THE MORNING AFTER
On 14 February 1929, four men, posing as police officers, burst into a Chicago liquor warehouse controlled by George ‘Bugs’ Moran, Al Capone’s chief rival, and executed seven men. Gang warfare ruled Chicago’s streets during the prohibition years. The St Valentine’s Day massacre, as the incident became known, was the climax of a series of murders, bombings and kidnappings that rocked the windy city – and the United States. Crime kingpins, from Chicago’s Al Capone to New York’s Arnold Rothstein, amassed huge fortunes in the highly profitable illegal liquor trade, their supply rings smoothed by payoffs to judges, politicians and policemen on the beat. Rebellious men and women patronised the illicit speakeasies and nightclubs these organised criminals controlled. In this subterranean world of illegal drink, new dance crazes and musical genres – jazz prominent among them – were all the rage.
Such stories have loomed large in the popular imagination for almost a century, serving as the plots for innumerable Hollywood movies. But prohibition did a lot more than usher in a golden age for organised crime, jazz joints and bathtub gin. It sparked a vast increase in the power and reach of the federal government, and an upsurge in rightwing mobilisation led by a reborn Ku Klux Klan. It also forged new political loyalties among the ethnic urban working class to the Democratic party, where they would remain for much of the century.
If prohibition had
