American History Tellers - Prohibition - Poisoning the Well | 4
Episode Date: February 28, 2018The rise of the speakeasy was one of many unintended consequences of Prohibition - and others were much deadlier.Not coincidentally, at the same time Prohibition was taking effect, the Klu Kl...ux Klan rose to power. They combined Prohibition’s anti-immigrant rhetoric with violence. As the number of speakeasies continued to grow, and states continued to buckle down, suppliers couldn’t keep up. Quality went down. Most bootleg alcohol from the time had elements of stuff that would kill you. But people everywhere still wanted to drink - and they would go to any length to get one.Almost everyone could see there was a problem with how Prohibition was actually playing out, but no one could agree what the solution was.No Place of Grace by T. J. Jackson Lears is a fantastic book to learn about the roots of modernism and anti-modernism in American culture. Allan Levine’s The Devil in Babylon also explores these themes, specifically how these impulses played out in 1920’s America.For more on the author of Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street by Richard Lingerman is a great read. And to understand the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and Prohibition, Paul Angle’s Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness and Thomas Pegram’s articles and books, including One Hundred Percent American are essential reading. Again, Lisa McGirr’s The War on Alcohol explores these topics quite thoroughly and connects them to the rise of the modern state. A few different articles have delved into the dirty political campaigns of the 1920s, including this good summary by Mental Floss.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.
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Imagine it's 1924. It's the end of the working day and it's getting dark.
Time for you and your brother to close up shop on your family's small grocery store in Greenbush, an Italian-American neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin. The two of
you are almost ready to leave when you hear a noise coming from way down the street. You stop
what you're doing and listen. Your brother turns to you. Do you think it's the Klan? Carlo warned
me there's a good chance of them coming out tonight, on account of that woman who died of poison hooch last week.
It's not fair. Most people here don't have anything to do with the illegal business.
I don't think they believe that.
The other day, a guy came in here and asked me for some Dago red wine.
I told him to get out, but he got really threatening.
Thought I was holding out on him.
You can see the mob now at the end of the street.
They're getting closer, carrying lit torches.
There's probably 50 of them, wearing white.
They're chanting.
What are they saying?
I can't tell.
You and your brother hunker down a little and watch.
You're lucky.
They pass your store, but your neighbor is not.
Johnny's pool hall.
He has a back room where he sells wine.
If the mob knows, they might be going after his place. Later that night, you hear that all the
windows at the pool hall had been smashed. Not only that, but the mob murdered one of your
parents' neighbors. He was a grocer too, and as far as you know, his family had nothing to do
with bootlegging. He was just one victim of what the newspapers called the Rum Wars. And Madison wasn't the only place where the anti-alcohol crusade had taken on
an altogether more sinister character. Across the country, immigrant communities accused of
supplying illegal liquor were under attack by an organization at the peak of its power, the KKK.
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From Wondery, this is American History Tellers.
Our history, your story.
I'm Lindsey Graham. On the last episode of Prohibition, we explained how instead of stamping out public drinking,
American cities came to be dominated by hundreds of thousands of speakeasies.
These illegal bars also came to be known as blind
pigs. It's an unusual name, and it dates back to the previous century when, the story goes,
an innkeeper in Maine charged patrons to view a real-life blind pig he kept in a separate room.
Admission included a glass of rum. Only a few years after the Volstead Act officially outlawed
intoxicating beverages,
blind pigs had become a common sight, especially in places like Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans,
and New York, all hubs for smuggling. The rise of the speakeasy was one of the many unintended
consequences of prohibition, and one that in turn led to several problems. On this episode,
we'll hear how the battle over illegal drinking turned deadly in more ways than one.
From anti-immigrant campaigns to mass poisonings.
If you had picked up a copy of the Atlanta Constitution in November 1915,
you might have noticed a small headline that read,
Klan is established with impressiveness.
