History That Doesn't Suck - 161: An Epilogue Toast to Prohibition’s End with Author Daniel Okrent

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Cheers to Professor Jackson’s post Prohibition conversation with distinguished author Daniel Okrent! Dan is the the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, winner of the American Historical Association’s prize for the year’s best book of American History when it was published in 2011. Last Call was a go-to book in the HTDS bibliography for episodes 157-160 as we researched and selected the stories to tell in these four podcast episodes we’ve just completed. Dan was also the first Public Editor of The New York Times, where he was charged with being the public’s advocate for accurate and objective journalism by the paper. So Prof. Jackson couldn’t resist the opportunity to get his perspective on the state of news reporting today which, as astute HTDS listeners know, is often called the first draft of history. Spoiler alert: they both agree one must be a critical thinker when it comes to the potential bias of the news media one consumes – helpful tool here from AdFontes. Dan Okrent is also author of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, and Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history.  Before his tenure at the Times, Okrent spent 13 years at Time Inc., where he was successively editor of Life magazine; corporate editor of new media; and corporate editor-at-large. Earlier in his career, he worked extensively in book and magazine publishing in various editorial and executive positions. He has held fellowships at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (where he was, in addition, the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer in 2009-2010). ____ Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette  come see a live show get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. HTDS is part of the Airwave Media Network.  Interested in advertising on the History That Doesn't Suck? Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to History That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson, and as in the classroom, my goal here is to make rigorously researched history come to life as your storyteller. Each episode is the result of laborious research with no agenda other than making the past come to life as you learn. If you'd like to help support this work, receive ad-free episodes, bonus content, and other exclusive perks, I invite you to join the HTDS membership program. Sign up for a 7-day free trial today at htespodcast.com slash membership, or click the link in the episode notes. My friends, I'm pleased to share with you my conversation with a distinguished author and historian in his own right. Dan Okrent, the author of Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, winner of the American Historical Association's Prize for the year's best book of American

history when it was published in 2011. It is one of the most comprehensive and well-written books about the crazy decade-plus period when America outlawed alcohol. Last Call was a go-to book in our bibliography and helpful roadmap as we sourced and researched and selected the stories to tell in the four podcast episodes we've just completed. My conversation with Dan was a chance to dive deeper into stories I couldn't fully tell in the episodes. For example, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who was given the unenviable task of enforcing the 18th Amendment under the Volstead Act. Americans overwhelmingly hated this law, and therefore she was given the unflattering nickname Prohibition Portia. That's a Shakespeare thing, FYI. Today, we might call such a position the buzzkill top cop. Dan has written several other books,

see our episode notes, and he was a former editor of Life Magazine and the first public editor at the New York Times. In that latter position, he was charged with being the public's advocate for accuracy and objective journalism by the paper. So I couldn't resist the opportunity to get his perspective on the state of news reporting today, which, as you astute HTDS listeners know, is often called the first draft of history. So here I am with Dan Okrent, the author of Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. Dan, thank you again for being here. It's a pleasure to see you. Pleasure to speak. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Excellent.

As we were getting started on the research for these last few episodes, I got a copy in the hands of my researchers. Right. Thank you. I would say you're welcome. But let's be honest, I am the one who's been welcomed. I thank you yet again for writing it. I'd love to just know what drew you to the subject in the first place.

You clearly poured years of your life into this thing. What took you there? My previous book was called Great Fortune, The Epic of Rockefeller Center, which is really a book about New York in the 1920s and early 30s, particularly Midtown New York. And I was doing research for one chapter about how the Rockefeller interests acquired the land, 228 different land leases to be able to assemble the piece of property that became Rockefeller Center. And I was working down the properties on 49th Street. And this one, they bought the lease for $1,500. This one for $2,200. This one for $80,000. This one for $105,000, $315,000, $65,000. I said, what? And those were all speakeasies. Those were people who actually were earning real money during Prohibition.

