Smashing the Liquor Machine

A Global History of Prohibition

By: Mark Lawrence Schrad

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history.

Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era.

Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than Americans have been led to believe.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Tantor

I’d love to say it takes a hatchet to temperance myths…

But the book is actually more of a scalpel that carefully, methodically, and completely disassembles those myths then just as carefully assembles a more accurate narrative. And that narrative is a revelation—and not just for people interested in history. I strongly recommend this book to people renegotiating their own relationships with alcohol, not because it pushes sobriety ( it absolutely doesn’t), but because it sheds so much light on how powerful commercial and government interests engineer addiction for profit. And on how some of the greatest men and women in history have fought back.