One Summer: America, 1927

billion a year out of the hands of legitimate interests and put it in the hands of murderous thugs. It made criminals of honest people and actually led to an increase in the amount of drinking in the country.
    Nothing, however, was stranger than that it became the avowed policy of the United States government to poison a random assortment of citizens in an attempt to keep the rest of them sober. Mr Hickox was unusual only in that well-off people generally weren’t the victims since they were careful to get their booze from reliable suppliers. That was why people like Al Capone did so well out of Prohibition: they didn’t kill their customers.
    Mr Hickox died because of a problem that hadn’t been fully thought through when Prohibition was introduced – namely, that alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions and antiseptics, embalming fluid and much more. Thus it was necessary to allow its continued production for legitimate purposes. Inevitably, some of that still-legal alcohol (actually a great deal: 60 million gallons a year, by one estimate) was diverted into the bootleg trade. To render industrial alcohol disagreeable for drinking, the government took to ‘denaturing’ it by dosing it with poisons such as strychnine and mercury which had the power to blind, cripple or kill those who drank it. Denatured alcohol became ‘America’s new national beverage’, in the cheerful words of one Prohibition official.
    Figures vary wildly on just how many people died wretchedly from drinking denatured alcohol. Root and De Rochemont in their authoritative Eating in America report that 11,700 people died in 1927 alone from imbibing drink poisoned by the government. Other sources put the number much lower. However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizensan agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world and was patently harmless in moderation.
    Almost everything about Prohibition was either inept or farcical. The Treasury was charged with enforcing the new laws, but it wholly lacked the necessary qualifications, funding or zeal for the job. Starved of resources by Congress, the Prohibition Department hired just 1,520 agents, fn1 and gave them the impossible task of trying to stop the production and consumption of alcohol among 100 million citizens (or about 75,000 people per agent) within an area of 3.5 million square miles while simultaneously protecting 18,700 miles of coastline and border from smugglers. The federal government expected the states to take up the slack and enforce the laws, but the states were almost everywhere severely disinclined to do so. By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.
    The economic cost to the nation was enormous. The federal government lost $500 million a year in liquor taxes – nearly a tenth of national income. At state level the pain was often even greater. New York before Prohibition relied on liquor taxes for half its income. It is little wonder that states were reluctant to find the money in their reduced budgets to prosecute a law that was impoverishing them.
    Speakeasies proliferated wildly. One block in midtown Manhattan was found to contain thirty-two places where one could get a drink. Liquor was so freely available, and often so little hidden, that Prohibition seemed sometimes barely to exist. In Chicago, where some 20,000 saloons remained in business, in some neighbourhoods bars operated openly and didn’t pretend to be anything else. In New York, the number of drinking establishments was put at 32,000, double the pre-Prohibition total.
    And of course the stuff that was sold in these new establishments was entirely unregulated. In Chicago, a municipal chemist tipped some bootlegged whisky down a sink and watched in astonishment as it sizzlingly ate through the porcelain. Curious to know what exactly was in bootlegged whisky, the New York Telegram employed a chemist to test 341 samples brought from city speakeasies. Among the ingredients he isolated were kerosene, nicotine, benzene, benzol, formaldehyde, iodine, sulphuric acid and soap. About one in six samples, he