In 1908, in Shreveport, La., a black man named Charles Colman was charged with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old white girl. Colman was drunk, and, a reporter for Collier’s implied, had likely been drinking something called “Black Cock Vigor Gin,” which featured a picture of a nude white woman on its label, along with the words “Bottled by Lee Levy & Co.” This racial conflagration, and others like it, only inflamed those groups that already spoke in favor of outlawing products like Levy’s: among them, progressives hoping to save black men like Colman from lynching, as well as xenophobes trying to save the country from what the magazine McClure’s labeled the “acute and unscrupulous Jewish type of mind which has taken charge of the wholesale liquor trade in this country.”
Prohibition was among the defining issues in American politics and civil life in the early 20th century. One thing made clear by “Prohibition,” a captivating three-part series directed by Ken Burns and televised October 2–4 by the Public Broadcasting Service, is that the division between “wets” and “drys” was determined by race, class and geography as much as by drinking habits; drys — largely rural, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant — used the alcohol issue to advance very different ideologies. According to Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” and featured in the series, one of the movement’s primary motivations was fear of losing the country to immigrants. Like other immigrants, Jews were caught in the crosshairs, having to renegotiate a relationship to alcohol at the same time as they negotiated an American identity. And after the United States passed its first amendment to curtail civic rights it seemed the one became a stand-in for the other.
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