American History Tellers - Prohibition | Interview with Lillian Cunningham | 7

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

Do you know the record for the longest ratification period of any constitutional amendment? Lillian Cunningham did. She’s an editor with the Washington Post, host of two outstanding American History podcasts, Presidential and Constitutional, and she’s our guest today. We’ll talk about amendments, those presidents you can never remember (can you name anything about Millard Fillmore?) and she helps us preview the next series on AHT, the Age of Jackson.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. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. Next week, we'll be back with the first episode in a brand new six-part series on the age of Jackson. Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, America was growing at a rate faster than the Founding Fathers had ever anticipated. It was a time of instability, political change, and reform that would birth our notions of

Manifest Destiny and the first true sense of what it meant to be American. But today, we'll be talking with Lillian Cunningham, reporter and editor with The Washington Post. In the 45 episodes of her podcast for The Post, Presidential, Lillian profiled every president of the United States from Washington to Trump. In her follow-up podcast, Constitutional, she analyzes the intent and interpretation of the Constitution throughout our American history. But before I talk to her, I wanted to thank you again for listening to our show. Over the last several months, we've received hundreds of really great reviews. So if you haven't left us a review yet,

please do on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to American History Tellers. Reviews help others find this show and helps us know what you think. If you want to give even more specific feedback, including which areas of American history you'd like to hear next on American History Tellers, you can fill out our listener survey at wondery.com slash survey. That's wondery.com slash survey. So next, let's get into my conversation with Lillian Cunningham.

We discussed the pendulum of American presidential politics and how we swung from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Herbert Hoover and back again to FDR. We also discussed how the 16th and 17th Amendments paved the way for prohibition in the 18th and then the reverse with repeal enacted in the 21st. Lillian, join me from the Washington Post Studios in Washington, D.C. possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Explore themes of friendship, loss, and hope with remarkably bright creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Find what piques your imagination. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up.

I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery 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. Lillian Cunningham, thank you for joining me on this week's show. Oh, well, thanks so much.

Your first podcast, Presidential, devotes an entire episode to each of the presidents. How did you arrive at the idea for the podcast? So the idea for Presidential came to me in 2015. We were going into a presidential election year. thinking about how valuable it would be to brush up on my presidential history and be able to put this new election we were going through into better context by understanding former presidents' leadership styles and how they got to office. And so I actually went out searching for a podcast on all the presidents I could listen to just on my walks to work to brush up. And I realized there wasn't anything like that out there. And the idea just kind of

stuck with me as something that would be really valuable for me, but also probably for a lot of people. So I took it to the editors at The Post and was fortunate enough that they agreed and thought it would be a great 44-week experiment. Right. So one episode on each president for all of 2016 leading up to Election Day. So it was a big thing, but I learned so much from it. So from the beginning then, you really had an idea to go for the entire scope of presidential history. That was the idea. I was kind of naively ambitious, but that was the idea from the beginning was to start with George Washington and to devote equal time, actually. You know, each president, whether it was Abraham Lincoln or Chester Arthur,

got the same amount of time, you know, one episode for each. And it forced me to spend a lot of time with presidents that I really knew not much about before. And that was probably the most eye-opening part of it was to kind of connect the gaps between the presidents I did know something about and these kind of like dark periods in the American presidency where my knowledge was just totally lacking.

Do you mean dark as in terms of tone or dark as in just nothing was there? More like black holes where I just, you know, there was no light shining through of my own knowledge. No, they weren't necessarily the worst times in our country. We tend to be taught about those, but they were the periods where, you know, we had presidents who have been kind of deemed by history unremarkable. But actually, we're interesting in their own right, for sure. I'm deeply interested in the chronological walk that you took because I think it's ambitious.

I don't know how to better describe most podcasts other than naively ambitious. But it also allows a real sense of what history is, this slipstream of time and decisions that just kind of happen one after the other. In this march of presidents, did you learn anything from the chronology more than just the biography of each of these men? One of the big things I took away, especially, you know, this is especially true in America with a democracy, is just how much each president we've had has in some way been a

response to the president we had before that one, you know, and you really notice that more when you march chronologically and pay attention to each of them and you see the way that the country has progressed, sometimes taken steps backwards, but in any event, sort of moved forward through history, kind of in this constant conversation about, okay, based on the leader we have now, what are we looking for in our next leader? And I also think, for me, my eyes were really opened to some of the presidents I did know a bit more about, like Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, FDR. I think I had a different appreciation for how exceptional they were because I could see what other men in office before them had done with the roles and some of the ways that they had

prefaced the arrival of stronger leaders in the country's history. I think in order to understand really great leadership traits in some of the presidents, you have to, you need to understand the rule, you need to understand the norm, you need to understand how hard it is to make some of the tough decisions they made. Speaking of tough decisions, this series that we're wrapping up is on prohibition. But the largest question, and I still don't know that it's answered for me, is how did this happen? out and make a decision that requires two-thirds approval of the Congress and three-fourths of states to abolish a freedom that seems to modern sensibilities pretty innocuous. Hmm.