A week or so earlier, on Thanksgiving Day,
a group of men dressed in white robes had apparently climbed nearby Stone Mountain, Georgia,
and set fire to a cross to mark their re-establishment of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
The original Klan had been active in southern states after the Civil War,
promoting white supremacy and organizing violent attacks on newly freed African Americans. Among the group who took part in the founding ceremony on Stone Mountain in 1915
were two old men who had been part of that original organization.
The new group was led by William J. Simmons, who gave himself the title Imperial Wizard.
He'd been inspired to revive the organization, at least in part, by Birth of a Nation,
a hugely popular film released that same year, which portrayed the Klan of old in a heroic light.
The new Klan claimed to promote Anglo-Saxon Christian values
while demonizing African Americans, Jews, Mexicans, Asians, and any other non-white immigrants.
In its first years, the group grew slowly, but in the 1920s, membership skyrocketed.
The rise of the Klan was at least
partly in reaction to the massive social changes we heard about at the beginning of this series.
By 1925, the Klan had managed to spread out of the South and Midwest into every region of America.
Local Klan chapters staged rallies across the country. That year, tens of thousands of Klansmen
marched down the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Their banners read, America First, or America for Whites.
At the local level, the Klan sponsored baseball teams, baby beauty pageants, and had their own radio shows.
Planes dropped American flags attached to parachutes at KKK picnics.
And at nighttime gatherings, they set off fireworks that formed three Ks in the sky.
They'd arranged for streetlights along the routes of their marches to be turned off,
so their torches and white robes looked brighter in the dark.
Their public processions were designed to be as dramatic as possible.
The KKK and other white supremacists blamed much of the era's problems on immigrants,
from the post-war recession to unemployment.
And they also thought future generations of white Americans would be ruined by the drugs and alcohol that they said came from
foreigners. Anti-immigrant rhetoric had been part of the movement for prohibition from the very
beginning, but now that rhetoric was being combined with the violence of the Klan. Clarence Darrow,
a trial lawyer who was taking on the religious right in Tennessee at the time, described the connection between the KKK and the Anti-Saloon League.
The father and mother of the Ku Klux Klan is the Anti-Saloon Leaguer.
I would not say every Anti-Saloon Leaguer is a Ku Kluxer,
but every Ku Kluxer is an Anti-Saloon Leaguer.
The Klan led a campaign of intimidation against people it accused of being involved
in the illegal alcohol business.
Across the South and Midwest, they torched speakeasies
and burned crosses on the lawns of suspected Jewish and Italian bootleggers.
And the Klan had a practice of publicly humiliating those accused of bootlegging
or even just being heavy drinkers, tar and feathers.
Klansmen would drag their victims into the streets,
cover them in sticky black tar and chicken feathers, and leave them there.
But in some parts of the country, the violence went much further. One of the worst outbreaks of violence
was in Illinois. In 1925, southern Illinois was awash in moonshine. The area was home to a large
immigrant population. Among the most prolific moonshiners was Charles Berger, a Lithuanian
Jewish immigrant. When alcohol was outlawger, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant.
When alcohol was outlawed, he'd established a thriving business in Harrisburg distilling,
transporting, and selling alcohol. Eventually, he was forced to move his business over the county
line to Williamson County, where he opened the Shady Rest Speakeasy. He was competing for business
with other moonshiners in the area, and the rivalry frequently blew up into armed conflict.
On one occasion, a rival gang tried to blow up his speakeasy by dropping dynamite from a plane.
Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan had begun to organize in Williamson.
They managed to get some of their members elected to the local government, and with the support of religious leaders and local residents, they organized a vigilante militia to shut down the stills and roadhouses.
Led by S. Glenn Young, a former federal law enforcement officer, the militia began conducting searches looking for illegal alcohol and taking away suspected bootleggers to their own makeshift jails.
