For JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton revisits Prohibition during the Coolidge administration, when the moral outrage that pushed for Prohibition didn’t extend to saving the lives of people dying from poisoned industrial alcohol:
…[the] New York of the 1920’s viewed certain populations as disposable. By entering the sphere of immorality, alcoholics, in the eyes of the Coolidge administration, forfeited their right to life. It’s telling that, even in death, there are two rules: one related to “respectable drunks” and one for the degenerates.
