You're Dead to Me - Prohibition in the USA

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Prof Sarah Churchwell and comedian Kemah Bob in 1920s USA to follow the implementation and after effects of Prohibition. From Bootleggers, Wet’s and Dry’s, Speakeasy’s and Rum Rows, take a look at the origins of the Prohibition Laws and how a movement designed to encourage temperance backfired on the nation entirely.Produced by Cornelius Mendez Script by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse Research by Tim GalsworthyThe Athletic production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, do like history, or people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You may have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History, but that's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we serve up a refreshing cocktail of laughs and facts that won't leave you with

a hangover the next morning. And if you've listened to some of our previous episodes, you'll know that we're rounding off series three with five episodes on American history. And today we are journeying back to the 1920s and early 30s to learn all about the Prohibition era in the United States of America. And to help me distill fact from fiction, I'm joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she's Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London's School of Advanced Study and is an expert on the American literature, culture and history of this period,

particularly the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. In fact, her book, Careless People, Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, is full of juicy original research into the Prohibition era and we'll be exploiting that today. It's Professor Sarah Churchwell. Hello, Sarah. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, writer and producer from Houston, Texas, now based in London. In addition to being a hilarious stand-up and the host of the Fock It Up comedy club, showcasing femmes of colour,

you'll have seen her on telly as host of It's a Sin, After Hours, or heard her on loads of radio and podcasts, including BBC's Grown-Up Land and The Guilty Feminist. It's the spectacular Kima Bob. Hello, Kima. How are you? Hey, thanks for having me. I'm all right, you know. Kima, your first time on the show. How were you with history at school? My best memory of history class is when I was in eighth grade, which was taught by Coach Greer, because that's how much we care about history in America. Mostly coaches teach it. So my fondest memory is just we're taking a quiz and my phone rang and my ringtone was,

let's get it on. And I just really felt so fun and funny in that moment. Coach Greer did not appreciate it. And I hope that answer just tells you what I was up to in history class. Right okay I don't want to get too personal Kima but are you a fond boozer a tip a like do you enjoy a little drink or are you like me and a bit of a boring teetotaler? It's a kind of mixed bag it depends what's going on like I really do enjoy whiskey here and there and every time I like have some scotch I'm just like wow like there's an old

white man who lives inside of me and he's loving this moment so yeah i do i do enjoy a bit of whiskey here and there but not a huge drinker at the same time i can't put them away she's complicated so what do you know this is where i have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And you probably know that Prohibition was the US federal government banning alcohol. You might know a bit about the gun-toting police-bribing criminals like Al Capone from the films and telly. I'm thinking Boardwalk Empire and baby-faced Bugsy Malone, a classic.

You probably think of the Prohibition era as the Roaring Twenties. That's the Gatsby stuff that we know and love. It's flappers, it's cocktails, it's jazz. You probably know about speakeasies and bootleggers. But why did Prohibition come about and who wanted it? Let's find out. We're going to start with two funerals. But don't worry, Kima, nobody's died. These are somewhat unusual funerals, because on the eve of Prohibition coming in, in January 1920, many hotels and restaurants in New York held farewell shindigs for booze. So Kima, what do you think these shindigs look like? Well, I'll tell you first what I know they sounded like, right? And it was probably like, fashionable, but there was desperation in the air. Love it. Sarah, desperation in the air? Yeah, there was definitely desperation

in the air. And the parties in particular, they were actually all over the country, but in New York held a bunch of them. They had everyone dress in black. They draped the walls in black cloth. They had drinks in black glasses and specially created black bottles. They had orchestras playing funeral dirges, and they carried these caskets that were full of these black bottles of the booze that you would never drink again. There was one party that got reported at the time where all the guests got a miniature souvenir coffin they could take home with them so that they would always know the day that the booze had died. And there was a New York Times headline the next day saying John Barleycorn died peacefully at the toll of 12 because the law came in at midnight. So that's the first funeral. They got into the spirit of it.

See, I'm going to make spirit puns here. Nicely done. I love the spirit of it. See, I'm going to make spirit puns here. Nicely done. I love the drama of that. I'm not always proud to be an American, but hearing about the theatrics of all this, go USA. So that's New York. But in the South, we've got quite a different funeral going on. Is it Virginia, where we have an ex-baseball player called Billy Sunday,

who's become a preacher, he's become an evangelist, he's anti-booze, and he's hosting his own funeral. Very different vibe this time. Billy Sunday and the pro-prohibitionists, they were basically dancing on the grave of alcohol. So they were thrilled because they thought that they were putting booze to rest forever and that this was like the death of alcohol and that they had triumphed. So they in particular, the Billy Sunday party, they hired mimes to pretend to be drunk, like to mimic drunk people, and also devils because the demon liquor was being banished forever from purity of America. And so they had these like 20 foot coffin as they took it to what they thought was going to be its final resting place.

But that is not how it worked out. This was putting John Barleycorn into the ground. So John Barleycorn is kind of like symbolic figure, like Johnny Appleseed, who planted trees. It was kind of folklore personifying alcohol. This is a radical new law that comes in in 1920. We need to rewind, much like in The Hangover. We woke up in the morning after the night before and we're going, what happened? So, Sarah, obvious question.

