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Smugglers, Bootleggers and Scofflaws:
Prohibition and New York City

January 4, 2014 by Editorial Staff 3 Comments

Smugglers BootleggersUsing previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson’s Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City (SUNY Press, 2013) examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers.

With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, “drying up” New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation’s greatest liquor market.

Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York City’s scofflaw population—patrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubs—as well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James “Jimmy” Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation.  Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New York’s smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.

Author Ellen NicKenzie Lawson is the editor of The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women (transcribed with Marlene D. Merrill). She lives in Loveland, Colorado.

Note: Books noticed on The New York History Blog have been provided by their publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

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Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: Crime and Justice, Cultural History, liquor, Long Island, Maritime History, New York City, New York Harbor, NYC, Political History, Prohibition

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. James S. Kaplan says

    January 5, 2014 at 8:34 AM

    Does the book cover Owney Madden, the Duke of the West Side, who supposedly controlled liquor distribution in Hell’s Kitchen and the theatre district? I’ll have to read it.

    Reply
  2. Ellen N. Lawson says

    January 5, 2014 at 6:38 PM

    Yes. See chapter 4 on Hell’s Kitchen, also see pp. 67,82,86,90,101-02,113,137, and 144.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Rum-running Submarines off Croton Point? | CROTON says:
    January 4, 2014 at 9:14 PM

    […] Thanks to the New York History Blog, which alerted us to this book with their recent review. […]

    Reply

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