslim leader who murders some of his own wives to escape the Red cavalry, and the hero, who only wants to go home after the wars, determined to rescue the remaining wives. Ash describes the Russian hero as a man who serenely lights his own cigarette from a smoldering fuse attached to a bundle of dynamite, which reminded me that, as in the case of the coordination of tanks and tactical airpower, a technique invented by the Germans, or the realist novel, a literary form pioneered in Western Europe, the Russians are not necessarily maladroit when adapting things invented elsewhere. As Ash told her story, I was quickly persuaded by her assertion that the Western was made for the Russians: Siberia as the West, indigenous peoples hostile to Russian expansion as the Apaches, and a shared enthusiasm for strong silent types. On the other hand, people may not need immediately obvious cultural-historical parallels to the history of the United States to make and bolt down their own versions of Westerns. The Germans were for a long time mad for their novelist Karl May, one of the best-selling German writers of all time, greatly admired by Germans as various as Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Hermann Hesse. Between 1912 and 1968 Germans made 23 movies of May’s books. As for Westerns recast in local costume, one of the greatest westerns ever made is surely Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, in which Toshiro Mifune plays a masterless samurai who hires out to two competing gangs of gangsters fighting over control of a terrified village, and cleans up the town by betraying both of them. Yojimbo was remade first by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood in the Mifune role, and then as an entirely American neo-Western, one updated to the 1930s. That later remake was by Walter Hill, and is titled Last Man Standing, with Bruce Willis playing a version of Mifune’s character. So we exported Westerns, and in some famous cases wound up re-importing and re-adapting what we had originated. Cultural interpenetration is an intricate business. It is also a very wide-ranging one. A year or so ago, my friends were off to see a very highly praised Thai Western, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger. Americans have sent more dreams out into the world than we may realize.
December 8, 2007
Mining Disasters II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Just as an addendum to Fredric Smoler’s post on mining and its death toll, it might be noted that that toll has been decreasing steadily for the last century in this country. There are three principal reasons for this. One has been the effort to prevent another disaster such as occurred at Monagh, West Virginia, a hundred years ago, when 362 lives were snuffed out in an instant. In 1910 the U.S. Bureau of Mines was created to investigate accidents, advise on safety procedures, and teach courses in mine safety. Regulation of mines has been increasing steadily ever since and today is governed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created the Mine Safety and Health Administration as part of the Labor Department. The second reason has been the growth of open-pit mining and the reduction of tunnel mining, which is intrinsically far more hazardous. Open-pit mining uses far fewer miners per ton mined, and the two principal causes of tunnel mining disasters, collapse and explosion, are negligible factors. The third reason is that management has come to realize that an unremitting emphasis on safety is simply good for the bottom line. The result in the United States mining industry has been spectacular.
Year: Average Annual Deaths / Average Annual Injuries
1936-1940: 1,546 / 81,342
1941-1945: 1,592 / 82,825
1946-1950: 1,054 / 63,367
1951-1955: 690 / 38,510
1956-1960: 550 / 28,805
1961-1965: 449 / 23,204
1966-1970: 426 / 22,435
1971-1975: 322 / 33,963
1976-1980: 254 / 41,220
1981-1985: 174 / 24,290
1986-1990: 122 / 27,524
1991-1999: 93 / 21,351
2000-2004: 67 / 13,601
Even if you factor in the reduction in the total number of mine workers, thanks to greatly increased productivity, the reduction in mining deaths has been impressive. In 1970 there was about one death per million man-hours in coal mining (the most hazardous type of mining). By 1977 the ratio was down almost to one death per three million man-hours. In 1995–99, there was less than one death per six million man-hours.
Indeed the number of work-related deaths in all occupations has been declining for the last century. In 2004 there were only 5,703 work-related deaths in the United States (and almost 14 percent of them were homicides and self-inflicted injuries). That is not many more than the number of miners being killed every year in the first decade of the twentieth century, and we have a vastly larger workforce today than we did a hundred years ago. That’s also equal to the number of miners killed every year today in China.
