American History Tellers - Prohibition - Closing Time | 1

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

On January 17, 1920, the United States passed the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, ushering in a 13-year dry spell known as Prohibition. But how did a country that loved to drink turn its back on alcohol? How did two-thirds of both the House and Senate and three-fourths of State legislatures all agree that going dry was the way to get the country going forward? It had always been a long, uphill battle for the temperance movement, but towards the end of the nineteenth century, certain forces aligned: fears of industrialization, urbanization and immigration. Traditional American life was changing - fast - and many people looked for a scapegoat: the saloon.For more information on how Prohibition came to be, check out Professor David J. Hanson’s, “Alcohol Problems and Solutions,” a comprehensive, interactive site that outlines all the various stakeholders in the Noble Experiment.Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is a key text for learning more about Prohibition and how it came about. And, to narrow in on New York, itself, Michael Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City is a tremendous resource.The bootlegger character was based on a real story, A Bootlegger’s Story: How I Started, which ran in the New Yorker in 1926.For more on the Atlanta race riots and how they connect to Prohibition, check out this story on NPR, in which professor Cliff Kuhn describes his research. To learn more about the intersection between race and the policing of Prohibition, Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State is invaluable.Further references can be found in America Walks Into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops by Christine Sismondo.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's 1919 and you're a waiter at one of the top restaurants in Manhattan. You're working at Sherry's on the Upper East Side. Your customers are the toast of the town, and everyone, everywhere, is celebrating. The Great War is over. The future is bright. The mood is high. The money is flowing, and the tips are generous. Until January 17, 1920, when suddenly the party's over.

That's the date of the passage of the Bolstead Act, otherwise known as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution or Prohibition. Your restaurant remains open. You still have your job. But with nobody drinking, your tips are no longer cutting it. You tell your wife you're worried. You're going to have to start dipping into savings. There goes her dream she'd been saving to open her own business, a beauty parlor.

Meanwhile, customers keep asking you for alcohol. You must have an inside line, right? But you don't. In these early days of prohibition, the city is bone dry and those who didn't stockpile a personal supply are out of luck. Then, one night, about six months into prohibition, you get home from work, and no sooner do you take off your coat, the bell rings, and there's a fellow at your door. Can I help you? I followed you from the restaurant. Can I come in so we can have a quiet conversation? Who are you? A very good friend of yours sent me to see you. You let him in because you're curious. You sit at the kitchen table and he starts to talk. Do you find a lot of your old customers ask you for something to drink? Well, sure. Almost every night, actually. I thought so. I can help you supply it to them. Well, now you're a little alarmed. I'd get in trouble, fired or arrested. No, that's not the

way it works. You're worried about where this is heading, but you're also feeling a little desperate about your lost income. All right, then how does it work? Well, a very good friend happens to have a large supply of liquors available, very choice stuff, and he needs you because you know the sort of men who can afford it. Ah, now you get it. At the restaurant, you're on a first-name basis with all sorts of men like that. He stands up. I'll be in touch. And he leaves as suddenly as he arrived. When you go back into the kitchen, you realize that he has left an envelope on the table with $200 cash and a card with an address on 46th Street that reads, Drop by tomorrow.

The next day, you head over to 46th and meet the boss. His name's Dolan, and you realize that this $200 is just the tip of the iceberg. With the new prohibition, citizens who had never even considered jaywalking are about to break the law. Maybe it was just to bring back cocktail hour, or, like the waiter, to make some serious cash. that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers.

I'm Lindsey Graham. And in case you're wondering, no, not that Lindsey Graham. On American History Tellers, we take you to the events, the times, the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our fights, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday citizens as extraordinary events happened. And we'll show you how history affected them, their families, and affects you. We're continuing American History Tellers with a six-episode series about prohibition. This is part one, closing time. When most of us think of America's prohibition period, we imagine bootlegging, gangsters, flappers,

speakeasies and bathtub gin, jazz, Elliot Ness and the untouchable federal agents hunting down the mobster Al Capone. But those are images of the roaring 20s during prohibition. Before we get there, let's go back a few decades earlier to a less colorful time. Instead of svelte flappers and short fringe frocks, imagine groups of stern-looking, unsmiling matriarchs dressed in long-sleeved dresses with white ribbons pinned to their lapels, trimmed hats, and fox stoles. Meet the members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. These women are usually credited with bringing about prohibition,

