Best Quotes from Last Call by Daniel Okrent with Page Numbers

"If a family or a nation is sober, nature in its normal course will cause them to rise to a higher civilization. If... debauched by liquor, it must decline and ultimately perish." —Richmond P. Hobson

"Americans drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn." —W. J. Rorabaugh

"Intoxicating liquor used by everybody, repudiated by nobody." —Abraham Lincoln

"Moderate Drinking Is the Downhill Road to Intemperance and Drunkenness." —William Lloyd Garrison

"Those whom they desire to convince and persuade are their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons." —Abraham Lincoln

"We should be hardly better than a nation of sots." —George Ticknor

"Snap your burning chains, ye denizens of the pit." —John Bartholomew Gough

"Cath the universal ear and set the key of that mighty orchestra..." —Frances Willard

"I have cared very little about food, indeed, very little about anything, except the matter in hand." —Frances Willard

"The day is surely coming when... trained haters of alcohol will pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon." —Mary Hunt

“I was a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.”

“They need me,” she explained.

“The public could see by my editorials that I was not insane.”

“I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down.”

“The prayer, the agitation, the indoctrination, and the political activity had to some degree worked.”

“Mr. Cook was sheriff and I was treated very nicely by him and Mrs. Cook.”

“The saloon offered something very valuable: in the best cases companionship and comfort, in the worst an escape into oblivion.”

“His dead self would stir in him.”

“Life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.”

“It may cost us millions and even more, but what of it if thereby we elevate our position?”

The town of Oberlin, Ohio, named for an Alsatian cleric who ministered to the poor, was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian clergymen who chose 'to plant a colony somewhere in this region whose chief aim will be to glorify God & do good to men.'

From its very beginning the colony and the eponymous school at its heart attracted men and women desperate to change the world.

Strategically focused, the ASL could more effectively apply its intimidating tactics.

The Anti-Saloon League is not in politics as a party, nor are we trying to abolish vice, gambling, horse-racing, murder, theft or arson.

Never again will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.

The real secret of the League’s success is its unrivaled opportunity to reach the hundreds of thousands of churchgoers while they are in church and through their pastors.

The Anti-Saloon League may not have been the first broad-based American pressure group, but it certainly was the first to develop the tactics and the muscle necessary to rewrite the Constitution.

Wayne Wheeler was a 'locomotive in trousers.'

This one thing we do.

The league was also 'the most autocratic, the most dictatorial, as well as the most dangerous power ever known in the politics of this country.'

"Open fire on the enemy."

"My personal belief as to prohibition, pro or con, is nobody’s business but my own."

"I do not know how you may feel about this, but I would rather die than run from such a conflict."

"The chief cry against national prohibition has been that the government must have the revenue. Now... the adoption of the Income Tax Amendment to the Federal Constitution furnishes an answer to the revenue problem."

"Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired."

"The only hope of the Anti-Saloon League’s success lies in putting the ballot into the hands of women."

"When woman has the ballot, she will vote solid for prohibition."

"The social revolution that was the suffrage movement would bring the Prohibition movement to the brink of success."

"We are teaching these crooks that breaking promises to us is surer punishment than going back on their bosses, and some day they will learn that all over the United States—and we’ll have national prohibition."

"It must be evident to every logical mind that what is needed is an additional balance of power... sure to throw itself into the scale against the saloon."

I do not desire nor will I tolerate your scurrilous contumely.

He got along without their society so well that he saw no reason for resuming it.

I saw black men carry our flag on Santiago Hill.

Because the white man is supreme in this country, it is the white man’s responsibility to give absolute justice to the black man.

All men are the same.

In the name of your manhood, in the name of your patriotism, in the name of all that is held dear by good men, in the name of your fireside, in the name of our institutions, I call on you to join hands with me and each one to do his full duty.

He fought not for results but for causes.

Seek the enfranchisement of women everywhere.

Take the offensive everywhere. Attack! Attack! Attack!

What is the object of this resolution? It is to destroy the agency that debauches the youth of the land.

The party of change will always be more motivated than the party of the status quo.

Inertia will not hold against the press of passion.

Once the ASL, the WCTU, and the other antialcohol zealots acquired the support of other political movements...the results were catalytic.

Even if one ignored the predatory brewers and distillers, it would have been difficult for this average American to find someone to identify with on the wet side of the political ledger.

