said to be the second only to the automobile industry, the graft paid to public officials topped $2 million a week and this was at a time when you could get a hamburger for a nickel.^[6]  In New York the typical speak-easy had to shell out $400 a month between the Prohibition Bureau, the Police Department and the D.A.’s office, and the lowly cop on the beat picked up an extra $40 every time there was a delivery.^[7]  A reporter for the New York Evening Sun summed up American history in 1930 as “...Columbus... Washington... Lincoln... Volstead... two flights up and ask for Gus...”^[8]

The havoc was not limited to institutional damage. The Volstead Act also produced alarming changes in drinking patterns. Beer consumption dropped dramatically but the sale of hard liquor doubled.^[9]  Here was another law of the smuggling trade at work: you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package.  Beer is bulky.  Whiskey is compact and easier to conceal.  If you’ve ever been to a college football game, you’ve witnessed this phenomenon.  Students are normally beer drinkers but since alcohol is prohibited at the stadium, they sneak in a flask and become whiskey drinkers. This distortion of behavior was visited on the Jazz Age with a vengeance.  Instead of buying a drink, they bought a bottle and they didn’t get up until there was nothing left but the glass.   In the decade before prohibition Americans had been gradually turning away from alcohol—a tribute to the temperance advocates—and now the trend was dramatically reversed.  Drinking became fashionable. If you didn’t have a hip flask, you were out of it. And since the speakeasy had no liquor license to lose, there was no need to check I.D.  If you could reach the bar, the question was “What’ll it be?” This laissez-faire attitude produced another astounding evolution.  Before 1918 the only females hanging out in saloons were hookers and dancers.  If the ladies drank at all, they drank at home.  Now women were flocking to the speakeasies in such numbers they would give the era one of its enduring images—the flapper. As Heywood Broun complained, the old