Tensions between the Klan and the bootleggers were rising and soon exploded into an all-out war. The violence left
at least 20 people dead in the region. In the terrorized immigrant community, many families
up and left. The Klan continued to enjoy support, though. To many, they were taking on armed gangsters
who local politicians had been too afraid to tackle. When S. Glenn Young was shot and killed
by a lawman later that year, 15,000 people came out to his funeral. To the bootleggers, the Klan
were targeting immigrant businesses, and without their leader, the militia was vulnerable. The next
year, Charles Berger and other bootleggers banded together, armed with tommy guns and shotguns,
and launched an attack on the remainder of the Klan leadership, killing several of them
and effectively putting an end to the raids. The violence in Williamson and in other parts of the country divided public opinion. On the one
hand, almost everyone could see that there was a problem with the way Prohibition was actually
playing out, but nobody could agree what the solution ought to be. Anti-Prohibition groups
sprang up, working to overturn the 18th Amendment. At the forefront of these efforts were several
women's organizations, like the Mollie Pitcher Cluber Club. The Molly Pitchers lobbied for the state of New York to adopt a
lenient enforcement policy, basically to look the other way when it came to illegal drinking.
The most powerful and longest-lasting organization was the Association Against
the Prohibition Amendment, which had been established in 1918. In the early 20s,
the organization was campaigning for an immediate legal exemption for beer and wine
and for eventual full repeal.
But in states where the Ku Klux Klan and Anti-Saloon League were strongest,
there were calls to get tougher on illegal alcohol.
Indiana, for example, doubled down, passing the Wright-Bone-Dry Law in 1925.
The law implemented stiffer penalties for selling alcohol and outlawed
medicinal liquor. And Indiana wasn't the only state to go bone-dry. Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas
also passed tough anti-alcohol laws. In some places, even the wine used for Holy Communion
was banned. Even with the stricter rules, though, there were people everywhere who still wanted a
drink, and they were taking more and more risks to get it.
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Imagine again you're that bootlegger from our first episode. You've gone from waiter to
independent operator, and now you've started working for a crime syndicate
supplying illegal alcohol.
You've been getting the good stuff from Rum Row,
but your boss has asked you to come talk to him
about some changes.
Yes, sir, what do you have in mind?
From now on, the fine liquor from Canada
is for sample purposes only, not deliveries.
We can't deliver genuine scotch liquor
or genuine anything else.
We can't get enough of that stuff any longer.
So what are we going to sell?
We have 15 or 20 big plants now.
They're converting alcohol into whiskey and wine and cordials.
You've already been selling some.
People can't tell the difference.
But it's not poison hooch or anything.
I guarantee it wouldn't harm a child.
But we can't tell anyone.
The customer likes to think he's getting the real good,
so let him keep thinking that. It's good for business. You're quiet. You know that the quality
of goods has been going down. It just makes sense. There are too many speakeasies and not
enough good alcohol to go around. And we have a new system for ordering and pickup. From now on,
you call the warehouse and order cases of soap. Soap? He hands you a list with brands of soap on it,
each one a code for a type of liquor. When you want whiskey, you ask for ivory. When you ask for pears, you get gin. When you order, they'll tell you where to pick it up. We're not going to
keep things at the same warehouse anymore. This scene is based on one described by a bootlegger
writing anonymously in The New Yorker in 1926. He wrote that selling fake alcohol was as much
about perception as anything else. By the mid-20s, he wrote, everyone knew that it was almost
impossible to find real Gordon's gin from England, so trying to sell anything called Gordon's gin
raised a lot of suspicion. But the anonymous bootlegger wondered if changing the label on
the bottle would make a difference. To test this,
he sent a bottle of moonshine labeled Gordon's Gin to a man he calls the president of a leading
New York bank. But the banker wasn't convinced and sent it back. When the anonymous bootlegger
sent the same moonshine, but this time labeled South American Gin, the banker loved it and
ordered more. Of course, it was exactly the same gin I had sent him in the London bottles,
wrote the bootlegger, but he was having a great time fooling himself.
The liquor would not hurt him, and he could afford to pay for it.
But the quality of bootleg alcohol had always been an issue.
