For most of us, Prohibition seems like a peculiar American experiment—a doomed attempt by straight-laced religious conservatives to ban alcohol, and, with it, fun. But as it turns out, we've got it all wrong: Prohibition was actually a progressive struggle that united powerless and oppressed people around the world—Leo Tolstoy, Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi, and Chief Little Turtle, among others—against a system designed to exploit them. Listen in now as political scientist Mark Schrad reveals the real reasons that Prohibition became "the most popular, most influential, and longest-lived international social-reform movement in the history of the world"—and historian Lisa Lindquist-Dorr tells us about the rum-runners, Cuban entrepreneurs, and corrupt judges who kept booze flowing during those dry years.

Photo c. 1929, from Rutgers University Libraries

Episode Notes

Mark Schrad and Smashing the Liquor Machine

Mark Schrad is a professor of political science at Villanova University; Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition is his third book.

An official tourist brochure for Cuba from the 1920s.

Lisa Lindquist Dorr and A Thousand Thirsty Beaches

Lisa Lindquist Dorr is a professor of history and associate dean of social sciences at the University of Alabama. Her latest book is A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South During Prohibition.

Whiskey cases on a beach in the Bahamas, c. 1920. Image from the Library of Congress

Stiltsville

Stiltsville, the cluster of shacks on pilings where Miamians partied during Prohibition and beyond, is located about a mile offshore in Biscayne Bay, Florida. Here is a link to Nicky's write-up of her visit, with many more images, and here's the PBS documentary featuring local historian Paul George.

Photo of Stiltsville by Nicola Twilley.