Here's Where It Gets Interesting - A Cocktail Toast to the Mob

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

On today’s episode of our series on Prohibition, we talk about two things that go hand in hand with the enforcement of dry laws: crime and cocktails. The spread of both was a direct consequence of t...he 18th amendment as mobsters ruled the violent industry of bootlegging and the rough liquor they sold was made more palatable with mixers.  Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 7 of our series about prohibition, from hatchets to hoods, the mayhem of a dry America. When we think about prohibition, we think about the lack of access to alcohol, right? We're taught about the time period as a standalone in US history, as this specific era that was defined by its strict laws and its clever loopholes. And when we think about the Great Depression, it too seems like a time that was defined solely by the stock market crash and the unemployment calamities. But the truth is that these time periods overlapped. And in most American households during the final years of Prohibition, the pantries were nearly as empty as the liquor cabinets. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
Starting point is 00:01:00 On a great day in early November of 1930 on the south side of Chicago, a sign appeared in the window of a seemingly empty building. It read, free soup, coffee, and donuts for the unemployed. In the year since Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed, Chicago's hardest hit job sector, manufacturing, had seen a 50% drop in employment. Times were tough, and they were getting worse. The city's emergency relief funds had been completely depleted. Traditional sources of help, like churches and charitable organizations, were running on shoestring budgets themselves. A hot meal for a hungry belly was hard to come by, so naturally,
Starting point is 00:01:47 the sign promising free food for those who couldn't pay became a beacon of hope. On the first day the building opened its doors, over 3,000 people stood in line to be served, and every day after, it opened on time and gave out a free breakfast of donuts and coffee. Coffee with sugar, I might add. Plus, free midday and evening meals of soup and bread. And we're not talking about like some watered down broth with yesterday's vegetables and stale bread. This is not prison food. No, it was some of the best food these men had ever eaten.
Starting point is 00:02:28 The donuts were baked fresh every morning, and the coffee was freshly ground. The loaves of bread were made daily and served warm from the ovens, and the soup was full of belly-filling beef and vegetables and flavored with fresh herbs. I would like to eat at this place, okay? This is my kind of food. But here's the thing. Where the food came from was a complete mystery. No one knew who was behind the free daily meals, and to be honest, they didn't really care, right?
Starting point is 00:03:07 It filled their stomachs and saved their pennies. Until one day, about a week later, when the press revealed the man behind the mystery. Chicago's newspaper headlines read, Unemployed flock to soup kitchen run by Al Capone. That's right. The notorious crime boss Al Capone was feeding the hungry people of Chicago. And frankly, they loved him for it. It was more than the government was offering them at the time. Here is a news clip. was offering them at the time? Here is a news clip. It costs Al $2,500 per week to feed these men. First real meal in days, thanks to Mr. Capone's hospitality. Best soup I had in about five weeks. Fine.
Starting point is 00:04:15 I've been walking all around town. I've been seeing a good many places. They give the poorest soup I ever got. But this is the finest soup I ever tasted in my life, and give my regards to this place. Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1899 as one of nine children to an Italian immigrant family. In sixth grade, Al's grades began to slip, and one day his teacher reprimanded him by hitting him, which at the time was a common way to discipline students, especially in Catholic schools where rules were very strict, Al's temper flared and he hit the teacher back.
Starting point is 00:04:54 And consequently, he was expelled and never returned to school. He didn't even finish sixth grade. Instead, he took odd jobs around his Navy Yard neighborhood for the Italian-American Five Points Gang, eventually settling at one of their bars near Coney Island, where he rose up from dishwasher to bartender. One night, Al started to flirt with a girl who didn't want his attention, and her brother took out a knife to attack him. The man aimed to cut Capone's throat, but missed his mark and sliced the side of Al's face and neck. It was actually a very severe injury. He obviously survived, but the knife cuts gave him the lifelong nickname we all know him by, Scarface. Al himself hated that nickname, by the way, and he regularly lied about how he got the scars.
Starting point is 00:05:54 He liked to tell people they were war injuries. How that would have been possible, given that he was a tiny teenager during World War I, I don't know. That's neither here nor there. After a few more run-ins with both the law and other gang members, the New York Five Points boss transferred the young and hot-headed Al to their Chicago outfit to be protected under the leadership of a man who would become one of his biggest mentors, Johnny Torrio. Al arrived in Chicago at age 22, and Torrio quickly made him his number two man. The pair ran a well-organized crime group that included everything from an international bootlegging business to turf wars with rival gangs.
