WASHINGTON – The evening of Jan. 16, 1920, hours before Prohibition descended on America, while the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, drank champagne in Washington with other members of Harvard’s class of 1904, in Norfolk, Va., evangelist Billy Sunday preached to 10,000 celebrants: “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. … ” Not exactly.

Daniel Okrent’s darkly hilarious “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” recounts how Americans abolished a widely exercised private right – and condemned the nation’s fifth-largest industry – in order to make the nation more Heavenly. Then all Hell broke loose. Now that ambitious government is again Hell-bent on improving Americans – from how they use salt to what light bulbs they use – Okrent’s book is a timely tutorial on the law of unintended consequences.

The ship that carried John Winthrop to Massachusetts in 1630 also carried, Okrent reports, 10,000 gallons of wine and three times more beer than water. John Adams’ morning eye-opener was a tankard of hard cider; James Madison drank a pint of whiskey daily; by 1830, adult per capita consumption was the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80 proof liquor annually.

Although whiskey often was a safer drink than water, Americans, particularly men, drank too much. Women’s Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women’s rights – rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. So the United States Brewers’ Association officially opposed women’s suffrage.

Women campaigning for sobriety did not intend to give rise to the income tax, plea bargaining, a nationwide crime syndicate, Las Vegas, NASCAR (country boys outrunning government agents), a redefined role for the federal government and a privacy right – the “right to be let alone” – that eventually was extended to abortion rights. But they did.

By 1900, per capita consumption of alcohol was similar to today’s, but mere temperance was insufficient for the likes of Carry Nation. She was “six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache,” and she wanted Prohibition. It was produced by the sophisticated tenacity of the Anti-Saloon League, which at its peak was spending the equivalent of 50 million of today’s dollars annually. Okrent calls it “the mightiest pressure group in the nation’s history.” It even prevented redistricting after the 1920 census, the first census to reveal that America’s urban – and most wet – population was a majority.

Before the 18th Amendment could make drink illegal, the 16th Amendment had to make the income tax legal. It was needed because by 1910 alcohol taxes were 30 percent of federal revenues.

Workmen’s compensation laws gave employers an interest in abstemious workers. Writes Okrent, Asa Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola Company, saw “opportunity on the other side of the dry rainbow.” World War I anti-German fever fueled the desire to punish brewers with names like Busch, Pabst, Blatz and Schlitz. And President Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism became a wartime justification for what Okrent calls “the federal government’s sudden leap into countless aspects of American life,” including drink.

And so Prohibition came. Sort of. Briefly.

After the first few years, alcohol consumption dropped only 30 percent. Soon smugglers were outrunning the Coast Guard ships in advanced speedboats, and courts inundated by violations of Prohibition began to resort to plea bargains to speed “enforcement” of laws so unenforceable that Detroit became known as the City on a Still.

Prohibition agents cherished $1,800 jobs because of the bribes that came with them. Fiorello La Guardia taunted the government that it would need “150,000 agents to watch the first 150,000.” Exemptions from Prohibition for church wine and medicinal alcohol became ludicrously large – and lucrative – loopholes.

After 13 years, Prohibition, by then reduced to an alliance between evangelical Christians and criminals, was washed away by “social nullification” – a tide of alcohol – and by the exertions of wealthy people like Pierre du Pont who hoped that the return of liquor taxes would be accompanied by lower income taxes. (They were.) Ex-bootleggers found new business opportunities in the southern Nevada desert. And in the Second World War, draft boards exempted brewery workers as essential to the war effort.

The many lessons of Okrent’s story include: In the fight between law and appetite, bet on appetite. And: Americans then were, and let us hope still are, magnificently ungovernable by elected nuisances.

© 2010, Washington Post Writers Group