So I said, what? And Prohibition? Prohibition? How is it possible? How is it possible that this country spent 13 years depriving some people of something that they really, really wanted. It's kind of an oddly anti-democratic notion in a way. Not that everybody wants alcohol, obviously. But I think the key point about the unlikelihood of prohibition, there are only two things in the Constitution that limit the behavior of the individual.

Everything else is limiting government. The two things that limit the behavior of an individual, the 18th Amendment, which says you can't buy or carry or manufacture a glass of beer, and the 13th Amendment, which says that you can't have slaves. And the insane equivalence of this said, oh boy, I got a book here. Yeah. I mean, you're not saying anything that I don't think I or my listeners weren't aware of. And yet when you frame it like that, that packs a punch. Okay. Well, you already are kind of just have said the surprise that led you toward this book. What other surprises came out as you did the research? We always learn so much, right? And that's kind of the thing that motivates me to write history is to learn what I don't know about things that might be interesting.

And I'm sure that's how it drew you. I hear you. It drew you as well. Oh, my God. I learned so, so much. Though it was enacted under the rules set forth in the Constitution about how you bring about a constitutional amendment, it did have the approval of 34 state legislatures, and it did have the approval of two-thirds of Congress. But there was in no way a majority of Americans who supported it. Right. Well, I mean, New York State, for instance, which would be an unlikely place to support prohibition, this is all before one man, one vote, which comes in the Supreme Court, you know, endows half a century later. A legislator from upstate New York could be representing fewer than one twentieth the number of constituents of a legislator representing Brooklyn, New York.

That the density of population was such. And in many states, it was by county. And in Georgia, which led to the big decision that changed this, it was one state senator per county. That included Fulton County, which had Atlanta, the biggest city in the capital, and the tiniest rural county. So when you look at the numbers that suggest that there was a majority, it's just not there. It's really not there. And certainly, by the way people behaved, it was not there. And, you know, the largest lesson of prohibition is you really can't legislate against human appetite. Prostitution has been legislated against by nearly every government across the world for centuries, and yet it exists across

the world. And if people want something and it's not directly injurious, I mean, people want to go around murdering people, obviously, that's different. But if it's a matter of personal taste, you cannot legislate against it. Another thing that I learned, I mean, to move from the grand to the tiny, as I think many Americans who've studied it grew up with, the notion that Joe Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, was a bootlegger. And I think I've established beyond a shadow of doubt that that's a total fabrication. You can't prove a negative. But I really researched, because I thought he'd make a great character, because he was a really hateful man in so many ways. And how can we really show what this bad guy was doing during Prohibition? I know why people

came to think that he was, but he simply was not. There is not a shred of historical evidence that indicates he was. So that was a real surprise to me. I was really surprised by the nature of the Prohibition coalition that it stretched from the right, the Ku Klux Klan, to the far left, the industrial workers of the world, the most radical labor union in American history, and they were both for prohibition. Neither for the reasons that you would think. The Klan supported prohibition partly because there was a religious motivation among Baptists and Methodists, but also because the political machines of the big cities were controlled by the liquor industry and the taverns. Speaking of the Kennedys, Joe Kennedy's father was a political boss, his empire based on a tavern.

And these were the Democrats with strange last names who were, you know, kind of the Klan believed corrupting American politics. Think of all the Italian last names that were connected to alcohol. So that really wasn't there. And then the IWW, their view was that alcohol was used by the manufacturers, the employing class, to subdue the working man, to keep him drunk and kind of in a stupor and keep him from organizing. Some truth to that. So this is kind of, when I'm doing the research, this is dazzling me.

Oh, yeah. It's not every day you get to grab such extreme groups on the right and the left and find them, sure, different rationale, but coming to the same conclusion. Yeah. No, that's wild. And I will say, I thank you. I learned that in reading your book. I had always assumed the Kennedys had done some bootlegging. That's what I've been told as well. I learned that in writing the book, so we're in the same place.

