The War On Alcohol By Lisa Mcgirr - 1161 Words

In Lisa McGirr’s book The War on Alcohol it is hard for the reader to pinpoint one central thesis. One thesis however, can be simply marked down to the title of one of her chapters entitled â€Å"Selective Enforcement.† During the Prohibition period police were cracking down on speakeasies and bootleggers and people smuggling alcohol across state lines. However when police would make these arrests the people being arrested were mostly of minority origins. Although poor whites from the South did get arrested as well, most of the jails and prisons were made up of blacks, hispanics and latinos. McGirr said that â€Å"Uneven enforcement was the hidden reason the white, urbane upper-middle class could laugh at the antics of Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, while Mexicans, poor European immigrants, African-Americans, poor whites in the South, and the unlucky experienced the full brunt of Prohibition enforcement’s deadly reality† (McGirr, 71). This is an important sentence by McGirr because it helps extend her thesis more. What she is saying with this is that because of this selective enforcement that the police did, they would not go and bust a nightclub filled with the upper class and would let the â€Å"urbane elite† (McGirr, 71) get away with drinking and distributing alcohol, even though it was illegal. Instead, the police would go and bust the poor, lower class of minorities that were making and distributing alcohol. In the South, poor African-Americans and whites would work together to