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Funding for this program provided in part by
Bank of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland.
One of the most bitter conflicts between the government and the
people of the United States came in 1919 with prohibition when
the government took extreme measures to see to it that
people did not consume illegal alcoholic beverages.
We'll find out just how far things went from Deborah Blum.
She's the author of "The Poisoner's Handbook."
Welcome to University Place Presents. Thank you. It's great to be here.
Now before we get into prohibition, per se, I see
you have some jewelry that is from that very time.
Some very distinctive stuff there.
What exactly did you bring? Yes, I brought some 1920s
jewelry to show you. This is a flapper snake bracelet. And actually if I was wearing
one of those nice little flapper sleeveless outfits, this would
wrap around my upper arm. I actually don't know why they
were so fascinated by snakes in the 1920s. I have a theory. You do?
Yeah, I think it was the discovery of King Tut's
tomb in 1922, that made all those things happen.
Oh, that's really, because this would be like a
Cleopatra kind of asp. But the other thing I brought to
show you is a poison ring from the period.
And if you look very carefully you'll see I can pop the catch.
And what would be the social context for using one of those?
Well, let's say I really didn't like the questions you
were asking, I'm leaving this a little loose, but I might
say can I fix your coffee? Let me stir in a little cream
for you. And as you see, you can hardly see
it, but right here I've opened up this little
compartment, and this would actually hold a lethal dose
of something like cyanide or strychnine which were widely
available at the time. You could buy them at pharmacies. They were tonics.
What I love about this is that people have this sort of idea
of what a poison ring looks like, and they think it's some
visible big honking thing. But real poison rings
were very deceptive. So this one is an example.
Are those things readily available? They don't make them now the way they used to.
When I got this one, I bought it at an antique store, one of my
sons said to me did you go to the jeweler and say can I just
see those rings you keep under the counter.
Were they special order? There's a lot of questions about
how people acquired them. Well, it was an age of
secrecy in the 1920s. It was an age of getting away
with things. No matter who you were or how high you
were in the chain of authority, it seemed to be
fashionable. I guess not the White House so much but
in places almost that high in government circles to
snip one over on the government. That's exactly right.
I always think of the 1920s as being one of the most
anarchistic periods in American history because here you have
a time when across the country people are violating a newly
passed amendment of the Constitution.
Knowingly and willingly they're figuring out ways to evade
American law, and it's not just little sects of society, not
to say that there weren't more extreme criminal examples of
that, but in their kitchens, in their bathtubs, in their
backyards, in their garages, people were breaking the law and
hiding it consistently or going out to little
secretive speakeasies. So in that sense there's like
this national movement toward a kind of really
interesting lawlessness. I guess to put a really broad
brush to it, there were two kinds of alcoholic beverage.
There was the kind that was made by real distilleries or
breweries and smuggled into the country, and then there
was what might be called the more home-grown variety.
There was home-grown and then there was the ongoing theft by
gangster bootlegger syndicates, the kind of Al Capone side of
this, to steal denatured alcohol from the factories that
made industrial alcohol. And denatured alcohol is in fact
grain alcohol, in which you've added some contaminants
so it's non-potable. And then you use it to clean
medical instruments or it's fuel alcohol, and so the
bootleggers, one of the ways they would, aside from brewing it
themselves, is they'd steal this denatured alcohol and then try
to get the contaminants out of it, package it, stick like a rum
label on it, dye it a little bit and shlep it out there.
And by about 1926, 60 million gallons of denatured alcohol was
being stolen every year. So this was alcohol that might
have been perfectly respectable grain alcohol in the
first place? Right. Denaturing laws say this: you're making an alcohol that is not
drinking alcohol. It's non-potable alcohol.
And if you're on that side of the alcohol business, you don't
have to pay all the taxes and fees that alcohol producers
make, but you have to follow government formulas for
denaturing, essentially taking the natural alcohol and turning
it into non-drinkable alcohol. But if you could go in there as
a chemist and remove the contaminants, sometimes just
something that makes it taste bad, then you can repackage and
sell that alcohol. And so the bootleggers realized that
they could make a lot of money if they could steal this
and that all these little hidden stills, and there were a lot
of them, couldn't keep up with what the factories were doing.