December 7, 2007
The Memory of Surprise Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:20 PM EST This is the date that was to live in infamy, although so far December 7, 2007, has passed with little mention of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There is an AP wire story in The New York Times, but nothing by any Times writer, other than a snide throwaway that John McCain tersely mentioned the event a day early on the campaign trail. When I was a kid, December 7 did live, if not wholly in infamy; people remarked on the anniversary of the Japanese attack, older people sometimes with solemnity, younger ones mostly if not entirely in a mildly comical tone. That mildness was testament to the fact that Japan had switched from being a hated enemy to an unthreatening junior ally in a single instant, the moment of the surrender. There was a brief revival of Japanophobia in the eighties, when Japanese economic success seemed to coincide with the end of American economic hegemony, and there were references to economic Pearl Harbors on our auto and consumer electronics industries, but the Japanese economy tanked for what seemed like a decade, and the American economy turned out to be in the middle of a generation-long boom, which is probably why Japanophobia fizzled. While it lasted, it was a little ugly. I remember an alarmist novel by a very popular writer, one that became a movie, and it had a scene of sadistic Japanese tycoons murdering a beautiful blonde American call girl as background to further sneak attacks on our economy, and that seemed to be shades of Fu Manchu. But it was a flash in the pan, and a of couple years ago I threw away half a shelf of economic journalism on the Japanese threat to America; nothing dates faster than ominous previsions of the future. Thinking it over, the perdurable effect of the Pearl Harbor attack was on our Cold War strategic posture, and on our deeper strategic thought. World War II began for Americans with a absolute strategic and tactical surprise, the loss of the core of our Pacific battle fleet in one bloody morning, two battleships sunk and six damaged. By strategic analysis as it then stood, we had sustained a devastating loss, for battleships took years to build. In fact, the two surviving carriers mattered more than the ravaged battle fleet, and the conventional wisdom nowadays is that relative American and Japanese industrial capacity mattered infinitely more than anything that could have happened on December 7. But we remembered that we had been hit by what seemed a bolt from the blue, and those first hours in which the country seemed defenseless. As it happened, our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, also entered World War II as the victim of devastating strategic and tactical surprise, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. The effect of the surprise achieved by Hitler was exponentially more deadly than of that achieved by Admiral Nagumo. Fewer than 2,500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, but the first season of Barbarossa saw three million Soviet dead, missing, and captured before the German drive stalled in front of Moscow in December. The memory of the cost of being surprised was a deep trauma for both Soviet and American strategists, even though both countries emerged from the war as absolute victors. Those strategists spent the better part of the next five decades fearing an equivalent strategic surprise and procuring and deploying force structures designed to minimize the possibility. The unnamed memory of Pearl Harbor is almost certainly in the room when American planners debate what to do about Iranian nuclear potential. Surprising the Americans, of course, destroyed the Japanese empire, just as surprising the Soviets annihilated the Third Reich; within a very few years, both initial victories had become the two most Pyrrhic victories in all of history. The defeated seem to very vividly remember what those first victories cost them, for Japan and Germany are now among the least militarist cultures in the modern world. The victors, too, have their memories of those first surprise attacks, and their strategic cultures have been shaped by them as decisively as they have been shaped by anything. So in crucial places we do remember Pearl Harbor, even if we may not remember just what we are remembering.
December 7, 2007
Mining Disasters Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:10 AM EST A piece in The New York Times states that at least 70 miners are dead in a coal mine in Shanxi Province, with another 29 miners missing. The Times is cautious about the relative magnitude of the tragedy, remarking that this toll represents “one of the country’s worst mining accidents this year,” an unsubtle reminder that coal mining remains a peculiarly deadly trade. In China, around five thousand miners are killed each year. By a coincidence, another story in the Times reports a strike in South Africa, tens of thousands of workers protesting the death rate in that country’s mines. Around two hundred miners die each year in South Africa. By a more macabre coincidence, today is the centenary of the Fairmont Coal Company mining disaster, the worst such event in American history. One hundred years ago in Monagh, West Virginia, at 10:20 a.m., what is thought to have been a methane explosion ignited coal dust and killed 362 miners, some of them boys, injuring around twice as many more. The earth shook eight miles away; the force of the explosion knocked street cars off their rails, toppled horses, and smashed buildings and pavements. It was a bad week for American coal miners: six days later another 239 were killed in a coal mine in Jacobs Creek, Pennsylvania. In fact, it was a bad decade. Less than two years later, 259 miners would die when a coal mine in Cherry, Illinois, caught fire. A few years before, 179 had died on January 25, 1904, when the Harwick Mine exploded, in Springdale Township, Pennsylvania. British and American miners, who suffered a truly staggering number of deaths and crippling industrial accidents, had a deserved reputation for militancy, and when I was a young graduate student they were the heroes of the then-growing field of labor history. In those days you could still very easily buy records of their songs. Some were startlingly grim, some harshly witty, others eerily if understandably mournful. Somewhat perversely, in those days people also mourned the closing of coal mines, and when Margaret Thatcher helped kill off the industry in Great Britain, she was loathed with an intensity unparalleled in the very considerable annals of Thatcher hatred. It was, in truth, hard not to be moved by the miners, but it seemed worth remembering that their deeply impressive solidarity had been bred by a couple of centuries of suffering no one should have had to endure. It was not wise to take that solidarity as the natural consciousness of working people, as a number of labor historians then seemed to do.