which made alcohol illegal across the United States from 1920 to 1933. The Volstead Act wasn't just a normal law. It was an actual amendment to the Constitution, the 18th Amendment, which reads, The manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. As leading historian of the period, Daniel Okren points out in his book, Last Call, this was only the second time

the Constitution was amended to limit personal freedoms as opposed to expanding them. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is America's mission statement, but the 18th Amendment certainly seems like a turn away from those founding words. So how did it happen? How did this group of women reformers, who didn't themselves even have the right to vote at the time, wield enough power to pass a constitutional amendment? The short answer is, they didn't do it on their own. They had a lot of help from a broad coalition of allies, women and men, who joined the cause to fight not just alcohol, but unions, immigrants, minorities, and the changing face of America as it entered the modern age.

Before Prohibition, people were drinking a lot of alcohol, usually cheap whiskey. In the 1830s, for example, people drank about seven gallons of absolute alcohol per year, about three times what average Americans drink now. And that caused a lot of problems in families, communities, and in the workforce. But these were problems that Americans and Europeans for hundreds of years before them were used to. But changing technology was reshaping industry and society. The cities were exploding while farms were emptying out. The country was rapidly modernizing, and a drunk workforce, suddenly compressed into dense urban centers, created new problems that alarmed

the nation. It was these new fears, fears of industrialization, fears of immigration, fears of miscegenation, fears of losing the old pastoral American values, that drove together a disparate coalition against the saloon. But it all started with women. Although there had been small upstart temperance movements in the United States pretty well since the Declaration of Independence, it wasn't until after the Civil War that the movement started to gain traction. Many women who had been busy fighting for the end of slavery, either as abolitionists or as volunteer nurses in the war against the South, felt that they had time to tackle a new cause. Their push for prohibition is what we now call the second wave of temperance,

the first having been before the Civil War. In this movement, many writers, men and women, wrote temperance plays and novels, some even taking them on the road for performances in churches and community theaters across the countries. Most of these plays had two things in common, greedy saloon keepers and broken families. Here's a scene from one featuring a mother just having finished a hard day's work as a washerwoman making dinner for her two children, both of whom need new shoes and school supplies. The father comes home drunk again. The audience gasps as he raises his fist threateningly. Supper ready yet? Almost ready. Almost? Why isn't it ready now? The daughter, Mamie, cowers. Her mother tries to console her, confiding in a whisper. Oh, Mamie, he told me only this morning

that he wouldn't do it again. What's that? Don't you dare talk about me unless you want to feel the weight of my fist. But he doesn't follow through on the threat. Instead, the father falls down into a chair and passes out. Little girl Mamie turns to the audience. If I were a man, I'd put everyone who sells whiskey in jail for 10, yes, 20 years. As the play continues, the father violently takes the money his wife worked all day to earn. He scowls at his children and laughs at his wife, and staggers back into the night to squander what little they have on more drink.

Some of the plays were more complicated than this simple morality tale, but most weren't. And even though the storylines were predictable, Americans had an endless appetite for them. One of the most famous temperance novels, T.S. Arthur's 1854 Ten Nights in a Bar Room, was performed thousands of times touring rural areas all across America. These plays and short stories helped inspire many women to take action for the first time. They formed groups and organizations to help families broken up by alcohol and spread the gospel of temperance. The most famous of these was the Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in Ohio in 1873. The work of the WCTU eventually attracted the attention of one of the most well-educated and talented women of the era, Frances Willard. Formerly the Dean of Women at

Northwestern University, Willard had just left her position as a result of bitter feuding with the school's president, who also happened to be her ex-fiancé. Willard became the WCTU's second president in 1879. She had a clear vision. Temperance was key to women's safety and civil rights. Domestic violence was common in that era, as was child poverty. And Willard believed both problems stemmed largely from men's abuse of alcohol. Here's one of her speeches. From the rum shops every year in America, 60,000 of our citizens reel out into eternity and taste a drunkard's death. There are half a million steady drinkers. Behind this, a million moderate

drinkers. And behind them, two million occasional drinkers. Behind them, a million moderate drinkers. And behind them, two million occasional drinkers. Behind them, all little boys go tramp, tramp, tramp to a drunkard's tomb. And remember, these unfurling ranks, for they are always full, you know, must be recruited from somebody's cradle, from somebody's fireside, perhaps your own, no matter how stately or proud that home may be. Some ladies say to me in all sobriety, I wish the best in the world for your grand cause. I hope it will succeed, but then I have no boys. Perhaps you have daughters.

