American History Tellers - Prohibition - Down and Out | 5

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

Closing Time by Daniel Francis provides a good account of the border wars and smuggling across the northern border. Robert Rockaway’s article “The Notorious Purple Gang” details the gang’s origin as well as the Cleaners and Dyers War.For information about the link between Prohibition and organized crime in Chicago, Gus Russo’s The Outfit and Get Capone by Johnathan Eig are invaluable sources. Al Capone’s Beer Wars by John J. Binder is a fantastic re-assessment of the period that sorts out some of the fact from fiction, in a highly mythologized period. For more on the Increased Penalties Act, Michael Lerner’s Dry Manhattan, is a good resource used for this podcast, as is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call. Robin Room’s The Movies and the Wettening of America is the source for the section on Hollywood’s move away from temperance.Kenneth D. Rose’s American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition provided insight into Pauline Sabin’s work, as did David J. Hanson’s comprehensive resource, Alcohol Problems and Solutions. The Washington Post’s recap of The Man in the Green Hat exposé is available here. Support this show 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. It's November 6th, 1928, and in a hospital bed in Manhattan, a man is fighting for his life. He's been shot in the stomach. And despite the best efforts of surgeons at the hospital, his condition is clearly getting worse. His lawyers have gathered at his bedside. You understand this is your last will and testament, Arnold? Yes, yeah. I want to make sure Inez is looked after. Carolyn can take care of herself. Okay, it's done. Inez will get one

sixth of the estate for a decade. After that, it reverts to the firm. Yeah, yeah, Inez. The firm. Um, hey, we'll need some witnesses here, impartial ones. Nurse, can you get one of the others to come over here quick? The dying man is Arnold Rothstein. He's 46 years old and one of the richest men in the city.

Two days earlier, New York City police had found him bleeding badly outside the Park Central Hotel. We need you to ask Mr. Rothstein if he understands what he's doing and is of sound and competent mind. So ask him if he understands it's his will, his final will. Okay? Um, Mr. Rothstein, do you understand this is your will? Huh? Whose will is this, Mr. Rothstein? do you understand this is your will? Huh? Whose will is this, Mr. Rothstein? Oh, my will, my will.

He's barely able to hold a pen, but he signs the papers. There, it's done. Two police detectives step forward. Mr. Rothstein, we understand you're very sick, but we need to know who did this to you. Rothstein says nothing. Was it Dutch Schultz? Was it Titanic Thompson? Tell us and we'll make sure he serves hard time for what he's done to you. Rothstein looks at the detective. You stick to your trade and I'll stick to mine. Who did it, Mr. Rothstein? Me murder did it. And that was all the cops could get out of him.

Rothstein died later that day, taking the name of his killer to the grave. Still, there was no shortage of possible suspects who might have wanted him dead. See, Rothstein wasn't just any old rich guy. He was one of the most famous bootleggers of the 1920s, and one of the most powerful mob leaders in American history. Throughout his career, he was known by several different names. Mr. Big, the man uptown, the big bankroll, and the brain. Before Prohibition, he'd been into gambling,

a casino owner, a bookmaker, and a racetrack investor. He had a reputation for fixing sports events and making a lot of money on the outcome. When their Chicago White Sox, the team with the best record in baseball at the time, lost the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, it raised suspicions that Rothstein had bribed them to throw the games. Eight White Sox players were eventually banned for life for taking part in the conspiracy which became known as the Black Sox scandal, but it could never be proven that Rothstein was involved. Still, if gambling made his name,

it was Prohibition that made Rothstein's fortune. By the time he died, he was worth more than $10 million, $140 million at today's value. As Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, bootlegging had become big business. And like Rothstein, many of the most successful businessmen were gangsters. Ponder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness? Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate. Available now wherever you get your books. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. We're continuing American History Tellers with our six-episode series about prohibition. This is part five, Down and Out. In this episode, we'll look at the rise of organized crime in response to the massive demand for alcohol and how the tide started to turn against the national experiment to go dry. By the late 1920s, it was becoming clear to almost everyone that Prohibition as it stood wasn't working. Americans were still drinking. In fact, now they were drinking as much as before the 18th Amendment

was passed. More than any other racket that had come along before, bootlegging under Prohibition allowed American street gangs to transform into massive, lucrative, organized crime enterprises. To some people, the mob bosses who ran them were heroes, breaking an unjust law to give the people what they wanted. But it came at a cost. Extortion, kidnapping, and murder. What was the fuel that drove it all? Liquor from Canada, which the gangs imported in large quantities.