Where does this come from? A new thing that comes straight off the back of the First World War. Has this been, like Kima's favourite whiskeys, maturing in the barrel for many decades? Definitely maturing. It had been brewing. We might even say it had been fermenting. It had taken the best part of a century. The movement had begun in the 1830s and 1840s, and it came out of an evangelical fervor, which is why. It was also the same reform energy that argued for

women's suffrage. And at the same time, they were also arguing for what they called temperance. In America, we still to this day and always did have a kind of mix and match approach to law. So local states and municipalities will have all their own kinds of different laws. So there had been various places in the United States that were dry, but it was not a dry country. This was a movement to make temperance national. A lot of the prohibition era laws that finally came into effect in 1920 are still in effect to this day in various parts of America. And the temperance movement is about moderation initially, but in America, it's understood to be a sort of voluntary abstinence from alcohol. But prohibition, of course, is when that is forced onto other people who maybe don't

want to be temperate. As you say, there's a progressive element to it, there's a radical element to it, but there's also a fairly racist, nativist energy to it as well. It's about pushing back against people of colour, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Polish, German. This is also about trying to defend America's racial identity, I suppose, against newcomers. Yeah, absolutely. So there was a really strong political element to prohibition that I think has been lost in the way that we tend to think about it now. You've got to remember that this is also a period in which kind of three great waves of immigration came to the United States. The biggest groups at the time were Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans. And all of them

were culturally characterized by clear association with a certain drink. So the Irish were associated with whiskey. They brought whiskey with them to these older puritanical communities that were much more evangelical. And in the South, they were Baptist. So they were also non-drinking in a lot of the parts of the South. So you've got these Irish who suddenly come in and they're drinking whiskey. And then you've got these Germans who come in and they're drinking beer and they're brewing beer. And then you've got these Italians who come in and they're drinking wine. And all of these terrible foreigners are doing all of this drunken behavior. And then they decide it leads to criminality. And of course, it leads to sin. And so they basically saw it as totally immoral, but also as a way to criminalize immigrant communities. I love it, man. Let me tell

you one of my favorite combinations. Okay. I love when racism and Christianity come together. I love when racism and Christianity come together. That's just a nice, strong, firm handshake. Right? It's all good, Kima. Nothing bad in America has ever happened from bringing race and Christianity together. It has been all good. So good. I went to a private Christian university in Texas, and we had a quote unquote dry campus.

On said campus is where I got drunker than any other time in my life. Prohibition doesn't work. It doesn't work. And thinking about the different laws across the nation, it is so interesting because in Texas, you can't buy booze on a Sunday, still in 2021. I think it stops at a certain time in the evening. And so on my college campus, we would all like rush out before the time to try to grab it. It's so hypocritical. I mean, my campus was dry and you also couldn't have sex on it. Try to tell that

to the pregnant girls. It's a miracle. But Sarah, there's also a progressive campaign here. There's a lot of feminists and Christian groups also are behind prohibition as well, which is slightly counterintuitive. Absolutely. I mean, it becomes less counterintuitive if you think about it as a health reform movement, which it also was. At a time when you don't have any kind of real medical understanding of alcoholism, where you don't have a cure, you try just for prevention. And in particular, there were feminist energies behind it. Again, in terms of stopping something at the root cause, it was a way of stopping domestic violence. For women, you know, they didn't have any legal control in their

own homes. They didn't have economic control. Too often, they found that their husbands were drinking up the wages and then coming home and beating up them and their children. And so there actually was a strong progressive side to it. But there was also an economic argument. Industrialists like Henry Ford was pro-prohibition because they thought their workers would be more disciplined and more efficient if they weren't hungover. But there's also a safety argument because remember, factories are coming in now. We're becoming industrialized. And there had just been catastrophic factory fires. So if you were a drunk or a hungover worker, you weren't just posing a risk to yourself.

You were posing a risk to everyone in the factory. So there were actually reasonable arguments behind it. The problem was how they went about trying to make it happen. What did they do? They passed prohibition. I mean, what do they do? Sort of sums it up. What have you done? Are you saying that this is a complicated issue and that it's not black and white? What? So in 1917, the 18th Amendment is passed.

That's the constitutional bit. And then after more politicking, in October 1919, you get the infamous Volstead Act, named after a Minnesota politician called Andrew Volstead. And the act was vetoed by the president, Woodrow Wilson. I went to Woodrow Wilson Elementary School. And I got so drunk. So Woodrow Wilson tries to veto it, but he fails. Congress and Senate, they pass it through

because of all this coalition of supporters behind it. And so it comes into force. And Sarah, what does the Volstead Act ban? And what are the penalties if you break it? The Volstead Act declared no person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish, or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorized in this act. And the act also created the Bureau of Prohibition, which was under the control of the Treasury Department, which was supposed to enforce the law. And it included penalties of $1,000, which was supposed to enforce the law. And it included penalties of $1,000, which is a lot of money at the time, or 30 days in jail for a first offense. And that could rise to $10,000, which was a fortune in 1920, and a year in jail if you had further breaches. The act did allow brewers to

stay in business as long as they produced what was called near beer, you know, low alcohol beer, as they produced what was called near beer, you know, low alcohol beer with a maximum of 0.5% alcohol. So brewers kind of had a little get out clause, but almost the rest of the entire alcohol industry in America was wiped out in a shot, so to speak. I'm going to keep making fun. You've mentioned there's some loopholes. So Kima, can you guess what some of the major loopholes and workarounds and cheats that people found? I'm guessing that a top one will be when said alcohol represents the body of Christ. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Could tell you went to a Christian university.

