“Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb" (Fitzgerald 39-40). Since this novel is set in the time period during the 1920s, prohibition occurred at this time meaning that alcohol was illegal to manufacturing, store in barrels or bottles, transport and sell. Gatsby was a bootlegger (a form of organized crime) in the context that he sold and purchased these beverages illegally. This quote shows how Gatsby was able to transport the alcohol into the Unites States without being caught, he would have this alcohol located in the bottom of these crates so that it would look like he was just shipping fruit and not alcohol.
This is a picture of oranges and lemons which would arrive in crates along with the alcohol that Jay Gatsby snuck into the United States during the prohibition.
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This is a picture of Jay Gatsby (from the movie The Great Gatsby) with some alcoholic his hand. He is at one of his parties that he would throw in hope that the love of his life, Daisy would show up. At these parties he would have tons of alcohol.
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