Document: Frederick Lewis Allen,
"Alcohol and Al Capone" (1931)
Source: [will open in new window]
Frederick
Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New
York: Harper and Row, 1931), Chapter X
Available online at The
American Studies Program at the University of Virginia
Who was Frederick Lewis Allen? See his
Biography
Comments:
Allen notes in the document that “To say that prohibition--or,
if you prefer,
the refusal of the public to abide by prohibition--caused the rise of
the gangs
to lawless power would be altogether too easy an explanation.”
Gang warfare and
bootlegging did not begin with national prohibition, but prohibition
encouraged
the consolidation of crime as a business, by requiring higher levels
of
organization to transport illegal supplies of alcohol, and to facilitate
the
political environment of corruption in which police and other municipal
officials would ignore the illegal traffic. For a study of the relationship
between crime and prohibition, see Humbert S. Nelli, The Business
of Crime:
Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (University of
Chicago
Press, 1977)