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Class, Crime & Cocktails: How the Speakeasy Became Glamorous
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When Prohibition shuttered the saloon, America's wealthy simply moved their drinking somewhere more exclusive — and the criminal syndicates that supplied them rewrote the rules of organised crime. This chapter traces how Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein, and Meyer Lansky turned illegal liquor into a sophisticated, high-society enterprise.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Picture a Thursday night in Manhattan, nineteen twenty-four. A woman in a beaded dress steps off a taxi on West Fifty-Fourth Street.
To understand how the speakeasy became glamorous, you first need to understand what Prohibition was built to destroy. The Anti-Saloon League spent decades lobbying Congress toward the Eighteenth Amendment.
A speakeasy wasn't always glamorous. In poorer neighborhoods, it was a basement room, a back kitchen, a curtained corner of a barbershop.
The key point here is supply. A speakeasy is only as good as what it serves.
This is where Arnold Rothstein enters the picture, and his role is easy to underestimate. Rothstein was already established as a Manhattan financier and fixer before Prohibition.
The social shift inside the better speakeasies was genuine and worth examining. Before Prohibition, the saloon was a male space.
It would be a mistake to let the glamour of the high-end speakeasy crowd out the rest of the picture. Al Capone's Chicago operated on entirely different terms.
The social hypocrisy at the heart of Prohibition was impossible to sustain indefinitely. The law was enforced selectively.
The story of the speakeasy's rise to high-society status isn't really about glamour. It's about what happens when a law ignores the preferences of the people with the money and the connections to avoid it.
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