Yep. That's, again, you say that part of the motivation for doing history is the things we learn as we try to write it ourselves. And yeah, I could bore you with the characters I've tried to follow, the stories I thought I was going to tell just to find out, oh, that was a load of crap. Okay. Exactly. Exactly right. So as we talk about, you know, you've got the extreme right, the extreme left, the way this is being cobbled together, despite the fact that we have an absolute failure to really have a democratic, a majority of Americans in favor of this. My mind does go to Wayne Wheeler, the anti-saloon league champion of lobbying.

I'm just curious. This is kind of my impression. I'd like to please agree, disagree with me. Has there been a more effective lobbyist in U.S. history? No, absolutely. And in fact, he invented both the idea and the phrase pressure group. And he was an absolutely brilliant man and a ferocious man. And in the 1920s, one of the most famous people in America. And by 1935, nobody knew who he was. Totally forgotten.

Disappears from history. That's so wild. But he amended the Constitution. He did it through political wiles, through lobbying and intimidation and very clever vote getting. One of the things that he realized is that you don't need a majority to win an election. You just need to win the 5%, 10% people in the middle in any close election. If I've got them, then I can make something happen. So he would do that.

He would find a candidate that he wanted to support, got the support from the rest of the Anti-Saloon League and everybody else who wanted the Prohibition Amendment. And that guy might win by 2% of the vote in a particular district, but that was the equivalent of winning 100% of the vote. And there's one other organization very well known in this country that learned how to do this, the NRA. It's exactly what the NRA did. The NRA didn't become a... There were a lot of Democratic elected officials in the NRA until about 20 years ago. And like Wheeler, they made sure that they had influence in both parties and that they only cared about one issue, one issue alone. So Wheeler, he didn't care if you were a socialist who wanted slavery and children to be taken from their parents.

As long as you're for prohibition, okay, I'm with you. I mean, I'm overstating when I mentioned those other things, but just as an illustration. Sure, but no, but the hyperbole drives the point home. Exactly. Yeah. So the impression I came away with by the time I was done with these prohibition episodes, by the time I was done with your book, is that this is perhaps the most impactful figure in American history that is completely forgotten, more or less.

Well, I think that's true. I mean, he was not an elected official. He was not an appointed official. He never had any official position. He came to prominence even before radio was invented. So it's not as if he had assembled, you know, a national following. He did it simply by virtue of political smarts and a fathomless, bottomless energy, endless energy. You know, he's such a fascinating character.

And while my mind is on characters of prohibition, do you mind if we talk about Mabel for a bit? I always like to talk about Mabel. We did not get, you know, as these episodes come together, sometimes there are these stories that I'm trying to fit in. I'm trying to fit in while, of course, telling the larger overarching story. Mabel did not fit in the way that I wanted her to, alas. So please, you feel free. Mabel Walker Willebrand, known as the Prohibition Portia, was the Assistant Attorney General.

And there were not a lot of women who were at that subcabinet level. She was the second one in American history. Assistant Attorney General during three Republican administrations of the 1920s, specifically in charge of prohibition enforcement. She was a progressive. She was on most issues of the time you would call liberal. And she wasn't particularly for prohibition, but she did believe in the rule of law. And she was ferocious. And given this assignment, she said, I'm going to fulfill this. And she was a tireless prosecutor, constantly frustrated by

political reality. You know, she said that prosecuting lawyers, both federal and state across the country, they satisfied the dries by indicting people and then satisfied the wets by never bringing them to trial. And she was constantly fighting. And, you know, the people she was working for, the Attorney General, Harry Doherty, probably the most corrupt cabinet official in American history. He was a heavy drinker. And the Secretary of the Treasury, who was in charge of prohibition enforcement, Andrew Mellon, he owned Old Overholt, and he did not believe in prohibition at all. So she's got to work against this unbelievable resistance. And though I disagreed with what she was trying to accomplish, I have huge admiration for her determination to do it. Mabel got up every morning and took an ice cold bath.