So you had alcohol smuggled in from Canada, especially in the
beginning before the government got much more efficient at
keeping that out, you had home-brewed bathtub gin, which was
usually really nasty stuff, and you had repackaged denatured
alcohol, which was also really nasty stuff because the
chemists really usually couldn't get everything out.
You didn't know how good the chemist was in the first
place who was doing this. That's exactly right.
And it's one reason that a lot of our really famous sort of
frou-frou cocktails were invented during the prohibition
era because people were forever trying to come up with ways to
hide the taste of the alcohol. The alcohol was really rough,
nasty stuff. So you'd put orange juice in it and
make a screwdriver. You'd put tomato juice in it
and make a bloody Mary. You'd put a whole bunch of fruit
juices and cordials and make a bee's knees, was one of the
famous ones, or sidecar. I am amazed to hear that in New
York City alone during prohibition there were 30,000
speakeasies. And you can imagine the accelerating
growth of these because we're really talking
about prohibition goes into effect in 1920, it's killed off
in the Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1933, and in
13 years they add 30,000 of these secret little
bars and restaurants and backdoor saloons.
It's kind of phenomenal. And it tells you how much people
continued to drink in that time. And if you go back and look
through newspapers of the times, you see a lot of stories
of people behind bars, even grandmothers behind bars for
making bathtub gin. That's exactly right.
And one of the things you have to realize about all this
homebrew, is that you're getting an organic material and
you're fermenting it to alcohol, but it's not like people were
rushing out into wheat fields or cornfields and
brewing great grain alcohol. They couldn't do that.
So some of these homebrews people did destructive
distillation of their furniture. Of their furniture?
They get wood alcohol? They got wood alcohol. Varnish notwithstanding. Yes.
There were actually some moonshiners in Tennessee who did
a still and rain poison ivy through it because poison ivy
vines are all over the place. In the winter they just
stripped them down and ran it through the still.
So you really didn't know what you were drinking and it
could be way more interesting than you wanted it to be.
So was there a point at which you say that the government
became much better at stopping the professionally made stuff
from coming into the country? That was probably the
one real government enforcement success story.
They couldn't keep it from happening in the United
States but they got better and better at keeping it out.
Actually, one of my favorite stories, some of the language we
use today is built from that smuggling time, so one of the
most famous smugglers was a guy named Bill McCoy.
He would run ships down to Cuba and bring back rum.
And it was always really good rum. It was real whiskey.
It was, in fact, the real McCoy.
And Bill McCoy was arrested and sent to prison about two years
into prohibition, and the same thing starts happening from
Canada. And that's why eventually there's less and
less good grain alcohol, decent whiskey in the
United States and more and more and more of this, make it in
your bathtub kind of effect. So the whiskey gets rougher.
And something else happens. You're not longer even
able to smuggle, say, wine, even in from Canada.
Everything's hard liquor. That's what people could make.
They could make whiskey. They could make hard liquor.
They couldn't make wine. They weren't making beer, except, of course, in their bathtub.
And so you get this incredible rise in alcoholism during
prohibition because all that there is to drink is hard
liquor. So tell me more about beer. Why is beer not a bigger part of the picture?
Beer was a major target of the anti-prohibition forces.
The big breweries, in fact, owned a lot of the
pre-prohibition saloons. These were seen as locations
where crime brewed, and when prohibition came in the
government really shut down the breweries.
The breweries themselves were a major target and you see this
across the country. And by the end of prohibition, we had,
before prohibition, this wonderful variety of beers and
breweries everywhere, and at the end of prohibition the only ones
that had really survived were, Anheuser-Busch, for instance,
made fake beer and they made cereal and they made all kinds
of other products to just keep themselves in business through
prohibition. But beer was a real target.
And the other thing about beer was that breweries give off a
very distinctive odor, right? Sure, that yeasty smell.
So you had the enforcement agencies prowling around
neighborhoods looking for stills which they knew were anywhere,
and beer was a major signal. So people didn't brew as much
secret illegal beer because they were going for things that
weren't quite as aromatic. I'm guessing that maybe the
markup wasn't as good as it would be for hard liquor, too.
There would be that, yes. I gather there would be major
publicity campaigns to let the public know that, yes, we're
smashing another still today or this would be a good news story
to break an illicit warehouse. That's exactly right.