December 6, 2007
A Forgotten Anniversary Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST Monday was an interesting anniversary—the date conventionally given for the start of the Greek Civil War. In late 1944 the Communist-controlled Greek resistance movement ELAS controlled most of the country; the Germans had evacuated Greece and the Allies had simultaneously landed in that country in October of 1944. On December 3, 1944, fighting broke out in newly-liberated Athens between ELAS and the British Army. The civil war was complicated, as was the history that preceded it, probably too complicated to even summarize here. The war lasted until 1949 and was pretty brutal, at least 40,000 killed and more than a million people relocated during the fighting. The Greek right was supported first by the British and then by the Americans, in a long and ugly contest. I think it is worth remembering the start of the Greek Civil War because of the way it ended. It is nowadays fashionable to say that guerrilla wars are unwinnable, so what seems worth pondering today is that ELAS lost. That loss is a particularly remarkable outcome if one assumes that revolutionary nationalists are particularly likely to win guerrilla wars, and forces compromised by collaboration with imperialists and occupiers peculiarly likely to lose them, which are the assumptions one sees almost every day in newspaper commentary on modern war in general and the Iraq war in particular. In Greece, as it happens, the resistance, while brutal, had indeed fought the Germans, while the Greek right was markedly tainted by collaboration with the country’s occupiers and by a near-fascist prewar dictatorship. All through the civil war the Greek right murdered and tortured thousands of often heroic anti-Fascist partisans as well as considerable numbers of civilians, which by the conventional wisdom should have doomed it. But it won. It is not pleasant to acknowledge it, but this even may have been the best outcome for the people of Greece. A Communist-controlled Greece, had Stalin in fact wanted such an outcome, which at the time he did not, would have almost certainly have been an even nastier place than the Greece the right’s victory produced—but one does not have to assume that the right’s victory was the least bad outcome to reflect on the fact that the right’s victory was, by the conventions of modern pseudo-historical wisdom, an almost impossible outcome. In fact, guerrillas lose almost all the time, much, much more often than they win. Sunni Arab guerillas, for example, are extremely unlikely to win in Iraq. What is amazing is that for the last three years much of what passes for respectable opinion has insisted on the contrary, invoking history as proof of that contention. History, of course, is usually remembered very selectively. Here’s another piece of history: It took a long time to produce a stable and democratic Greece. Greek politics were nasty and volatile for decades, and in 1967 an ugly rightist coup brought back torture and authoritarian rule to the country. Greek politics is to this day marked by very ugly anti-Americanism, some of it deserved. Greek political culture remains in many respects unattractive. Almost 50 years after the start of the civil war, Greece is also, as far as one can tell, a moderately prosperous and very stable democracy, an outcome that would have seemed impossible in 1944, or even in 1974, the year democracy was reestablished in Greece. Thirty years after the outbreak of the current round of the Iraqi civil war will be 2033. It seems slightly perverse to insist that in 2033 Iraq will almost certainly not be a democracy, but I seem to read and see such an insistence almost every day.