Even just a few years into Prohibition,
it's estimated that about two-thirds of the alcohol that people thought
was imported from Canada or Europe was actually fake. As the number of speakeasies rose, the demand for
imported alcohol only grew higher, and the amount of counterfeit alcohol being sold only increased.
The anonymous bootlegger writing for The New Yorker said that by 1926, everything,
even the expensive stuff, was being made in factories in Brooklyn or New Jersey.
The average age of a bottle-marked 12-year-old Scotch Brooklyn or New Jersey. The average age of a
bottle-marked 12-year-old scotch was about 30 days. But the age of the alcohol wasn't the only thing
that was fake about the booze being sold. Much of the moonshine on the market was made from something
called industrial alcohol. Industrial alcohol had been around long before Prohibition. It's alcohol
distilled specifically for use in factories and power plants. Unlike
consumer alcohol, which was subject to a sin tax, industrial alcohol was often exempt from tariffs.
Right from the start, this industrial alcohol posed a problem for the government.
How to make sure that consumers didn't just buy the tax-free industrial alcohol
and drink that instead? The solution the government came up with was to require the companies denature the alcohol.
Denaturing meant adding noxious chemicals
to discourage people from drinking it.
Some of the additives were worse than others.
Some just made drinkers nauseous.
Others induced vomiting.
The very worst could make you go blind, even kill you.
Bootleggers, though, decided that if alcohol could be denatured,
it could be renatured, too.
It was a lot easier than making alcohol from scratch, the old-fashioned way, in a pot still.
Some redistilled the alcohol to try to get the impurities out.
Redistilling was complicated, though, since most people didn't know how to use a still properly.
And there was also a whole range of methods that was even less reliable.
It wasn't as if you could read up about it either, because even books about how
to make alcohol were illegal. In newspaper articles, poems, and songs from the time,
it's clear that many people knew the dangers that came with this alcohol, but they drank it anyway.
In one song from the 20s, the hero meets a bootlegger's daughter at a dance. He sings,
The way she drinks gin is a terrible sin, but girls will be girls, as you know.
Despite that, they get together. But it's nothing but play Just taking out orders for dead
I know that this stuff's full of poison
But me and my sweetie won't die
When we want a drink
We go out to the sink
The bootlegger's daughter and I
Imagine it's 1926.
You live in Boston, and you're a science writer.
You know there's a lot of illegal alcohol out there.
Worse, you think the public is misinformed about how much of it is lethal.
You decide to do a little research.
You start by visiting an acquaintance you heard was into bootleg alcohol.
You visit him in his office at the electric company he works for. He offers you a drink. Can I get you something for your thirst? Maybe.
Depends on what you got. Gin. Perfectly good gin, I assure you. How can I be sure? Our bootlegger
gets his alcohol from us here at the plant. We sell it to him. He renatures it. My cut is to get
a little back for personal use. What kind of alcohol
are you using here at the plant? It's perfectly good. It's just denatured with a little menthol.
That doesn't sound too dangerous, but it doesn't sound quite right either. Menthol? You sure? Yep.
Some people have drunk too much and got digestive trouble, you know, but a little won't hurt you.
You turn down the offer of the drink, but you ask to see the raw alcohol and take down the formula. Later, you look up the government guidelines for denaturing
alcohol in electric plants like the one you just visited. According to the guidelines, for every
20 gallons, you have to add a gallon of wood alcohol. The more technical name for wood alcohol
is methyl alcohol or methanol. And you know that methanol is a far cry from menthol.
As little as half an ounce of methanol could permanently damage the optic nerve,
meaning that every 20-ounce bottle made this way would likely contain enough to harm a person's
vision. Blindness, even. 40 ounces could be fatal. This story is based on a Boston science writer at
the time, Donald Wilhelm. He really did go out and research moonshine, and what he found was shocking.
Lab results show that 92% of the bootleg alcohol tested had some trace elements of deadly compounds
like cadmium iodide, chloroform, acetone, benzene, or shellac.