A stream of smuggled whiskey from Canada increased steadily throughout the late 1920s. The province of Ontario had long been a big whiskey producer until passing its own prohibition in 1916. But after its repeal in 1927, Ontario was back in the liquor business. Canadian distillers were eager to get back to work and start supplying their supposedly dry neighbor to the South. And the fact that it was illegal in the U.S. didn't stop them. As Harry C. Hatch, a Canadian spirits tycoon, famously said,

The Volstead Act does not prevent us from exporting at all. It prevents someone from over there from importing. There's a difference. At the outset of Prohibition, most bootleggers had brought alcohol from Canada by water, carried by small boats. If they were stopped, the smugglers would claim that they were headed for Cuba. These supposedly Cuba-bound boats, though, often made several trips per day across the

Detroit, Niagara, or St. Lawrence rivers. And then they docked in border towns like Buffalo and Ogdensburg, New York. These towns became important crossings with sophisticated organized crime networks set up to distribute the booze to the rest of the states. Eventually, cars replaced boats as the main way to smuggle booze across the border. Bootleggers used the newly completed Ambassador Bridge and Tunnel that connected Windsor, Ontario with Detroit. Michigan outlawed alcohol a few years before national

prohibition went into effect. As a result, the smuggling and bootlegging operations there were already established by 1920, particularly in Detroit, where criminal organizations flourished. The most famous of these organizations was led by four brothers, Abe, Joe, Raymond, and Izzy Bernstein. The brothers had grown up in extreme poverty and had started stealing as a way to survive. But over the years, their crimes had gotten bigger, and they gained a reputation for being both fearless and ruthless. Even as youngsters, the brothers were more daring,

more outrageous, and more violent than others. They're tainted, bemoaned the shopkeeper recently victimized by the crew. They're not like other kids their age. They's rotten. Purple like the color of bad meat. And that's how the Purple Gang got their name. The gang smuggled much of their alcohol from Canada. They would hijack other gangs' trucks

and drive them over the frozen ice of the Detroit River to pick up shipments. That earned them another nickname, the Jewish Navy. And the Purples weren't just involved in illegal alcohol. Back in 1924, the gang had also run an extortion ring that targeted the city's dry cleaners and laundry workers. In what became known as the Cleaners and Dryers War, they enforced their shakedown with theft, vandalism, and even stink bombs. In 1925, when the owners of Novelty Cleaners and Empire Cleaners. In 1925, when the owners of novelty cleaners and empire cleaners refused to pay up, the Purples dynamited both businesses and murdered their owners.

Detroit might not have been called Murder City back then, but with this violence, it was beginning to get a reputation. As big as Detroit was, the real capital of crime was its bigger, wealthier neighbor, Chicago. 1920s Chicago was a huge, rapidly growing metropolis. At its center, poorer European immigrants lived packed together, far from the suburbs and the homes of the city's wealthier residents. After Prohibition went into effect, many of the city's bars had simply taken down their signs, but carried on serving alcohol. But keeping these speakeasies going required a steady supply of booze from Detroit.

Most of that contraband was being delivered to one customer, Al Capone. Alphonse Gabriel Capone grew up in Brooklyn, where he ran with several gangs, including the Junior 40 Thieves, the Brooklyn Rippers, and the Five Points Gang. He was known as Scarface, a nickname he got because of a bar fight he got into as a teenager. And the story says a lot about how Capone operated for the rest of his life. When Capone was 18, he had gotten a job as a waiter about a block away from the Coney Island boardwalk at a dive bar dance hall called the Harvard Inn, owned by a local gangster named Frankie Yale.

One hot August night in 1917, a young woman named Lena Gallicino was at the bar with her brother Frank. She noticed a man staring at her. Frank, that waiter is staring at me. Can you ask him to stop? She's talking about Capone. Frank motions for him to come? She's talking about Capone. Frank motions for him to come over, which he does. But before Frank can say anything, Capone is coming on to Lena, loud enough for people at other tables to hear. You got a nice ass, honey. And I mean that

as a compliment, believe me. Frank is incensed. I won't take that from nobody. Apologize to my sister now, you hear? Come on, buddy, I'm only joking. This is no joke, mister. Capone suddenly turns, his face white with anger. Capone starts moving towards Galluccio. He's bigger, and if there's a fistfight, then Capone wins. But there wasn't going to be a fistfight. In an instant, Galluccio lunges at Capone, slashing at his neck and face with a pocketknife. Capone falls to the floor, blood gushing from three deep cuts. He was lucky to live. The injury was serious, as were the scars. Al Capone hated those scars that gave him the nickname. He usually told people he got them in France during the war, not from a bar fight. As for Frank Galluccio, he was lucky. Others who later