And I think that that well symbolizes her nature. I can see that. And as you pointed out, she's not only doing battle in trying to enforce the law against those who are breaking it, she's doing battle trying to enforce the law with an administration, with colleagues who don't believe in that law. That's right. And eventually she's fired by Herbert Hoover right after the election of

28, and she ends up becoming an entertainment lawyer. Clark Gable was one of her clients. Oh, no way. Louis B. Mayer, founder of the King of MGM, was a very close friend. She is filled with inconsistencies, but the consistency was the determination to do the job she was given. I can respect that. Okay.

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when we come out of prohibition with all these new regulations, it's less than we tend to think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's of course illegal during prohibition, but if you have no governing structure to allow for the legal sale of liquor, then there are no regulations of any kind. So if you wanted to open a speakeasy next door to a church or across the street from a grade school, you could do that. And why would there be laws saying you can't do that if the whole law says you can't open a speakeasy anywhere. If you wanted to serve a 15-year-old, fine. If you wanted to serve until, you know, five in the morning, six in the morning, no problem. So if you wanted it, and this is particularly in the big cities, obviously. Of course. If you wanted alcohol, it was really easy to find because there was no regulatory structure in the absence of legal alcohol. Comes 1933 and the repeal amendment and the assignment of all authority over alcohol sales and manufacture to the states, suddenly there are laws, there are age limits, there are, you know, where can you

place your speakeasy or where can you build a distillery? I mean, Mississippi was dry under the law until the 1950s, but they collected a tax on liquor sales. That was a regulation that was in place. It's illegal to sell liquor, but come by my place, you can buy some and I'm going to have to pay tax on it. It's just, there was this patchwork of laws that came in and some of them, you know, once, if you're a speakeasy owner and you have a license granted you by the state to sell alcohol, you have something you have to protect. So if you are serving at nine in the morning, or you are serving 15-year-olds, you can lose that license. And if you lose that license, you're in big trouble, because who wants to go into a speakeasy at a time when there's a bar in every corner? Right So, the laws were enforced. The laws were

self-enforced and then very much so enforced in differing ways in differing states. During Prohibition itself, within those carve-outs in the Volstead Act, do you have a particularly favorite one, one that made you chuckle the most as you learned about it? You know, the three major carve-outs were medical, religious, and fruit preservation. Each one of them is hilarious because each was a soft throne to specific members of the prohibition constituency. Right. We want prohibition, but you know. Yeah. So the farmers were given the right to continue to preserve fruit, which is to make hard cider. In apple-growing parts of the country, there was somebody selling hard cider every five miles down the highway.

The medical one, in 1917, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted that there is no therapeutic value to alcohol for any treatment of disease or ailment. By 1922, they suddenly had discovered about, I think there were about 40 diseases, ranging from influenza to snake bites. Sure, sure. So then it began in New York. You could buy a prescription for $2 from a doctor who was happy to give you one, and you could take it once every 10 days, I believe, to a drugstore. And with that prescription, you could buy a pint of whiskey that said on it,

for medicinal purposes only. I am sure that was absolutely respected, naturally, by all consumers. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And, you know, the Walgreens chain, Walgreens had five stores before Prohibition, all in Chicago. And by the end of Prohibition, they had something like 80 because they had been selling whiskey all during Prohibition. So you're telling me the place that I have filled many a prescription, not alcoholic prescription, for my family over the years. It's there because of prohibition, more or less.

That was its big growing point. A lot of things have happened in the intervening 100 years. Of course. But certainly that was the thing that launched Walgreens into a national chain. Oh, that's wild. That might be my favorite little nugget so far, Dan. Please carry on. Well, the third one was the religious exemption.

And this was a stop to the two groups that were most opposed to prohibition, religious groups, the Catholics and the Jews. And they both said, you know, we have to have it for our sacrament. The man who built Beaulieu Vineyard, still one of the outstanding vineyards in the Napa Valley, Georges de la Tour, he, by the six or seven years into Prohibition, he was making communion wine with 10 different grape varietals. You could have your Zinfandel communion wine, you could have your Saturn communion wine, and this was all under the excuse that we need this for our services. Priests would come there to bless their good fortune that they could get for their congregants, the wine that they not only needed, but also the wine that they wanted.

