American History Hit - Prohibition

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

On 17 January 1920, the 18th Amendment came into effect in the United States. It made the manufacture, sale and transportation of 'intoxicating liquor' illegal.Sarah Churchwell is BACK to explore the realities of the roaring twenties with Don. Why was alcohol banned? How did prohibition become federal law? And why would the US government have poisoned its citizens?Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Anisha Deva. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. A light wrap on an inconspicuous door. A small panel shoots open.

A password is uttered in a whisper. The eyes hold for a suspicious moment. Then the heavy door pulls open just enough to allow us inside, into a short, unlit corridor, leading to a second door that opens into a world. Opulent velvet curtains drape the windless walls. Plush armchairs host shady conversations. Everything is dim, dark. fogged by cigarette smoke, so you can hardly make out of face.

It's jazz music and small talk. Men and women mingling, laughing, their glasses brimmed with cocktails made with questionable spirits, bathtub gin, and homemade moonshine, all mixed with sugar, mint, and lemon to mask an ugly aftertaste. Everywhere in this room is a transgression, a law broken, a crime born of the sale and distribution of the prohibited alcohol. Greetings, I'm Don Wilden, host of American History Hit, and thanks for joining us. Today, it is nearly inconceivable, shocking even, the notion that at one time in America it was constitutionally illegal to manufacture, transport, and or sell alcoholic beverages.

Can you imagine? In a country that has historically loved to drink, a century-long protest movement finally evolved into a political powerhouse that effectively shut down the breweries and distilleries and all the saloons, in an earnest effort to sober up American morality. And it worked. Prohibition. Well, it sort of worked. For 13 years, anyway. Many back then considered Prohibition a ridiculous and divisive nonsense. H. L. Mencken called it a crazy enactment.

But its impact on the future of American culture is undeniable. And if it didn't straighten up American lives, at least it improved our livers. And here with me today on the line from London, to explain its effect both domestically and abroad, here's the esteemed professor, Sarah, Sarah Churchwell. Hello, Sarah, thanks for having me back. Sarah, you and I were on a previous episode, which I recorded in your office with you at the University of London. Lessons of the Civil War, I invite everyone to circle back and hear that one. Fascinating critique of Gone with the wind. This is a very different subject altogether. It is the about 90th anniversary of the repeal

of Prohibition, which was December 5th, 1933. You are an expert on the period, thanks to a great book you've written called Careless People, Murder, Mayhem, and the invention of the Great Gatsby. I mean, that's the roaring 20s right there. It's great to have you with us. Thanks so much. You must have done a lot of research on Prohibition for that book, I imagine. I read a lot of books, and I also drank a lot of cocktails. I thought, if you're going to research Prohibition, there's theory, and then there's proxas. Just get drunk.

So the subject's interesting. Prohibition, 1920, 1933, a fabled era, which most Americans today find just ludicrous. But it happened for serious reasons. Americans were slashed. In the 19th century, it had become a moral crisis, not to mention a physical one. Why was booze so popular in the United States? Or was it any more popular than elsewhere? Well, no, there certainly was an explosion of drinking in the United States.

I don't claim to be a global historian, so I can't say whether it was more popular in the U.S. in the 19th century than it was in other countries. But what happened in the 19th century was that, first of all, we need to remember that we're talking about the Industrial Revolution. and the Industrial Revolution had all kinds of effects and unintended consequences, and one of them was that it got cheaper to make and distribute things, and one of those things happened to be alcohol. Think about the ways in which Transcontinental Railroad changed the ways that Americans live their lives across the 19th century. That also made alcohol easier to get a hold up. Ironically, given what happens with prohibition, it made safe alcohol easier to get a hold of because it was industrial produced. And so you didn't have to make your own alcohol.

