Posted 7:39 PM by Gene

Jonathan Yardley, reviewing a book about Prohibition and New York, says the great crusade "did not have a single redeeming quality." We respectfully disagree; we cannot envision the Roaring Twenties without that bathtub-gin fueled insouciance; never before had America known such cultural upheaval, and though the price was high (how many did die from poisoned alcohol?) it made the nation more confident. On the other hand were we to look for "a time from which the nation probably never will recover" we could go back to the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia, when the south demanded Thomas Jefferson blot slavery from the Declaration of Independence; or to the Great Depression, which ruined our industries and blighted our cities, and which, in many senses, we live with to this day.