Starting point is 00:06:45 And it suspected the strategic murders of anyone who impeded Johnny and Al's success. By the time Al turned 26, Torrio, who had just barely survived a gunfire ambush, retired and moved to Italy. Al Capone became the boss of the Chicago outfit. During the height of Prohibition, Al Capone had the bootlegging system mastered. He was rolling in cash from gambling and prostitution businesses, but it was the illegal booze trade that made his wealth skyrocket. And like George Remus, Al Capone knew just what to do with his money. Practically every police officer and elected official in the city of Chicago was paid off or bribed to look the other way. Everyone was in his pocket. And when he paid $250,000 to ensure that his
Starting point is 00:07:47 chosen candidate would win the 1927 mayoral campaign, he felt untouchable. He told the Chicago Herald-Examiner, who doesn't break the law of the land? 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. Everyone breaks the law. 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 trays at Lakeshore Drive, they call it hospitality.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Al Capone had been shot at hundreds of times, almost poisoned, and had a constant bounty on his head. There was very clearly great risk involved with his illegal business, but as ruthless as he was, Al was also known to be a family man. Not a whole ton is known about his wife, Mae Capone, and this is probably intentional. While Al sucked up any limelight he could get, his family life was kept private in an effort to keep them safe. Mae was the daughter of Irish immigrants and married Al in December of 1918 in Brooklyn, which in itself was controversial. The pair was so young that they needed the written permission of their parents, and the Irish and Italians in New York in the
Starting point is 00:09:20 early 20th century were not exactly known for getting along. That would change around the Second World War, but before that, there wasn't a lot of intermingling. A few weeks before their wedding, Al and May had welcomed into the world their only child, a boy named Albert, who they called Sonny. Sonny's parentage, by the way, has long been scrutinized. By that point in his life, by the time Sonny was born, Al had already contracted syphilis, which he apparently never sought treatment for. It's possible that Al was sterile and Sonny was somebody else's son, or maybe Al passed on an STD to May and his newborn son, Sonny was prone to infections as a child and had a particularly severe one in his left ear that left him partially deaf.
Starting point is 00:10:13 With the success of his bootlegging enterprise, Al bought May and Sonny a lovely two-story brick home in Chicago, and there she raised Sonny and educated him in Catholic schools. She attended mass at a nearby church almost daily with other members of the Capone family who had also moved to Chicago. Capone also bought and set up a family compound on an exclusive island near Miami Beach. He purchased the property in 1928, and the 30,000 square foot lot already contained a storm-safe mansion. Al expanded the property by adding a boathouse, a gatehouse, with another couple of bedrooms, a grotto with native plants, and a little waterfall, and a pool, which is still today one of the largest private pools in Miami.
Starting point is 00:11:08 This compound wasn't just a relaxing haven for the Capones. It was also the perfect place to monitor the rum running shipments coming from the Caribbean. The property was equal parts getaway and business office. This family man who gave his wife anything and everything she wanted, and let's be clear, he did have numerous mistresses on the side, he was also responsible for as many as 200 murders. Indirectly, of course, he kept himself so clean that the authorities had no idea how to prosecute him. The evidence just wasn't strong enough to bring charges against him specifically. In 1927, a Supreme Court ruling gave the Treasury Department the authority to demand income taxes from bootleggers, even though the income they earned was through illegal activities.
Starting point is 00:12:11 With this new ruling, our Prohibition-era heroine, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrand, built a scheme to go after the mob for tax evasions. Frank Wilson, a Treasury Department agent and former accountant who would go on to head the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case and become the chief of the Secret Service, was tasked with building a case against Al Capone. Wilson spent months looking through any and every financial record and paper trail of evidence he could find. He knew that Al Capone frequented dog races, so he hung around the tracks and struck up conversation with anyone he could to learn what they knew. But no one was willing to tattle on the mob boss. on the mob boss. Word got back to Capone that the feds were sniffing around, and so he put out a $25,000 hit on Frank Wilson's head. Undeterred, Wilson changed his base of operations
Starting point is 00:13:14 for safety and continued to dig for evidence. It took years of work. Years. Frank and his team reviewed around 2 million documents before they finally found a small little detail that Al Capone had missed, which would prove he had income that he hadn't paid any income tax on. While Wilson was gathering evidence, Al was ruling Chicago with a violent fist. On February 14th, 1929, seven members of Bugsy Moran's bootlegging gang, enemies of Al Capone's Chicago outfit, were gunned down in a parking garage by men dressed as police officers. Even though Al was in Florida with his family at the time, it was widely believed that he was the man giving the orders. Photos of the massacre were printed in the newspaper, and the bloody graphic images paired with the name Al Capone frightened the general public.