Give me some Eucharist, girl. I'm all over that Eucharist. I want a little blood. I want a little body. I want a little body. Break that bread. It's interesting because I know like at one point, cocaine was like a part of actual medicine. So I wondered for medical uses.

Yep. Another one. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Oh my God. I feel so smart right now. You're doing great. You're doing great. The medical usage, over 6 million prescriptions were issued by doctors for medicinal usage of alcohol.

Oh, I bet. I'm doing inverted air quotes on the medicinal. A lot of sick people. So many sick people. So this was like the glycoma of the time. I need the marijuana for my eyes. And as you say, sacramental wine, not for christianity but also for judaism as well people managed to register fake synagogues fake churches they had their friends come and be their congregations and people pretended to be

priests they pretended to be rabbis so they could get hold of sacramental wine for religious services supposedly so those are two of the exceptions there's some more actually first one is that so they could get hold of sacramental wine for religious services, supposedly. So those are two of the exceptions. There's some more, actually. First one is that you were allowed to own your own private supply. You weren't allowed to buy it or sell it, but you were allowed to own your own. What the hell? Yeah, so rich people had a year's advance warning.

They knew this was coming. So they just bought all the alcohol and put it in their cellar. So they were fine. And then the other one is the Californian winemakers figured out that they could sell people dried up raisin and grape cakes that were dry cakes. And then they would put warnings on the label saying, caution, if you accidentally allow this to ferment,

which is obviously a terrible idea, it would turn into wine, which would be awful. You should definitely not do that. The other one, Sarah, that you told us about was the cordial extract. Exactly. So what they do is they said you can get these imitation flavors of gin, rum, whiskey, chartreuse, and it was non-alcoholic, so it's perfectly legal for them to sell it. But then again, there was a kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, where they were like, and you definitely should not add this to alcohol to make it taste

like whiskey so a lot of people would buy these extracts obviously and just use them as kind of mixers we've recently lived through the brexit nightmare of remainers and levers who were the two sides of the arguments in terms of their label came up oh the drunkies and the straights that's good better than the real one yeah the real one's not as good the real one sounds like cat food it's uh wet versus dry so you got the wets the wets are on team booze and the dries are on team prohibition well i stand firmly with megan the stallion and carter b on this one going wet all the way wet ass prohibition yes definitely yeah definitely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the organisations, Sarah, who were in Team Dry. So can you give us a rundown of the movers and shakers in Team Prohibition? So there was the Christian Temperance Union, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the American Temperance Society, Prohibition Party, and then the Anti-Saloon League, which was the really big one. That was the most powerful. It became an incredibly effective political lobbying group. They didn't care about your political affiliation. You could be in any party and they didn't care if

you drank in private. All they cared about was that you supported Prohibition in public. And the real mover and shaker there, or should we call him a Wheeler dealer? See, I'm going to keep making really bad puns um because his name was wayne wheeler um and wayne wheeler was actually their attorney but he became their spokesman and he was very much the front man for the anti-saloon league and he was an incredibly effective political operative some people described him as the most powerful man in america if you didn't vote the way that he wanted he would just find ways to destroy your career. I mean, he's a bad dude, but there's worse dudes. Who would be worse than Wayne Wheeler,

do you reckon, Kima? Think about race and religion. Oh, no. Just lay it on me. I'm ready. I'm ready to know the truth. I'm not sure if I can handle the truth, but I need to receive it. I feel like you're not going to be surprised when I tell you, because they're pretty much always the bad guys in American history. So it's our old friends, the Ku Klux Klan. Oh, my buddies. I thought to myself, I said, too obvious. Exactly.

I said, no, it couldn't be them again. They saw themselves as Christian. They saw themselves as enforcers They saw themselves as this enforcers of moral, upright America. Then, you know, violence was always their go-to strategy, you know, when in doubt, burn something down. They burned down, you know, stills and buildings. They would tar and feather people, whip people. They would have armed raids on, you know, bootleggers. They even had gun battles with bootleggers and they were not averse to murder. The thing about the Klan by the 20s was that it wasn't just Black people who were their targets. And by that point, they were the self-declared militant army of like American

righteousness. And so at that time, Prohibition came very much under their self-proclaimed right to kill anybody who didn't do what they told them. It's very like Make America Great Again vibes. You betcha. You've written a certain book on that exact subject, Sarah. Is it called Make America Great Again with vibes? With vibes, yeah. The energy in this nation is a bit off. So they are going after places that manufacture booze,

places that sell it and serve it, people who drink. They're just using violence. But in the north, in New York, in Chicago, there's a lot more of a sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge culture. And these are places you go to for drinks and they are speakeasies. Do you know that phrase? Yeah. You knock on the door and then someone's like, say the password.

