Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Prohibition

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed. It banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol.  The path to the 18th Amendment was something that was almost a century in the making, and once it was passed, it was widely ignored both illegally and through numerous legal loopholes.  Finally, after being in place for almost 14 years, it was repealed with overwhelming popular support using a constitutional method that has never been used before or since. Learn more about prohibition, how it came about, and how it ended on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On January 16th, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It banned the manufacturer, sale, and transportation of alcohol. The path to the 18th Amendment was something that was almost a century in the making. And once it was passed, it was widely ignored, both illegally and through numerous legal loopholes. Finally, after being in place for almost 14 years, it was repealed with overwhelming popular support using a constitutional method that has never been used before or since. Learn more about prohibition, how it came about and how it ended on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us. every week on the ThuLine podcast from NPR. The period known as Prohibition is often overlooked in American history,

yet both its passage and its repeal was the result of some of the biggest social campaigns in American history. The origins of Prohibition date back to the early 19th century and the beginnings of the temperance movement. I will give the temperance movement this one point. Early Americans had a huge drinking problem. If you remember back to my episode on early American alcohol consumption, Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries drank an astonishing amount of alcohol. The Americans of this period arguably drank more alcohol than perhaps any people in world history. In 1820, for example, the average man in the United States consumed four gallons of pure alcohol per year, or the equivalent of 18 gallons of 90 proof alcohol. That is over four times the alcohol consumed by the biggest alcohol consuming country in the world today, Moldova. And I should also note that the vast majority of this consumption was in fact consumed by men, not women, a fact that will be vital in the history of prohibition.

All of this alcohol couldn't be consumed without some sort of repercussions. Drunkenness was rampant, as were alcohol-related illnesses. The movement that spawned the temperance movement was known as the Second Great Awakening. This was a Protestant religious revival that took place in the 1820s. Part of the Second Great Awakening was the growing call for people to either moderate or abstain from alcohol consumption. This was the beginning of the temperance movement. The American Temperance Society was founded in Boston in 1826 and it grew rapidly. Within 10 years, it had 8,000 local chapters and over 1.5 million members who had pledged,

to abstain from alcohol. Over the course of the 19th century, a host of other temperance organizations arose, including the Prohibition Party in 1869, the International Organization of Good Templars in 1851, the Women's Crusade in 1873, the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League in 1893. The efforts made by these organizations ranged from trying to run candidates for office

to marches and protests to even more extreme tactics. One of the most famous members of the temperance movement was a woman named Carrie Nation. From 1900 to 1910, she would often lead raids on saloons and bars where she would literally destroy the establishment with a hatchet. She was arrested 32 times. Many of the members of the temperance movement were women, and in no small part, the women's suffrage movement sprang from the temperance movement. Suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both heavily

involved in the Temperance Movement. During the progressive era in the early 20th century, many in the Temperance Movement saw progressive policies as a way to advance their agenda. It was during this period that attempts began to ban alcohol in some states completely. One of the things that really brought the idea of nationwide prohibition to the forefront was the U.S. involvement in World War I. In the early 19th century, the primary forms of alcohol consumed in the U.S. were cider and whiskey. However, by the early 20th century, this had changed to beer, and the majority of breweries in the United States were almost all run by Germans. Beer, and by association, alcohol, became associated with America's enemy in the war, which gave the idea of prohibition an element of nationalism that

didn't exist before. On October 1, 1917, during the middle of the war, the Senate passed a resolution with the wording of the 18th Amendment that was to be sent to states for approvals. which was then approved by the House on December 17th. Ratification of the amendment took place when Nebraska, the 36th state to approve the amendment, did so on January 16th, 1919. The amendment itself went into effect one year after its ratification, and it did not make the consumption of alcohol illegal. Rather, it banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol.

Prior to the ratification of the 18th Amendment, on November 18th, 1918, Congress had passed the Wartime Prohibition Act, which banned the sale of beverages with more than 1.28% alcohol. The Wartime Prohibition Act was passed a week after the war ended. Enforcement of the 18th Amendment was set forth in the Volstead Act, which was drafted by the Anti-Saloon League and proposed by a representative from Minnesota named Andrew Volstead. The Volstead Act went into effect on the date the 18th Amendment went into effect on January 17, 1920. Initially, Prohibition did decrease alcohol consumption, because if nothing else, it couldn't be sold and manufactured openly. Estimates are that alcohol consumption declined by about 70% overnight.

However, there were many loopholes in the Volstead Act. For starters, any alcohol that was purchased before the inaction of Prohibition was technically legal. So, some wealthy people amassed enormous stockpiles of wine and liquor, which meant that for all practical purposes, they weren't affected by prohibition at all. As a result, dinner parties and parties where there wasn't even food involved rose in popularity. Another loophole was alcohol used for religious use. Catholics and Jews both use wine for religious purposes, and they were allowed to continue to do so. The Volstead Act allowed for 10 gallons per person per year to be consumed. But the definition of a rabbi was very ambiguous. There were many people who claimed to be rabbis who suddenly had large congregations where they could distribute sacramental wine.