at home. And so it actually became more popular. You also have the rise of the middle class. You have the rise of certain kinds of labor laws. That mean that people have a little bit more discretionary income. So some of the changes that would lead to the kind of 20th century attitudes that were familiar with around drinking as a more social activity started to happen. That's one set of, you know, factors. Another big factor in the U.S., certainly, why there was a spike in drinking was that you had a population that was historically dry, because, of course, the Puritanical Protestant community that had come over with the earliest British waves of immigration were often teetotal, and if not teetotal, were certainly temperate. And they saw that they took that position through religious conviction. And then you have

in the South, you have Baptist communities that, again, through religious conviction, were teetotal. But in the 19th century, immigrants start coming, immigrants who have strong links with drinking cultures. Hold that thought, because that's the big point I want to get to next. But I just want to nail down how much we were drinking. I mean, 1830, the average American drank about seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. That's more than 60 bottles of whiskey. I mean, just consider that. Seven gallons of pure alcohol. We're not just drinking beer or wine in those days. That's the more digestible lower percentage stuff. This is whiskey and hard cider. I mean, it really was an extraordinary amount of this. Part of the reason I've always talked sort of anecdotally is that it was so dangerous to drink water. You know, water was a really questionable. beverage in those days, especially in the cities, I suppose, where you had sort of a septic problem. Yeah. Those sort of toxins don't live in alcohol in that kind of environment. So if you're going to have a drink, at least it's not going to make you physically sick until you've had too much of it.

But all of this contributes. The high-minded thing that I have learned from doing this podcast, I just want to put a pin in for everybody, is this is the mercantile era of the United States, right? That's what you're referring to with the industrial era. This is when people are learning how to make money. And the middle class rises because they learn this. Beverage-making is an incredibly good profit-making exercise, and that has a lot to do with it. You know, we are a country that loves to make money. So beverage and alcohol is a great place to do that. That all contributes, correct?

Absolutely. And the rise of restaurant culture. Again, when you have a little bit more discretionary income, the rise of the middle class, it means that you're not just cooking and eating your own food. You're not just living on sustainable farming. But you've got also the increase of urban living, which creates restaurant culture and fosters a drinking culture. It fosters the development of saloons.

if you're in rural areas, they're fewer and farther between literally as well as figuratively. But I would also go back to your point about the average drinking and just remind people that that kind of average is as shocking as it sounds. We've got to remember that that average would not have included the vast majority of middle class women. And it would not have included these temperate communities that we're talking about. And what that means is that the people who were drinking were drinking enough to make that average go that high. Because there were plenty of people who weren't touching alcohol at all. and as a significant proportion of the population. So imagine how much the people who were drinking were drinking to make that an average per capita

consumption. Insane. Was there just not an awareness of the danger of drink like that? I think there wasn't a sense that it was addictive in quite the ways that we have. But people absolutely knew what its dangers were. And that's exactly what takes us to prohibition. They certainly understood its dangers. And I want to underscore your really important point about the dangers of water, because we forget that with modern sanitation, that there wasn't just an.

obvious alternative. And indeed, the other obvious alternative that we're all familiar with, soft drinks, is basically an effect of prohibition as well. So you're absolutely right that a particular beer was given to people as a healthful alternative often to water. And that's why sailors drank rum on boats, because it was safer than the water. So these are really important contexts for us to understand what otherwise might seem in a modern context quite inexplicable. Now, let's talk about these immigrants because this is really fascinating. The 19th century have all these waves of immigrants. One of those waves is from Germany. Enormous amount of German immigrants come for different reasons than we traditionally know. I mean, this is a great land of opportunity for Germans to come

over because there are these industries that are already developed in Germany that they can see great promise for in America. One of them is beer making. The midsection of the country, the Midwest, St. Louis, all the way up to Wisconsin, is great for Pilsner beer. manufacture. Why? Because of limestone. The whole middle part of the country is famous for its caves, right? Those caves are limestone caves. When you have limestone, you have a natural refrigeration. The earth holds a temperature at a certain level year round. Pilsner beer needs that kind of stability, that temperature stability. All throughout the middle part of the country, you have that everywhere. And they knew that was there, and they knew that they could make a new beverage that Americans would

really like, because we were all used to ale and wine, but Pilsner beer was going to quench thirsts. Absolutely. And let's not forget the amber waves of grain all across America's heartland. So they see all the natural resources that they need in order to bring over a set of technical skills that they already have and to create an industry that they know how to build. So there's a huge opportunity just waiting for them. And that is exactly why the Germans land in the Midwest, as you said, and begin brewing. So the Germans are coming over in part because they can see the business opportunity. They're also, of course, fleeing revolution in the mid part of the 19th century. At exactly the same time, in the late 1840s, there is also a massive wave of Irish immigration to the U.S. from people escaping the famine. And what do the Irish bring with

them? They bring a whiskey culture. And they, of course, are settling in the eastern and Midwestern cities in particular, New York, Chicago, Boston. We all know about the Irish immigration population in those major cities at that time in the 19th century. And Italians with the wine culture a little bit later in the 19th century, but they become part of this kind of moral panic. So what happens is with the spike in drinking in the culture overall, this puritanical legacy

that says that drinking is the devil's brew and that everybody's going to go to hell, and also they know that it is dangerous, they can see it's dangerous. Then you have immigrant cultures coming in and bringing what to those older immigrant communities are seen as foreign, alien, dangerous habits. They think that they bring crime.

