Daniel Okrent > Quotes

“alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level,” and by the time of Repeal had risen “to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t own slaves, and you couldn’t buy alcohol.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“So was a brochure entitled “How Prohibition Would Affect California,” an unmistakable example of Stoll’s high-stepping jauntiness. There wasn’t a single teetotaler “among the world’s really great men,” Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey. How he knew what he claimed to know about the drinking habits of his Hall of Fame was unclear, but it set up the punch line: “What names can the prohibitionists show to compare with those above?” the brochure asked. “Has there ever been a prohibitionist who was a really great man . . . unless it be Mohammed, the first prohibitionist?”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“But Taft also believed that the citizen who obeys only laws that he endorses “is willing to govern, but not be governed”—willing, in other words, to destroy the rule of law.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“wouldn’t have to suffer the confiscation of hip flasks en route to San Francisco. That was because they didn’t have to take any along. San Francisco had officially declared its distaste for Prohibition even before it had started. Back in 1919, the city’s considerate board of supervisors, mindful of the hardship about to be visited upon its citizens, had unanimously repealed the city ordinance banning unlicensed saloons.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city’s main thoroughfares in his honor—out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging,” either Capone or one of his amanuenses said. “When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.” It was a recurrent theme, this shrugging disavowal of evil intent: “Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble,” he said at another time, “and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“asking them to join his new Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (probably a better name than another he had considered, the Association Against Fanatical Minorities).”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday’s enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. “The reign of tears is over,” Sunday proclaimed. “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“He did not consider it “the function of law to jack up the moral tone of any community.” That, he said, was “the function of the home and the church.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“San Francisco in 1890 might have seemed barely more saloon-sodden than that, reporting one for every 96 residents—but this was a measure only of the city’s 3,000 licensed establishments, while less restrictive estimates threw in an additional 2,000 unlicensed places.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“There wasn’t a single teetotaler “among the world’s really great men,” Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“whose four-story limestone mansion at 12 West 49th was sufficient for himself and his wife, while the neighboring houses at numbers 10 and 14 provided him with protection against development from the east and, to his west, a place to store his books and paintings.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“and in December 1931 parts of New York looked as if God had gotten bored with the Creation business in the middle of the sixth day and simply walked off the job. Work”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“It was all a hyperinflated display of presumed expertise on the part of men who were not experts, preaching the lessons of a science that was not science, justifying prejudices that were too ugly to be acknowledged.”
― Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America

“not most, of the high-steel workers were Caughnawaga Mohawks from upstate New York.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Photographer William Leftwich was rewarded for his nervy visit to the uppermost reaches of the RCA’s steel frame when two workers standing fifteen feet apart on a single beam began to toss a football back and forth.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Time and Fortune, a columnist wrote, “We wonder if there will ever be any building again.” Sixty-four percent of the city’s construction workers were unemployed.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“one man used a portable forge to heat rivets to the glowing point, pulled each one from the fire with tongs and threw it across open space to a crewmember who would catch the burning metal in a can.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Rockefeller properties: his own house; the annex next door at number 12 (acquired in part to hang the Unicorn Tapestries, which just didn’t seem to fit in the nine stories of number 10); his father’s house, the old Huntington mansion, at number 4; the family gardens at numbers 6 and 8; and, backing onto those, numbers 5 and 7 West 53rd Street, the double mansion that was the winter home of Junior’s sister, Alma Rockefeller Prentice.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“Junior was fundamentally free of anti-Semitism, and maintained throughout his life social, professional, and philanthropic bonds with a number of Jews. But”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“3 East 84th still looks both fitting and fresh. It also looks familiar: the limestone”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“It was rare, though, that Weaver troubled himself about a player's feelings. He asked them to put out on the field, nothing more, and offered no special treatment in”
― Daniel Okrent, Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game

“Art is one of the great resources of my life,” Abby had written the year before. “I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from, whatever subject it represents.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of the stuff; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population’s capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“political identity that Bertram Wolfe characterized as “an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism [and] Mexican agrarianism.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“At the Beaux-Arts he was that most admired of students, “a second-place man.” First place in academic competitions belonged to the highly capable and absolutely conventional; the truly brilliant, whose innovative work made the masters at the Ecole uneasy, learned to be content with second.”
― Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center

“The only ill-chosen word in that sentence was “quasi.”
― Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition