The Black Market, The Great Gatsby, and the Corrupted American Dream

The History & Economics in Literature: Prohibition and The Great Gatsby

Introduction

The Roaring Twenties were a decade of glittering contradiction. America attempted to legislate virtue through Prohibition, implemented the 18th Amendment¹, and the Volstead Act². Yet the decade throbbed with jazz, speculation, and rebellion against restraint. It was an age that preached purity but practiced indulgence, creating a moral landscape as unstable as the stock market itself. 

Prohibition aimed to uplift society by eliminating alcohol. Instead, it boosted demand, pushing drinking underground and turning an ordinary consumer good into the engine of a fast-growing criminal marketplace. Far from cultivating discipline, it trained the public to work around the law rather than respect it. In this hidden economy, a new American figure emerged: the Prohibition gangster. Men like Al Capone symbolized the unintended consequences of moral legislation—profiting from the very vice that government sought to eliminate.