and drunkenness obviously can lead to crime and did. It's certainly correlated with poverty. And then we need to throw in one other ingredient to the mix, which is incredibly important across the 19th century, which is the rise of the gradual, slow but eventual rise of women's rights. And remember that there's crime, you know, external public crime, if you like, legal crime, that drinking engenders, but there's also domestic crime.

There's domestic violence, which wouldn't even been recognized as a crime at the time because women didn't have any rights within the home. So you have a situation in which many, many women are trying to deal with alcoholism at home. They're dealing with the domestic violence that it was fostering, and they're dealing with the poverty that it could be creating when their husband was effectively drinking up all of their wages and, you know, sitting in the slum. So women become leaders in the temperance movement, not just because they're Christians and because they're supposed to be moral guardians of the soul of the nation, although that's part of the culture.

But for much more pragmatic reasons, which is that it's a proxy for legal action that they can't otherwise take. And if you don't have a medical cure or treatment of any kind, then you try to pull it out at the roots. And that's part of what prohibition was about as well. So there are all of these ways in which different communities across the country were being kind of catalyzed into a sense of moral panic at these rising rates of drinking and saying something must be done and increasingly agitating for prohibition as the correct answer. It's both troubling and encouraging to imagine the time. I mean, you know, I'm a 60s-born kid. And so I know that there was a time before the internet, you know, before ultra-awareness of everything

was in your hand at any given time. Never mind the 19th century. You know, things that happened in the home, domestic violence, drinking, all kinds of things that were, you know, the social ills of this country. People just didn't communicate the way they do now. There wasn't a public awareness of this stuff, which is why I mean it's encouraging because the community aspect of this, the uprising of organizations that we'll talk about in a moment is an extraordinary factor of American life that really comes through defeating these problems in America. And the women are at the center of it all. It's political activism of a kind that we completely recognize. It's just behind a project that we wouldn't see as being that kind of political project now. But it's

exactly that. It's political activism. It's actually, if you take out of it, degree to which it didn't work and the way it backfired in its undetended consequences, it is an inspiring story about collective action in the U.S. There's another aspect to it as well that really comes into just before the passing of prohibition in 1920, of course, is when it comes into law, which is another part that, if you like, is the kind of positive side of prohibition. Their hearts were in the right place, and this was a good faith effort to do better as a society. And that is also about workplace safety, because as part of the industrial revolution,

you have this increase in factory workers and people were coming to work drunk or hungover, and it was creating really serious workplace accidents. And so it was, again, a way to try to legislate so that if you're operating heavy machinery, you're not drunk while you're doing it. And so we have different laws to manage that. But again, you know, this was a good faith effort in many respects at first to try to create a better and safer society. I want to come back to the immigrant thing later because it's a double-edged sword there.

You know, on one hand, it's the land of opportunity. all these innovative people are coming, but they're also representing that which America will backlash against. There's a huge amount of anti-immigrant stuff that happens as a result. But let's get on to prohibition and how it really happens. This actually starts, as I mentioned in the opening, as a very gradual effort. It's not like, you know, one day the United States just decided this was a bad thing. This is, of course, a state-based movement that starts in pockets in America. First and foremost, in Maine, like the 1850s, there was an individual who says, let's get this problem solved. that sort of spreads out. Absolutely. And in fact, it's even earlier than that. One way to think about

this, and the way I often think about prohibition and the temperance movement, so-called, although it became, you know, obviously a prohibition movement, is that there are really three great reform movements across the 19th century, of which prohibition, what became prohibition is just one. And they all took a century to come into force. But they emerged together, their kind of triplets as social reform movements. Temperance is one. The abolition of slavery and women's suffrage, which we've already mentioned, is the third. All of those come out of the religious revival in the first decades of the 19th century that was called the Second Great Awakening. And that revival, that movement was focused on piety, personal betterment, an emphasis on individual responsibility to make a better society. And the