If you have not, somebody has, and somebody has boys. If you have daughters and not sons, try to fathom the unfathomable lessons in these words, a drunkard's wife. There is a war about this in America, a war of mothers and daughters, sisters and wives. But women had few legal rights and no political voice. Consequently, Willard's crusade focused on self-defense and the right to vote. She published something called the Home Protection

Manual, and long before the internet, it went viral published something called the Home Protection Manual, and long before the internet, it went viral. In this popular and powerful petition, Willard argued that to save families, women needed to be able to vote, capturing the political power needed to turn counties and states dry. Willard tied the temperance movement to that for women's suffrage. Both popular in their own right, together they were formidable.

The Home Protection Manual increased membership in the WCTU by over six-fold in just 10 years and made Willard very famous, one of the most famous women in the world at her peak. She even planned the women's programming at the legendary Chicago World's Fair in 1893. There, she gave a speech urging women to do everything to fight the bloody crimes and city of violence that was threatening American liberty. As long as we're chained to king alcohol, she cried, can we really call ourselves free? Imagine it's 1897. You're one of the 900,000 immigrants that will arrive in the United States in that year alone.

After a long sea voyage from your native Poland, you finally arrived at Ellis Island. You pass the medical exam and complete the paperwork. You're weary, but also excited about starting your new life in America. And the first thing you see after leaving the Arrivals Center? The saloon on Ellis Island itself. Which, great, sure, let's have a drink. And maybe someone in there can tell you how to find people from your hometown of Lublin. They've got to be somewhere in New York, and maybe there's even some fellow Poles at the bar. But as you head toward the saloon, a woman in a long dress with a black shawl

and a white ribbon jumps in front of you. She's holding a stack of paper leaflets and starts shouting questions. Russia? No. Hungary? Magyar? You shake your head, confused. Polsku? Well, you're surprised. Maybe she can help you. Tak? Yes, yes. Here, take this. Read it. You look at the flyer she's handed you. It's written in Polish, but it's all about American values and Christian citizenship. You're confused. You want to leave, but aren't sure whether or not this is part of the official process. Maybe someone in the saloon can help you understand.

But the woman sees you glance in its direction. Don't you want to be a real American citizen? Here in America, good men take the pledge't you want to be a real American citizen? Here in America, good men take the pledge, a pledge to be an American, a pledge to be a good Christian citizen, and a pledge not to drink alcohol. You don't understand everything, she says, but a glance at the flyer tells you not to go into that saloon if you want to be a real American. The fight against immigrant drunkenness proved to be the most popular platform of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the villainization of the immigrant saloon would attract supporters from all over the Northeast. The reason it had so much traction?

By the turn of the 20th century, America was reeling from the dizzying changes brought in by the recent flood of immigration. And many Americans were angry about it. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941.

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to start listening today and uncover the real story behind America's most notorious scandals. The period known as the Age of Immigration began in the early 1880s, when the United States went from a sparsely populated country of about 60 million people to a bustling nation of over 90 million in 1910. Over those 30 years, America's population grew by 50%. Most of these newcomers came from Europe, a trip made possible by massive steam-powered ships crossing the Atlantic. The wave of Irish and German immigrants in the 1860s had given way to a flood of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe 20 years later. Most immigrants settled in cities, and nearly every major urban

area exploded. Each wave of immigration brought with it a renewed feeling of anxiety about what was happening to American culture and society, and the backlash against immigration fed directly into a strong anti-alcohol sentiment. To be clear, these immigrants probably did not drink any more than anybody else who came before them. The peak of drinking in the United States, remember, was in the 1830s, well before these waves of immigration. But sometimes, when change happens quickly, people experience what historians call a moral panic. People blame many different problems on a single cause. Sociologist Stanley Cohen of the London School of Economics popularized the term

