shouted for him to stop. The man—a duck hunter—couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his outboard, so he cruised on, oblivious, and the agents blew him away.^[2]

 “I made a mistake. I was stupidly wrong,” wrote Joy. “America must open its eyes and recognize that human nature cannot be changed by legal enactment.” In a complete about-face he cancelled his membership in the Anti-Saloon League and became a major supporter of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.  This newly minted organization was headed by a blue-chip roster that included the three du Pont brothers, the head of General Motors, and the president of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Like Joy, most of these tycoons had been supporters of prohibition until they were confronted with the reality. Now they were concerned about the future of the Republic and there was plenty to be concerned about.

In the first year of prohibition, crime leaped 24 percent in the nation’s major cities and before the decade was over the criminal justice system would be overwhelmed.^[3] The federal caseload tripled and civil cases were brushed aside to make room for the flood of alcohol offenders. Drowning in the flow, judges began offering “bargain days” where a whole courtroom full of suspects would be allowed to plead guilty in return for a small fine. The federal prison system was operating at 170 percent capacity and the cost to the taxpayers was about to increase by an order of magnitude.^[4] 

Even more alarming to old-money aristocrats like the du Ponts was the dangerous erosion of respect for the criminal justice system. Prohibition enforcement tarred every institution it touched—Coast Guard, Customs, Treasury, Justice—and local cops and sheriffs in cities and counties all over the country. An officer could triple his annual income in a single day just by looking the other way.  By 1929, one out of four federal agents had been dismissed for charges ranging from bribery, extortion, conspiracy, and embezzlement, to drinking the evidence and submission of false reports.^[5]  In Detroit, where the liquor trade was