Spirits of Defiance

With the possible exception of the 1960s youth movement, few historical events are as difficult to discuss without the undue influence of their popular culture representations as Prohibition. From Eliot Ness and The Untouchables (1987) to Al Capone and Howard Hawks's original Scarface (1932), modern perceptions of the “dry decade” (1920–1933) are indelibly tainted by images of bootleggers, speakeasies, and Valentine's Day massacres. Surprisingly, however, there has been little discussion of the way literature treated the havoc wreaked by the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act. Spirits of Defiance goes a long way toward disassociating Jazz Age alcohol consumption in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and the Harlem Renaissance from individual dipsomania—an overdone topic— to demonstrate how their “fiction ... doubled as cultural reportage” (p. 32). When a 1920s character such as George Babbitt or Jay Gatsby took a shot of whisky, Drowne insists, he enacted “political and social meanings”—not the least of which was to provide readers with viable strategies for “evad[ing] the Prohibition laws” (p. 33). In keeping with its cultural orientation, the book thus eschews an author-chapter structure to focus instead on four stock motifs: liquor providers (moon-shiners and bootleggers), consumers (members of the flapper youth culture), and two sites of drinking (the speakeasy/roadhouse and the cocktail/house party). Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) exposes the economics of bootlegging (the money was made in large-scale interstate trafficking, not in the local backwoods still) as well as the graft and payoffs it brought to the political scene, corruption memorably epitomized by the noxious Clarence Snopes. The Great Gatsby (1925), meanwhile, reveals that beneath the racial stereotyping of gangsters as Jews and Italians lay a capitalist heart every bit as devoted to the American dream of self-making as Benjamin Franklin: for Gatsby, after all, bootlegging is merely an economic means to the romantic opportunity of winning back Daisy Buchanan, and the fact that he feels no remorse about the source of his wealth underscores Fitzgerald's critique of the romance of money. The chapter on youth culture emphasizes a point historians have only tentatively explored: how the culture of public bingeing—one thinks of Gatsby's gin-soaked parties—manifests the twentieth-century notion of performative identity. As Drowne writes, “It surely never occurred to [Andrew] Volstead and his fellow congressmen that antiliquor laws would make drinking even more attractive to rebellious, disillusioned postwar youth searching for a modern identity to match their modern world”—an identity that was inexorably rooted in demonstrating one's “lost” or “wasted” status (p. 92)

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