How Prohibition Made Gatsby Great

By Mark Thornton

The new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a good movie, but it is no indictment against capitalism, as some may contend. It is rather an implicit condemnation of government prohibition.

When I read the book in high school I did not like it. I found it hard to read, not because it was overly complicated or poorly done, but because of the subject matter. The book (as well as the movie) dwells on decadence, licentiousness, promiscuity, and recklessness, or what was called “luxury” in the old days. I have an aversion to all that, and there was only so much I could take.

There is an important difference between wealth and luxury (in the modern sense) on one hand and the type of riotous over-the-top behavior on display in movies like The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge!, andLeaving Las Vegas.

Having written my dissertation on the economics of prohibition, I now understand the value of The Great Gatsby much better. The decadence on display serves, not merely as titillation for the reader/viewer, but as an object lesson in the evils of prohibition.

The whole plot is intimately tied to the prohibition of alcohol accomplished by the18^th Amendment to the Constitution. In particular, many aspects of the plot are driven by the black market that developed in the 1920s.

Prohibition made alcohol illegal, but it did not eliminate it. Illegal producers known as moonshiners sold their illegal product to illegal distributors known as bootleggers, who in turn sold it to illegal retail establishments known as speakeasies. Everything had to be secretive. The process was overseen by organized crime syndicates and street gangs who paid bribes to corrupt politicians and law enforcement. Respect for the law sank to an all-time low.

In the world of this black market, property rights were protected with machine guns rather than judges and juries. The stigma against young women drinking in bars at night was displaced by the allure of an exciting night out on the town drinking and listening to jazz. Instead of these profits going to competing entrepreneurs, the money was going into the pockets of thugs and wannabes. Social order was replaced by chaos. This cultural decay was the ironic fruit of the puritanically-motived prohibition movement.

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