And they used to do very public demonstrations of destroying
stills. They welcomed publicity for raids, for
destruction of stills or when they would get a secret
catch of liquor or whiskey, or sometimes barrels of alcohol.
They would make a point of calling photographers and
calling newspapers and dumping it and smashing it in
the most public way possible. I can only imagine.
There must have been a lot of drunk raccoons and
other creatures down there. Rats down in the sewers.
That's right. Staggering around the sewers.
So, in terms of what the government was actually after,
what the federal government was actually after
during prohibition, where were they coming from?
Well, prohibition was a highly moral idea.
And some of it was driven by that complete sense of disarray
after World War I. The world is falling apart all around
us, and we have this image of this purer, simpler
time. It was driven a lot by religious groups. There were a lot of people who
felt that it was a rural versus urban kind of crusade, these
dens of inequity that were the big cities where people were
consuming massive amounts of alcohol, and they were in fact
consuming massive amounts of alcohol, they needed to be
straightened out. And some people argued that it
was an anti-immigrant... Because Italians would
drink wine, Germans would drink beer, Irish would drink.
That's exactly right, Irish whiskey.
So all of those things went into effect, but the sales pitch was
we're going to become a more moral, better country, and once
we dry the United States out we'll all be functioning
on a higher plane. Had that ever been done
anywhere else on a national level, do you know? No. We were like the test case for
what doesn't work when you run a moral prohibition campaign.
Who were the voices saying in 1917, 1918, if you try this
on a federal level it's not going to work?
Well, among them were the people, I wrote a book about
looking at some of the people who pushed back against
prohibition in the 1920s and some of them were scientists.
The heroes of my book "The Poisoner's Handbook," for
instance, started crusading against prohibition before it
even went into effect because they were starting to see early
on an increase in wood alcohol deaths in New York City.
And so they actually started saying wait a minute,
think, think, think. People are not going to quit
drinking, but what you're going to see is more
poisonous alcohol. And then throughout, you saw
public health officials, you saw scientists who were like
the people in my book, who were medical examiners who were
starting to see people dying from poisoned alcohol saying
wait, think, this is going really badly, we're seeing more
alcohol deaths, we're seeing more poisoned alcohol
in the cities, push back, push back, push back.
And they were very public about it. Then if you
actually look at the politics of it, you'll see that
in the newspapers of the time they'll talk about dry
legislators and wet legislators. And from the beginning
you had that political split. It's just that the dry
legislators for much of the 1920s were in power.
They were mostly republican. They'd been put into
power by some of these sort of moralistic crusaders.
They were somewhat hypocritical. For instance, Herbert
Hoover famously called this the noble experiment.
Was he the one who came up with that term?
But Herbert Hoover used to go over to the Belgian embassy and
drink good whiskey from the continent because that was not
United States territory and so you could drink good whiskey
there. So they were a little bit two-faced about it. But through the 1920s the dry
politicians were in major power, and you see wets push back,
push back, push back, but they actually didn't have enough
power to change anything. It seems kind of oversimplified,
doesn't it, to say dry versus wet, because it
seems to me there were at least two kinds of so-called
wet politicians. Those who actually say alcohol
is wonderful, there's nothing wrong with it, you can drink
it and everything should be just fine if you're at all
responsible. But there are also those who say it may
or may not be moral, but it's just foolish to ban it
because people are going to drink it anyway and this
is what's going to happen if you try to ban it.
So moralist versus practical. It was.
And the dry versus wet thing was largely newspaper shorthand.
You're a headline writer. Sure, we still see that
today in politics. It totally caught on because
it was so concise, but yes, if you looked at both the wets and
the drys you saw a complex array of sort of different motives.
Some of the people who pushed back against prohibition early
on were actually university presidents and legal scholars
who said we don't believe that there's anything in the
Constitution that justifies this kind of government intrusion
into private decisions. And the decision to drink or not to
drink is a personal decision. So now you're getting right down
into these very individual lifestyle choices, and we
don't believe that government should be doing that.
So some of the push back, in addition to the kind of public
health push back that I was describing, came from people
like that who were just like, this is completely wrong.
Some of the wets were people who came from states like Wisconsin
or Missouri which had had wonderful brewery cultures and
were watching this ripple effect of economic destruction.
We're, one, seeing that it didn't work, and we're, two,
seeing that it did a lot of harm, and we're saying think
again, this is just definitely not a smart policy move.
