BAPTISTS AND BOOTLEGGERS

Southern travels, with cocktails.

Smith combines travelogue and history in a brisk, breezy tour of sites throughout the South associated with Prohibition: museums (the Moonshine Museum, for one, and the Museum of the American Cocktail), hotels, distilleries, bars, speak-easies, and cemeteries. Each chapter features capsule biographies of colorful figures in the battle to ban alcohol, some long lost to history; points travelers to places of interest; and ends with recipes for cocktails with such enticing names as The Presbyterian (made with Palmetto whiskey), Mary Pickford (based on rum), The Kentucky Mule (bourbon, of course), and White Trash Lemonade (made with white lightning moonshine). In the South, prohibition began long before the 18th Amendment banned the sale and transport of alcohol in 1920. By the early 19th century, Smith discovered, America was “a nation of drunkards” who consumed great quantities of alcohol. “Beer and hard cider were safer alternatives than water, which might kill you,” and commercial distilleries proliferated. Here, Smith quotes Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: “by the 1820s, liquor was so plentiful and so freely available, it was less expensive than tea.” Drunkards, though, were a threat to their families, inspiring many women to hail reformers such as hatchet-wielding Carry Nation, who wreaked havoc among saloon patrons. Protecting the family was not the only impetus for prohibiting alcohol. Racism, too, was a motivation: “The stereotype of the drunken black man defiling white womanhood was a driving force behind the Southern temperance movement.” As much as many religious leaders supported prohibition, so did bootleggers such as Al Capone, who made fortunes supplying thirsty customers, evading punishment by bribing public officials and the police. One teetotaling South Carolina governor took the cue from bootleggers and put control of production and distribution of liquor in the hands of the state government, “reaping vast funds for the state treasury.” State liquor stores still exist, Smith found, as do dry counties throughout the South.

A jaunty, informative journey into the past.