moral panic in the early 1970s, and more recently, historians have used it to try to understand episodes in which large groups of people react, sometimes violently, in fear of a threat to prevailing social or cultural values. In turn-of-the-century America, those fears were of growing urban populations, new immigrants, and changing technologies. And their scapegoat was the immigrant saloon. Historians now know that most people emigrating to the U.S. had a pretty good idea of what things would be like when they arrived. The cliché that they all believed the streets would be paved with gold is not actually true. Many had contacts and family members waiting. Some even had jobs lined up well

before they arrived. But even those lucky enough to have a community waiting for them still found comfort in the immigrant saloon. At the saloon, they could connect with others from the old country. Historian Michael Lerner writes in his book, Dry Manhattan, that the saloons became kind of a new national headquarters. Imagine now you've just arrived in Chicago from your home in Lithuania. It's the early 1900s, and you're excited about the opportunities about to unfold for you and your wife in your new country. At home, it was hard to change your lot in life, but here, here it's possible as long as you work hard. Your first job is in Chicago's meatpacking district. It's lunch hour. You can

eat in the stench of the slaughterhouse, or you can run over to Ashland Avenue, where there are several blocks of saloons called Whiskey Row. Signs outside the bars advertise hot pea soup and boiled cabbage, or sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Just walk in. All of these signs are written in different languages, including your native Lithuanian. You open the double-swinging doors of a nearby saloon. The saloon keeper greets you in your native tongue. Sveikas, welcome! You start to head to a corner where there's a warm stove and some of your co-workers gathered, laughing and talking. But the saloon keeper beckons you over to the bar first.

Always happy to welcome a hard-working man. What'll it be? You're a little shy, maybe ashamed of your broken English, but you get out that, yes, you'd love some hot pea soup. Of course, but that's on the house. You don't have to pay for the soup. That comes for free with the drink. So what will you have? Well, this seems like a good deal to you. For the price of one drink, you get to eat a hot lunch next to a warm stove. And frankly, you deserve a beer after a hard day slicing meat. You feel smart. You're getting a free lunch. A lager, please, sir. The saloon keeper pours you a lager and points you over to the free lunch table. You help yourself to soup. It's a little thin, but you gobble it up anyways, talking about the

old country with your friends. A new fellow from the plant comes in and he buys a round of beers. And before lunch is over, one beer has turned into four. Then it's back to work, but you're warmed up from the inside and in a much better mood. A few drinks are good for a man who works hard, you say to a colleague. Maybe we should stop in the saloon for a little supper on our way home, too. That scene is based on ones described by progressive author Upton Sinclair in his 1906 book, The Jungle. Although Sinclair was pro-prohibition, he understood the appeal of the working man's saloon. But Sinclair, along with many other Americans, worried that immigrant drinking presented a threat to the moral health of the country.

Solutions to that threat varied. Some folks wanted to reduce immigration from certain countries. Others advocated closer scrutiny over immigrants to weed out criminals and radicals. And others still focused solely on the saloons, which they accused of causing moral decay, physical disease, radical politics, and of course sex. Which led reformers from a range of organizations to refer to the saloon as Satan's recruiting office. Sinclair wrote The Jungle to show how hard and dehumanizing factory life was for the workers. The book was a hit and wildly influential. It even motivated President Theodore Roosevelt to act, but not in the way Sinclair had hoped. What bothered readers of The Jungle most were the scenes of industrial accidents

and the idea that their food was unsafe. One chapter told the story of a worker who fell into a vat and was rendered into lard, then packaged and sold. So the legislation Sinclair's book influenced ended up regulating food safety, not the labor laws Sinclair had wanted to protect the mostly immigrant workers. I aim for the public's heart, Sinclair later wrote, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. Throughout this period, cities continued to grow at staggering rates. Chicago, for example, went from 300,000 in 1870 to nearly 1.7 million by 1900. In a remarkably short period of time, just two or three decades, the peaceful pastoral rhythms of rural life have been replaced with the frenetic pace of the city.

Crowded and noisy streets were confusing, chaotic, and disorienting. Smog belched from coal-burning machine shops and noisome fumes emanated from slaughterhouses. Where did alcohol fit into this modern existence? Was it a habit better suited to the old colonial farm? There in the fields, workers traditionally refreshed themselves throughout the day with jugs of farmhouse ale, a little boost to continue on with the hard work of cleaning, planting, harvesting, and tending to the animals. In fact, it wasn't uncommon for colonial farmers to start the day with a little beer, a habit that began back in Europe where the water wasn't always safe.

