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Rum Running and the Roaring Twenties

Prohibition on the Michigan-Ontario Waterway

Philip P. Mason

By WSU Faculty, Canadian Studies, Detroit, Great Lakes, History, Michigan

Paperback
Available May 2024
ISBN: 9780814351048
Pages: 192 Size: 7 x 9.5
Illustrations: 206 b&w photos
$25.99
Hardcover
Published: December 1995
ISBN: 9780814325834
Pages: 192 Size: 7 x 9.5
Illustrations: 206 b&w photos
$39.99
Ebook
Available May 2024
ISBN: 9780814351055
Pages: 192 Size: EPUB
Illustrations: 206 b&w photos
$19.99
Review

Mason takes you back to the era when Detroit was on top of the world, a boom town throwing off the new wealth of the auto industry and creating a new way of life for the working class.

— Crain’s Detroit

On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in the United States, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, use, or importation of alcoholic beverages. Yet the resulting peace and tranquility predicted never materialized. The Prohibition experiment failed dismally in the United States, and nowhere worse than in Michigan. The state's close proximity to Canada, where large amounts of liquor were manufactured, made it a major center for the smuggling and sale of illegal alcohol. Although federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies attempted to stop the flow of liquor into Michigan, an astounding seventy-five percent of all illegal liquor brought into the United States was transported across the Detroit River from Canada.

Using police and court records, newspaper accounts, and interviews with those who lived during the time, Philip P. Mason has constructed a fascinating history of life in Michigan during Prohibition. He regales readers with stories of the bungled efforts by officials at every level to control the smuggling and sale of illegal alcohol. Most entertaining are the creative smuggling efforts undertaken by citizens of all walks of life-the poor, middle class, and affluent, upstanding citizens and organized criminals and gang members.

By 1928 Prohibition was a major issue in the presidential campaign. In 1933, with the support of President Franklin Roosevelt, Michigan's governor William Comstock, and other leaders, the Twenty-first Amendment was passed, repealing Prohibition. Michigan was the first state to ratify the amendment on April 10, 1933, and soon the Detroit River was returned to pleasure boats and fishing and commercial vessels whose holds no longer carried illegal liquor.

Philip P. Mason (1927-2021) was a Distinguished Professor of History at Wayne State University and director of the Archives of Labor & Urban Affairs at the Walter P. Reuther Library. He was the author of The Ambassador Bridge and the editor of Copper Country Journal, amongst other publications. Professor Mason received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan; he was awarded 2009 Historical Society of Michigan Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mason takes you back to the era when Detroit was on top of the world, a boom town throwing off the new wealth of the auto industry and creating a new way of life for the working class."

– Crain?s Detroit