It was a national distribution system, and it built a huge, huge business. Winston Churchill came and visited in, and you can imagine what Winston Churchill thought about Prohibition. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. That's just a great image even in my head. Please carry on, Dan. So, he's a distinguished visitor there. This is toward the end of Prohibition, and he has to have his liquor, his wine, and his brandy. And in the guest book at the vineyard, you know, he wrote it, you know, never has Bacchus been served so well by God or God that served Bacchus well, the two coming together. The Jews, it was different. The Catholic distribution system was through the bishops. You would send legal sacramental wine to the bishop of X, Bishop Rick. You would distribute it to the parish

churches. The churches would then distribute it in the back room to their members. Jews did not have a hierarchy. They had, you know, in fact, anybody, there was not even a certifying agency to say who's a rabbi and who isn't. Then there was that moment in the New York papers, I'm probably not going to remember the names correctly, but two rabbis who were selling sacramental wine for the Sabbath service named O'Hara and Melvany, you know, that Rabbi O'Hara, could you please give me some wine? There's a congregation, Talmud Torah in Los Angeles, you know, had fewer than 100 family members, families as members and beforehibition and well over 105 years into Prohibition because they could get the sacramental wine and their other wine from the rabbi. Well, Dan, all I'm hearing is that 1920s America really loved God.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's our takeaway. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, of course, those carve-outs, though, as wild and fun as they are, I mean, I love the thought that you can get hard cider,

but you can't get certain cough syrups anymore. Right. Most people are going to these speakeasies that we've touched on. And of course, my listeners have heard

about some of the gangsters that start filling in everything from the rum running to the moonshiners to the vehicles that they're being driven and bootlegging. This is a massive, only organized crime could really, in my mind, as I was thinking about the breweries that are getting shut down, it just makes perfect sense that large organizations would step in to replace. Well, the large organization was created by prohibition. Pre-prohibition, there were mobs

in every big city. And they would have controlled, you know, drugs and gambling and prostitution. But when you have to get your hands on huge quantities of physical goods, you need somebody to help you from somewhere else. So Detroit, which was the funnel through which an enormous amount of alcohol came from Canada, largely from the Bronfen family of Seagrams. It had to be distributed to other places so the Detroit mob makes a deal with the Chicago mob. And then they also decide whose territory between the two cities is which. And this happens all over the country until a conference that takes place in Atlantic City in 1929 in which the mobs from all these cities come together and say, we need to learn

how to cooperate. And they set up their own internal judicial system and regulatory system. That's the birth of the National Crime Syndicate. Right. Prohibition really is then the, again, organized crime. It's existed for centuries. I'm sure it's probably one of the first things humanity figured out. Yeah. I'm sure it's probably one of the first things humanity figured out. But this is really, it's just a petri dish for letting it grow and blossom and hit a whole other level, right?

Absolutely. And that was one of the reasons why there was this big turn against prohibition that begins on a national basis probably around 1928, which is, well, the woman who founded the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Repeal, who was, you know, really one of the great characters in the whole story, she saw her sons having no respect for law because her teenage and college-age sons were, you know, going to drinking parties every weekend. She said, how can I raise them to believe in law when the law is not enforced? Right. Well, as all this takes off, we do have the romanticization of these gangsters, which also, as I'm recalling, it starts to wane a bit as the violence kicks up. And of course, there are the most famous names out there, and we've covered some of them. Al Capone,

for instance. Have you covered Elliot Ness? We get him in there with Al, yeah. But I kind of found in my mind, I was thinking back to our Gunslingers episodes from a year or two back. There are just more names and legends than one can ever get to without, you know, dedicating the podcast to forever. I think legends is an important word to use because a lot of them are created by Hollywood. Our sense of prohibition, and this was true 50 years ago, 60 years ago, was what we saw on the movie screen. If you didn't have direct experience with the mob, you saw Jimmy Cagney,

