Prohibition consumed Seattle, igniting a war that lasted nearly twenty years and played out in the streets, waterways, and even town hall. Roy Olmstead, formerly a Seattle police officer, became the King of the Seattle Bootleggers, and Johnny Schnarr, running liquor down from Canada, revolutionized the speedboat industry. Frank Gatt, a south Seattle restaurateur, started the state’s biggest moonshining operation. Skirting around the law, the Coast Guard and the zealous assistant director of the Seattle Prohibition Bureau, William Whitney, was no simple feat, but many rose to the challenge. Author Brad Holden tells the spectacular story of Seattle in the time of Prohibition. “When you live in Seattle long enough, at a certain point you need to sit down and read a history that ties together the half-heard stories about vice dens and crooked cops you’ve pieced together from locals at the bar. Brad Holden’s “Seattle Prohibition,” a slim but dense account of Seattle shortly before, during and after Prohibition, is an excellent place to start. This is a riveting drama of plainly told facts.” —The Stranger “In a rapidly evolving city with little sense of its past, Brad Holden is Seattle’s new, essential cultural historian. His book builds a better understanding of how we arrived at the present and does it with color, wit and artful storytelling.” —Thomas Kohnstamm, author of Lake City “Elements of this story may be familiar to those who know some regional history, but there are some fascinating tidbits, such as how the booze trade contributed to the city’s first radio station.” —The Tacoma News Tribune

Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, but from 1920 to 1933 the country went dry. After decades of pressure from rural Protestants such as the hatchet-wielding Carry A. Nation and organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League, the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Bolstered by the Volstead Act, this amendment made Prohibition law: alcohol could no longer be produced, imported, transported, or sold. This bizarre episode is often humorously recalled, frequently satirized, and usually condemned. The more interesting questions, however, are how and why Prohibition came about, how Prohibition worked (and failed to work), and how Prohibition gave way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol. This book answers these questions, presenting a brief and elegant overview of the Prohibition era and its legacy. During the 1920s alcohol prices rose, quality declined, and consumption dropped. The black market thrived, filling the pockets of mobsters and bootleggers. Since beer was too bulky to hide and largely disappeared, drinkers sipped cocktails made with moonshine or poor-grade imported liquor. The all-male saloon gave way to the speakeasy, where together men and women drank, smoked, and danced to jazz. After the onset of the Great Depression, support for Prohibition collapsed because of the rise in gangster violence and the need for revenue at local, state, and federal levels. As public opinion turned, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to repeal Prohibition in 1932. The legalization of beer came in April 1933, followed by the Twenty-first Amendment's repeal of the Eighteenth that December. State alcohol control boards soon adopted strong regulations, and their legacies continue to influence American drinking habits. Soon after, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The alcohol problem had shifted from being a moral issue during the nineteenth century to a social, cultural, and political one during the campaign for Prohibition, and finally, to a therapeutic one involving individuals. As drinking returned to pre-Prohibition levels, a Neo-Prohibition emerged, led by groups such as Mothers against Drunk Driving, and ultimately resulted in a higher legal drinking age and other legislative measures. With his unparalleled expertise regarding American drinking patterns, W. J. Rorabaugh provides an accessible synthesis of one of the most important topics in US history, a topic that remains relevant today amidst rising concerns over binge-drinking and alcohol culture on college campuses.

This work is an accurate, wide-ranging, and entertaining account of the illegal liquor traffic during the Prohibition Era (1920 to 1933). Based on FBI files, legal documents, old newspapers and other sources, it offers a coast-to-coast survey of Volstead crime--outrageous stories of America's most notorious liquor lords, including Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. Readers will find the lesser known Volstead outlaws to be as fascinating as their more famous counterparts. The riveting tales of Max Hassel, Waxy Gordon, Roy Olmstead, the Purple Gang, the Havre Bunch, and the Capitol Hill Bootlegger will be new to most readers. Likewise, the exploits of women bootleggers and flying bootleggers are unknown to most Americans. Books about Prohibition usually note that Canadian liquor exporters abetted the U.S. bootleggers, but they fail to go into detail. Bootleggers and Beer Barons examines the major cross-border routes for smuggling liquor from Canada into the U.S.: Quebec to Vermont and New York, Ontario to Michigan, Saskatchewan to Montana, and British Columbia to Washington.

