Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (2018)

Prohibition, with all its crime, corruption, and cultural upheaval, ran its course after thirteen years in most of the rest of the country--but not in Memphis, where it lasted thirty years. Patrick O'Daniel takes a fresh look at those responsible for the rise and fall of Prohibition, its effect on Memphis, and the impact events in the city made on the rest of the state and country.

Prohibition remains perhaps the most important issues to affect Memphis after the Civil War. It affected politics, religion, crime, the economy, and health, along with race and class. In Memphis, bootlegging bore a particular character shaped by its urban environment and the rural background of the city's inhabitants. Religious fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan supported Prohibition, while the rebellious youth of the Jazz Age fought against it. Poor and working-class people took the brunt of Prohibition, while the wealthy skirted the law. Like the War on Drugs today, African Americans, immigrants, and poor whites made easy targets for law enforcement due to their lack of resources and effective legal counsel.

Based on news and documents, O'Daniel's lively account distills long-forgotten gangsters, criminal organizations, and crusaders whose actions shaped the character of Memphis well into the twentieth century.

Pappy O'Daniel is a professional librarian and historical researcher who worked for the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. There he spent nine years in the history/social sciences department working with archival and genealogical collections. O'Daniel is the author of When the Levee Brekas: Memphis and the Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927; Memphis and the Superflood of 1937; High Water Blues; and Historic Photos of Memphis. He has published articles in West Tennessee Historical Society Papers.