The prohibition was quite possibly the weirdest time in American history as it was the only time the United States government explicitly removed a right of the American people. Due to this weirdness it is a great setting for a story like The Great Gatsby. The roaring 20’s is such an interesting time capsule of the transition between an old America and the modern era. The setting of the time was the aftermath of for the time the biggest war in history, the onset of new technologies and the peak of industrialization with everyone moving to major cities to work for poor wages. All before the 30’s and the Great Depression and dust bowl In The Great Gatsby we see the older part of this transitional era as the rich didn’t change too terribly much as in the previous century the rich would make there way by exploiting workers in fields and other industries, and in the 20th century they did so by doing the same but in city’s. Getting back to the prohibition with all the chaos of the time it was amplified by the illegalization of alcohol due to this the aforementioned ways of getting rich added a new way of making it big and that was bootlegging this was a fascinating business as there were many different ways of doing it you had the people make it moonshine in there bathtub, importing it from offshore and smuggling it back into the country, priests and other religious leaders selling wine, holding up your own trucks to steal the liquor from yourself (what Al Capone did) and In my opinion the most impactful was drivers making hidden compartments in there cars to get past the cops but also modifying there cars to go faster to outrun the cops. What makes this so interesting is that this need for speed that these gangsters had is what led to the creation of Nascar as you get a bunch of adrenaline junkies who run from cops with fancy fast cars there gonna have some fun racing them. By not too great stretch of the imagination Jay Gatsby could have been a small part of creating one of the biggest motor sports and I find that too funny.