And then you're like, Pony Sunshine. And then he's like, come on in, Jack. Exactly. During prohibition, the number just massively increases. The great thing about prohibition is that it just is this complete experiment in backfiring. Like every single thing they tried to do just totally backfired. So in trying to keep the number of bars and saloons down,

they just exploded. And by 1922, only two years in, there were 5,000 speakeasies in New York. And by 1927, there were over 30,000 speakeasies in New York City. And that was twice as many as there had been legal establishments before Prohibition. there were over 30,000 speakeasies in New York City. And that was twice as many as there had been legal establishments before prohibition. So they literally doubled the number in seven years.

That's so bonkers. But I kind of get it, you know, because people love an exclusive moment. We love to do something a little sneaky. So if everyone is now in a position where they get to create their own VIP room, oh, you know what's going down. New Yorkers are notorious for nightlife. I have a feeling you've gotten a much more glamorous image in your head than most of these speakeasies actually were. Is not? No, they were pretty grotty little basement dives. No chandelier? Not so much. Later, when they started to make more

money, at the beginning, they were really pretty ratty. And you just kind of went anywhere where you could get a free drink. But then when they started to get organized, and they started to get successful, that's when the glamour started to make its way in. Now, a lot of these places would have signs on the outside saying prohibition law is strictly enforced here. But of course, you got inside. That's when you knew it was a speakeasy yeah exactly yeah exactly you get inside and they would uh there'd be sort of spaces to hide your drinks under the tables you've got startup businesses i applaud that entrepreneurial spirit yes the american way but also chemo if you'd gone into a speakeasy and you'd asked for a setup what would a setup be well i wonder if a setup would be like can i have like some ice and stuff

also i want to say that this sneaky prohibition business is still going down in 2016 i went to a thai karaoke bar in la where you're not allowed to sell alcohol after a certain time, but I sure did get some wine in a teacup. Okay. So it's still happening, but yeah, I need a setup. You guessed it spot on. Sarah, a setup essentially is a sort of make your own kit. You buy the non-alcoholic stuff and you bring your own booze. Exactly. You got it. Absolutely right. They bring you the glass and the ice and like the stirrer, but you could also get the mixers and the ingredients for like a full cocktail. So you could order the setup for a mint julep and they'd bring you the mints and the sugar and you just pay for the privilege. Prices varied, of course, but there was a cafe outside of Denver

that charged $2 for a bottle of ginger ale or mineral water in 1925. And this is a time when the average wage of an unskilled worker was $3.64 a day. So it's basically your entire day's wage just to get the setup. And you still got to supply your own alcohol. And so you have your alcohol in a flask, which you have to get from somewhere. And what happens when the law turns up, Kima? How do you think people react when the prohibition units smash down the door and say, you're all under arrest? Well, I think there are a few methods that you could use. One is the oldie but goodie, hide and seek, right? Nice. Go on for a little hide. You got a play in possum where you just fall over, just stay real still, and maybe they'll leave you alone love it i think that's a good one makes me think of like secret compartments or whatever like what

is happening there's a bit of that sarah but there's also quite a lot of fighting back isn't there yeah there was a lot of resistance they developed the secret cellars and the secret hideaway stuff again later it took them a while to organize that at the beginning they just like threw things at the police the favorite things that I found were these stories that got reported in the early days. And literally like the owners of these speakeasies would be like lobbying, like cooking equipment at the police. And there was one that I found where they, they like cutlery and crockery that they were throwing at them. And there was an agent who got knocked out cold with a rolling pin,

like this woman just like walloped him because he was trying to arrest her. And a few days later, when agents raided a winery in the Bronx, people were like throwing rocks from their windows at the police as they were trying to enforce it. And of course, the other thing is that, particularly in places in big cities like New York and Chicago, the cops were all Irish. The Irish knew that prohibition was against them, and they didn't want to stop drinking either. So they would actually often, instead of going around and enforcing the law, they would go around speakeasies and demand drinks from the customers. And there was a story that got told one time where a cop said

that he was going to run them all in because they'd run out of booze and they wouldn't give him any. That's amazing. Okay, so no one's behaving themselves in the cities are people behaving themselves in the white house in washington in the capitol building sarah are the lawmakers of america upholding the law this one's gonna shock kima you're gonna be shocked core kima hold on i'm trying to brace myself physically okay it's safe the politicians were hypocrites as a brit greg this is a surprise to you that that's even possible i live in a nation of tremendous moral dignity in politics so yeah so you have a you have a president in 1920 president warren g harding who had campaigned as a dry. He was publicly pro-prohibition.