tangled with Capone didn't live to tell the tale. In 1919, Capone got into an argument with a member of a rival gang. Unsurprisingly, things got heated, and quickly. Capone beat the man, savagely, leaving just a heap of bleeding flesh behind. When word of the beating got around, the excess of violence brought too much heat for his bosses. For his own protection, and that of his new wife, Capone's superiors sent him to Chicago to work for a gangster named Papa Johnny Torrio. At the time, there were at least a dozen gangs competing for the alcohol business in Chicago. Torrio's organization was one of the largest. They operated out of Chicago's South Side and a suburb called Cicero.

Torrio's biggest rival was the Irish-run North Side gang, run by Dean O'Banion. Torrio attempted to avoid all-out turf wars with O'Banion by making concessions on the South Side, sharing profits in some of the outfit's activities, including some of its revenues from beer and from its lakefront casino, The Ship. But instead of repaying the favor, O'Banion sold him a brewery that was about to get raided by the cops. Torrio was promptly arrested. To the members of his gang, it looked like a setup. Torrio's arrest sparked a bloody gang war that became known as the Chicago Beer Wars. By the time the dust settled, O'Banion was dead,

and Toreo, after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, decided it was time to get out and retire to Italy. Toreo handed the business over to Capone in 1926. By 1928, with Capone at the head, the Chicago outfit was raking in $1 million a year. He was only 29 years old. Al Capone stands out because he was more colorful than almost any mob boss in history. He relished the limelight. He spoke with reporters. He was known for wearing custom suits and flashy jewelry. And he conducted his public affairs with a certain flair. He was also popular because he cultivated an image of himself as a man of the people,

a Robin Hood of sorts. He created school milk programs for poor kids and gave generously to charities. Capone didn't deny he was making his money by breaking the law. In fact, he seemed to relish telling people what he was doing. He once said, Nobody wanted Prohibition. This town voted 6-1 against it. his money by breaking the law. In fact, he seemed to relish telling people what he was doing. He once said, nobody wanted prohibition. This town voted six to one against it. Somebody had to throw liquor on that thirst. Why not me? It's 1928, and you're a reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner.

Personally, you like a drink or two after work, but your newspaper is still in favor of prohibition. You're waiting outside the Lexington Hotel on Chicago's South Loop, where Al Capone is staying. Your editor knows that the paper sells when Capone's on the cover, so it's your job to get a quote from him. After waiting around for a while, a car pulls up outside and Capone gets out. He's hard to miss, a big man in a flashy suit with a couple of bodyguards on each side. Mr. Capone, some say you're breaking the highest law of the land, the Constitution. What do you say to that? Who doesn't? The only difference between me and everyone else is that I take more chances than the average man who has a cocktail before dinner and a flock of highballs after him. You're saying everyone breaks the law? Sure they do. But there's a difference between rich and

poor people breaking the law. When I sell liquor, they call it bootlegging. When they serve it on silver trays on Lakeshore Drive, they call it hospitality. Capone winks at you and saunters into the hotel lobby, his entourage in tow. Despite his criminality, despite his reputation for violence, you find yourself admitting he's got a point. Capone had a real knack for PR. A brawling gangster in his youth, he had reinvented himself as a charming, roguish, modern antihero. To a lot of people in Chicago, he was just a guy making

money off an unfair law that nobody wanted in the first place. Plus, he was supplying the liquor that kept the city wet and the speakeasies running, which to a lot of people was a good thing. In 1928, Capone was a millionaire many times over and one of the most powerful and famous men in America. He had been flouting the law for years, not just making a mockery of prohibition,

but making a killing off of it. But that fame and power meant nothing when the real force of the law came down on him. It wasn't the Chicago Crime Commission. It wasn't the FBI or the Department of Justice. Al Capone was finally stopped by the IRS. To be continued... at 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. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast series essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with

masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time, only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. The events of February 14, 1929 would come to be known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. On that day, Chicago police made a gruesome discovery. Seven men had been gunned down in a warehouse in the Lincoln Park District. Six of them were dead, but one was still alive. His name was Frank Gusenberg.