So, yeah, I mean, really, even if you look back to the 1840s, the 1850s, you start to see the beginning of the temperance movement. And it does have this kind of gradual build over time. By 1869, you get an actual prohibition party, which is putting forward presidential candidates. Now, I mean, they're not getting very far. At most, they're getting like 2% of the vote in presidential elections. But you see, as you said, the movements start to crystallize. And I mean, I think part of what's happening, aside from just that there's always this kind of natural slow build to movements like that is that you also enter an industrial revolution. And that, I think, precipitates and accelerates the temperance movement. You're just getting different social

dynamics. You're getting easier access to saloons and alcohol and bars. And so that, you know, the culture around drinking is morphing at the end of the 1800s in a way that then kind of increases the reaction among other people in society to say, hey, this looks like a vice in our country that's getting out of control in some way. We've investigated a lot of the changing social dynamics, whether it's industrialization, urbanization, or even the immigrant influence on Americans at this time. And it seems like it's fearful. And a moment in which mainstream Americans felt that the character of the nation was changing, and for the worse. That seems, however, to be a very common fear that happens generationally throughout all sorts of different eras of American history. So, hearkening back to your comment that each president rides a swing from or away his predecessor, how did Teddy Roosevelt lead into Wilson, so part of what we see at the turn of the 20th century that who didn't really take executive power and run with it. But then, you know, Theodore Roosevelt changes that. And he was a big fan of Lincoln's and embraced the idea that the president should have a lot of power to, like, move the nation in new directions. And we see that then manifest in its own sort of way

with people like Woodrow Wilson, who will come later. But I think you're totally right that part of what happens is he starts to establish a little bit more the idea that government can play this very active role in shaping a better society. And, I mean, Theodore Roosevelt certainly wasn't pushing for prohibition, but I think the idea that the country, the Congress, the president, could be involved in trying to shape the moral fabric of the country

and play this very active role in making it a better place to live, improve the lives of citizens, is something that then starts to, in its own subtle way, tee up the possibility of something like prohibition, this idea that you'd make this big social engineered experiment to get rid of a vice.

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. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming.

Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery 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. We recently dove into the story of the godfather of modern mental manipulation, Richard Bandler, whose methods inspired some of the most toxic

and criminal self-help movements of the last two decades. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid and Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening. In my last question, I completely skipped over Taft. I went straight from Roosevelt to, you know, and that's indicative of... A lot of people do. Right. So let's not give him short shrift. In this moment, Taft had four years of his own. Was there anything that we need to underline in this period? Well, you know, I think, I mean, I would probably focus

less personally on Taft, although there are lots of interesting things to talk about with Taft. But I mean, I think as far as prohibition goes, you know, a really interesting thing to remember, and that helps explain part of what happened, were some of the state legislatures choosing them. And we also get an amendment for the income tax. Then we get prohibition and then we follow, you know, follow that almost immediately with women's right to vote. And, you know, two of them, the income tax and the direct election of senators are happening prior to prohibition. So while those are kind of working their way through under Roosevelt and Taft, and then as Wilson takes office, those intertwine so crucially with prohibition.

So the direct election of senators means that suddenly senators, like representatives, feel a lot more beholden to public opinion. For prohibition, that means as the country starts thinking more and more seriously about the temperance movement and more people get behind that idea, senators also feel more pressure to respond to that public sentiment in a way they didn't before. And then the income tax is incredibly important in the story of prohibition. One of the reasons that prohibition was not really gaining enough steam to be an amendment for a long time was the fact that the government brought in so much money from taxes on alcohol. At one point, it had reached about a third of revenue that was coming from taxes on alcohol. At one point, it had reached about a third of revenue that was coming from taxes on liquor. So even though people were upset about the way alcohol was kind of ravaging society, it just didn't seem at all politically feasible to ban the sale of alcohol

because the government's revenues would just plummet. Well, all of a sudden, you get this income tax amendment, and they have this whole new revenue stream, and they don't actually need the taxes from alcohol anymore. So it's that amendment that ends up enacted in 1913, which really finally opens the door for a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol sales to seem politically viable suddenly in a way it never had. We're veering into the territory of your second and most recent podcast, Constitutional. What were you trying to achieve with it? Sure. So the podcast I did after finishing presidential is called Constitutional, and I just recently wrapped up the finale for it.