Starting point is 00:14:23 Before he returned to the city, he knew he needed a plan to get himself back in their good graces. A stellar reputation with the people provided padding between his operations and the law. Plus, unlike most mob members who sought to keep a low profile, Al's outgoing and gregarious nature meant that he loved the limelight and took the opportunity to be in it whenever he could. In addition to starting the Soup Kitchen in 1930, he held press conferences and promised that he would provide free therapy to the families of men who were killed by the mob, neglecting, of course, to mention that it was likely him that was behind a lot of their murders. He gave away front row seats to games at Wrigley Field. He played Santa
Starting point is 00:15:13 Claus in local schools, and he always stopped to help people in need. If, of course, it was an action that could be done in public. But the law caught up with him anyway. Capone was arrested on June 5th, 1931 for owing over $200,000 in taxes from his gambling enterprises. With Frank Wilson's evidence ready for trial, the case against Capone began. evidence ready for trial, the case against Capone began. His lawyers thought that it would be a minor shakedown and that he'd maybe get a slap on the wrist or at most a one to two-year sentence. To be sure that everything went his way, Capone and his people bribed the chosen jury to make sure they found him not guilty. However, the judge, who had not been paid off, found out about the scheme and switched the entire jury at the last moment and gave them all guards
Starting point is 00:16:12 to make sure that no one from Capone's camp could get to them. Al Capone, the people's mobster, the Robin Hood of Chicago, had spent the past few years championing the city, feeding its Skid Row residents, and flashing around his goodwill where he could. But during the trial, it came to light just how much money he really had and how he spent it. Sure, he paid a few thousand dollars a day to give jobless Chicagoans donuts and soup, but his custom-made Italian suits cost $7,000 each. And he spent the equivalent of a regular family's monthly income on just one pair of silk underwear. In the midst of the Great Depression, his reputation as a regular guy was beginning to tarnish. The prosecution's main argument rested upon the fact that if he was spending that much money, then he had to be earning it.
Starting point is 00:17:18 And once one of his accountants became a surprise witness, it was all over for Al. One of his accountants became a surprise witness. It was all over for Al. On October 18th, he was found guilty of the charges against him and sentenced to an astounding 11 years in prison. At first, he was placed in the Cook County Prison in Chicago, where his wife and son visited him almost every day, and his mom regularly showed up with baked goods. visited him almost every day, and his mom regularly showed up with baked goods. When he was moved to the penitentiary in Atlanta, he called in favors and got his cell set up like a hotel room with super luxe bedding and a radio for entertainment. Guards were paid off by Capone's people, and he received special treatment and perks that the other inmates didn't.
Starting point is 00:18:07 received special treatment and perks that the other inmates didn't. But then Alcatraz officially opened on an island in the San Francisco Bay. It was regarded as the most secure prison in America and the Department of Justice decided to transfer Capone there as a publicity stunt for its opening. as a publicity stunt for its opening. Al was transported by train, and as it traveled across the country, people flocked to each of the depot stops to catch a glimpse of the notorious mobster and cheer for him. If the government had wanted publicity, they certainly got it. At Alcatraz, Capone couldn't pay his way into comfort. His five years there were a mixed bag. At one point, he suffered a stab wound given to him by a fellow inmate in the laundry room. But not long after, he was permitted to play the banjo in the prison band, which he did with gusto.
Starting point is 00:19:10 which he did with gusto. By November of 1939, he was paroled in part because his cognitive faculties were deteriorating rapidly, likely from his lifelong untreated syphilis. Capone spent the rest of his life at his mansion in Palm Island, Florida. And remember when I said that Alexander Fleming had quite accidentally discovered the antibiotic penicillin in 1928? In 1942, the drug was ready to be mass produced and Al Capone became one of the first Americans to be treated with it. Penicillin couldn't reverse the damage that had already been done, though. But it did slow its advancement, and Capone lived until January of 1947. When he died, duplicate caskets were sent to Chicago for his funeral to prevent his body from being stolen. He was the stuff of legends. While Al Capone wanted to be known, countless other members of his Chicago mafia
Starting point is 00:20:13 stayed under the radar as much as possible, as did members of organized crime rings in places like New York City and Detroit. But their stories and legends would eventually leak into city histories and pop culture lore. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.