He published his story in Popular Science magazine in July 1926.
It was called, Millions of Americans are Committing Slow Suicide.
But six months later, things would suddenly get a lot worse.
Instead of slow suicide, hospitals were faced with a crisis of epidemic poisonings.
Imagine it's Christmas Eve.
You're a nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
You're already expecting the worst of this shift.
Ever since Prohibition, the holidays have been a horror show.
People keep coming in with cases of bad alcohol poisoning.
A lot of people are violently sick to their stomachs.
Over the years, a few have gone blind.
You're filling out your paperwork when a man bursts in through the emergency room door.
He looks terrified.
Are you all right, sir?
Is he still behind me?
Who?
Santa!
He's chasing me!
There's no one behind you, sir.
You're safe here.
He chased me all the way here.
He was swinging at me when he got close.
You don't immediately think about alcohol in connection with this guy's hallucination
until he gets closer,
and you can see he's flushed and gasping for air.
You can also smell some kind
of toxic fumes. You see utter terror in his eyes. Try to calm down and have a seat while I get a
doctor. There is no Santa following you. He had a bat, a baseball bat. He's coming after me.
The doctor comes and gets him onto a gurney so he can be sedated, but it is too late. Before the
doctor has time to assess him properly,
the man dies. And he's just the first of many more to come. By New Year's, 29 more people will die
of alcohol poisoning at the Bellevue. And it wasn't just in New York. All across the country,
alcohol poisoning was increasing. By the end of Prohibition, at least 10,000 people died.
It turned out that those who died hadn't just been
drinking badly made moonshine. They were being poisoned by kerosene, mercury, formaldehyde,
and other poisons, as well as the methyl alcohol to boot.
Where was all this poison alcohol coming from? And why now?
The same guidelines for industrial alcohol had existed long before Prohibition, but it turned out that they'd been changed shortly before the 1926 Christmas poisonings.
President Calvin Coolidge had been so frustrated by the presence of bootleg booze that he ordered the amount of poison required to denature industrial alcohol be doubled.
Under the new guidelines, a 20-ounce bottle of industrial alcohol probably contained enough methanol to kill a person. The federal government also upped the amount of some of the other deadly
poisons added to the formula, acetone, benzene, and cyanide. New York's chief medical examiner,
Charles Norris, knew who to blame. Just four days into the Christmas epidemic at the Bellevue,
he held a press conference in which he pointed the finger at the federal government. The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the
bootleggers are doing with it, and yet it continues its poisoning process, heedless of the fact that
people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United
States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poison liquor causes. It wasn't just industrial alcohol that was
making people sick. Jamaican ginger, or jake as it was called, was a popular stomach medicine at
the time. It was sold as a cure for nausea, cramps caused by flatulence, and summer complaint,
otherwise known as diarrhea. But it was also an easy way to get drunk, and the manufacturers knew it.
To try and stop people drinking Jamaican ginger, the Treasury Department issued new rules
requiring the manufacturer to increase the amount of ginger in the medicine.
The idea was to make it so bitter nobody could possibly enjoy it.
The company was not happy at all.
If they made it undrinkable, they would lose the bulk of their sales. So instead of increasing the amount of ginger in the medicine, they added a
chemical that successfully fooled the government tests, but didn't change the taste. Unfortunately,
the chemical they use, tricresyl phosphate, is a neurotoxin. Even in small quantities,
it caused numbness of the hands and feet, which often leads to permanent paralysis.
Tens of thousands of people who drank Jamaican ginger were affected.
They were easy to spot because the medicine left them unable to use their foot muscles.
It became known as Jake Walk or Jake Foot once everyone realized that Jamaican ginger was to blame.
The phenomenon was so common, people even wrote songs about it, like Jake Liquicker Blues, Jake Jigga Juke, and Jake Walk Papa.