He was famously a huge drinker behind the scenes. He threw the best parties in DC. Everybody came to the White House to get loaded. He had more whiskey than anybody. And alcohol just kind of flowed. And it was a huge open secret. Everybody knew about it. But it wasn't just in the White House. It was also in the Capitol building. There was a secret bar in the Senate library that just had a kind of little curtain over it, so not very secret. And they stocked it with confiscated alcohol. So they would confiscate the alcohol and be like, give that to us, and then put it in their secret bar in the Senate library. And they also had bootleggers literally storing alcohol in the Congress cellars, both the House and the Senate, so that all of the politicians could just order whatever they wanted. So they still had their in-house bar,

and then they would go up to the floor and vote dry, and then go back to their back rooms and all get soused. I vote for prohibition. It's extraordinary. I'm getting the sense here, though, Sarah, that there was still a very strong inequality in the way in which prosecutions were happening so can we assume therefore that people of color the poor immigrant communities were being hit hard no no no greg no no no this in in equal in it i'm sorry I can't even pronounce it because that's how much I can't even wrap my head around the concept. There's no way this was present. Sarah, please.

Really sorry to have to tell you. And obviously this is the only time in American history that it happened this way. But wealthy people were protected and poor people were victimized. I know. But luckily when Prohibition ended, Kima, that ended too. And we just, we definitely got it right after that. And then I noticed, I love how things are. As ever, right, wealthy people were protected. They had their friends in high places. They had their cops who they were giving kickbacks to. And they were able to buy what they wanted and store it safely.

And it was poor black and immigrant communities, as Greg said, who were facing large scale arrest. They were on the streets. They would get arrested. Then they get jailed and also police violence. They were easy targets, right? They were softer targets. And so that when the prohibition agents had to show that they were doing something, those were the people that they could go after. But also, this is really important important the rich could afford safer alcohol whereas the poor who are buying it off the street could literally be drinking anything it's so weird it's almost like laws only apply to certain people no don't say that keema that's a that's a very it's weird i know i'm a radical but follow me here this is something i came up

with right now and i don't appreciate you shutting down my theory. This is where we get moonshine. We get the idea of bootleggers. We get the idea of gut-wrought bathtub gin. I mean, this stuff is dangerous, Sarah, isn't it? One of the most obvious symptoms for bathtub gin was it would send you blind. People went blind a lot because it all had what's called wood alcohol, which is the dangerous part of alcohol. Drinking alcohol has that removed from it. And they were permanently blinded. I mean,

they would like run into the hospital screaming that they couldn't see. The bootleggers would add different ingredients to alcohol to give it a kick. Ether was really common, like anesthetic. Ether is what they're using to put people under for surgeries at the time. And ether is incredibly dangerous, right? I feel like ether is so dangerous that I thought it was just a concept. I didn't know it was an actual substance. It's a real thing. Like I was just like, ooh, ether. Like black holes, ether. No, like chloroform, dude.

Wiping people out. But also formaldehyde, turpentine, gasoline. people out, but also formaldehyde, turpentine, gasoline. And then also a lot of it had traces of poisonous metals from the utensils that they used, traces of arsenic, of lead, of copper. So all of these poisonous elements were all just kind of circling around. And there was also sometimes the government were doing this. Some of the alcohol on the streets was deliberately poisoned so people wouldn't drink it, but people still drank it. The government putting people in danger to prove a point? Well, in this case, no, no, we're just, we are stunned right from start to finish. In this case, I think it was more the government getting behavioral psychology wrong. Their intention was that they would poison the alcohol, it would be labeled as poisonous, and then it would act as a deterrent. But they didn't count

on the fact that the bootleggers would just strip the poison labels off of it. The New York Times was reporting on it by the mid to late 1920s that hundreds of people were being killed by government poisoned alcohol. That was actually one of the big backlashes that eventually would lead to the repeal of prohibition because not unsurprisingly, people got annoyed at the idea that the government was deliberately poisoning American citizens. Also, sometimes people are dumb. And like, I bring in a lot of new information to the table, just like you, Sarah, and it's crazy. Do you guys know this phenomenon where you say that something is naughty and then

people especially young people just want it like music with swear words in it there are strains of weed where you read the name and it's literally like amnesia insomnia insanity zombie and people are like i gotta get this in my body sounds dangerous let's roll there's a weed called green crack green crack doesn't that sound terrifying I can't wait to try it one day let's flip it to the more glamorous side now because that's the darker side of it Sarah you're an expert on F Scott Fitzgerald his great novel The Great Gatsby in a lot of ways it's been sort of romanticized that novel a lot of people think, it's been sort of romanticised, that novel. A lot of people think of it as a sort of quite a glamorous, fun novel

and people want to go to Gatsby parties. But those parties that he's having, are they illegal? Well, again, I would just draw the analogy with drug taking today. If really rich people are throwing a party at which cocaine is just readily available, the police are going to turn a blind eye. And so the Gatsby parties are very much that vibe. Super rich guy who just has the absolute best that money can buy. And what's exciting about Gatsby is that he has real French champagne, and it's flowing like water. You can't get that anywhere else. And so that's the glamour of it. When you

go back and you look at the novel, you realize that there's only one really glamorous party in it. And there are three party set pieces, and two of them are really pretty sordid and depressing. And what Fitzgerald is even in the novel is really pulling out is the sleaze that we're talking about here is that and Gatsby is a criminal and the romance and the glamour of the novel sometimes makes people forget that. I feel like my English teacher is a piece of crap. I gotta say, The Great Gatsby is the most mistaught novel in America. Let's move on to some hard and hardened crims. You'll know Scarface Al Capone. Yeah. Do you know Max Boo Boo Hoff? No, not a lot of people talking about Max Boo Boo Hoff.