He was an enforcer for the Northside Gang. His brother Peter was also in the warehouse that night, but Peter was dead by the time the police arrived. Frank was shot 14 times, but was somehow still breathing. He was taken to the hospital, and doctors managed to get him stabilized long enough for police to ask him who had shot him. His response? No one shot me. And three hours later, he was dead. Al Capone himself was far away in Florida that night,

but that didn't stop the city's newspapers from linking him to the killings. And there were plenty of reasons to suspect Capone and his gang were behind the murders. There was a lot of bad blood between them and the Northside gang, dating back to the Chicago Beer War days. But the police found nothing, and no one, not Capone or any other mobster, was ever tried for the St. Valentine's Day massacre. For many Chicagoans, the gruesome killings were the final straw. A few months later, a delegation of city bigwigs went to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Hoover to ask him for his help in bringing down Capone. Hoover had come to office as a supporter of Prohibition. He seemed to know

that making it work was more complicated than just clamping down on a few bootleggers and gangsters. In his inaugural address in 1929, he said, There would be little traffic in illegal liquor if only criminals patronized it. He'd set up an 11-person panel of judges, law enforcement officials, and academics. The Wickersham Committee, as it became known, was tasked with studying prohibition and non-compliance and making recommendations on how to improve it. But what he heard from the Chicago group stirred Hoover to action. He would later write about the visit in his memoirs. He said the group told him that, quote,

Chicago was in the hands of the gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, that the governor of the state was futile, of the gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, that the governor of the state was futile, and the federal government was the only force by which the city's ability to govern itself could be restored. The president was outraged that a major city was being run by the mob. He agreed to help and asked the attorney general to put together a task force to catch Capone.

After that, Hoover met every day with his top advisors, including Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury Department, which had oversight of the Bureau of Prohibition. Each meeting began with Hoover asking the same question, have you got that fellow Al Capone yet? One man trying hard to answer that for Hoover was Chicago's Crime Commissioner, Frank Lash. At this point, Lash was nearly 80 years old, with a long career in Chicago, and had built a reputation as a straight-talking lawman. He believed that to bring down Al Capone the man,

he would first have to bring down Al Capone the myth. To do that, he went after the mobster in the court of public opinion, taking every chance he got to publicly criticize him as a dangerous criminal. Lash's own views on crime were muddled by a strong anti-immigrant prejudice. He once claimed that real Americans weren't gangsters. The crime wave stemmed from immigrants with, in his words, the Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians supplying the brawn. In 1930, Lash began publishing a list of hunted criminals,

and Capone was at the top, public enemy number one. One of the reasons the Bureau of Prohibition was having such little success in clamping down on the liquor trade was rampant corruption in law enforcement. To deal with this, the Bureau decided it needed to bring in the cleanest cops they could find. And among this new wave was Elliot Ness, a young Bureau agent from Chicago. Ness personally selected a team of nine men that he thought were above reproach and immune to the temptations of bribery or blackmail. When Al Capone unsuccessfully attempted to bribe members of his team with a sum close to the agent's annual salary, Ness held a press conference to share the news of the incident. The Chicago press gave them their new name, the Untouchables. But while Ness and his colleagues gained a lot of press and acclaim

for pursuing the mob kingpin through raids on stills and small charges like contempt of court, the lesser-known law enforcement professionals who actually led to Capone's demise were Assistant U.S. Attorney Mabel Willebrandt and Chicago U.S. Attorney George Johnson. It was Willebrandt who became known as the First Lady of Law who came up with the idea to go after Capone not for bootlegging, but for tax evasion. Because in 1927, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Treasury Department could demand income tax from bootleggers. Even though the income was earned through illegal activities, that was no reason the government couldn't still tax it.

With patient and diligent legal work, the government began building a solid tax evasion case against Capone. One of the biggest pieces of evidence came from his own lawyers. His defense team had been trying to negotiate with the Internal Revenue Service. Crucially, the lawyers admitted that Capone had not declared at least $100,000 per year in income. It amounted to a confession of guilt. They had it on paper that he'd failed to pay tax on the money he'd made. In October 1931, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion. He was furious. He raged that he'd never heard of anyone getting more than five years for tax evasion and that he was being

punished for something else entirely. He wasn't wrong about that. 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, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands.

But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life.

Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. By 1929, alcohol consumption in the United States had almost rebounded to pre-prohibition levels, and even those who had access to safe alcohol were developing unsafe drinking habits, like drinking in unregulated establishments and binge drinking. Unsure of when they might next have a chance to drink alcohol,

people were drinking a lot all at once, and it was a public health nightmare. And with crime on the rise too, public opinion was turning against Prohibition. But Congress? Congress was still all in. In May 1929, the Republican-controlled Congress was still committed to shoring up Prohibition.