I can't eat, I can't talk, I've been a-drinking this Jake
Until now I can't walk
Come here, Mama, hold me by the hand
I'm a Jake Walk Papa from a Jake Walk clan
Listen here, Daddy, I've told you before
You keep a-drinking that Jake, don't you knock at my door
I love you, Daddy, but don't you see
You can't drink Jake and get along with me
In the wake of the mass poisonings, the federal government faced public criticism.
But prohibitionists doubled down.
When Time magazine asked for a comment from the Anti-Saloon League,
the League responded,
the government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when
the Constitution prohibits it. To root out a bad habit costs many lives and long years of effort.
To Prohibition's opponents, this was the height of hypocrisy. After all, one of the main arguments
for outlawing alcohol in the first place had been that drinking was dangerous and destroyed lives.
But for the League, any price was worth paying
in the quest to rid the country of alcohol, even war.
Imagine you're a member of the Anti-Saloon League,
attending the organization's annual national convention.
This year, it's in Chicago.
You really believe in the League's good work.
The old saloon was pure evil.
But Prohibition-era America hasn't been the utopia you expected.
Instead, there's been violence everywhere, and lots of it.
Sometimes things seem to be breaking down, not getting better.
You've just come from a talk by Ernest Charrington, one of the most famous league leaders.
He's even published a book called America and the World Liquor Problem.
He argues that until the whole world has eradicated alcohol,
America can never be safe.
After his speech, you and a fellow member go for dinner.
Your friend starts up a conversation about Charrington.
You know, he was right about the problems coming from other countries.
We need tougher borders.
I don't know.
I've heard most of the illegal booze
is actually being made right here in the States. I think Charrington I've heard most of the illegal booze is actually being made
right here in the States. I think Charrington knows what he's talking about. Can you imagine?
Every day, another thousand cases come through Detroit alone. Those Jewish whiskey makers in
Montreal are making a mint. Yeah, but that stuff he was talking about with Cuba, that's crazy.
It's one thing to talk about trying to establish chapters in Canada. Totally another thing to start talking about starting wars over alcohol. You expect your friend to agree here,
but to your surprise, he seems to have bought Sherrington's argument. Why? Don't they threaten
our lives, our health, the very fabric of our society when they make alcohol and sell it to us?
You can't force other countries to adopt our laws. It's just not right. I think you can.
It's the same as any foreign threat. As long as alcohol is out there, America will never be safe.
You decide you don't want to get into this any further, so you change the topic.
But you're also starting to wonder if you want to remain part of the League.
You're already on the fence, and this year's meeting seemed a little more extreme.
Prohibition was dividing the country into two opposite camps. The American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a new novel lampooning supporters of Prohibition. It was called Elmer Gantry,
and it featured a womanizing, drunken, greedy, and ambitious preacher. When it came out in March
1927, it sparked off a
firestorm of controversy and was banned in at least three cities. The criticism only served
to drive up sales, which of course thrilled the book's publisher. But supporters of Prohibition
were outraged. There were calls for Lewis to be imprisoned or sent to the electric chair.
A group in Virginia even invited Lewis to come down to attend a lynching, his own.
The rhetoric and violence was getting worse.
Opponents of Prohibition had had enough,
and they were about to get a chance to change it at the ballot box.
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On August 2nd, 1927, President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, is at the Summer White House,
a game lodge in Custer
State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Coolidge said he felt more comfortable there.
The journalist H.L. Mencken famously said that Coolidge's chief accomplishment was to have slept
more than any other president in history. But on this day, in 1927, Coolidge would distinguish
himself in another way, namely, by becoming the fourth president in the history of the republic to not seek re-election. The president's reasons for retiring
were never made clear, but it might have been that he didn't like the look of where the economy was
going. His wife, Grace Coolidge, supposedly told one reporter, Papa says there's going to be a
depression. Whatever his reasons, Coolidge's decision came as a massive shock to the country, and it left the race to succeed him wide open.
For the Republicans, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover won the nomination to be the
party candidate, and former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith became the Democratic nominee.
Smith had been born and raised in Manhattan to an Irish and Italian immigrant family.