social reform movements come out of that. So though we often talk about abolition, women's suffrage and prohibition as being three distinct and, you know, weirdly simultaneous phenomena, that's not the case at all. They were, in fact, interrelated from their inception. And there's a reason why prohibition and women's suffrage come into law in the same year in 1920. They both basically took about a century to make happen. Because the problem of slavery was far more urgent and far more vicious, it came to a head much sooner. But they start around the same time around the 1820s and 1830s, you see these movements to reform so that by the 1840s and 1850s, you're starting to see the kinds of legal changes that you're talking about in Maine,

Vermont, a lot of it is, again, in these puritanical communities in the Northeast, where they just said, look, we need to do something about this and we're going to make a change. And it was very much state by state throughout the 19th century. It is, you know, again, like that today. The analogy that I would draw is, and this may sound like an invidious analogy, but I don't mean it that way. I just think it's accurate, is that it's a lot like gun control laws now. You see a major social ill and state by state, each state is trying to figure out how to solve it. And then because your neighboring state might be doing it differently, people can move across the states and they may or may not be affected differently by those laws and say, well, we stop drinking in Maine, but oh my God, those people are coming over from

Pennsylvania who are heavy drinkers. These, you know, German drinkers are coming over. And so we've got to do something to stop them repolluting our communities. So over the course of the 19th century, that effort to make a state-by-state local intervention starts to break down because of the movement of people's across the federated United States. It's a lesson for those of us today, you know, who are addressing ills in whatever version we're doing. I mean, this really was the way it was done back then out of practicality as much as anything. Today, we turned so heavily to the federal government because of media pushing us that

way often. This is how change was made in America through the 19th century into the first half of the 20th. We expected it would start with our states and it would develop slowly and gradually, which is kind of how the best changes happen. There are some headlines. You know, there are headline groups. the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded 1874 in Hillsborough, Ohio by women Christians

who declared at their first conference in Cleveland, Ohio, 1874, that they would create a sober and pure world through abstinence, purity, and Christianity. These things seem so vaunted at this point to be so naive, really. How were they building this movement through language? The Women's Christian's Temperance Union, which is now only remembered for its stance on temperance, was also a group that was actually advocating for women's suffrage. It was working around questions of prostitution and sex rights. It was taking on a broad range of what we might see as feminist issues, which is why I say that it's important to understand prohibition,

as for them, what we would describe as a feminist issue, because it was a way of addressing domestic violence and poverty. As you say, they had these rhetorical campaigns that they were very effective at leveraging. And again, this may sound foreign to us right now, although increasingly less so, as we become a less secular society, or at least as we become a society that's more in conflict over whether we are a secular society or a religious society again. But in the 19th century, this number is off the top of my head, so it won't be entirely accurate, but it is something like 90 to 95 percent of Americans self-identified as Christian across the 19th century.

So it was a high majority of the population, not just that they were culturally Christian in the ways that we might understand that in a kind of secular world, but that they were actively pious that they were engaged in and understood themselves as active Christians. And so if you had a reform movement that you wanted to make in the 19th century, Christianity was your go-to strategy in the United States. And of course, abolition, again, was also, you know, made on the same grounds that it was unfitting for a Christian country to enslave others, that it was immoral. And it was immoral for people to drink. And it was immoral for women as the moral guardians of American culture to allow American culture to degrade itself to that degree.

It's important to remember that these are people who genuinely believed that drinking was a sin in and of itself and it was a sign of more general sinfulness. And it meant that you were going to help. They were operating on a conviction that they were saving people from damnation. You know, there isn't much of a stronger conviction than that. And again, you know, we might say that it was none of their business in the way that we understand society. But you can't fault them for not operating in good faith and having their hearts in the right place. They're literally trying to save people from going to hell. That was the language that they used in their campaigns. And it was very successful. This is where the phrase demon liquor comes from, or certainly where it was popularized anyway. It was with the idea that

liquor is literally a demon. It turns you into a demon. And they also understood it as a slippery slope to other kinds of addictions. Again, they wouldn't use that language. But they saw them all as being interconnected. So they knew that in states of intoxication, certainly, that people were prone to violence. So the idea that it turned you into a demon. You didn't have to go far to find examples of that. Every home was dealing with it. So in the absence of any kind of medical intervention, understanding it in a Christian framework as a moral campaign was the obvious paradigm in which to think about alcohol and to argue for its reform. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. If a woman was experiencing domestic violence, where would she turn typically in those days?