you saw Edward G. Robinson. It was this notion of something that could be glamorized post-prohibition was also, this is history, this is in the past, we don't do this anymore, was phenomenal for Hollywood. And if you think of the number of names that we know, and you can attach one, nearly every one to a movie or a television show. Right. And now they can be, frankly, folk heroes in many ways, even though they were murderous lawbreakers. But on the other side, I mean, Ness is, I think, an outstanding example of it. Ness had nothing to do with putting Al Capone in prison.

That was done by the IRS. He was, you know, he was honest. He did what he said he would do. But he was not particularly effectual. Chicago was absolutely dripping, drowning in alcohol throughout Prohibition. And after that, Eliot's career went along after Prohibition. And after that, Eliot's career went along after Prohibition, he died an alcoholic. The irony. Well, among the gangsters and the agents, is there any story that you think doesn't

get told as often as it should? Or even just a favorite that you particularly are drawn to, even if it's a load of legend. I mean, it is Ness. In fact, the reason how it came about, Elliot Ness, he had a public safety in Cleveland, and he was a drunk, and he was nearing the end of his life, and he thought he would write a memoir because he was known by the newspapers in his time as the Untouchable. And he died midway through his discussions with his ghost writer, Oscar Pirelli. So we have no reason to believe that anything in that book is something that Eliot Ness actually

said or did. This was a guy who wrote for the men's magazines of the times. He was a hack. And he invented this exciting story and then sold it to the movies. So, you know, it gets two, three, four times removed from the reality by the time we've absorbed it. And we see Robert Stack on television, or was it Kevin Costner who played him in the movies? This is building a mountain out of an anthill. So, yeah, that's one of my favorites. You know, there were, the notion of the mobsters making deals and having a governing system is really provocative. So Meyer Lansky, who was one of the geniuses, is a fascinating character. And he was nothing like the way that he was portrayed by Lee Strasberg in The Godfather under a different name.

He was a really tough guy, but he also had the mind of an accountant and he knew how to make rules. And he really made the wheels of the National Crime Syndicate turn. He also grew up a block away from Lucky Luciano. They had known each other since they were kids, which didn't hurt. He had, the way those two met, yeah, that was an interesting... They were kids. They met as kids. Yeah. Well, the mobsters, by and large, there were exceptions. Well, there were two sources.

They came from the slums. They were poor immigrant families, Irish, Italian, Jewish, overwhelmingly. The other source of the mobsters were law enforcement, where the corruption of law enforcement, coast to coast, was unbelievable. The Prohibition agents, 2,600 of them, assigned to cover the entire country, the borders and the coasts. They were paid measly salaries. I mean, the modern equivalent of, you know, $50,000, say. Yet people wanted those jobs desperately because the opportunity to collect graft was phenomenal.

The leading crime buster in Seattle, because the opportunity to collect graft was phenomenal. The leading crime buster in Seattle, Olmstead, who became the name party in a famous Supreme Court case. He lived in the finest neighborhood in town as a member of the police force in Seattle. He had a lot of money. His kids went to private schools, but he was a cop. And he was well-respected until he got busted. Yeah.

Yeah. Thought to be an upright officer of the law. Yeah. In its time, Capone, who was great at press relations, he really understood publicity. He was a folk hero among people in Chicago. He wasn't a folk hero if your sister got gunned down by one of his mobsters, but he was the guy, he gave the public what they wanted. He provided alcohol at a time when alcohol was not necessarily easy to get. Pete Dan, so all in all, would you say prohibition was a good idea or a great idea?