The Non-Drinkers had been organizing for fifty years and the Drinkers had no organization whatever. They had been too busy drinking.

Among his own, he could be eminently practical.

Men vote as they pray rather than as they drink.

One of those Civil War amendments that posed the last roadblock to congressional approval of constitutional Prohibition.

The principles of State rights are as sacred as the virtue of the vestal virgins.

In the end, though, when the Eighteenth Amendment was brought to a vote...they were able to pry from the wet column nine southern and border state Democrats.

"I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live."

"I will fight them till hell freezes over, then I’ll buy a pair of skates and fight ’em on the ice."

"The liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no other man."

"I have no interest in a God who does not smite."

"How can we justify the making of any part of our breadstuffs into intoxicating liquor when men are crying out for bread?"

"The problem of what to do with the farm surplus will be solved in a jiffy; the children of drunkards will consume this surplus in the form of flap-jacks for breakfast."

"The business of manufacturing alcohol, liquor and beer will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community, and will be transferred to the quasi criminal class."

"Prohibition was written into the Constitution with as much deliberation as attended the enactment of any amendment to the Constitution."

"I will gradually work out the machinery that will, with the cooperation of the states, make the country dry, we cannot hope that this law can be enforced so as not to be violated. All laws will be violated."

"These were not necessarily anomalies; it became clear as the race to ratification accelerated through 1918 and into early 1919."

“Equal Pay for Equal Work,” would be unveiled in a week and would resonate for decades.

“No man living” would ever see the Volstead Act modified.

“They are dead that sought the young child’s life!”

“We were all elated by the marked decrease in so-called disorderly conduct.”

“We learned to drink milk as never before.”

“They drink this in preference to water. They carry it to their work in their dinner pails and they won’t work without it.”

“If your honors... shall find a way to uphold the validity of this amendment, the government of the United States, as we have known it, will have ceased to exist.”

“The selfless patriots who financed Root’s legal challenge—the brewers, of course—likely imagined that, too.”

“It is as necessary as coffee to the average American and tea to the average Englishman.”

“My heart is in the grave.”

"Life has few petted darlings."

"Who drinks bootleg drinks with Death."

"I refuse to believe that out of our one hundred and twenty million population . . . it is impossible to find four thousand men in the United States who can not be bought."

"Politics first, law enforcement second, has been the order."

"This is an unbought victory, and ten times as valuable on that account."

"I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote."

"Warren Harding could get his drinks from Taylor, his manservant . . . who kept it stocked with bourbon and Scotch."

"Every imaginable brand of whisky . . . cards and poker chips ready at hand—a general atmosphere of the waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside."

"Mabel Willebrandt, aka 'the Prohibition Portia,' possessor of 'one of the keenest legal minds in the United States.'"

"Many of them are well-meaning, sentimental and dry, but they can’t catch crooks."

"I could hardly face the return trip. All that son-of-a-bitch could shoot was deer."

"I just did."

"You were somebody if you had money."

"Work? Me work? Only suckers work."

"The liquor business in Saskatchewan is controlled by me."

"This operation from the beginning was one man. You’ve probably gathered that."

"The Bronfmans would expect to be represented on the board of the Holding Company, but as this would be a private company and not a Trading concern their connection with same, even if known, should not affect the business prejudicially."

"A certain quantity of the liquor the family had put on those boats had somehow ended up in the United States."

"Interest is the greatest invention in the history of the world."

"The alchemy of desire led them to start manufacturing their own stock."

"A void precisely the size of the 34,667 cases and 1,860 barrels in its capacious hold."

"The liquor business had already transformed the Bahama Government’s financial condition as if by magic from a deficit to a comparatively huge surplus."

"The conditions supervening in the United States early in 1920 brought Nassauvians into the twentieth century."

"The men who made the greatest fortunes in Nassau never sailed a ship nor sold to any person in the United States a pint of booze."

"Each time [I] took 5,000 cases of Scotch [out of the harbor], I left $30,000 in the hands of the customs authorities."

"Rum Row… was like going to a supermarket."

"Hundreds of such men were operating out of every one of the liquor ports, boosting their earning power and the economic health of their communities."

"For all the factors that made St. Pierre so attractive…the most important to the Canadians was its status as part of metropolitan France."

"A State is only responsible for the enforcement of its own laws, and he had no obligation to implement the laws of another nation."

"Prohibition was an affront to the whole history of mankind."