there wasn't the kind of law enforcement. There wasn't the sort of support networks that we have today. How was that done? Well, she couldn't turn anywhere except to her family members. It wasn't just that there wasn't legal enforcement. The laws were against her. Their laws were that she had no rights within the home. The laws were that her husband owned all property in her name. She could not have bank accounts in her name. So he got to decide what was done with the property and with the wages. And if she went to the police, they would say, tough. It's his choice. There were no laws against domestic. violence, except in the most extreme cases, and often not even then. And that includes, of course, not just spousal abuse, but also abusive children. Mothers were, in the vast majority of cases,

were almost powerless to stop domestic violence from happening. And they knew that alcohol, obviously alcohol is not a sole cause of domestic violence, but it also certainly is a contributing factor. It seems like that's important to underscore that this whole movement, beginning as it is a women's movement had to have been fueled by women getting together and saying, what the hell am I supposed to do here? This guy's drinking every night. He's beating the kids. He's doing everything. Who do I turn to? This becomes a very fertile bed to grow a movement in. Exactly that. Before then, literally the only people they could turn to were family members, but the law would return them to their marital home if the husband asserted his marital rights.

And of course, remembering that we're also in an era in which marital rape is also legal. So as part of what we are broadly referring to as domestic violence, you know, it's worth being specific about what kinds of violence was covered under that broad umbrella that marital rape was also legal and again would certainly have been impacted by alcohol abuse. So really, where else would they turn? The law is not on their side and the only place that they could turn before the emergence of these kinds of organized groups was to family members and friends. And that's your only recourse. And they may or may not have been able to be. able to, you know, intervene with a violent husband, but the vast majority of times they couldn't. And women were helpless in these situations. And then you develop these kinds of organized politically active groups saying, we are going to change things. And that's why they were so closely associated with suffrage movements as well, because they understood that these were interconnected, of course, that women's rights were what needed to be asserted here. And if they couldn't assert them through the courts around property rights, maybe they could assert them indirectly around a movement

to at least stop the worst of the kinds of abuses that women were having to deal with because of alcohol abuse. Other organizations also rise up, the Anti-Saloon League founded by Wayne Wheeler. There's a whole movement going on, but I need to ask you, how did they do this? I mean, how did it come to the past that we actually passed a law to prohibit alcohol? 1920. Actually, the ASL and Wayne Wheeler, who you just mentioned there, are absolutely crucial to answering that question because Wayne Wheeler was a political operative that, you know, lobbyists.

today could learn a lot from. The ASL really is one of the first political powerhouse lobbying organizations, isn't it? They kind of shove a political position forward and start working it. Absolutely. They're still to date, one of the most successful political lobbying groups in American history, right up there with the NRA and the civil rights as a more positive version of it. And probably those three, certainly across the long 20th century, have got to be the most consistently organized and the most single focused. And that's the key thing about their success. Each of those lobbying groups, we need to remember that they are single-issue groups. And the ASL, the Anti-Saloon League, unlike the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which, as we have said, had other political battles that it was fighting around women's rights.

The ASL did not care what party you belong to. It did not care what religion you were. It did not care whether you drank in private. It did not care anything about what you did as long as you voted for prohibition than Wayne Wheeler was working with you. And so he created this really powerful coalition of people who, for any number of reasons, believed that prohibition was legally the right thing to do. But he didn't have kind of purity tests about them needing to agree with him on every single thing. He just said, pragmatically, if you vote for prohibition, I'm your guy. And so he helped an enormous number of politicians get into power on the basis of that platform. The unique aspect of this fight is that they choose to do it constitutionally, as opposed to legislation. I mean, this could have been

just laws changed, but they go for the jugular here. They want an amendment to the constitution. How did that happen and why so bold? Well, it didn't start out that bold, right? So they did try to do it state by state. The ASL developed later after, you know, almost a century at that point of various kinds of efforts across the country to create detembrance movements and then. and abstinence movement. By the time that the ASL came along in the early 20th century, America had developed this kind of ad hoc set of responses to the problem of drinking. And there were states that were bound and determined not to pass anti-drinking laws that never did, by the way. It was never ratified in Connecticut. So they wanted national uniformity. They wanted it to be a

