You're Dead to Me - Prohibition in the USA (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 31, 2022

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. They take a look at the origins of the Prohibition laws and hear how a movement designed to encourage temperance backfired on the nation.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Produced by Cornelius Mendez Script by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse Research by Tim GalsworthyA production by The Athletic 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. 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. 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 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 School of Advanced Study. It is Professor Sarah Churchwell. Hello, Sarah, thank you for joining us. 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, 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. 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. 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. You probably think of the Prohibition era as the Roaring Twenties.

That's the Gatsby stuff that we know and love. 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. These are somewhat two funerals. 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 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. I love that. I love the like drama of that. 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. They hired mimes to pretend to be drunk, and also devils because the demon liquor was being banished forever from purity of America. And so they had these like 20-foot coffins 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 is a radical new law that comes in in 1920. So, Sarah, obvious question, where does this come from? The movement had begun in the 1830s and 1840s. That movement for reform actually created three

great reform movements in the 19th century. It was exactly the same moral fervor that led to abolition. 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. This was a movement to make temperance national. But there's also a fairly racist, nativist energy to it as well. It's about pushing back against people of color, Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Polish, German. Yeah, absolutely. So 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. And all of these terrible foreigners are doing all of this, like they're all of this drunken behavior. And so they basically saw it as totally immoral, but also as a way to criminalize immigrant communities. 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. 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. 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 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, 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? 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 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.

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. Ah, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's interesting because I know like at one point cocaine was like a part of actual medicine. So I wondered for medical uses. part of actual medicine. So I wondered for medical uses? Yep, 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. And as you say, sacramental wine, not just for Christianity, but also for Judaism as well. So those are two of the exceptions. There's some more actually. First one is that you are allowed to own your own private supply. 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. So what they do is they said, you can get these imitation flavours 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 leavers. Who were the two sides of the argument in terms of their label, Kima? Ooh, 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 wet versus dry. The wets are on team booze and the dries are on team prohibition. Well, I stand firmly with Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B on this one going wet all the way. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the organizations, Sarah, who were in Team Dry. So can you give us a sort of 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. 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. The real mover and shaker there, Wayne Wheeler, he became their spokesman and he was very much the front man for the Anti-Saloon League. 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. So it's our old friends, the Ku Klux Klan. Oh, my buddies. No, there couldn't be them again. They saw themselves as Christian. They saw themselves as 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 tarm feather people, whip people. 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 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. 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. Ba-na-na-na-na-na, da-na-na-na-na, da-na-na-na-na, da-na-na-na-na. Yeah. You, like, knock 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. 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. 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. 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. At the beginning, they were really pretty ratty. 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. 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. Nice.

You've got play and 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 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. 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? Politicians were hypocrites.

What? So yeah, so you have a president in 1920, President Warren G. Harding, who had campaigned as a dry. 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. 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. 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 colour, the poor, immigrant communities were being hit hard. As ever, 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 arrests. They were on the streets. They would get arrested then. They would

get jailed and also police violence. But also, this is really important, the rich could afford safer alcohol, whereas the poor who are buying it off the street could literally be drinking anything. 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? 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. 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. Also, sometimes people are dumb. And like, 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 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 of it as a sort of quite a glamorous fun novel and people want to go to gatsby parties but 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 Gadsby is that he has real French champagne, and it's flowing like water. Like 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. 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. 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 organized crime really takes hold in Pro 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. Akima, what's your adorable gambling crime name going to be? It's a tough one. I think I would like to be known as, like, Lil' Keems. Uh-oh, Lil' Keems is coming. That's all the very big, muscular dudes that work under me, and like, shh, shh, hey, stop having fun. It's Lil' Keems.

And I come through and I say, hello, boys. 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. And these gang wars are known as the Chicago Beer Wars. You know, why are the beer wars such a big deal for Capone? They were fighting over who was going to control the city.

And it was the North Side and South Side gang. And this was part of what led to the repeal of prohibition. There is a sort of romantic aspect to prohibition criminality. Have you ever heard of Rum Row, Kima? No, but it sounds very exciting. 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. 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. As well as Al Capone and as well as Boo Boo, another very famous criminal in this era is George Remus. His life is properly melodrama, isn't it? 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 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. 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 that's why by the end of the 1920s, it was all kind of out of hand. 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. 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. So the government needed the money. Suddenly you've got the argument for taxation. It cleared 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. 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. 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. But on the other hand, the bad stuff was so bad. 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. 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!

That brings us on to the last segment of the pod. It's the nuance window. This is where Kima and I 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 favorite 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. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much. And that's all we have time for. But a huge thank you must go to our guests. In History Corner, we had the awesome Professor Sarah Churchwell from the University of London. And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant Kima Bob. And to

you, lovely listener, join me next time as we party hard with another pair of lively patrons. But as for me, I may be a teetotaler, but i'm off to go and make myself some california raisin cakes bye hi i'm helen lewis and i want to tell you about a podcast I've made for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It's called The New Gurus, and it's about how everywhere you look on the internet, people are giving advice. Advice they claim will transform your life. Advice that gets them thousands, no, millions of devoted followers. These online prophets are telling us how to eat, how to think, how to get rich, how to find love, how to manage our time. These are the new gurus. Just as people will say

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