Starting point is 00:20:37 We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio!
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Starting point is 00:21:28 and wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1920s, Detroit was the fourth largest city of the United States. The rapidly expanding automobile industry gained the attention of job seekers from all over. They flooded the city hoping for a piece of prosperity. But Detroit attracted more than just the unemployed. The city was quickly becoming a hotbed for organized crime gangs. Organized crime in Chicago and New York made newspaper headlines with their
Starting point is 00:22:06 bootlegging wars and gang violence, but the Detroit crime market was arguably worse because of its proximity to Canada. Less than three miles across the Detroit River lies the city of Windsor, Ontario. When Michigan's statewide prohibition law went into effect on May 1st, 1918, Detroit became the first large city in the country to go dry, at least in theory. The city went from around 1,800 licensed saloons in 1918 to around 25,000 illegal bars and speakeasies in 1925. Rum runners and smugglers brought hundreds of thousands of cases of Canadian whiskey across the Detroit River each month. And if that seems like a lot, know that it paled in comparison to the amount of whiskey and beer that was being brewed and distilled in Detroit by organized crime syndicates. By 1923, the over-the-top amount of rum running happening on the Detroit River and violence taking place within the boundaries of the city
Starting point is 00:23:18 had gotten so bad that the Michigan governor sent state police into the city to enforce martial law in an attempt to restore some law and order. Dozens of city officials, including the mayor, were arrested and convicted on prohibition violations. But the reset was temporary because the Purple Gang was poised to take over. The Purple Gang, led by a guy named Abe Bernstein, was a gang of mostly young Jewish immigrants who started out as petty thieves and pickpockets in an area of the city called the Eastern Market. Over time, they graduated to more serious crimes like armed robbery and extortion. When Detroit became a major port in the illegal alcohol trade, the Purple Gang stepped in and became some of the most ruthless bootleggers of the era. It's assumed that their members murdered hundreds of men from rival factions during Detroit's bootleg wars.
Starting point is 00:24:31 The Purples, named such when a Detroit business owner commented that they were rotten like the color of bad meat, ruled the Detroit underworld from about 1927 to 1932. Everyone was scared of them, and no one, not even the authorities, felt safe in crossing them. Eventually, after Prohibition ended, the gang's power began to wane. There was so much infighting and murder between their own members that they started to lose control of their power and turf. Within the first year of Prohibition, alcohol consumption had dropped to historic lows, albeit temporarily. America didn't stop drinking, and all the loopholes that allowed alcoholic beverages to keep flowing in various ways led to a rise in bootleggers like George Remus, the Chicago Outfit, and the Purple Gang who battled for control of illegal alcohol
Starting point is 00:25:26 distribution. And while we've talked about how some of these operations worked in American cities, there was even more action happening on the water. The Coast Guard was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of rum-running ocean fleets who sailed the seas, particularly in the Caribbean. A yacht builder, a guy named Bill McCoy, who had built opulent vessels for the super-rich like Andrew Carnegie, helped establish the practice of rum-running. He and other rum-runners like Lucky Luciano and Bill Dwyer loaded up on imported liquors at ports and places like Nassau in the Bahamas. And the alcohol came from all over Canada, the Caribbean islands, England, mainland Europe. Once the boats were full of booze hidden under false bottoms, they would anchor in international waters just outside of the U.S. jurisdiction.
Starting point is 00:26:26 The most well-trafficked area, known as Rum Row, was near the shores of New Jersey. There, the ships operated like floating liquor stores, selling to smaller, faster ships known as contact boats. Where those boats went from there was none of Bill McCoy's business. The liquor, of course, was making its way to the mainland and most often being sold through the mob to illegal drinking establishments. If you've ever heard the phrase, it's the real McCoy, it originated with our rum-running friend Bill. Sellers would tell their buyers, it's the real McCoy, to let them know that it was actually Bill's gold standard rum and not some watered-down substitute. the Henry L. Marshall off the coast of Atlantic City. McCoy escaped in a motorboat, but his schooner was seized and his entire rum-running plot was busted up. A warrant for his arrest was put out, and in November 1923, another one of his vessels was boarded and he was apprehended.