But even years after the water was proved to be healthy, a surprising number of people couldn't shake the habit of a morning refreshment. It can be hard for us now to imagine exactly how much alcohol Americans drank before Prohibition. Sure, peak alcohol was in the 1830s, but well into the 20th century, Americans drank whiskey that cost just pennies a glass. Taverns and saloons were open morning, noon, and night. Now, these terms tavern and saloon are a little bit loose and often used interchangeably. The most important distinction is really that early taverns didn't have bars where people stood up to drink. That came later, and with them, the term saloon. Bar itself is a more modern term.

It refers to the long bar that became a prominent feature of late 19th century saloons. But by any name, saloons and taverns tended to be open much earlier than today's bars. They were open early in the morning to serve the people popping by for an eye-opener or corpse reviver on their way to work. And Americans drank at lunch, at dinner, and sometimes in bed. That was one thing on the farm. It was quite another in the factory, where workers operated dangerous machines. Even just walking around the city streets, a hazy moment of inattention could put you in real harm's way with those new streetcars rapidly replacing horse-drawn carriages.

Especially once Henry Ford started inventing things like the quadricycle in 1896, the first of the personal automobiles. Ford was another figure who became worried about the mix of drunk workers and dangerous machines as he began to realize his vision for a modern automobile factory. He only hired family men, workers who promised to refrain from gambling and drinking. Ford's new assembly line factories required a sober workforce, and if you considered that his product, the mass-produced Model T, could be a lethal weapon in the hands of a drunk driver,

it makes perfect sense that Ford supported Prohibition. Ford wasn't the only wealthy businessman who didn't want his workers hitting the saloon either. The saloon was also, often, headquarters of the unions. Imagine it's 1902 and you're in Pennsylvania. You work in a coal mine. The company has a saloon where you can cash your checks. But today, you go to John Burke's saloon for a change of scene. When you get inside, you realize it's full of men from the mine, and they're talking about the recent pay cut.

Charlie, who's been vocal about rejecting the pay cut, buys a round. He asks his group, would they go down into the pit themselves, do you think? They would not. Would they have such fine, soft hands if they did? They would not. If only we'd stand together. They'd come to you on their knees to ask for terms, but they play on our fears. They break you into pieces and then ride off in their private cars. How long will we stand it? How long? We'll not stand it.

We'll have a union. We'll get together and stay together. If they refuse us our rights, we'll know what to answer. We'll have a union. We'll get together and stay together. If they refuse us our rights, we'll know what to answer. We'll have a strike. Hear, hear. John, around for the bar. In solidarity. To the strike. Strike, strike, strike.

Not all of them understand or hear every word Charlie's saying. But they know this word strike. They translate it and proclaim it in Polish, in Italian, in Greek. That scene is also very similar to one of Upton Sinclair's, from his book King Coal, a classic novel about the labor unions in the mines. Dozens of coal mine walkouts were decided in that period to fight treacherous labor conditions, and saloon keepers often welcomed the meetings. But the industrialists who owned the factories and mines saw the connection between the saloons and unions,

and they were eager to throw their support behind a new organization, the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893. The Anti-Saloon League was happy to work with these deep-pocketed power players, just as it was happy to work with the WCTU and support women's suffrage, and for anybody else for that matter, with any agenda, so long as they wanted to ban the saloon. For ASL leader Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, the enemy of his enemy was always his friend, so long as everybody knew that the worst enemy was the saloon. Wheeler's hatred started early on, when he was a young kid helping out on the family farm near Youngstown, Ohio.

One day, he was the victim of a drunken farmhand's carelessness with a hay fork, which wound up lodged in his leg. Wheeler said he never got over the trauma, and that set him on his life's mission to eradicate alcohol. You could say it wasn't just Wheeler's life that was forever changed by that accident, but also the entire country's. Wheeler, called the Dry Boss, was probably the most important character in the entire history of Prohibition. He was largely responsible for turning it into a reality. Under Wheeler, the Anti-Saloon League didn't bother connecting the alcohol problem with education, poverty, or labor conditions. The ASL was a single-issue organization.