nationwide ban. And they wanted that in part because, again, as we can see with, you know, controversial issues around our own political fights right now on a state-by-state basis, reproductive rights being the obvious one. With the repeal of Roe v. Wade, there is an enormous conversation happening in our country, as everybody listening to this knows, about the fact that women can move state to state and what will happen if they have different reproductive rights in different states. And those conflicts are already arising and the questions about how those laws are going to work and practice are identical to the kinds of problems that arose around the fact that there were different laws around temperance and around abstinence as you moved from

state to state. So they wanted uniformity and they wanted to be able to institute this national ban. It's also a different political context. I mean, we're coming out of the 19th century when a lot of amendments have been made to the Constitution. Changing the Constitution is an ordinary and necessary part of American life. It's part of activism. It's part of improving and progressing forward. Now we have a completely different idea of this. I mean, we shudder at the thought of the political campaigns involved in changing the Constitution. Back then, it could be done, whatever reasons in Congress. But the 18th Amendment is proposed on December 18th, 1917, then, as you say, ratified only by 36 states on January 16th, 1919. On July 22nd, 1919, the Volstead Act, named for Andrew Volstead

of Minnesota, a little trivia point there, passed by Congress, and the National Prohibition Act goes into effect on January 17th, 1920. What has a lot of? happened that day? Was it just illegal to have a glass of wine in your house? No, it wasn't that radical, right? No, it wasn't because it was the manufacture, the sale and the transportation of liquor that was banned, not crucially owning alcohol and not drinking alcohol. Those were not criminalized. So the idea that we have that, you know, people who were kind of caught drinking on the street or something might be thrown in jail, it's not true. To use a modern analogy, if we think about illegal drug use today, the difference in penalties between whether you are caught as, you know,

a user of drugs or a dealer of drugs, there is a major difference in the criminal penalty and the same thing applied here. They took the view that it was the dissemination of the alcohol. That was the problem. Also, they recognized that there were medicinal uses for alcohol and that there needed to be medicinal exceptions. That becomes a huge problem in the enforcement of prohibition, but as they conceived of it, they thought that this would be how you would manage it, is that you would say you could still have alcohol where you needed it, but that it would be licensed and controlled more effectively. It was, of course, licensed and controlled less effectively once it all started. It was perceived really as a urban versus rural problem. I referred to H.L. Mencken

early in the opener. Those who fought against it were really the urban people, you know, and this was the yokels who wanted to, you know, inflict themselves. It's a theme that still goes on in America is the Suburban's versus the cities. In the cities, you had speakeasies, of course. The loopholes begin to show in big way. New York City has, I don't know, they never are able to put a number to it, but it's upwards of 100,000 speakeasies. It's insane. You know, like, you could get a drink anywhere, basically.

It's a huge part of the roaring 20s, which you are such an expert on. Tell me how prohibition had the ironic effect of fueling this country and fueling the culture. Absolutely. So, you know, I think we do need to the pushback against the idea that the second that the Volstadt Act went into effect that sort of everybody was ready with these really high-tech speakeasies, You know, the idea that we get from Hollywood that they have all of these tunnels already built and all of these systems already. That took years to develop, obviously. So there was this expectation that everybody was going to get, you know, wildly drunk on the last night. And then there was going to be this kind of national hangover and everybody would give up drinking.

And that's just not what happened. One of the reasons that it didn't happen is because there was almost no enforcement. They said we were going to do this nationally, but then they didn't actually put federal money into enforcing it. And what that meant was that in big cities, actually in rural areas too. It was incredibly easy to set up your speakeasy in the basement of anybody's home. You could just turn your bedroom into a speakeasy. It was just totally easy to do. And then you just spread the word, again, exactly like drug culture today. Everybody knows if they're in the neighborhood where the dealer is and where they go to get it,

if that's what they're interested in finding. The word of mouth just takes care of that problem for you. And what happened particularly in the big cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago was we spoke earlier about the fact that the Irish community was, you know, a heavy drinking community that came in. And of course, at that point in time, who were the vast majority of the police in New York, Boston, and Chicago? Well, they were Irish. And they did not want drinking culture criminalized.