I mean, Boo Boo's quite an adorable nickname for a very dangerous man was he one of the guys with like the guns but like the guns that are like but they have like a circle bullet thing it looks like a roll of film in the gun because it's so old tommy gum absolutely you are you have absolutely nailed it that is that's exactly what you should be picturing. I actually don't know why he was called Boo Boo. A lot of them did have nicknames that seem almost endearing now. You're like, oh, Boo Boo. But yeah, he was a terrible man. And he became one of the wealthiest gangsters in America. So what happened with Prohibition, the most important ways in which it backfired was that it took crime, which had been, we might say, disorganized,

right? Crime was random. A stab here, a steal there. Exactly. But what happened was organized crime really takes hold in prohibition. And obviously, the most famous one being Al Capone so that they can control not just alcohol, but then all of the kind of underworld. The nighttime economy. The nighttime economy. That's very well put. Exactly. So prostitution and gambling, racketeering, all of that stuff. Kima, what's your adorable gambling crime name going to be?

Well, I'm not a murderer for sure. Good. Wink. You probably should just do the wink and not say it, but I don't care. It's a tough one. I think I would like to be known as like little keems oh little keems is coming that's all the very big muscular dudes that work under me and like hey stop having fun it's little keems and i come through and i say hello boys lovely sarah what would your crim name be i I mean, I'd just call you The Professor.

I think it'd be great. Oh, I like it. Yeah, let's go with that. That's scary. It is. Literary scholar by day, crime boss by night. I think I'd go with weasel face. That's probably not because I look like a weasel. I'd be some sort of underling.

I'd get rounded up and the cops would be like, oh God, it's weasel face again. Anyway. Not weasel face. The most obvious criminal violence that everyone sort of knows is the St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. This is Al Capone at his absolute worst. And it's part of a bigger gang wars, Sarah. He's in Chicago, which I know is your native city. And these gang wars are known as the Chicago Beer Wars. You know, why are the beer wars such a big deal for Capone? It was a nickname that was applied to it. It wasn't so much that it was

beer per se. They were fighting over who was going to control the city. And it was the North Side and South Side gangs. But the thing that I think that's amazing about the St. Valentine's Day massacre is there were seven gangsters who were gunned down in a garage in Chicago, seven gangsters. It was called a massacre, sparked a national outcry, made Al Capone public enemy number one. And in 1929, it turns out that America still thought that it was crazy for people to kill each other with guns. So whatever was happening with Prohibition, they were like, oh my God, seven dead gangsters. It's a massacre. Front page news all over the country. Seven dead gangsters wouldn't even get like the back page of a single newspaper in America today. If they were outraged by seven, oh, they would hate what's going on these days.

They sure would. It shows that this idea that America has always been tolerant of gun crime is simply not true. And this was part of what led to the repeal of prohibition. So you're telling me that I can kill my way out of any problem? No, you can't. I'm afraid because you're African-American and you're a woman. Oh, come on, Sarah. Stop telling me things. I think the rules might be different for you.

But I'm okay, yeah? Okay, Greg's great. I may be okay, depending. Who set up this system and how do I complain? There is a sort of romantic aspect to prohibition criminality. Have you ever heard of rum roe, Kima? No, but it sounds very exciting. Is it like rum raisin ice cream?

It's just as delicious. It's a sort of offshore investment scheme. Yeah, it's a floating liquor store. So what they would do is they would have these boats that had sailed in from the West Indies and from Canada. And the boats would anchor at the three mile point where it was international water and the American law enforcement couldn't go. international water and the American law enforcement couldn't go. Off of Long Island, you could look out in the water and you would see these boats floating in literally international waters. And then under cover of darkness, everybody would get in their little pop-pop motorboats and just go out there. The smugglers would just go pick it up. Capone also used, as you say, this kind of offshore import route. He brought a lot of the liquor that he smuggled in from French islands off the Canadian coast

called Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, where alcohol was really cheap. And supposedly, the story goes that Capone made the islands so rich that he's still considered a hero there and that they built houses out of the wooden cases from the champagne bottles. What would you build your house out of, Kima, if you had a debauched house made of the byproduct of exciting lifestyles i think definitely go with some cork insulation am i right learners and then you take those bottles you find assorted colors and you make your own stained glass who's gonna be in this beautiful depiction it's me but still doing the stuff that jesus would be doing hey it's my house oh lovely i love the idea of you just the last supper that'd be great but um kind of just smiling with my teal fro just like i'm new jesus i think it could be cool the other thing that we

should mention very quickly is stock car racing which is the modern sports very popular in the south is supposedly derived from bootleggers getting booze into the country from mexico and from canada outrunning the cops by souping up their cars apparently something like 95 percent of the booze coming into the country was never apprehended by the cops. As well as Al Capone and as well as Boo Boo, the delightful Boo Boo, another very famous criminal in this era is George Remus. Sarah, he strikes me as Gatsby times a million. Like he really makes his money in prohibition.

