The biggest single boon to the machine occurred on January 16, 1919, with passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which, once it went into effect one year later, inaugurated the long, bloody era known as Prohibition. The Volstead Act—a series of laws and regulations that sought to eliminate the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of alcohol in the United States—became the law of the land. Thus began the most robust era in the history of organized crime. It was also a time when the new music became elevated to an exalted cultural status, so much so that a young author named F. Scott
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