They were vehemently anti-prohibition, and they had voted against it. So they had no interest in enforcing it. So as these speakeasies proliferate, the cops are often, especially in New York, anecdotally, the cops on the corner is going to tell you where the best speakeasy is because he's an Irishman and he'll see you there later tonight. And they're kind of, you know, jokes about that. but it's also true because they recognized that it was an anti-Irish and anti-immigrant movement at its source for some people, which it was. We also haven't yet mentioned the importance of the Ku Klux Klan in rural areas,

who were really important part of the story, because they were the enforcers of prohibition in rural areas, because they saw it as part of their kind of Christian duty to be the moral guardians of the nation. And so they were using violence to police drinking in rural areas. They didn't have that kind of reach in most. of the urban areas. And so again, what you have is a kind of free-for-all that starts to develop in urban areas where the cops are turning a blind eye. Nobody else is going to do anything about it.

And let's circle back to the fact that women just got the vote. So women get the vote in 1920 at the same time, and you have a group of young women who, of course, would become known as flappers. Hemlines rise at that time. They start smoking as a symbol of their new independence. Various kinds of contraceptive measures are becoming easier and easier to get a whole. of and better and better understood, partly thanks actually to government campaigns around sexual hygiene during the First World War because of soldiers stationed around the country. So young people understand contraception better than their parents did, and they're migrating to cities, and they're getting jobs.

And they have cars, right? So they have mobility. All of these factors are contributing to a sense of new independence among the young, and particularly among young women, And drinking fits right into that. And then you say all the Victorian old ladies who are still wearing their bodices and their bustles and have their hair in a bun who are Christians and who have been imposing all of this on you, your whole lives, they're the ones you're against. And so you have a massive backlash against the generation that had pushed this through.

And the young people stand up and they say, no, thank you. We're getting drunk and what are you going to do about it? That's amazing. All right. So this is why I'm excited talking to you every time I do, Sarah, because you are a professor of public understanding. And this is exactly what these kinds of issues excite me about. I'm wringing my hands as you're talking because when you get into this conversation, everything is so well connected. You know, one thing sets off another. And that's what makes the 20th century,

especially for me, such an exciting, you know, crucible of change in all of human civilization, but certainly in American times. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention organized crime and the rise of that. This becomes an engine. Is it anywhere close to the sensationalism of the movies. How much did organized crime play a part in this? Actually, it is one of the less sensationalized part and one of the more accurate parts in the movies is how important organized crime was to this. Up until that point, you have disorganized crime, which sounds like a joke, but is serious. The crime just happens sporadically. But the rise of organized crime was a major factor in the ultimate repeal of prohibition and the popular backlash against it.

It was very clear that it was leading to really serious urban violence and the most famous example of that, of course, was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929 when Al Capone's gang and a rival gang got into this gun fight. It's worth reminding listeners today again who grow up in or who know our gun culture in America today. For those who think that we've always turned a blind eye to gun violence, we might, or that we've always been like, oh, that's just what American culture is like. Remember that the St. Valentine's Day massacre was the machine gunning of five career criminals and two bystanders, and the country went insane and said, we do not do this. This is unacceptable, and it led directly to the repeal of prohibition. Now, there were other factors leading to repeal. It wasn't the only one. But it absolutely

was one of the major causes, was that gun violence was totally unacceptable, and it was seen as something that was being fostered by the organized crime profiteering off of prohibition. Because the government wasn't taxing alcohol, career criminals saw a way in which they could make a profit off of it. And it got connected then with narcotics. It got connected with gambling, with racketeering, with prostitution and other kinds of underground activities. But this is the organization of organized crime. That's the moment that it happens. Yeah, around the distribution. I mean, all the business that's necessary to do this stuff on that level, that's where Luciano and all those guys get it together. Exactly. So, Sarah, you know, we're talking to organized crime. All sorts of

things happen. Unintended consequences of prohibition. One of the big ones is when the government gets involved in trying to steer people away from alcohol, from finding their own sources of this. It's an amazing story. Fill me in. So a lot of people don't realize this, but in fact, by the end of prohibition in the late 1920s, when it was becoming clear that it just wasn't working and people were still selling and distributing bootleg alcohol, what was called denatured alcohol. So it was supposed to be alcohol that was made unsafe for drinking. So it was labeled as such, and you were supposed to know, as you were today, that this is