Starting point is 00:27:48 and he was apprehended. McCoy surrendered and said, I have no tale of woe to tell you. I was selling whiskey and good whiskey to anyone who wanted to buy. McCoy received a jail sentence of nine months, but McCoy was a low-key celebrity and he had friends in high places, so he was given permissions to leave the jailhouse every single day as long as he returned in the evening to spend the night in his cell. I mean, come on now. That seems like too good of a deal. When he was released, he left the rum running business altogether because he felt it had just gotten too crowded. Even the Coast Guard admitted they only had the resources to stop a small part of the onrush of illegal booze brought into the country by rum runners. Every time the authorities expanded their operations, the runners just got smarter and quicker. Turns out, complete prohibition was unenforceable. It also led to an extremely unique community miles off the shores of Miami in the middle of Key Biscayne Bay.
Starting point is 00:28:57 The community, Stiltsville, was built on wooden and concrete pylons out on the sand flats two miles offshore. It was only accessible by boat, and it became a hideaway for celebrities, politicians, judges, and other Miami bigwigs to gamble, drink illegally, and generally flout all the laws during the Prohibition era. flout all the laws during the Prohibition era. Sometime around 1922, about a dozen stilted buildings began to spring up in the bay as outposts for smugglers. But they soon became hangouts. So in 1933, a guy named Crawfish Eddie Walker began to build more solid structures. He claimed he was selling fishing supplies to boaters. But it was that is not what it was. He would invite his buddies over for illegal drinking and gambling and he would
Starting point is 00:29:55 simmer up bowls of seafood chowder on a small stove to chase it all down. Crawfish Eddie's shack didn't get any less popular in the post-prohibition era. All sorts of people who wanted to stay off the radar of the local law enforcement hold up there to gamble and generally descend into debauchery. More structures and social clubs began to rise up from the bay in the late 1930s. And by the 1960s, Stiltsville's heyday, there were 27 shack structures built in areas one to three miles off of shore where people could go gamble outside the watchful eye of the law. It was essentially a red light district accessible only by boat. Over the years, most of the structures were destroyed by hurricanes and tropical storms. Six houses remain and are now owned by the National Park Service and registered
Starting point is 00:30:52 as a U.S. historic landmark. Even though we've been talking about alcohol that was smuggled into homes and illegal bars from other places like Canada, Europe, and the Caribbean, by far the most common type of alcohol that the average American drank was moonshine. And most of the myths about moonshine that have persisted over the years are true. It was super harsh and made with some very questionable ingredients. Gin became popular to produce because it was the easiest alcohol to distill. But we're not talking about like artisan batches containing a dozen hand foraged botanicals from a pristine conifer forest. No, nope. It didn't get the nickname of bathtub gin for no reason, okay? The gin wasn't actually made in a bathtub most often. The spirit was so strong that the amateurs who
Starting point is 00:31:54 distilled it often had to top it off with straight water to make it drinkable. The bottles were too large to fit under a sink's faucet, so they used bathtub spigots instead. To make crude liquors drinkable, people began to mix them with ingredients that would mask their foul taste, or at least to sweeten it. Cocktails had been part of American culture for well over a century, but they were often mixed in big batches in a bowl like a punch. but they were often mixed in big batches in a bowl like a punch. They evolved with prohibition in order to conceal the astringent taste of cheap spirits. Bartenders created popular drinks like the Gin Rickey, which sweetened gin with lime juice and club soda, or Al Capone's preferred gin drink, the Southside, gin mixed with a simple syrup, lime, and mint. The Mary Pickford, named after one of Hollywood's biggest stars, was a rum drink sweetened with pineapple juice and grenadine and topped with a maraschino cherry. Watching these new cocktail
Starting point is 00:33:01 trends and how they were impacting the food, beverage, and entertainment industries was a young woman who was just starting her career as a writer. Her goal? To be the country's first true food author and journalist. Before there was Julia Child, there was Clementine Paddleford. Clementine grew up in Kansas at the turn of the 20th century. She was a country girl. She went to and from school every day on horseback. By the time she had her graduate degree, she was freelancing for a number of magazines and papers in Kansas and New York. She was given mostly puff pieces and articles that paid next to nothing. She had to take side jobs like babysitting and waitressing just to keep herself in New York. It was a city that she had a longtime love-hate relationship with. She wrote to her mom in 1922
Starting point is 00:33:59 and told her, sometimes I fairly hate New York. But even after a two-year reprieve in Chicago, Clementine couldn't quite quit the city. She finally found her niche as the women's editor of the New York-based Farm and Fireside magazine. The position fueled her interest in food and agriculture, and we're not talking about someone who sat hunched over the typewriter at her desk. No. Clementine was often out traipsing around women-run and owned farms in her tall galoshes. She herself had been a farm girl after all. In 1930, Clementine joined a new publication and ran a number of articles about food, but she wrote about it in a whole new way. Her articles weren't boring notations on the benefits or nutrients in certain types of food or recipes with bare bones instructions. Clementine chose to tell stories. She even wrote about her own experience, knowing it was universal, saying, We all have hometown appetites.