"Has there ever been a prohibitionist who was a really great man . . . unless it be Mohammed, the first prohibitionist?"

"Lulled into a sense of false security . . . ,' Stoll explained, 'the grape growers announced they were going to make wine, because the ban would surely be lifted before the crop was ready to be harvested."

"Everywhere he traveled the vines were heavy with fruit and the disposition of the growers was as sunny as the California skies."

"The unexpected demand for fresh wine grapes from Eastern cities and buyers . . . offering from $25 to $30 per ton... turned out to be a goldmine for those who saw it coming."

"Over here, several odd-looking trucks with crushing machines and eight-hundred-gallon tanks mounted on their beds are pulled up next to freight cars; they’re in competition with the operators in the abandoned warehouses nearby."

"Grapes are so valuable this year that they are being stolen."

"When the growers had retooled their operations to meet the clamorous demand, a robust, elaborate, and entirely legal distribution system had developed."

"You could tell who the growers were by their silk shirts and Cadillacs."

"Mainly, the growers' ability to adapt quickly to the changing landscape of the market kept them afloat during turbulent times."

"The willingness to innovate and embrace change can lead to unexpected prosperity."

"Opportunity bred ingenuity."

"In the early stages of the medicinal liquor business, a clever Chicago lawyer named George Remus looked at Prohibition and said, 'I saw a chance to make a clean-up.'"

"He learned there isn’t enough money in the world to buy up all the public officials who demand a share."

"The day has passed in Philadelphia when societies and organizations can hold banquets in big hotels and serve liquor."

"Success is often about being in the right place at the right time."

"A gallon of alcohol flowed into the bootleg trade through a process that was only superficially complicated."

"It was a chance to make a living—and a lot of money—without any direct contact with the illegal trade."

"In the carnival of corruption, Philadelphia was the big top."

"The revelation of Union National’s complicity in Hoff’s racket led to the resignation of its president, Joseph S. McCulloch."

"Emory Buckner, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, saw it differently: the industrial alcohol business...was 'a perfect carnival of corruption.'"

"Nobody stays at home anymore."

"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."

"A pretty girl in a speakeasy was the most beautiful girl in the world."

"Prohibition would do more than close the saloon; it would also let domestic drinking out of the closet."

"The light laughter of soprano voices rings now where once sodden male wretches stood and sang Mother Machree."

"The night clubs have done more to improve race relations in ten years than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades."

"As you sail away, far beyond the range of amendments and thou-shaltnots, those dear little iced things begin to appear, sparkling aloft on their crystal stems."

"This is not a case of the revolt of the youth but a case in which youth is led by the revolt of middle age."

"Prohibition has become an attempt to enthrone hypocrisy as the dominant force in this country."

"Drinking is done almost everywhere, by almost everybody."

"It will warp the whole political fabric, prevent clear thinking—even by those who are capable of thinking clearly, and hide the merits of the men who run for office in a fog of feeling."

"If the federal government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time."

"The courtly, Yale-educated Sheppard... rose each year on January 16 to commemorate the anniversary of the amendment’s ratification with speeches layered in Shakespearean eloquence and brightened by his sunny optimism."

"Prohibition was not voted into existence by total abstainers, nor was the abstinence of elected officials essential to its maintenance."

"The un-dry had a cobbled-together alliance of their own, a vocal wet caucus had formed in Congress."

"The situation grows more and more menacing... It is the city versus the country. That is, the wet versus the dry."

"It is not best for America that her councils be dominated by semicivilized foreign colonies in Boston, New York, Chicago."

"Prohibition created dazzling opportunities for the children of the immigrant slums."

"They were not content to rely on the phenomenon reported... a reverse diaspora that had immigrants returning voluntarily to their European homelands because, they declare, America has gone dry, which they consider tyranny."

"What mattered was Sackett’s vote on the Senate floor, and had he (or any other dry) been inclined to wander during the nose counting it would not have been for lack of discipline."

If I am licked, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I was licked by things from the outside and by nothing inside of myself.

It seems an impossible thing to persuade those who want law enforcement that what is required here in this district is less enforcement.

A bootlegger is making his money as honest as some of these nice honest-to-goodness people.

Not by the next general election, but by the next generation.

To call such proceedings ‘law enforcement’ is a farce.

The man who buys liquor when he is thirsty for it is not a criminal in the sense that a check forger or thief is a criminal.

