In 1827, Protestant minister Lyman Beecher called for “ardent spirits” to be banished “from the list of lawful articles of commerce,” and for the next century, activists worked to eradicate alcohol from American life. The Eighteenth Amendment should have been their moment of triumph, but notoriously, the 14-year “noble experiment” ended with the amendment's repeal and the temperance movement's demise. Most Americans view Prohibition as a laughable, inconsequential failure, but historian Lisa McGirr argues that it was a powerful moment in modern American history. It transformed lives, realigned partisan politics, and most importantly, provided the foundations for the modern federal penal state and the war on drugs. These timely contentions are certain to interest a wide range of scholars and the broader public.

McGirr develops her important claims over eight lively chapters. Experts will find little new in her rehashing of the roots of the Eighteenth Amendment, but lay readers will appreciate the background. Some scholars will quibble with her eagerness to dub Prohibition “radical,” especially in light of the near century-long crusade against drink and the propensity of Progressive reformers to turn to government and constitutional change to achieve their goals. As elsewhere in the book, her characterizations here are sometimes too neat. Prohibitionists, for example, would not have agreed that the Eighteenth Amendment was “the first constitutional amendment intended to take away rather than to safeguard liberty” (31–32) To them, Prohibition would emancipate Americans from the tyranny of drink.

McGirr is at her strongest when detailing the selective enforcement of Prohibition. She shows how the politics of illicit liquor production and law enforcement favored large-scale suppliers who could afford the costs of payoffs. By contrast, small-scale producers, especially those among the urban, ethnic working class and African Americans, became the targets of authorities. This trend continued as everyday citizens—organized by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Ku Klux Klan—mobilized to enforce Prohibition. McGirr's claim that these popular efforts constituted the “first massive entry of the Christian Right” into twentieth-century public life, although provocative, needs further elaboration and analysis to hold (139).

Uneven enforcement had major political consequences. McGirr argues that those besieged by Prohibition rethought political loyalties, especially beginning with the presidential election of 1928. Although Republican Herbert Hoover easily defeated antiprohibitionist Democrat Al Smith, urban ethnic workers decisively joined the Democratic Party. Similarly, many African Americans reconsidered their historic allegiances to the Republican Party. In McGirr's telling, this electoral shift pushed Franklin Roosevelt to champion the repeal of Prohibition and ultimately won him the White House. His subsequent New Deal—what many see as the birth of the modern American state—owes much to the partisan transformations sparked by Prohibition.

But even before the New Deal, McGirr stresses, Prohibition had already initiated the rise of the modern state. Standard narratives of conservative retrenchment during the 1920s, she contends, overlook Prohibition's expansion of federal penal power. Big government emerged not with Roosevelt's New Deal, but with Republicans who backed Prohibition, and especially with Hoover. His Prohibition-fueled war on crime, McGirr shows, drove the lasting expansion of federal policing, surveillance, crime reporting, and prison construction. The war on alcohol would come to an end, but the new federal penal state would remain, and beginning in the New Deal Era, be directed toward narcotics. In this way, Prohibition provided the most vital foundations for the ongoing war on drugs.

There is little doubt that Prohibition deserves a prominent place in the history of the American state, but is it as significant as McGirr suggests? To make the case, others will need to more thoroughly explore the complicated workings of the American state, including beyond the federal government. McGirr is certainly aware, for example, that the Eighteenth Amendment authorized both the federal and state governments to enforce Prohibition. Her emphasis on federal power, however, obscures the mechanics and lasting significance of dual enforcement, including its significance for narcotics control. Moreover, McGirr's uncomplicated portrait of the state before 1920 establishes a tidy baseline against which to paint Prohibition as a major moment of change, but it conceals much about the state, including how pre-1920 inheritances may have shaped the war on alcohol. Further attention, for example, to the early twentieth-century expansion of policing at the state and local levels might show Prohibition as an important part of a multifaceted effort to create a modern penal state. Indeed, it might have brought McGirr to soften her position that it was Prohibition—as opposed to a constellation of state-building initiatives before 1933—that facilitated the rise of the American state.