December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 08:45 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Angelo Dundee, with whom you wrote My View From the Corner, is probably the best-known trainer in boxing history. Someone, maybe you, once described the trainer’s job as “a chess master who plays with live pieces.” Is there another boxing trainer would you say was Angelo’s equal as a chess master? In our book, Angelo describes a trainer’s job as one where “you’ve got to combine certain qualities belonging to a doctor, an engineer, a psychologist, and sometimes an actor, in addition to knowing your specific art well. The job also comes with a lot of headaches, which aren’t included in the job specs. In short, the very word “trainer” is a catchall covering a complex job; there are more sides to being a trainer than in a Rubik’s Cube. But there was one area Angie never involved himself in: a boxer’s personal life. In the book he explains that he learned his lesson very early when he had a four-round fighter who “came to me one day and said, ‘That wife of mine, what a pain in the ass she is.’” Distracted, Angie told him, “Well, you know how women are . . .” and left it at that. As Angie tells it, “Wouldn’t you know it, the fighter went home and told his wife, ‘Angie thinks you’re wrong . . .’ and I lost him. So whenever a fighter tries to say something to me about his private life, I just say, ‘look, do me a favor, will ya? Go over and hit the light bag.’” Angie learned at the knees of so many famous trainers, trainers like Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, Charlie Goldman, Freddie Brown, and so many others who lit the way for him and on whose shoulders he stood. He shared their corners, their methods, and their stories and captures them all in the book. One of those he was especially fond of was Ray Arcel, from whom he learned many of the trainer’s “tricks of the trade.“ Especially Arcel’s work in the corner during a fight. Arcel had, according to Angie, “One little trick of cleaning off his fighter, wiping his gloves, greasing him nice and smooth and putting his hair back in place before sending him out of the corner for the next round. Now the opponent figures ‘What the hell’s going on? I thought I was beating the bejabbers out of this guy, and he looks like he’s stepping out of the pages of GQ magazine.’” Another of Arcel’s “tricks” that Angie picked up on was something he learned “watching Arcel one night when his fighter hit his opponent with a shot to the chops and the opponent went down with a thud. The referee started the count, tolling off the numbers at a snail’s pace. As the count finally reached a torturous and prolonged “five,” Arcel showed up at the top of the steps, robe in hand, and put it on his kid, inspiring the ref to quickly pick up the count and count the opponent out. And wouldn’t you know it, Angie used the same trick with his fighter one night at Madison Square Garden, and the ref turns around, sees Angie with the robe in hand, and gave the fallen opponent a quick count. As Angie says, “You learn from watching other people.” And he had the best to watch. Every time I see an estimate of how many books you’ve written, the number seems to change. Here it is, December 5, and as of today how many have you written? Like the woman under oath who, when asked her age, replied, “I’m 39 and a few months,” and in the follow-up answer to the question, “How many months are ‘and a few’?” said, “24,” the answer to how many books I’ve written is subject to the same “and a few” calculation. It all depends on what’s being counted. Is it the books I’ve written or those I’ve complied? Or those books that originally came out under one title and were later reissued under another title? Or updated versions of already published works? Or books I’ve worked on with other authors? My best guess—counting my latest book, My View from the Corner, with Angelo Dundee—is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50—and counting. But, then again, I’m writing ’em, not counting ’em. So, like Jack Benny, all I can do is say that the number is 39 “and a few.” You can fill in the blank for “and a few.” For a couple decades now, people have identified you from your TV appearances—the fedora and the cigar. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen that cigar lit. What’s the story there? Almost every thumbnail bio on me starts, “With his trademark fedora and cigar . . .” It’s gotten so I’ve come to believe that without the fedora and cigar I could probably enter the Federal Witness Protection Program and not be recognized. The cigar, however, is more than just a trademark. It is something I enjoy. Call it a habit, a practice or a convention if you wish—sometimes chomping on them, sometimes smoking them, and sometimes, as on television, wearing them. I also hold onto them, because at my age it gives me something to hold on to in case I’m falling down. Yes, I more than occasionally light one up. To me a good cigar is more than just a smoke. It’s a pleasurable way of living. Others have found cigar smoking a pleasurable way of living as well, including Mark Twain, who is quoted as saying, “If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven then I shall not go.” And he lived life to its fullest, as did Grouch Marx, Milton Berle, and George Burns, a happy group of mummers who, to listen to those antismoking folks, undoubtedly were killed by cigars at the average age of 89. Damn the P.C.-ers and do-gooders who would have me call homeless people “urban outdoorsmen” and hookers “human relations specialists.” The pursuit of happiness is one of our basic freedoms, and I'm free to smoke cigars whenever and wherever I want—just not in television studios.