Even a decline in arrests for offenses against chastity can’t be taken at face value.

The numbers became a jump ball, each side trying to tip them toward its own goal.

It was as if the ASL zealots had come to believe that enforcement of the dry laws was more important than their effectiveness.

I found that the great United States Court in the Southern District of New York had degenerated into whatever is in the subcellar under a police court.

"The very fact that the law is difficult to enforce, is the clearest proof of the need of its existence."

"No one can hold the confidence of his pupils or associates who cannot keep a smiling exterior, no matter how disturbed he is inside."

"The business pays very well, but it is outside the law and they can’t go to court...so they naturally shoot."

"If the Senator’s theory is that alcohol is so poisonous, then why put poison in it?"

"Those of us who don’t like Prohibition ought to stop complaining and organize and get rid of it, or shut up."

"Prohibition will fall into ‘disrepute’ and suffer ‘irreparable harm’ if the American public concludes that ‘universal snooping’ is favored for enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment."

"Crime may have been rampant, and illegal liquor may have been everywhere. But that did not mean he lacked an explanation."

"Did you ever hear of a man eating so much pie or cake or anything of that kind that he’d go home and shoot up the family?"

"We knew the officers and they knew us, the same as you know football players on another team."

"I give the public what the public wants. I never had to send out high pressure salesmen. Why, I could never meet the demand."

"As intelligent as she was beautiful, as energetic as she was elegant, Sabin engaged the Republican Party with the same vitality she brought to her luminous social life."

"Emancipated by defeat, he spent 1927 traveling the country, making the case not for the legalization of wine and beer, or for a redefinition of 'intoxicating,' but for outright Repeal."

"The fashionable rich demand their rum as an inalienable class privilege."

"He literally worked all the time."

"His loss would merely mean an increased devotion on his part to the cause in which he was enlisted."

"There is demand for action and publicity of action against 'Mr. and Mrs. Prominent Citizen.'"

"It would be the first time in his life Pierre had been part of something more expansive than his family business."

"Another important factor is the tremendous loss of revenue to our Government through the Prohibition laws."

"On the whole, there is much to strive for.”

"A candidate appealing to new citizens and other hyphenates drew nearly twice as many votes as had either James Cox in 1920 or John Davis in 1924."

What thou doest, do quickly.

We had no name for our organization. All that we had was youth, strength, and conviction.

If a law is wrong, its rigid enforcement is the surest guarantee of its repeal.

Public service is my motto.

Our only regret is that the woman was not sentenced to life imprisonment before her ten children were born.

The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.

Without the one, you couldn’t have had the other.

We have become accustomed to outrageous excesses.

The most menacing piece of repressive legislation that has stained the statute books of this republic since the Alien and Sedition laws.

It would be a great pity to have Detroit’s two leading industries destroyed at one blow.

"The Eighteenth Amendment cannot be repealed within a decade and possibly not within a generation."

"If he can never buy a drink without repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, he had better start right in learning to make his own."

"Here’s the good news, said Doran: in Prohibition’s first nine years, the government had spent some $141 million on all forms of enforcement...while collecting more than $460 million in fines, penalties, and taxes—a profit..."

"When people are ripe for reform, the laws will take care of themselves. Until then, they are useless."

"What once was hidden had burst into the open."

"The hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."

"The real strength of the Sabin organization...lies in the desire of the small-town matron to ally herself...with a congregation of bona fide, rotogravure society figures."

"Many a white woman has been saved from the polluting touch of lustful vengeance, and many a Negro man has been saved from the gallows or the flames."

"A woman of fine intelligence and breeding is Mrs. Charles H. Sabin."

"There could have been no clearer demonstration of the domestication of drink..."

No other private citizen of the United States has left such an impress upon national history.

Anything I might say could do nobody any good.

The end of Prohibition had been 'the one great disappointment and abiding sorrow' of his life.

By opposing the dominant position of the WCTU and its allies, Sabin and the WONPR proved that women were not a monolithic political bloc.

Mr. de Latour has expended a fortune this fall. He has furnished many men with work, paid good wages and contributed to the well-being of many families in the valley.

The sheer magnitude of the recollections is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.

There can only be one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul air of communistic Russia.

Prohibition cleared the field.

In every respect perfectly legal.

I acknowledge my mistake. The effort should have been directed against the XVIth Amendment.