But the idea behind constitutional was kind of like presidential to do this examination through American history of the story of the Constitution. Again, a bit ambitious and naive, but my focus for it was on people and forces that have, you know, played a really strong role over time in shaping and reshaping the United States Constitution. So it started out with a look at, you know, the original framers who met in Philadelphia and crafted all the original text for the Constitution. And then it quickly dove into stories of how certain amendments were passed in the case of prohibition, how, you know, this one amendment ended up

repealed. And then also in some cases, how pivotal Supreme Court cases changed the way that we interpret the Constitution, even if the words themselves didn't change. You know, there have been all these powerful moments in American history where people have kind of forced a new definition of the words that are already there. Let's stick with constitutional amendments for a bit. Before we get to the 18th, let's look at the 16th. Can you describe why we needed a constitutional amendment to levy an income tax? Oh, it's kind of a long, crazy story. So, I mean, let's see if I can do a short version. There was a lot of debate about whether Congress

already had the power in the Constitution to levy an income tax. And they actually, they did have an income tax that they introduced during the Civil War. But once they started doing it, all of a sudden there was this pushback that it wasn't really within their constitutional authority. This debate kind of played out through the late 1800s. And eventually the consensus was, all right, we need to actually write clear language into the Constitution that gives Congress this authority. And that was enough to kind of force the hand of passing a constitutional amendment that made it, you know, once and for all, a done, clear deal that Congress had this power. Returning to the pendulum swing between presidents, we had a series of presidents throughout Prohibition that made lip service to it personally, but certainly were, if not ardent supporters, believers in a law and order approach to Prohibition.

That would have carried through to Coolidge and Hoover, but then we had the Great Depression and the crash in 1929. How did we swing back so severely to Roosevelt in the beginning of the 30s? Yeah, so this is where the story of the income tax becomes, I know it doesn't sound glamorous, but becomes like really interestingly important again, because, you know, FDR is running for president. And as you said, we're like in the thick of the Great Depression. And part of what's happened is that since they've moved over to this system where the bulk of the government's revenue comes from income taxes, you know, they're looking out across the country and everyone's income has taken this huge nosedive in the depression, which means that the government has also had this well dry up for

revenue. It's kind of handcuffed in being able to spur the economy because it doesn't have money to to help jolt the economy forward. And so what FDR does in his campaign platform, which is extremely clever and sort of pushed on him by advisors, is he campaigns on a platform that they should repeal prohibition. And the argument that he makes cleverly is not like a moral one. It's not about

how, you know, ah, drinking isn't that bad. Maybe we made a mistake with that. His argument is that if we legalize the sale of alcohol again, we'll have taxes on alcohol again, which means a new source of revenue during the Great Depression to help get the economy back on its feet and get the government able to sort of function and bring the country along again. And so he makes this really smart economic case for bringing alcohol back into law. This is great because it gives a lot of other politicians as well whose views on prohibition had changed by that point. It gives them kind of an off-ramp because a lot of them had either voted for the prohibition amendment, or they had supported it while prohibition was in effect, and they were looking for ways out of supporting it that saved face. So this was a great one. And it also, I mean, once you legalize alcohol again, you don't just get the taxes from that, but it's a huge job creator. Suddenly, people can get jobs working in bars and opening breweries

and driving trucks that transport alcohol legally across the country. So that's the case FDR makes. And it's a case that ultimately is what, again, kind of opens the doors for this discussion about a new constitutional amendment repealing prohibition. 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,

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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 Ambees 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. So the 18th is the only amendment to be repealed, and it was done so through state conventions for the first time. In your investigation of all the other amendments, were there any other almost successful efforts to repeal another amendment? You know, there haven't been all the time that get fairly close that just sort of generally want to change something about the original language in the Constitution. So we've had like tons of amendments that have gotten fairly far that would change aspects of the electoral college, for example. Right. But there's no other amendment effort that's gotten very far that, you know,

directly sort of contradicts and overrides an amendment that we already have. You know, certainly you can probably imagine that while I was doing the constitutional podcast, I got a lot of of those have gotten anywhere near the kind of traction they would need to be real, to be realized. Let's keep talking about amendments. The 18th is another one in which many listeners might be surprised was even required. Why couldn't Congress just pass a law? Why was a constitutional amendment required? Well, that's the thing. It wasn't.