In Los Angeles, for example, one Jewish congregation went from 180 families to over 1,000 families within a year after Prohibition. Another loophole was medicinal alcohol. You may never have heard of medicinal alcohol, but it was a thing during Prohibition. When Prohibition began, the American Medical Association came out in San Francisco. said that there was no reason ever to prescribe alcohol. However, soon after prohibition started, doctors realized that there was a potential to make quite a bit of money by writing prescriptions for medicinal liquor. Whiskey manufacturers were able to continue to make small amounts under a label that said, quote, for medical use only. With a $3 prescription from a doctor,

you could go to the pharmacy, get a bottle of liquor, and then have your prescription refilled every 10 days. Another loophole was farmers being allowed to preserve their fruit crops. They could create cider and then distill it into a product that was known as Applejack, and it was totally legal. Wine producers found an ingenious way around prohibition. Rather than making wine, they sold what were known as wine blocks. Wine blocks were just blocks of concentrated grape juice. However, grape juice could be used to make wine, as the grape growers didn't want to be held liable for people using their product to make illegal wine, they explicitly put on the packaging that their product was not for making wine. In fact, they put detailed instructions for what you should not do

to turn their product into wine. They also sold their product with flavors such as burgundy, claret, and reisling. There was one case in 1927 of a producer of wine bricks that went to court, but they were found not guilty by a jury. Of course, most people didn't take such measures to get alcohol. They just got it illegally. Prohibition proved to be the biggest boon ever for organized crime in the United States. Organized crime had existed for decades in the United States, but for the most part, it was small-time crime involving individual neighborhoods, things like extortion, prostitution, and loan sharking.

Now all of a sudden, they were able to take things to a whole new level. It was as if a family restaurant suddenly became a nationwide chain overnight. There was an almost limited demand for an illegal product. and the group that was most able to meet that demand was an organized illegal organization. The mob and other criminal groups developed elaborate smuggling operations to bring alcohol into the country. This included smuggling booze across the Canadian-Mexican borders, as well as by sea from the Caribbean and Europe. The illegal activity extended to the retail level, with taverns, bars, and pubs being replaced with illegal speakeasies. As a result of all this activity, some mobsters like Al Capone became fabulously well.

The problem wasn't just people selling illegal alcohol. It was all the illegal activity surrounding it and emanating from it. There were multiple criminal organizations that were now competing with each other. Because they were dealing with an illegal enterprise, they couldn't very well compete in the marketplace. They competed with one another with murder and violence. And the result were things like the St. Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. It also corrupted law enforcement agencies around the country. Law enforcement officials were paid to look the other way to allow the booze to flow, something that most enforcement officials ethically had no problem with, as it had all been completely legal up until a few years before. The money flowing into crime

syndicates also saw increases in other illegal operations that the mob ran. Over time, the initial reduction in alcohol consumption began to increase back to and possibly even greater than the levels before prohibition. However, it wasn't just that prohibition was ineffective achieving its stated goal of ending alcohol consumption. In many ways, it had made things worse. Poisonings were common to unregulated production and consumption of alcohol. Products such as bathtub gin often contained poisons. Worst of all, crime was up across the country. Respect for the law was at an all-time low, as almost everybody was now a criminal, and law enforcement had likewise been corrupted almost everywhere. Eventually, even the most ardent supporters of Prohibition realized

that it had been a horrible mistake. One of the most prominent supporters of Prohibition was the world's wealthiest man, John D. Rockefeller, who in 1932 said, quote, when Prohibition was introduced, I hope that it would be widely supported by public opinion, and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased. The speakeasy has replaced the saloon. A vast army of lawbreakers has appeared. Many of our best citizens have openly ignored prohibition. Respect for the law has been greatly lessened and crime has increased to a level never seen

before. End quote. On February 20, 1933, the Blaine Act was presented to Congress, which would enact the 21st Amendment, which would overturn the 18th Amendment. After being approved by Congress, the states ratified the amendment relatively quickly because they didn't go the route of having the state legislatures approve it. Rather, the states held individual ratifying conventions whose only purpose was the ratification of the 21st Amendment. The 21st Amendment was the first and only amendment to have been ratified in this manner. The 21st Amendment was ratified and the 18th Amendment was subsequently overturned on December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment.

One of the big reasons why the 18th Amendment was overturned wasn't necessarily crime or unpopularity. It was money. In 1933, the country was in the middle of the Great Depression. Taxing alcohol was an opportunity to raise revenue at almost every level of government, not to mention the tens of thousands of people who would have jobs producing beer, wine, and spirits. While the 21st Amendment removed the national prohibition on the production and sale of alcohol, it's still allowed for prohibition at the state level.

Kansas remained dry until 1948 and Mississippi until 1966. In fact, Kansas didn't even allow the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants until 1987. Today, there are no dry states, but many states allow counties or municipalities to ban the sale of alcohol. In Arkansas today, 29 and 7.000. of the 75 counties in the state ban the sale of alcohol. Ultimately, Prohibition has gone down as one of the biggest failed experiments in American history. In an attempt to solve the problems of alcohol consumption, it arguably made things even

worse and ushered in a host of other major problems. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener TechSquid 1010 over on Apple Podcasts the United States. They write, Cool show. Dang, I was not expecting this show to be super good, but you prove me wrong.

Well, thanks, Tech Squid. I'd like to welcome you and many other new listeners who've discovered the show in the past week. While I was gone, the show rocketed to number one on the Apple podcast history charts and made it all the way to number 13 on the overall podcast charts for the entire country. I guess that sort of makes the show a three and a half year overnight sensation. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.