Its mission statement and reason for being could be boiled down to four words, the saloon must go. There was no need for education, no need for outreach or empathy with the working classes. The ASL had a hard law and order approach. Wheeler's ASL was also aggressive. Its no-holds-barred tactic of mercilessly lobbying politicians came to be known as Wheelerism. The dry boss used threats, intimidation, and constant hectoring to get the job done. It wasn't enough for Wheeler to hammer the politicians, though.

He saw an opportunity to use new mass communication networks, the telegraph and the postal mail system, to mobilize his followers and spread their voices. Under Wheeler's guidance, the League founded a printing house called American Issue Publishing House in Westerbill, Ohio, a town known as the dry capital of the world. It was one of the busiest presses in history, printing reams of dry propaganda and running 24 hours a day. 200 people worked there full-time at its height of capacity, and they turned out a quarter billion

pages of anti-alcohol material every month. Some of it was propaganda aimed at recruiting new supporters, but a lot of it was sent to politicians to flood their offices and amplify the voice of the dry cause. At one point, the post office in Westerville, Ohio, was mailing out 40 tons of paper a month, which prompted the United States Postal Service to install a first-class post office in this tiny town of just a few thousand. This was the birth of a new political tactic, pressure politics. The outright campaign against the saloon was about to begin. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorizes Victorian London. Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes.

Even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror, the only thing we see is our own monstrous abilities. From the host and producer of American History Tellers and History Daily comes the new podcast, The Real History of Dracula. We'll reveal how author Bram Stoker raided ancient folklore, exploited Victorian fears around sex,

science, and religion, and how even today we remain enthralled to his strange creatures of the night. You can binge all episodes of The Real History of Dracula exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List,

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Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. Imagine it's 1899 and you're tending bar in Kiowa, Kansas. One day, a group of women in black shawls walk in singing. One of them addresses you. Good day, you donkey-faced bedmate of Satan. We demand you close this saloon. Well, this is different for a Tuesday. Politely, you ask the women to leave.

The customers laugh and return to their drinks. But one day, a year later, that same woman barges into the saloon. I told you last spring to close this place. You did not do it. Now I am back. Get out of the way. The men at the bar, nursing hangovers with their hair of the dog drinks, stare in disbelief. One reaches under her shawl, pulls out a rock, and hurls it at you. The bottle shatters over your left shoulder. You dive under the bar as a second rock hits another bottle, showering you in glass and whiskey. Men, I've come to save you from a drunkard's fate. I'm going to break up this den of vice. Bottles crash to the ground. Liquor spills everywhere. Men flee the bar as she starts belting out Proverbs 23.

Who hath woe? Who hath sorrow? Who hath strife? Who has complaining? Then she runs out of rocks. God be with you, she says, and leaves. This woman was Carrie Nation. Newspapers would later report that one night in 1900, before she went to sleep,

she prayed for an answer to the problem of saloons. The next morning, she was woken up by a divine voice. Go to Kiowa, the voice said. I'll stand by you. Take something in your hands and throw it at these places in Kiowa and smash them. So Nation got up, went outside, collected as many rocks and broken bits of brick from her yard as she could find.

She wrapped them up in newspaper, put them under the seat of her buggy, and hitched up her horse. Nation drove 25 miles to Kiowa, all the while planning her attack on your saloon. Actually, yours was only her first stop in Kiowa. She smashed windows, bottles, and mirrors in two other saloons. And then, just after she left, proving to her that she was doing the good work of God,

the town was hit by a tornado. The following year, Carrie attacked a bar room in Wichita, getting her arrested. Most people trace her hatred of alcohol to the death of her first husband, an army doctor she met while volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War. He had a severe alcohol problem from which he died only a few years after they were married. For her second husband, Carrie's arrest was the final straw, and they divorced soon after. In one of their last conversations, he joked that if she really wanted to do serious damage, she should switch from rocks and grab a hatchet.

