The Girls in the Stilt House

The postwar period in America was an era filled with social change, new laws, holdovers from the past century, and hope for the future. Prohibition, the Great Migration, and sharecropping impacted the national climate of the 1920s and certainly influenced the text and its characters.

The temperance movement of the 1800s led to the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. This created a new national relationship with alcohol that is reflected in characters like Creedle, Frank, Dalton, and Virgil. From 1920 to 1933, “the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess. The solution [to] the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. [… It] is very clear that […] more people were drinking, and people were drinking more” (“Unintended Consequences of Prohibition.” PBS). In the novel, Virgil is often drunk and displays withdrawal symptoms when he cannot get the alcohol to which he’s become addicted. In addition, Creedle enlists Dalton Patterson to transport and store his alcohol, decreasing Creedle’s risk and implicating Dalton in the scheme. Prohibition also led to a great deal of police corruption, and it is this corruption that gives Frank such confidence that he can manipulate the law.