They could have, and most people today and some people back then would have even said they should have. That's what they should have done. They didn't need a constitutional amendment for this. And if you look at all of the constitutional amendments we have, there's something different about the 18th Amendment in that it's the only amendment that we ever passed that had this mission to socially engineer an outcome. And I think that's part of what the country learned from this failed amendment experiment is that this isn't the right type of thing to be in the Constitution. It's the kind of thing you should make, you know, Congress should pass a law about if it feels strongly.

But the Constitution is for something else. I think the character of the 18th Amendment probably is antithetical to most every other amendment. It is certainly one of the only ones that restricts liberties. Right. The rest of them that expressly promote liberties, enlarge liberties. I also noticed that it was actually passed pretty quickly, just one year and 29 days. This beats the speed of, for instance, the 16th. But some others you wouldn't have thought, like most of the Bill of Rights took twice as long to ratify. Yeah. Well, and one amendment that does move through the process even faster is the 21st Amendment.

Because that one they, you know, Congress passes in February of 1933. And by December of that same year, it's ratified and in effect. So, yeah, on both its way in and its way out, those amendments move faster than just about any other amendments in history. All right, bit of trivia. I actually knew this previous to this interview, but the record for the longest ratification period of any amendment I'm sure you know is? So the most recent amendment that we've passed in this country, the 27th Amendment, was actually the one that took the longest to go from proposal and passage to ultimate ratification. It took a really long time. It was proposed by James Madison and passed by Congress in 1791. And it took until the 1990s

for us to actually ratify it. And that has like a great story to it about a student at the University of Texas who found this old amendment and then went on a crusade to get the remaining number of states that were needed to ratify it. And the amendment was about making sure that members of Congress couldn't give themselves immediate pay raises. Our next series on American History Tellers will be on the age of Jackson. Ooh. So tell us a little bit about Andrew Jackson. Oh, man.

I'll just pause here for a second to say that is going to be an amazing podcast, and I can't wait to listen to it. So, I mean, Jackson is, has kind of a wild story. I mean, maybe I'll just, maybe I'll just tell a teensy bit about his childhood and then, you know, leave it to you to tell the rest of his story over time. But, you know, he's born in poverty, just like kind of in the middle of the woods in Tennessee. His father dies right before he's born. His mother is looking after several children. He ends up, he and his brother end up being captured by British soldiers and taken as prisoners when he's really young. And they're beaten and starved. And at one point, he refused to sign a British officer's shoes. And so the British officer took his sword and like slashed it across Jackson's face.

And for the rest of his life, he had this huge scar across his face from that moment. And his mom at one point finally orchestrated like a prisoner exchange and got the two sons back. But Jackson's other brother died shortly after from just all the mistreatment. And so, like, that's how his life begins. And it kind of just gets worse and crazier from there. You know, he's famously in tons of duels.

He ends up with, like, a bullet permanently lodged by his heart. I think he has another one in his shoulder. He has just this very brutal start to life. And this just kind of, you know, fight or be killed mentality that I think even as president, you see, like, it's been just sort of like ingrained in him to have this just aggressive, sort of defensive preservation attitude toward the world. And his wife dies while he's running for president. There is lots of drama in his story, his personal story. It's so exciting to hear you're going to be tackling him next. Well, speaking of what's coming up next, the last episode of Constitutional

debuted this past February. What are you doing next? That's a great question. I wish I knew the answer to. I mean, what I'm doing currently is going through this long list of ideas I have. A lot of ideas, actually, that listeners to Presidential and Constitutional have sent me over time about podcasts they hope I'll do next. And I have a notebook full. Every time I get an idea from a listener, I add it to my list. And so what I've been doing now is just kind of this fun brainstorming phase where I go down that list and toss in some other ideas I've had and start trying to, you know, sketch out for myself, like, well, what would it look like and what would it take to make a podcast on this topic and on that topic? And I'm hoping within, I don't know how long, but sometime kind of soon, one will emerge as just

like the kind of clear winner for what I should make my kind of podcast chapter three. But for now, I'm just rolling up my sleeves and trying to figure it out. But more audio. Well, thank you so much for talking with me. I really appreciate taking the time. And I'm looking forward to seeing, or hearing rather, what you have up next.

Well, thanks so much. I appreciate it. This is the end of our series on Prohibition. But next time on American History Tellers, we will be starting a brand new series on another important period in our nation's history, the Age of Jackson. If you enjoyed my conversation with Lillian Cunningham, be sure to check out her podcasts, Presidential and Constitutional. You can subscribe to them and this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you're listening right now.

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