Starting point is 00:35:11 Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste, once enjoyed on the farm or the hometown they left behind. Her articles and descriptions didn't just describe food and drink as merely sustenance. They described nostalgia, experience, ritual, and tradition. She had found her voice on the page, just as her actual voice began to fail her. At the age of 33, Clementine was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. The outlook was bleak. Doctors gave her two options. They could stop the cancer from spreading by completely removing her larynx and vocal cords, but it would literally leave her without a voice. Or they said they could try a partial laryngectomy, a new procedure that still carried risks.
Starting point is 00:36:05 They would only take out part of her larynx where the cancer was growing and leave her vocal cords alone. She might keep some of her voice, but they couldn't guarantee that the cancer wouldn't grow back. Clementine, who knew that speaking was integral to her work in journalism, chose the second option. So surgeons removed part of her larynx and outfitted her with a tracheostomy tube. In order to speak, she pressed a button on the side of her throat to allow air to pass through her mouth. She concealed the tube with a black velvet ribbon wrapped around her neck and that became her signature look. And though her voice was raspy and distinct, she could still conduct interviews. It may not have felt ideal to Clementine at the time,
Starting point is 00:36:52 but later in life, she came to think about it positively. She said, people never forget me. In March 1936, she began to write for the New York Herald Tribune. Her work completely revolutionized the way the American public thought about food and drink. She was flooded with invitations to write for well-known publications, and she began a column called How America Eats in 1940 and wrote for it faithfully until her death. She collaborated with companies in the liquor industry that had bounced back quickly and easily once Prohibition was repealed. She had with companies in the liquor industry that had bounced back quickly and easily once Prohibition was repealed. She had short little booklets called things like New Easy Ways to Cook with Rum. And home bar owners can be cocktail experts. She taught Americans how to use
Starting point is 00:37:41 Bacardi rum in both their cooking and entertaining. Clementine was really one of the first American writers who spoke about the food with respect and reverence. To her, meals and cocktails were serious business. When Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech in 1946, reporters wrote about the weight of his words and his intonation. But Clementine, she wrote about his dinner, saying, a souffle arrived in front of him with a rapturous half-hushed sigh as it settled softly to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream. She got her pilot's license and learned to fly a plane so she could sample food from around the world. She went anywhere and everywhere that she
Starting point is 00:38:35 could. She walked through the vineyards of France, ate chili out of tin bowls in Texas, and sampled roasted coffee beans in South America. In 1953, Clementine had attended the coronation of England's new Queen Elizabeth and had been honored by Time magazine. Her column was read in 12 million American households, and it got its start in Prohibition. In 1960, her articles were compiled into a cookbook. On the first page, she wrote, how does America eat? She eats in every language. Even with the increasingly popular trend towards foreign foods, the dishes come to the table with an American accent. By then, other writers had begun to emerge on the food writing scene. Clementine proved that it could be a lucrative career and that there was a huge
Starting point is 00:39:32 appetite for food entertainment. When she died in 1967, much of her work was forgotten. Americans preferred watching her successors like Julia Child on TV. But Clementine had almost single-handedly proven that by the time Prohibition ended, Americans were ready to take comfort in the ritual of eating and drinking. She taught an entire generation of people how to approach food and drinks, both economically and with creativity. The rise of home entertaining in the mid-1930s kept the Prohibition-era cocktail trend alive, and those who hosted parties at home put as much time and effort into their drinks as they did their dinners. Americans didn't invent the cocktail, but they certainly did
Starting point is 00:40:26 popularize it. Clementine Paddleford's post-Prohibition era was just the beginning of a growing lucrative movement in the culinary world. But there were other movements, steadily growing during prohibition that became a very real threat to the future of America. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit the follow or subscribe button on the podcast platform of your choice. We also benefit so much from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media.
Starting point is 00:41:26 Thanks for being here, and we'll see you again soon.

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