rubbing alcohol versus drinking alcohol, right? It's supposed to be labeled and you know. But because people couldn't get a whole. of safe alcohol to drink. They were increasingly drinking alcohol that they knew was unsafe because it was all they could get. And they would try to mix it and make it palatable. And then they were literally going blind. And so those stories that we hear are not urban myths. People were being blinded by unsafe alcohol. They were being poisoned by all kinds of chemicals that were being found in this bootleg bathtub gin and moonshine and stuff that people were making on their own. So the U.S. government conceived of a plan to stop this from happening and you need to hold on to your hat because it's one of the greatest plans of all time. which is that they decided that the best way to stop this from happening was to poison the alcohol more. So they basically added more ingredients to make it more poisonous in the naive belief that this would act as a deterrent and that what they would do is then label it as this is very unsafe. So skull and crossbones time, do not drink. But of course what happened was the bootleggers got

a hold of it, tore off the labels, poured in a little bit of juniper oil, and sold it anyway. And so people were literally being poisoned by the United States government. And if this sounds like a conspiracy theory, it was the front page of every newspaper in 1997, 1928, and eventually the government put up its hand and admitted it that they had done it. It was backfiring and it was directly responsible for the death of thousands of Americans during the latter years of prohibition. And that was, as you might expect, one of the single most influential. influential factors that also led to repeal. FDR was literally kind of voted in on the backlash

against the realization that this is what the so-called dry Congress had been doing to American citizens. But the big engine, horrifying as that is, the big engine is really the lack of tax revenues. And as we enter into the Great Depression, this is what becomes obvious to all kinds of states and communities around the country is, hey, we need more money. We used to get tax revenues from these drinks. We need it back. And that's really what tips the balance. isn't it, towards the repeal of Prohibition in 1933? Absolutely. It's the crash. It's the 1929 crash is the thing that makes it possible to repeal. There was a groundswell. There was a massive mandate. And FDR and the Democratic Congress,

the Democrats were mostly the wet party at that point. And they were voted in on an overwhelming mandate to repeal Prohibition in 1932. You mentioned earlier the fact that it was easier to amend the Constitution 100 years ago than it is now. And one of the amendments that actually led to prohibition in the first place was the 16th Amendment, prohibition is the 18th. The 16th amendment had just been passed, and that was the income tax amendment. So they thought that that would actually substitute for the income that they were getting from alcohol. And then they start to see the profits that organized crime was making and to realize how much money they're losing out on. And of course, to see the ways that it was affecting other sectors, most notably the hospitality sector.

So you have these other sectors that are being impacted during the Depression. People can't afford to go out and have a meal anyway. And those who can, restaurants are desperate for them to spend more. And also, you know, and this may sound like a facetious comment, but it isn't. The onset of the depression meant that they really needed to find some kind of a palliative. And to be able to say to people, here is a release of frustration and energy, and this is this thing that you've built for, and you can go have a drink while you try to survive this depression was not a small part of the messaging. As I say, it sounds like I'm making a joke about, you know, everybody needs a drink in the dark days, but actually a lot of them felt that they did. And it had become a hard drinking culture

because of the way in which prohibition backfired. Over the course of that decade, America had become a hard drinking culture. Those parts of it that weren't already in the 19th century had actually embraced it rather than abstaining from it. And so I think that with the added psychological pressure, there was just all that much more reason why people just said enough. The 21st Amendment is the first amendment to repeal an amendment to the Constitution. And the only one that's ever existed where one amendment was passed to repeal the previous one. That's the least of the story, but it's a fascinating one. I hasten to add to this conversation that you probably wouldn't have had the prevalence of jazz in America without the speakeasy movement, without the mixing of

cultures that comes through that cocktail culture that happens. There's plenty of effects that come from Prohibition that are with us today, you know, in a big way. And I don't know if we can be grateful to it, but that's the case of it. All the youngsters who are listening to it, this is what you can do for a living, be a professor who can put all this together as only Sarah Churchwell can do. It's so exciting to talk to you. You are a professor of public understanding and American literature at the University of London and expatriate. Congratulations. Her latest book is The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind, and the lies that America tells. As I mentioned, that is an episode that you can look back to on our hit list. I really invite you to listen to

this if you enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you very much.