December 4, 2007
The Expert Behind the Fedora and Cigar: An Interview with Bert Randolph Sugar (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 06:40 PM EST If Bert Randolph Sugar did not exist, it would have required Damon Runyan to invent him. A former editor of both The Ring and Boxing Illustrated magazines, the author and editor of more then 80 books, and sometime TV and film actor (including an appearance in Night and The City with Robert De Niro), Sugar can be seen on virtually any ESPN program on the history of boxing. He is instantly identifiable by his trademark fedora (black after Labor Day) and cigar. He was elected to the International Boxing Hal of Fame in January 2005. Sugar’s latest book is My View From the Corner (McGraw-Hill, 336 pages, $24.95), a collaboration with Angelo Dundee, the legendary boxing trainer of Muhammad Ali, to name just one of his many champions. Sugar answered these questions for us from his home in Chappaqua, New York. The interview is appearing in two parts. I suppose you’ve been asked this question more than any other, but who is the greatest fighter at any weight that you ever saw? Give us your top three. The word “greatest” takes on different meanings to different people. To be great you had to meet and beat great; you have to consider who a particular boxer faced—the quality of his opponents. Add to that his record, durability, boxing and punching prowess, peak years, reputation at the time, and on and on and on. You have to pretend all the fighters in your comparison are the same size—in modern terminology, ”best pound-for-pound” at any weight, any time. And here, aided and abetted by several fingers of truth serum at my neighborhood pub, are my top three picks of all time: One: Any and all descriptions for greatness can be applied to Sugar Ray Robinson, but no single description is adequate. He was boxing’s version of Rashomon; everyone saw something different. He could deliver a knockout blow going backward. He was seamless, with no fault lines. His left hand, held ever at the ready, was poetry in motion, his footwork was superior to any that had been seen in boxing up to that time; his hand speed and leverage were unmatchable. Robinson was unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon in his first 40 fights. It wasn’t until his forty-first, against Jake LaMotta, that he was beaten, losing a ten-round decision. It was a decision he would reverse five times. He was indeed the sweetest practitioner of “The Sweet Science.“ Two: Henry Armstrong, a physical loan shark who adopted General Clausewitz’s theory that the winning general is the one who can impose his will upon his enemy. No one who ever saw this fighter, known as “Hammerin’ Hank” or “Homicide Hank” or “Hurricane Hank,” will ever forget him: a nonstop punching machine, his style more rhythmic than headlong, his matchstick legs akimbo, his arms crossed in front of his face, racing the clock with each punch, and each punch punctuated with a grunt. A perpetual motion machine, Armstrong won 181 bouts, 101 of those by knockout, including winning the featherweight, welterweight, and lightweight championships, in that order, and holding all three titles simultaneously, the only man ever to do so. Three: Willie Pep was boxing’s version of the three-card monte player: Now you see him, now you don’t. His movements, which had the look of tap dancing with gloves on, left his opponents to speculate on their meaning and his fans to listen for accompanying music. Many of his opponents likened fighting the “Will o’ the Wisp” to battling a man in the hall of mirrors, unable to cope with an opponent they couldn’t find, let alone hit. Others compared the experience to catching moonbeams in a jar or chasing a shadow. Kid Campeche said after a fight in which Willie had pitched a no-hitter, “Fighting Willie Pep is like trying to stamp out a grass fire.“ Willie Pep’s long 22-year career was, in reality, two careers. In his first, Pep outclassed and outraced 109 of his 111 opponents, losing only to the grabbing, double-clutching Sammy Angott in a ten-round draw, and winning the featherweight crown at the ripe old age of 20. Then in February 1947 Pep suffered near-fatal injuries in an airplane crash. His career, if not his ability to walk, was thought to be over. But miraculously, less than six months later, he came back not only to walk, but to fight and win. Beaten by matchstick-thin Sandy Saddler for his title in 1948, he reversed the outcome in 1949 in as great a fight as the division has ever seen. The name Willie Pep will forever be remembered by fight fans as a name put to melody and symphony, a balletic will to grace and an ability to evade punches. The mixed martial arts type of fighting as exemplified by the pay-per-view success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship events has caused some people to say that boxing is now old-fashioned. How would you respond to that? Called by the Washington Post “gruesome junk” and by Senator John McCain “human cock fighting,” mixed martial “arts” is little more than glorified bar fighting without broken beer bottles, one step short of bomb throwing. Nevertheless, in our current culture of violence it seems to appeal to that 18- to 34-year-old segment of the market that has been weaned on violent video games and professional wrestling—substituting the cartoon violence of pro wrestling for the real violence of mixed martial “arts.“ All of which appeals to a viewing audience that possesses the attention span equal to the life of a mayfly. Hopefully it will go the way of demolition derbies, back to where it belongs: the bars. However, that doesn’t fully answer the question of whether boxing is “old-fashioned.” In a sense it is. For back in its salad days, that being for the first half and more of the twentieth century, boxing was one of the three major sports, along with baseball and horse racing. (Remember: this was before the 1958 Colts–Giants championship game elevated pro football to the higher echelon of sports!) Back in those days boxing was BIG and big news as well, The New York Times devoting five of its six front-page columns and three banner headlines to events like the Tunney–Dempsey fights. But following pro football, other sports soon began to take their place at the main sports table, courtesy of television, including pro and college basketball, college football, NASCAR, etc., etc., etc.; the et ceteras going on for about four or five pages or more. Hell, to watch ESPN and other channels, you’d think Texas Hold-’Em was a sport. Back in the late 1950s, just after the mob scandals came to light, Dan Parker of the New York Mirror wrote, “I’ve been at its bedside for 40 years waiting for boxing to die “ Well, here it is more than a half century later and boxing is still there. And will be there for many more years, all reports of its death—and even of its becoming “old-fashioned”—as exaggerated as those reports were of Mark Twain’s death. It’s too great of a sport not to be. Retract the obituaries, please! This interview concludes here.