You pick up my sarcasm there, right? There's something very positive that came out of prohibition, which was the knowledge that we will never do this again. It's total failure. It's corrupting influence. It's distortion of law. It's pervasive negative influence in the national politics, you cannot make a case to do it. And it's interesting to me, and I know you're from Utah, that Utah, of all places, was the last, you know, the state that was needed to put the repeal

amendment over the top. So if in Mormon Utah, they really want to get rid of prohibition, what more do I need to say? You know, you'll appreciate this. I do a live show where I go on the road, tell the story of the first hundred years of U.S. history in about a hundred minutes. So, we went to Gunnison, Utah. It's a very small little town. The theater, I think, actually seats more people than the population of the town. Right? One of these,

you can picture, right? Very rural farm. The old opera house, yeah. Yes. So, while we're there, you know, this is about two hour, three hour drives south of me. While we're there, the crew, you know, they know that I do history, they know, this is about two hour, three hour drives south of me. While we're there, the crew, you know, they know that I do history. They said, hey, how would you like to see an old speakeasy? What? Yes. Underneath this old opera house that, you know, is now used as a community

theater. Yeah, there was a speakeasy. So we went down and of course, it's not in the condition that it was then they're actually doing renovations at the time, but you know, to, to your point, right. Even, even here in Utah, which was the state that ended prohibition, right. It cast that final vote. It was just wild to me. It caught me so off guard. This is such a small one horse town. It had a speakeasy. It's crazy. Well, the last sentence of my book is Sam Bronfman, who's become a billionaire through Seagram's, which he had founded before Prohibition and then it flourished very much after Prohibition. Obviously, he's one of the huge liquor distillers in the world. Westchester County being interviewed about his business by a reporter from Fortune magazine, who generally wasn't concerned about prohibition. But just when they were finishing up, he said,

so Sam, tell me, what was it about prohibition? And he said, and this is speaking as a Canadian, he said, you people were thirsty. That's it. We were very thirsty, even in Gunnison, Utah. That's right, even in Gunnison, Utah. Dan, thank you so much. If I can ask one last question. Ted, you are the author of Last Call, but I know that you were also the first public editor of the New York Times. People talk and think a lot these days

about their news. And I just figured you might have some interesting thoughts. As I go through history, and I often use newspapers as a primary source, and we've got eras of yellow journalism, we often have papers that bring their own biases. And I am somewhat amused at times to see how many people in the present think that that's a new phenomenon. Well, it's a reversion to what, as you as a historian know, was always the case in American journalism until, you know, kind of the middle of the 20th century. Right. You know, the term objectivity wasn't used until 1920. In fact, a book by Walter Lippmann and by the then editor

of the New York Times, Charles Mertz. Yeah, the reversion to partisanship. I can tell you your politics if you tell me what television news you watch. I can tell you your politics if you tell me what newspaper you subscribe to. Well, to those who aspire to cut through it, what advice would you give? Well, don't trust one source and find a source that generally disagrees with you to balance whatever source agrees with you. Well, I will say it's heartening for me to hear you're saying exactly what I tell my students when they ask that question. I always like to ask a great mind, though, what their thoughts are.

I, too, I tell them you should be subscribing across the divides. You got to get the different perspectives. Well, once again, Dan, you're the author of Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, which I personally like to think of as the Bible for this era of history. Thank you. So, thank you again for your work and thanks for joining me today. This has been my pleasure. Thank you, Greg.

Well, my friends, that wraps up this epilogue. Thank you, Greg. the Harlem Renaissance to big league sports. If you enjoy HTVS, remember to hit the follow button so you won't miss new episodes and we'd appreciate a five-star review as it really helps people to find us. History That Doesn't Suck is created and hosted by me, Greg Jackson. Episode produced by Dosti McCraw with editorial assistance by Ella Hendrickson. Production by Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsey Graham of Airship. Visit HTVSPodcast.com for more information. And a special thanks to our members whose monthly gift puts them at producer status. Bernie Lowe, George Sherwood, Gerwith Griffin, Henry Brunges, Jake Gilbreth, James G. Bledsoe, Janie McCreary, Jeff Marks, Jennifer Moods, Jennifer Magnolia, Jeremy Wells, Jessica Poppock,

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