He worked his way up from a job at the Fulton Fish Market,
campaigning on his image as a down-to-earth politician
who would stand up for immigrants.
Although Smith had got the nod
at the 1928 Democratic National Convention,
he faced opposition even from his own party
for two main reasons.
Firstly, he was a wet who opposed Prohibition.
And secondly, he was Catholic.
During the election campaign, Al Smith's religion,
his support for immigrants, and his opposition to prohibition would become conflated by his
opponents. As the prominent Baptist preacher John Roach Stratton said at the time, Smith came to
represent all the things that the conservative heartland of America was opposed to. Cocktail
drinking, poodle dogs, divorces, novels, stuffy rooms, dancing, evolution,
Clarence Darrow, nude art, prize fighting, actors, greyhound racing, and modernism.
Shortly after he won the Democratic nomination, the Ku Klux Klan sent out a mailer that read,
We now face the darkest hour in American history.
In a convention ruled by political Romanism,
the Antichrist has won. And it wasn't just the Klan attacking Smith. Bishop James Cannon,
head of the Methodist Church, asked, shall dry America elect a cocktail president?
Invoking both anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic prejudices at the same time,
Cannon implied that as a Catholic, Smith had evil intentions for the country. The Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles, and the Russian Jews, that kind has given us stomach ache.
We have been unable to assimilate such people into our national life, so we shut the door on them.
But Smith says, give me that kind of people.
He wants the kind of dirty people you find today on the sidewalks of New York.
Imagine it's September 1928.
You and a friend are part of a crowd of people leaving a town hall meeting organized by the League of Women Voters. You've just finished
listening to the Democratic candidate, Alfred E. Smith. There's a certain glamour to Smith.
He's a worldly New Yorker. It's exciting that he came to Oklahoma City to speak.
Your friend is excited about Smith's chances in the election, and the two of you are laughing at some of the things his opponents are saying about him.
They call him Alcoholic Smith and say he wants to bring back the saloon.
But the two of you are more worried about some of the other rumors that are being spread about him.
You heard one person say that if Smith was elected, he would take his orders from the Pope.
That is un-American.
I can't believe people are playing such dirty tricks with our election.
I don't think people will fall for it. Americans are smarter than that. If anything,
it would probably backfire and help Smith. I hope so, but I'm not sure. A lot of people in my office
just seem to hate him so much. It's like they're prepared to believe the very worst about him.
Alfred Smith lost the 1928 presidential election. Badly.
Out of the 48 states that were part of the Union, he carried just eight.
He even lost his own state of New York.
Reporter Frederick William Weil said Smith was defeated by the three Ps.
Prohibition, prejudice, and prosperity.
America had picked Hoover over cocktails, evolution, and modernism.
Maybe people couldn't get their preacher's warnings out of their heads.
A vote for Smith is a vote for the devil.
Maybe America wasn't ready for a Catholic president.
Maybe it wasn't ready to give up on Prohibition just yet.
Under Hoover, Prohibition would continue.
The new president called it an experiment noble in purpose.
But if it was noble in purpose, in practice, the underground alcohol business was getting increasingly out of hand. By the
late 1920s, new organizations had sprung up to control the manufacture and supply of liquor
to America's cities. These new groups were as sophisticated as they were violent. The
government stepped up its enforcement, even as public opinion swung against the noble
experiment of prohibhibition.
The illicit booze business was changing, consolidating under savvy criminal overlords.
The Mafia.
From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of Prohibition from American History Tellers.
On the next episode, we follow the Mafia's rise to power, becoming criminal organizations that ran moonshining and smuggling businesses in major American cities.
And at the head of one of these organizations was the man who had become one of the best-known mob bosses of all time, Al Capone.
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, Mar between Peru and New Zealand,
lies a tiny volcanic island.
It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn,
and it harboured a deep, dark scandal.
There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it.
It just happens to all of us.
I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story
that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn.
When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with.
In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse
and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island
to the brink of extinction.
Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+.
Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.