She took him seriously and did. Her first hatchet job was in Topeka, where she attacked the saloon favored by state senators. After that, Cary Nation's assaults were called hatchetations, for which she was arrested more than 30 times. Her defense was that she was actually just enforcing the law since Kansas had been a dry state since 1880. Cary Nation made headlines, but didn't win a lot of converts. Prohibition was still a long way from becoming a reality, and it was clear proponents weren't going to get there just by throwing rocks. Even the Anti-Saloon League, with its pressure politics, had an uphill battle,

since the southern states simply weren't on board. Historically, temperance had been a Yankee thing, with temperance groups founded and operating in places like upstate New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. In the South, especially the states where the whiskey business was an important industry, it was harder to get temperance off the ground. But starting in the early 1900s, as some Southern cities started to urbanize, people in the South also started to experience their own anxiety about modern life, and that fed Prohibition sentiments. Atlanta, Georgia provides one of the most clear-cut examples. In 1906,

as Georgians prepared to go to the polls to elect a new governor, the white population was starting to resent the gains made by the former black slaves who had been freed after the Civil War. The growing black middle class and black business community wasn't a welcome development to white society. Instead, it sparked sparked backlash. The fire was stoked by two rival Atlanta newspapers, owned by the same two politicians running against each other for governor, Hoke Smith and Clark Howell. Each thought that they could use white resentment to help win the election. So when unsubstantiated rumors of a wave of sexual assaults arose, they both ran with it. Four white women, both papers

alleged, had been attacked by black men. Papers connected the assaults to a row of bars on Decatur Street, which most white Atlanta residents had heard sold cheap gin to a clientele made up predominantly of black men. Georgia State historian Cliff Kuhn writes that, one block away from the newspaper hawkers, a man got up on a soapbox, waved a paper, and yelled, are we going to let them do this to our white women? Come on, boys. And by nightfall, an armed mob of thousands had formed. Many Black residents went into hiding, but those who couldn't find shelter in time were pulled from trolleys, chased down streets, and beaten, clubbed, stabbed, and shot. Over four days of terror, the white mob killed 12 black men and injured countless others. It only ended when the Georgia State

Militia was finally called in to impose order. Even at the time, people recognized the newspaper's role in inciting this violence. In a report on the causes of the riots commissioned not long after, a Fulton County grand jury made the following statement. The sensational manner in which the afternoon newspapers of Atlanta presented the news of the various criminal acts largely influenced the creation of the spirit animating the mob of last Saturday night. It was a classic example of yellow journalism. Scaremongering exaggerations and half-truths designed to sell papers and in this case, outrage

and alarm the white population of Atlanta in order to influence an election. In the end, Hoke Smith won the governorship, and he moved quickly to address the crisis he himself helped create. The Decatur Street bars were dangerous, Smith's papers had said, so it

was only logical that they needed to be shuttered. And so, Georgia became the first southern state to go dry. Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina followed soon after. Modern historians increasingly view the anti-saloon and late prohibition movement less about religious conviction and more about race and xenophobia. In her 2016 book, The War on Alcohol, historian Lisa McGurr connects the ban on alcohol to Jim Crow and anti-immigrant sentiment, since it restricted freedoms, especially for ethnic minorities who had few options for social life. For instance, the Ku Klux Klan quickly threw its support behind the alcohol ban, and the Anti-Saloon League had no qualms about working with the KKK or anyone else on their side. The movement was

moving forward at all costs. In a short period of time, the South was won. But the cities were not. As one 1914 poster from the ASL pointed out, most of the people in wet territory lived in one of six cities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, and Cleveland. In fact, another famous poster sums up the situation and maybe reveals ulterior motives with shocking clarity. Try to visualize this.

A map of the United States, mostly white with several black splotches. The white areas indicate dry states and counties. The black splotches, the wets. In bold caps at the top, it reads, make the map all white. But here's the thing. Half of the U.S. population lived in wet territory. New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New Jersey, most clustered in urban centers. How do you convince city dwellers that for the good of the country, they had to get rid of their saloons? How do you keep Tennessee dry when there was liquor just over the border in Louisville, Kentucky?

Well, you need to go national, through a constitutional amendment, to make the map all white. Everything was in place, but it was going to take a force from outside America, the Great War, to push the cities into becoming dry. After a U-boat fired on and sank the Lusitania, taking 1,198 passengers and crew to their deaths, there would be a new enemy in America,

the Germans, along with the industry with which they were closely associated, beer. From Wondery, this is Episode 1 of Prohibition from American History Tellers. On the next episode, when a German U-boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, Americans found two new enemies, Germany and beer. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining

Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship, with additional production assistance from Derek Behrens. This episode is written by Christine Sismondo, PhD. Executive producers are Hernán

López, Marcia Louis, and Ben Adair for Wondery. Wondery. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy. This is Nick.

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