George Remus (Mar. 21)

George Remus: A Real-Life Gatsby

Lecture Date: March 21, 2024

The UMW Dining Lecture

In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quit practicing law and started trafficking whiskey. Within two years he owned 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States and was known as the "King of the Bootleggers”—and even served as an inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. Pioneering prosecutor Mabel Walker Willebrandt was determined to bring him down. Willebrandt's bosses at the Department of Justice office hired her right out of law school, assuming she'd pose no real threat to the cozy relationship they maintained with Remus. Eager to prove them wrong, she began a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the bootlegger. Their bitter feud reached the highest levels of government—and ended in murder. Drawing on her book ,The Ghosts of Eden Park, Abbott Kahler (named a “master of the art of narrative nonfiction” by The Wall Street Journal) will explore the unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story of a rags-to-riches entrepreneur and a long-forgotten heroine, of the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, of America’s fascination with celebrity, and of the infinite human capacity to deceive. Fans of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire will recognize many of the characters in The Ghosts of Eden Park, and appreciate that George Remus—often forgotten in the annals of Prohibition-era gangsters—has finally gotten his due.

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The great illusion; an informal history of prohibition. by Asbury, Herbert, 1891-1963.
Call Number: HV5089 .A74
Publication Date: 1950
G-man : J. Edgar Hoover and the making of the American century by Beverly Gage
Call Number: HV7911.H66 G34 2022
ISBN: 9780670025374
Publication Date: 2022-11-22
Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 "Masterful...This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work"--The Washington Post "A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough."--The Wall Street Journal A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage's monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover's life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.
Public enemies : America's greatest crime wave and the birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough
Call Number: HV6783 .B85 2004
ISBN: 1594200211
Publication Date: 2004-07-15
Acclaimed Vanity Faircontributor Bryan Burrough brings to life the most spectacular crime wave in American history: the two-year battle between J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In 1933, police jurisdictions ended at state lines, the FBI was in its infancy, the highway system was spreading, fast cars and machine guns were easily available, and a good number of the thirteen million Americans who were out of work blamed the Great Depression on the banks. In short, it was a wonderful time to be a bank robber. On hand to take full advantage was a motley assortment of criminal masterminds, sociopaths, romantics, and cretins, some of whom, with a little help from J. Edgar Hoover, were to become some of the most famous criminals in American history. Bryan Burrough's grandfather once set up roadblocks in Alma, Arkansas, to capture Bonnie and Clyde. He didn't catch them. Burrough was suckled on stories of the crime wave, and now, after years of work, he succeeds where his grandfather failed, capturing the stories of Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the rest of the FBI's nemeses, weaving them into a single enthralling account. For more than forty years, the great John Toland's Dillinger Dayshas stood as the only book that provides the entire big picture of this fabled moment in American history. But an extraordinary amount of new material has come to light during those forty years, a good deal of it unearthed by Burrough in the course of his own research, and Public Enemiesreveals the extent to which Toland and others were fed the story the FBI wanted them to tell. The circles in which the "public enemies" moved overlapped in countless fascinating ways, large and small, as Burrough details. The actual connections are one thing; but quite another is the sense of connectedness Hoover created in the American public's mind for his own purposes. Using the tools of an increasingly powerful mass media, Hoover waged an unprecedented propaganda campaign, working the press, creating "America's Most Wanted" list, and marketing the mystique of the heroic "G-men" that successfully obscured an appalling catalog of professional ineptitude. When the FBI gunned down John Dillinger outside a Chicago movie theater in the summer of 1934, Hoover's ascent to unchecked power was largely complete. Both a hugely satisfying entertainment and a groundbreaking work with powerful echoes in today's news, Public Enemiesis the definitive history of America's first War on Crime.
J. Edgar Hoover : the man and the secrets by Curt Gentry
Call Number: HV7911.H6 G46 1991
ISBN: 0393024040
Publication Date: 1991-09-01
Prohibition : thirteen years that changed America by Edward Behr
Call Number: HV5089 .B424 1996
ISBN: 1559703563
Publication Date: 1996-09-30
Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws : Prohibition and New York City. by Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781438448152
Publication Date: 2013-09-26
With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, "drying up" New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation's greatest liquor market. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws focuses on liquor smuggling to tell the story of Prohibition in New York City. Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers. Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York City's scofflaw population--patrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubs--as well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James "Jimmy" Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation. Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New York's smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
Only yesterday : an informal history of the 1920s by Frederick L. Allen
Call Number: E741 .A64 2000
ISBN: 0060956658
Publication Date: 2010-06-29