On the event of its publication in 1965, Murray Morgan wrote, The Dry Years, which might be subtitled 'The Fall and Rise of John Barleycorn, ' is a delightful blend of scholarship, narrative exposition and wit. ...Clark is knowing and acid about alcohol as a class problem. he points out that the drys were usually led by upperclass types whose peers would derive benefit by better habits in the working class. He does not, however, fall into the trap of attributing the attitudes of the reformers to hypocrisy. The drys were awash with sincerity. ...It is one of the many merits of this delightful book that Norman Clark does not rub our noses in the fact that though times change, problems remain. In this substantially updated edition of the classic story of a region's experience with Prohibition, Norman Clark reviews to the present the political history of liquor control in Washington State, and issue taken seriously in the state and the nation as those of black slavery, wage slavery, and child welfare. He traces the effect of social change upon liquor morality through nearly two hundred years of efforts to make the use of alcohol compatible with the American view of social progress.

Seattle has a long tradition of being at the forefront of technological innovation. In 1919, an eager young inventor named Alfred M. Hubbard made his first newspaper appearance with the announcement of a perpetual motion machine that harnessed energy from Earth's atmosphere. From there, Hubbard transformed himself into a charlatan, bootlegger, radio pioneer, top-secret spy, millionaire and uranium entrepreneur. In 1953, after discovering the transformative effects of a little-known hallucinogenic compound, Hubbard would go on to become the "Johnny Appleseed of LSD," introducing the psychedelic to many of the era's vanguards and an entire generation. Join author and historian Brad Holden as he chronicles the fascinating life of one of Seattle's legendary figures.

The first thorough historical account of the great Washington State city and its hero, Chief Seattle—the Native American war leader who advocated for peace and strove to create a successful hybrid racial community. When the British, Spanish, and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated land. Chief Seattle was a powerful representative from this very ancient world. Here, historian David Buerge threads together disparate accounts of the time from the 1780s to the 1860s—including native oral histories, Hudson Bay Company records, pioneer diaries, French Catholic church records, and historic newspaper reporting. Chief Seattle had gained power and prominence on Puget Sound as a war leader, but the arrival of American settlers caused him to reconsider his actions. He came to embrace white settlement and, following traditional native practice, encouraged intermarriage between native people and the settlers—offering his own daughter and granddaughters as brides—in the hopes that both peoples would prosper. Included in this account are the treaty signings that would remove the natives from their historic lands, the roles of such figures as Governor Isaac Stevens, Chiefs Leschi and Patkanim, the Battle at Seattle that threatened the existence of the settlement, and the controversial Chief Seattle speech that haunts to this day the city that bears his name.

Brewing beer in Seattle can be traced back to 1864, when in the small, unincorporated town of under 1,000 people the first brewery opened and began manufacturing porter and cream ales. Over the next 50 years, innovation and entrepreneurship would take Seattle brewed beer to extraordinary heights. By the eve of Prohibition, powered by its popular Rainier Beer, the Seattle Brewing and Malting Company was the largest industrial institution in the state of Washington and the sixth-largest brewery in the world. Prohibition would wipe out the industry in 1916, but by 1933, new faces such as Emil Sick would emerge and bring Seattle back to the forefront of the brewing world. Images of America: Brewing in Seattle is the first book completely dedicated to the rich history of beer in Seattle and showcases just about every single brewery of this great city, from the mid-1800s to the recent craft-brewery boom. It offers a rare glimpse of photographs, advertisements, and interviews from some of the innovators who helped shape Seattle into the beer lover's paradise it is today.

A comprehensive survey of the years the United States went dry--1920-1933.

The place of cannabis in global drug prohibition is in crisis, opening up new directions for socially engaged cannabis research. The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research invites readers to explore new landscapes of cannabis research under conditions of legalization with, not after, prohibition: "post-prohibition." The chapters are organized into five multidisciplinary sections: Governance, Public Health, Markets and Society, Ecology and the Environment, and Culture and Social Change. Case studies from the United States, Uruguay, Morocco, and the United Kingdom show readers alternative ways of thinking about human–cannabis relationships that move beyond questions of legality and illegality. Representing a cross-section of cannabis scholarship, the contributors provide readers with critical perspectives on legalization that are not based upon orthodoxies of prohibition. While legalization signals a global shift in the legitimacy of cannabis research, this collection identifies openings for academics, policy makers, and the public interested in ending the drug war, as well as a way to address broader social problems evident in the age of neoliberal governance within which prohibition has been entangled.

"Vintage photographs and 24 contemporary portraits capture the style and flavor of Jackson Street and its jazz legacy. Based on extensive interviews with jazz musicians, this significant new volume documents the smokey rooms, Prohibition antics, wartime parties, and unforgettable riffs that characterized great moments in Pacific Northwest jazz." -- Amazon.com viewed July 8, 2020.