His life is properly melodrama, isn't it? Some people in fact thought that Fitzgerald based Gatsby on George Remus. There's no evidence that he did, but he's the figure that definitely Fitzgerald was thinking about. So George Remus lived in Cincinnati. He was just a lawyer turned bootlegger. He saw an opportunity in prohibition, a very entrepreneurial spirit. And because he was a lawyer, he got the loopholes. So he bought up distilleries and worked out how to protect himself. And very quickly, he became the Rockefeller of bootlegging. But the melodrama came in because he did eventually get

caught and jailed. And while he was in jail, his wife had an affair with a Justice Department agent. So basically, she had an affair with a cop while he was doing time. And on the day that she was trying to finalize her divorce, he went chasing after her in this kind of dramatic car chase. He actually murdered her. He shot and he killed her. And then he went on trial again. And he was found not guilty. Kima, rich white guy found not guilty shocker. Sarah, I understand that you've studied these things, you've read these things, you teach these things even, but the way you keep presenting this, it's a mind blowing for me. I know. It's like history never changes. So this guy got off on

grounds of insanity. That was George Remus's defense. There was a huge media circus, the trial, and in fact, historians have called it the 1920s equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial. I mean, it was a huge, huge deal. I mean, the other reason Remus is angry with her is that she has been stealing his money. And this is a vengeance mission as well. So he's out to kill her. And sadly, he catches her and does kill her. Sarah, can we say that a lot of this corruption is because the criminals are so rich that they're able to just buy their way

through. You know, they're bribing cops, they're bribing judges, they're bribing witnesses. They've got so much money now that they are beyond the law. Absolutely. That's exactly what happened. And also, at the same time, the prohibition enforcement agencies were woefully underfunded. So they don't have anything like enough coverage, anything like enough agents. And then you've got all of these rich bootleggers and criminals paying off everybody and just making sure that things run the way they want them to run. And that's why by the end of the 1920s, it was all kind of out of hand. Prohibition was, it was really clear to everybody that it was really kind of destroying American society from within. My mind has gone to the fact that if it was legal, the government could have been getting some of those taxes, but I don't think these are taxpaying guys. Kima, you are

good at history. I'll tell you why. Is that why it came back? That's what happened. Oh, classic USA. You're spot on, Kima. In 1929, the Wall Street crash, we have the Great Depression, the disaster, the economic collapse. And that brings about a political question of how do we raise funds to get the economy back on its feet? And the answer is tax booze. Suddenly, prohibition is being debated again, Sarah. So is that what brings about the end of prohibition? Is it a political thing? Or is it a health and safety thing? It was all of the above, really. So the government needed the money. Suddenly you've got the argument for taxation. It's clear that they had lost the moral battle, as we've said, you know, speakeasies were everywhere.

People were drunk everywhere. It wasn't working on the most fundamental level. Then you've got the corruption. You've got the gangsters, you've got the St. Valentine's Day massacre, you've got this sense that criminality is just spiraling out of control and that actually instead of fixing everything and improving the moral life of the nation, it had destroyed the moral life of the nation. But it was really the crash. That was the turning point. In 1932, it was Franklin Roosevelt and also a Democratic Congress. They were swept in on a wet platform on an explicit mandate to repeal prohibition. And prohibition was repealed in 1933. I love the idea of being swept in on a wet platform. It sounds like a sort of water park. Yeah.

And suddenly prohibition out the window. Although not entirely, some states happily carried on with prohibition. The last state to repeal it was Mississippi in 1966. Historians have a really interesting debate about the impact of prohibition in terms of public health. Some say it genuinely did reduce alcohol rates in America. So liver cirrhosis, alcohol-related diseases did fall. Most Americans probably drank less. But on the other hand, the bad stuff was so bad. One of the things that I find really interesting about that debate as well is that, I mean, it did two other things that we haven't really mentioned. First was

that it got women drinking in public for the first time, and it really turned women into drinkers across the country, and they had never been doing that before. Yeah, baby. The other thing that happened in 1920, there were two amendments that were passed, and the other one was the one that gave women the vote. So women have this new economic freedom, this new political freedom. And then prohibition passes and drinking becomes sexy. And so then they all start drinking and smoking and having sex, which is what you do when you're drinking and smoking. And all of those things start to come together.