"A perfectly grand piece of historical record and synthetic journalism." -- Chicago Daily Tribune From Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor-in-chief of Harper's magazine, comes a classic history of 1920s America, from the end of World War I to the stock market crash and the beginning of The Great Depression. Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has an exuberance and proximity to its subject--the Roaring Twenties in all its scandal and glory--that uniquely captures the feel of the era. Only Yesterday deals with that delightful decade from the Armistice in November 1918 to the panic and depression of 1929-30. Here is the story of Woodrow Wilson's defeat, the Harding scandals, the Coolidge prosperity, the revolution in manners and morals, the bull market and its smash-up. Allen's lively narrative brings back an endless variety of half-forgotten events, fashions, crazes, and absurdities. Deftly written, with a humorous touch, Only Yesterday traces, beneath the excitements of day-to-day life in the 20s, those currents in national life and thought which are the essence of true history.
Ardent spirits; the rise and fall of prohibition. by John Kobler
Call Number: HV5089 .K67
ISBN: 9780306805127
Publication Date: 1993-03-22
"This is first-rate popular history, full of anecdotes and vivid personalities, with a compelling narrative."--Smithsonian Ardent Spirit covers the full range of the temperance idea in America, beginning in the early seventeenth century and continuing through the prohibition years, 1919-1933. Using a wide variety of sources, Kobler quotes the amusing and often startling comments relating to the efforts of prohibitionists and lawmakers, so that the speakeasies, the rum-running, the bootleggers, and the gang wars all come vividly to life. Here too are portraits of eccentrics, instant millionaires, law enforcement officers, and murderers-all part of the Noble Experiment which proved to be one of the most tragicomic sagas in American history.
The 1920s by Kathleen Drowne; Patrick Huber
Call Number: E169.1 .D796 2004
ISBN: 0313320136
Publication Date: 2004-03-30
The American 1920s had many names: the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Dry Decade, and the Flapper generation. Whatever the moniker, these years saw the birth of modern America. This volume shows the many colorful ways the decade altered America, its people, and its future. American Popular Culture Through History volumes include a timeline, cost comparisons, chapter bibliographies, and a subject index. Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Damon Runyon presented distinct literary visions of the world. Jazz, blues, and country music erupted onto the airwaves. The exploits of Babe Ruth and Murderers' Row helped save baseball from its scandals, while such players as Red Grange and Notre Dame's Four Horsemen brought football to national prominence. Yo-yos, crossword puzzles, and erector sets appeared, along with fads like dance marathons and flagpole sitting. Rudolph Valentino, talkies, and Clara Bow's It girl appeared on the silver screen. Prohibition indirectly led to bootlegging and speakeasies, while the growing rebelliousness of teenagers highlighted an increasing generation gap.
Prohibition Gangsters : The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation. by Marc Mappen
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9780813561165
Publication Date: 2013-06-06
Master story teller Marc Mappen applies a generational perspective to the gangsters of the Prohibition era--men born in the quarter century span from 1880 to 1905--who came to power with the Eighteenth Amendment. On January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in the United States, "outlawing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." A group of young criminals from immigrant backgrounds in cities around the nation stepped forward to disobey the law of the land in order to provide alcohol to thirsty Americans. Today the names of these young men--Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Nucky Johnson--are more familiar than ever, thanks in part to such cable programs as Boardwalk Empire. Here, Mappen strips way the many myths and legends from television and movies to describe the lives these gangsters lived and the battles they fought. Placing their criminal activities within the context of the issues facing the nation, from the Great Depression, government crackdowns, and politics to sexual morality, immigration, and ethnicity, he also recounts what befell this villainous group as the decades unwound. Making use of FBI and other government files, trial transcripts, and the latest scholarship, the book provides a lively narrative of shootouts, car chases, courtroom clashes, wire tapping, and rub-outs in the roaring 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and beyond. Mappen asserts that Prohibition changed organized crime in America. Although their activities were mercenary and violent, and they often sought to kill one another, the Prohibition generation built partnerships, assigned territories, and negotiated treaties, however short lived. They were able to transform the loosely associated gangs of the pre-Prohibition era into sophisticated, complex syndicates. In doing so, they inspired an enduring icon--the gangster--in American popular culture and demonstrated the nation's ideals of innovation and initiative. View a three minute video of Marc Mappen speaking about Prohibition Gangsters.
Dry Manhattan: prohibition in New York City by Michael A. Lerner
Call Number: HV5090.N7 L47 2007 and e-book
ISBN: 0674040090
Publication Date: 2009-07-01
Prohibition was aggressively promoted--and spectacularly unsuccessful--in New York City. In the first major work on the subject in 25 years, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the U.S. that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.
The long thirst : prohibition in America, 1920-1933 by Thomas M. Coffey
Call Number: HV5089 .C66
ISBN: 0393055574
Publication Date: 1975-10-01

Speaker: Abbott Kahler

Abbott Kahler (previously writing as Karen Abbott) is the author of four New York Times bestselling works of narrative nonfiction: Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar Temptress Soldier Spy; and, most recently, The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime. Her next nonfiction book, Then Came the Devil, is about a disparate (and scheming) group of settlers on the Galapagos islands in the 1930s. Her debut novel, Where You End, is inspired by a true story of identical twins and a strange case of amnesia, and will be published on January 16. Abbott’s has written for newyorker.com, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine. She is the host of an iHeartRadio podcast, REMUS: THE MAD BOOTLEG KING, about bootlegger George Remus.

Great Lives 2024: George Remus: A Real-Life Gatsby (Mar. 21)

George Remus (Mar. 21)

George Remus: A Real-Life Gatsby

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Speaker: Abbott Kahler

Speaker: Abbott Kahler

Simpson Library