The president had been worried about reports of bootlegging in his fraternity.ĭan, 62, makes his home in New York City and Wellfleet. Halfway through 'Last Call,' Dan brings the story home to Western Massachusetts by recounting when President Calvin Coolidge - who kept a dry White House and once toasted a head of state with a glass of water - 'mobilized the full might of the federal government to crack down on a bootlegging operation.'įour Holyoke men were eventually indicted for possession of 13 bottles of liquor and 37 cases of beer, and with selling to the men of Phi Delta at Amherst College.

He brought liquor into the country legally before the end of Prohibition and sold a great deal of it after.'Īnother follows the thread of the alliance between the progressives, suffragists and the Ku Klux Klan, which - surprise - supported the women's right to vote and helped pass Prohibition. Kennedy) made his fortune during Prohibition as a bootlegger,' Dan says. 'The one thing I thought I knew for sure when I started the book: Joe Kennedy (father of President John F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joe Kennedy along with the lesser-known-but-just-as-vivid Wayne Wheeler and Pauline Sabin - to move the story of the 18th Amendment and create in readers a page-turning chorus of 'I didn't know that!' He awakens ghosts from American history - Carry Nation, Billy Sunday, Al Smith, William Jennings Bryan, Al Capone, F. The newly released 'Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition' (Scribner, $30) is his latest book, one that took him four and a half years to research and write.

Last call prohibition