Trump's boat strikes: the war that isn't a war

A century of futility

Cargo on a dock in the Bahamas bound for the “parched American throat,” (1921 photo by Edward Jewitt Wheeler of the Literary Digest.)

The constitutional amendment that banned the making and selling of “intoxicating liquors” in the United States beginning in 1920 had an unintended side-effect: It completely transformed two islands in the Atlantic.

Nassau, the British colonial port in the Bahamas, was flooded with drink intended for illegal sale in the U.S. — its imports of Scotch whisky, for example, increased by 421% — and it reaped a fortune in tariffs on the alcohol trade. The tiny French island of St. Pierre, a sleepy fishing community off the coast of Newfoundland, charged a much lower duty and also prospered, turning over as many as six million bottles of booze a year.

The islands became nodes in a vast bootlegging network that slaked the thirst of Americans deprived of legal beer, wine and hard liquor. As Daniel Okrent relates in Last Call, his captivating history of Prohibition, “…