2007 - Prohibition Museum Idea
Sent:
Wednesday, April 25, 2007 7:14 PM
Subject: Prohibition in American Heritage
Magazine
The May issue of American Heritage has an article called, "Bootleg
Paradise." Author Wayne Curtis begins...
"Prohibition ranks
among America's most vivid historic epochs. Yet the era of flappers and jazz is
also curiously Oz-like. The drinking ban dominated the American social and cultural
conversation between 1920 and 1922. Then one day the country awoke as if from
a dream to find all traces of it gone, save for a few bootlegged bottles that
washed up at local historical society museums, flotsam on history's beaches.
"I'd been doing research on Prohibition for a book on the history of
rum and cocktail culture and early on got the idea that it would be enlightening
to visit some of the era's shrines. But where were they? There's no Prohibition
National Park, of course, and hardly anything more substantial than specious stories
and the vanished footprints of long-dead smugglers.
"One place piqued
my curiosity, however. I had often come upon references to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon,
a little-known archipelago off the coast of..."
OK- so you'll just
have to read the article to find out the rest of the story. But isn't it an interesting
thought? There are museums and monuments dedicated to preserving the memory of
the Holocaust so humanity never forgets. What about a Prohibition museum dedicated
to preserving the memory of the chaos, cruelty, culture, bootlegging, music and
speakeasies associated with Prohibition? (Gangsters, Elliot Ness, Tommy-Guns,
etc.) The suffering was not on any level approaching the Holocaust of course,
but it is an interesting idea.
Where are the artifacts anyway? Just beer
for thought.
Cheers,
Teri