It's a combination. Drinking, smoking, sex, the real trinity. Well, that's the new Jesus that you're're gonna yeah exactly you're gonna be jesus up in your stained glass window no rules just vibes as we said it had a lot of unintended consequences but one of its unintended consequences was that americans also started sweetening the recipes because they couldn't get the flavor from alcohol anymore. And so there are also historians who will argue that prohibition is actually at the root of America's obesity epidemic today. That was when Americans became accustomed to this kind of highly sweetened food that is still unusual in other parts of the world. Now, again, this is

debatable. So the ways in which prohibition is still with us and has shaped American society, it's much more than, you know, the St. Valentine's Day massacre or Al Capone and bathtub gin. The nuance window! All right, it's time to put a cork in our chat and that brings us on to the last segment of the pod. It's the nuance window. This is where Kima and I will have a little sip of a drink

and we allow our expert to give us a sober sermon for two uninterrupted minutes on anything that Sarah wants to say to us without much further ado, the nuance window. Well, I think the way we need to think about prohibition is the way that it's at the root of so much of American society today in ways that we don't really appreciate or think about. But I just was going to share my favourite fact really, which is that everybody thinks about prohibition as the era of bathtub gin. But most of what we think about bathtub gin is wrong, including the phrase itself. They didn't actually talk about bathtub gin, particularly in the early 1920s. It's not quite anachronistic, but it's almost anachronistic. So bathtub gin was what middle class people would make, and you would buy a gallon jug of safe alcohol from your local

friendly chemist and you would take it home and you would mix it using water from the bathtub tap which is where the name comes from in your big jug and then you would add those extracts we were talking about those oils of extracts for flavoring stir it with a spoon wait as long as you were willing to and that was bathtub gin. But they didn't call it bathtub gin. They called it synthetic gin. So if you were in a speakeasy in New York in 1922, in the year of Gatsby, you would be talking with your friends about how terrible synthetic gin is, not how terrible bathtub gin is. Amazing. Thank you so much. So what do you know now?

is. Amazing. Thank you so much. So what do you know now? Time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is a quickfire quiz to see what you have remembered. Kima, are you feeling excited about the quiz? Are you good with exams? Yeah. Test taker of the year, every year since I was born. Wow. Okay. I'm expecting good things. Here we go. Question one. Prohibition came into effect in America in which year? In 1920. Absolutely. Question two.

Name one of the groups that supported Prohibition. Oh, the KKK! There we go. Question three. When Prohibition was introduced, the Evangelist ex-baseball player Billy Sunday hosted a mock funeral for who? Johnny Barleycorn? Spot on. Question four. Yes!

How were grape and raisin cakes used as a Prohibition loophole? You can't sell the liquid, but you can sell the ingredients. So they were like, if we sell this little cake, then people can make their own wine. Spot on. Question five. By the end of Prohibition, doctors had given prescriptions in the number of six million for what? For booze, baby. It's medicinal alcohol.

Question six. What was the name of the Cincinnati bootlegger, a lawyer who ended up as a murderer and whose trial was called the O.J. Simpson Trial of the Twenties. Oh, Sarah informed us about this in such great detail. It was so colourful. There was a murder. It was tragic. I don't know this man's name. It was George Remus.

Question seven. What was the name of the Chicago Gang Wars which which led to the St. Valentine's Day massacre? The North versus the South Wars. Yep. And they were named after a certain type of drink. What drink? The gin fights. Ah, the Chicago Beer Wars. Although North versus South was good. I'll give you half a point for North versus South. Question eight. What were nightclubs that sold liquor in violation of prohibition called?

Sometimes they say that talking is hard, but speaking is easy. Lovely. Question nine. During prohibition, where could you get a sneaky drink inside the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C.? Behind the curtain, because they had a little bar. They did in the Senate library. And question ten 10 which was the last american state to repeal prohibition uh mississippi it was do you remember the year for bonus points too late the 60s 1966 bonus point amazing i'm gonna give you what am i gonna give you i think we're gonna go for nine and a half out of ten yeah well well done keema thank you so much greg i think we've all learned that i don't care about facts so i definitely don't care what score i got i feel like a winner

i hope you've both had fun learning lots about prohibition and listeners if you're in the mood for some more 20th century american adventures then shimmy on over to our episode about josephine baker and if you crave more rum guzzling criminals, why not sail over to the Blackbeard the Pirate episode. And remember, if you've had a laugh, if you learn some stuff, please share the podcast with your friends or leave a review online and make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. All that's left for me to do is to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we've had the awesome Professor Sarah Churchwell from the University of London.

Thank you, Sarah. Thank you very much. And Comedy Corner, we've had the marvellous new Jesus, Kima Bob. Thank you, Kima. Thank you. Everyone call me that forever. No one will have a problem with it. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time

as we party hard with another pair of lively patrons. As for me, I may be teetotal, but I'm off to go and make some California raisin cakes and then sell them on the internet. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Tim Goldsworthy. The script was by Emma Neguse, Tim Goldsworthy and me. The project manager was Isla Matthews and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. Hi, this is Jane Garvey.

I really hope you enjoyed that podcast. I'm here just to tell you about a new one on BBC Sounds called Life Changing, in which I get the chance to have some really, I hope, insightful conversations with people who've lived through some extraordinary challenges and experiences. Just have a listen. I knew I said this is it. I didn't know where I was going, what I was going to do. And literally, like what is seen in the films, I just took apart my mobile

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I mean, it's... This is crazy, isn't it? Absolutely crazy. It's absolutely crazy. Join us if you can. I promise you won't regret it. Subscribe now to Life Changing on BBC Sounds.