Prohibition seems, more than any other factor, to have set
kind of the pace, the cultural pace, for the 1920s.
This whole sense of getting away with something.
Everybody gets to get away with something.
And you see it has this ripple effect across the way
people behaved because it becomes coast to coast
acceptable to try to get away with things.
You see the role of women changes usually in this culture.
First they get the vote. The 18th Amendment was
prohibition but the 19th was women getting to vote.
So women have gotten to vote, and now women can sneak out and
go to bars. The old-time saloons were guys places. The old-time drinking clubs were
men only, but the speakeasies were open to everyone.
Find somebody like her that brings her own.
Right, it fostered the rise of independent women.
Now they don't have long, difficult-to-manage hair.
They have short hair. They have bobs.
Bobbed hair, short skirts, they smoke cigarettes.
So the whole sort of culture of women changed, and prohibition
fostered a different style of going out, a different style of
music and at core the belief that you actually could get
away with it, which people did. People broke the law
deliberately every day, and although the raids
were very publicized, they barely touched it.
So in a place, I'll just use Wisconsin as an example, but it
could be New York, what kind of loopholes were there in the
prohibition law? Alcohol was not 100% banned. Right. There was some, doctors could
write you a prescription for medicinal alcohol.
You can see these still on eBay, the old prescription forms, but
people believed that alcohol has, which it does,
sedative qualities. Or really nervous people had to
drink a little bit. So you could get your
doctor to write you a prescription for alcohol.
There was huge debate over sacramental wine in churches.
Oh, sure. How much do you get to have at
communion. That's exactly right.
And I believed that the government allowed states to set
their own standards, and some did and some didn't allow
sacramental wine. But those were two examples of
sort of simple loopholes. There was for a while Ford Motor
Company in the 1920s was developing a car that ran on
ethanol, and the government made them stop doing it. Wow. I know it's so backwards.
But they were developing a car that ran on ethanol as a
cheap fuel, but then the bootleggers started stealing it.
So the government actually went to Ford and said you can't have
this car and use this ethanol fuel because you're fueling the
illegal alcohol trade. So you see the government
coming at it in all kinds of directions.
And you see also, I was talking about the breweries being an
economic effect, but one of the things people forget is there
were other agricultural industries that were affected.
I was going to ask you about that.
You wonder about corn production, grain production,
certainly hops, even orchards that would make wine.
That's right. And people forget that pre-prohibition
the number one use of apples was for hard
cider. Johnny Appleseed, we never got the whole story there, did we?
He was beloved for his ability to spread alcohol
wherever he went. And the famous picture of one of
the famous crusaders against prohibition, Carrie
Nation, has an axe. People think, oh, well she was
breaking up, what? Stills? She was chopping down apple trees.
Is that so. That's the symbolism of the axe. And so you find the apple
growers in this desperate push to say how do we sell apples
when we can't have hard cider, and they actually came up with a
slogan an apple a day keeps the doctor away to try to
persuade people that apples were healthy. No one knew it.
There was no food science to show that apples were
good for you. But they made up this slogan to
suggest that apples had medicinal properties and
to keep apples being sold. So the ripple effect of
prohibition, again that's a getting away with
it kind of technique. So were these various
agricultural industries affected adversely by prohibition?
They must have been if much of your crop is dedicated to some
kind of alcohol production and suddenly in 1919
you're told no. Apples took a huge hit. Grapes.
Grape growers, if you think of vineyards for wine,
took a huge hit. Wheat went to other things and
corn went into things. And corn and wheat also could be
used for industrial alcohols. So everyone is trying, and I
think I referred back to Anheuser-Busch, to come
up with new products. Anheuser-Busch come up with,
it's called Bevo, this horrible grain-based nonalcoholic drink.
So they were all looking for new uses.
And I think Anheuser-Busch actually came up with some bizarre
grain-based, it wasn't like a baby formula but it was
some kind of grain drink you were supposed to feed
to your infants. They were desperate so they were
coming up with new uses for these things.
So by 1926, let's say, when the government becomes so
effective at stopping the smuggling of legitimately made
manufactured alcohol of one kind or another, now they have this
burgeoning industry even more surreptitious in
the home-grown alcohol. That's exactly right.
How did that play out in terms of the effectiveness of the
government, and what steps did the government take to see
to it that homemade alcohol didn't catch on?