December 3, 2007
Dry Manhattan Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:50 PM EST Michael A. Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, a well researched and delightfully readable study of Prohibition in New York City, has considerable relevance to today’s culture wars. Lerner begins by explaining that he limited his investigation into the effect of the Eighteen Amendment to New York City, because to the rest of the world, New York was America. It was also seen as a vortex of sin, and the Anti-Saloon League, under the local leadership of the single-minded, politically savvy, bigoted, and psychologically intemperate William Anderson, saw drying out the city as both a coup and a first step in spreading temperance around the globe. Anderson and his allies exploited both the Progressive Movement and World War I to push through Prohibition. The fact that many brewers were of German descent made the effort to outlaw beer seem patriotic, and drys argued that a sober soldier was a better soldier, though returning doughboys were outraged to find that the nation they had fought for had gone dry. Those men and women who did support temperance were often strange bedfellows—Norwegian church-goers and African-American labor leaders, tea merchants and women suffragists. What little support there was for the dry movement, however, dried up as soon as New Yorkers realized how drastically their personal liberty had been curtailed. The book is full of fascinating tidbits about the city under Prohibition. The closing of many cabarets and nightclubs was no surprise, but some hotels also failed, and even the great Ziegfeld had to shut down one of his shows. More unexpected was the effect on movie theaters. Certain that without spirits to raise their spirits people would have to find other means of escape, theater owners had predicted record audiences and revenues, but movie attendance plummeted. Lerner posits that the lack of liquor depressed everyone so completely that they had no taste for any entertainment at all. The book tracks other quirky side effects. In the first few months, both arrests and hospitalizations for inebriation went down, but soon the drunk and the poisoned were crowding emergency rooms, and the cost of law enforcement skyrocketed, while the police turned to criminal activity with unprecedented zeal and imagination. New Yorkers from every walk of life were resourceful in finding ways around the Eighteenth Amendment. Whether city dwellers were more ingenious is open to debate, but there is a priceless scene in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in which the eponymous protagonist sets out to get some bootleg hooch for a dinner party that demonstrates that the rest of the nation was not so cavalier about flouting the law. New York differed from the rest of the country in another way. The dry movement tended to be Nativist. New York teamed with immigrants and Catholics and Jews. Lerner points out that for all its deleterious effects, the neighborhood saloon was often a community center for new Americans. An excellent example of this was John McSorley, who nether drank nor smoked and ran his legendary ale house with a strict hand. New Yorkers put up a tough and inventive battle against Prohibition, and two of the individuals who led the struggle to repeal it, Al Smith and the formerly dry socialite Pauline Sabin, were locals. But though Prohibition took on a special flair and force in the city, the experience was national and has relevance for us as a nation today. Lerner points out that never before had an amendment been passed to limit rather than protect personal freedom. No wonder that the Eighteenth was imposed from above by special interests rather than demanded by grass-roots groups. Current proponents of an amendment to restrict personal rights, such as marriage, should take note. Prohibition was not only a dismal failure while it was in force. It unified those who had previously had little interest in the issue, incited lawlessness, and, after a little more than a decade, was repealed with glee.
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