It passed the Jones-Stocker Bill, which turned violations of the Volstead Act into felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison and $10,000 penalties, almost $150,000 in today's money. Prohibition's critics pointed out that this would disproportionately affect poor people, who'd be hauled in and charged with low-level alcohol sales. One U.S. attorney objected that the criminal justice system was already full of a seething mass of bartenders, peddlers, and waiters. And even some moderate Republicans thought this tough-on-crime approach went too far. Republican National Committee woman Pauline Sabin had been a supporter of Prohibition when it first came into effect. She once said that she believed a world without liquor would be a

beautiful world. Now, though, she was concerned that the next generation was growing up with a total lack of respect for the law. The young see the law broken at home and upon the street. Can we expect them to be lawful? Sabin had come to the conclusion that prohibition was unenforceable. She founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform in Chicago, rallying the support of society ladies and moderate Republicans. Her campaign was featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, and on the cover of Time magazine. After 10 years of poisoning deaths, vigilante raiders, street violence, and an increasing disrespect for the law, people were ready for change.

Even those who originally supported Prohibition were coming out in favor of reform, even full repeal. The influential Hearst newspaper chain offered a cash prize for the essay presenting the best solution to the problems posed by Prohibition. Out of 70,000 submissions, the paper's editors chose an essay written by Judge Franklin Chase Hoyt of New York, entitled The Effect of Prohibition in Juvenile Courtwork, in which he argued for the legalization of beer and wine. The essay competition signaled a massive change in editorial policy for the paper.

Up until then, all William Hearst newspapers had supported prohibition. But a decade in, Hearst suddenly decided it had been a failure that created, in his words, criminal conditions. Hearst's pivot and how it affected the view of prohibition in the pages of his newspapers was a turning point in public opinion. And it wasn't just the newspapers changing their tune. There were plays depicting drinking and gambling in a more positive light, not to mention the booze-soaked novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Even the motion picture industry, which has started out with temperance dramas

and reenactments of anti-alcohol plays, were now crossing over to the wet side. A couple of telling examples were Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens, two silent films from the late 1920s that feature young women enjoying a night out. Unlike the films that Hollywood had been churning out before, these didn't end with a commentary on the evils of alcohol. Tinseltown had turned against temperance. Even legendary Georgia fiddler Lo Stokes knew the score. He put it bluntly. Prohibition is a failure most anyone can see

For whiskey sold in every town in the good old USA For the policeman will arrest you He'll lock you up in jail He'll drink up all your liquor And turn you out on bail But supporters of Prohibition didn't take this renewed campaign for reform lying down. Audiences in 1929 might have seen newsreels of evangelical preacher Billy Sunday speaking in Boston titled,

Billy Sunday Burns Up the Backsliding World. Civilization and society rests on morals. Morals rest on religion. Religion rests on the Bible and faith in God and in Jesus Christ. America needs a tidal wave of the old-time religion. America needs to be taken down to God's bathhouse and the hose turned on her. And I want to take a pledge in this audience to join me in a pledge that you will never rest until this old God-hating, Christ-hating, whiskey-soaked, Sabbath-breaking, blaspheming, infantile, bootlegging old world

is bound to the cross of Jesus Christ by the golden chains of love. The temperance groups which had put such effort into passing the 18th Amendment found themselves now campaigning just as hard against repeal. Ella Boole, the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Unit, started directly lobbying politicians and endorsing dry candidates. She made regular appearances on the radio,

and she accused politicians of hypocrisy and double-dealing. But then, in late 1929, America went over a cliff. The Wall Street panic, in my opinion, it had to come. Stock speculation had become crazy. On Monday, October 29th, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 13% of its value. The following day, it did not recover. Instead, it lost an additional 12%,

earning it the name Black Tuesday. The incredible gains in the stock market over the previous decade had fooled many into a false sense of security. Average middle-class investors who hadn't been able to resist the lure of fast money had poured their savings into stocks and shares. They were encouraged by economists who predicted that the stock market's high value was the new normal. The foundations of that prosperity, however, weren't as solid as they looked. Middle-class Americans had borrowed heavily to pay things for like new homes and cars. While the economy was growing, that debt wasn't very important. But when the economy started to slow down, more and more Americans found themselves unable to pay back the money they owed.

The stock market crash brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. About $25 billion was lost in the crash, translating into about $350 billion in today's dollars. Wealthy investors suddenly found themselves penniless. Bankrupt stockbrokers threw themselves off buildings on Wall Street. But it was the middle and working classes who suffered the most. Imagine it's 1930. It's summertime, more than six months after the crash. Wall Street might be on the other side of the country, but the effects of the crash are plain to see all around you in San Francisco. The company you were working for went bust earlier in the year, and you've been out of work ever since. Now you're behind on your rent, getting desperate. You spent the day walking around the city asking if anyone is hiring, and no one is. To clear your head, you decide to take a walk along the bay.

You're not the only one out for a walk, even though it's the middle of a weekday. You see people feeding the seagulls or just staring out at the ships. Unemployment in San Francisco is not as high as the 9% national figure you read in the Chronicle, but is getting pretty bad here. You stop to admire the line of luxury yachts tied up along the waterfront. Big, sleek, modern boats. Must be nice, you think. You notice a glamorous young woman sitting on a bench watching you. She looks like she could have been in the movies. Want to buy one? She's grinning. You play along. Which one? Are you kidding? They're all for sale. All of them? That's right. Owners paid half a million dollars for them years back.

Don't have much use for them now that everything went to hell. Now you take a closer look at the boats. There are barnacles on the sides and the decks are going green for lack of cleaning. Matter of fact, I just sold two of them. I think it was a rum runner. Guess how much he paid? How much? Ten thousand bucks. And you just know he's going to rip out all that nice stuff from inside so we can fill her up with drink. I got my commission, though. That woman standing on the docks is Sally Rand, the famous burlesque dancer. In a few years, she'll make a huge name for herself performing at the Chicago World Fair. Her provocative dances, in which she hides her naked body using only ostrich feathers or balloons,

will also see her fall foul of laws against indecent exposure more than once. But on this day, she's earning a 10% commission selling the boats of bankrupt tycoons to bootleggers. Rightly or wrongly, President Hoover was the man everyone blamed for the Great Depression. Hoover's name became synonymous with economic hardship, and the country's many shantytowns, ramshackle huts, and tents for the homeless were all renamed Hooverville. Hoover's response to the economic crisis was further protectionism. He deported unemployed Mexican workers with the Repatriation Act and tried to close all borders to trade.

With his backing, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, raising or placing tariffs on some 20,000 imports. But it wasn't enough to save the economy or the politicians. For dozens of Republican congressmen, that was the last legislation of their careers. In the 1930 midterm elections, the Republicans were hammered, losing 52 seats to the Democrats. The number one issue was the economy, of course, but Republicans were also badly hurt by a five-part tell-all story about the secret drinking habits of the nation's congressmen. Splashed across the front page of the Washington Post right before voters went to the polls, George Cassidy, a D.C. area bootlegger, decided to blow

the lid off of Capitol Hill hypocrisy on his way out. For nearly 10 years, I have been supplying liquor at the order of the United States senators and representatives at their offices, Cassidy's piece began. On Capitol Hill, I am known as the man in the green hat. The expose was payback for arrests and raids he had endured over the previous 12 months. His story outlined how he had dealt in large quantities of alcohol, selling to prominent, supposedly dry politicians who bought directly from him, sometimes as early as nine in the morning. To many, the hypocrisy was astounding. With a little help from the man in the green hat, the Democrats did well in a number of races,

winning eight Senate seats and a sweep of the New York state elections. The mood in the country was turning, and quickly. But the federal government wasn't about to change direction just yet. January 1931 saw the publication of the Wickersham Committee's report, the committee set up by Hoover to look into Prohibition. The committee conceded that the so-called noble experiment was a disaster, but their solution was just to enforce the law more rigorously. The columnists from the New York World summed up the Wickersham report, Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail for a second term.

His speech to the Republican National Convention reaffirmed his commitment to Prohibition. The repeal of Prohibition would mean the return of the saloon. And with it, what Hoover said was its corruption, its moral and social abuse which debauched the home. The choice was clear. Four more years of Hoover meant four more years of prohibition. But the president was swimming against the tide. What Hoover had called the noble experiment

was looking more and more like a not-so-noble disaster. From Wondery, this is Episode 6 of Prohibition from American History Tellers. On the next episode, the voices of those calling for an end to Prohibition become impossible to ignore. But to bring back beer, you're going to have to do something that's never been done before. Repeal a constitutional amendment. 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, Ph.D. Executive producers are Hernán López, Marsha Louis, and Ben Adair for Wondery. 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. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books.