That's a great question. By 1926 you were starting to see
a kind of rebellion in state governments sort of oozing across
the country, with a lot of states saying this is costing
us a lot of money, this isn't working, and also crime and
going up because the illegal liquor syndicates really
flourished in the era of prohibition, and the small kind of
criminal groups became much larger in Chicago, in New York,
in Milwaukee. You see the rise of these bootlegging
syndicates and they start playing really rough.
So a lot of states started saying how can I end run
the prohibition. It's a Constitutional amendment
but the enforcement of it, the national enforcement of
it was the Volstead Act. Right, that's what gave it
the teeth. And then every state early on passed laws
enforcing or backing up the Volstead law so that you
had not only federal agents but you had state agents.
By about 1926 you see this starting to go away.
New York actually defunded its entire prohibition enforcement
division right about 1926, 1927. Wisconsin starts doing that too.
In 1926 Wisconsin actually votes to allow a kind of near
beer back into circulation, right? Which would have been
contrary to the amendment. They're just saying
too bad for you. State trying to trump the
federal government. That's exactly right.
And you see this tension when you're starting to look in the
newspapers in the '20s with the federal government starting
again to look at certain states and saying these are lawless
states. So what happens is in this period the
enforcement agencies are spread thinner and thinner.
The states are pulling back their troops, essentially,
by about 1926 to 1928. People are distilling away.
The moonshiner culture that had been famous in the deep south
spread to everyone everywhere. People are making bathtub gin.
They're building little backyard stills. They're using industrial alcohol for this?
No this is what they would be brewing their own, but the other
thing that is happening is now the bootleggers are stealing
massive amounts of industrial alcohol.
And so the federal government is spread too thin to whack out
every still so they make a decision to go after industrial
alcohol, 60 million gallons a year is a lot of alcohol, and
what they did is they went to the manufacturers of industrial
alcohol and they said we don't just want you to contaminate
this so it tastes bad, we want you to make it really poisonous.
They actually, and we have our chemists, this was the
US Treasury Department, they're enforcing prohibition.
Prohibition is really a law that prohibits commerce in alcohol.
So it's a Treasury Department enforcement division.
The Treasury Department does not have chemists today, per se, but
then they had a whole phalanx of chemists.
And these chemists went out and they developed new and more
poisonous formulas for industrial alcohol.
Their idea was the bootleggers will still steal it, but this
stuff will be so lethal, they won't be able to get the poison
out, their customers will drop dead and we'll just enforce it
that way. They really wanted to make it work that
way by killing the people who were drinking it.
That's exactly right. And so they come up with
these formulas. When you look at them now,
they're murderous formulas. They're putting in cyanide,
they're putting in benzene, they're stepping up methanol or
wood alcohol, and methanol is really, really,
really poisonous. When you drink it your body
metabolizes it to formaldehyde and formic acid in
considerable concentration. The formic acid, there starts to
be an epidemic of blindness. Formic acid attacks the optic
nerve and people start dying. And so going back just briefly
to my book, you have chemists working for medical examiners
often saying, are you crazy? And they put this into effect,
the first of these formulas, in 1926.
By the end of that, the government poisoning was thought
to have killed about 10,000 people nationwide.
The estimate is that poisoned alcohol during prohibition
killed 50,000 Americans. Mostly because this was wood
alcohol that people were brewing, it was bad stuff, but
the government was responsible for between a fifth and a
quarter of those deaths by this super poisoning of alcohol.
Were there some notable outbreaks of that kind of poisoning?
Well, in New York City, which
was a den of inequity, you saw about a thousand deaths
a year when it first started. It was phenomenal.
I was looking newspapers of the time, I was looking at the
Tribune, I looked at the LA Times, I looked at the Boston
papers, I'm looking at the New York papers.
So about the time that New York has started going alarm flares,
alarm flares. They've got 50 deaths in Chicago in one day. In one day?
Yes. In Milwaukee in one day. Now what happens
is you get a kind of chemist war where the
government has their chemists making these super formulas.
The bootleggers have more money than the government, basically.
It's a multibillion dollar enterprise, they hire a
chemist to take it out. And you see this back and forth,
back and forth. If you go into the newspapers of the
time, seriously people are calling the US government the
Borja government. And the Chicago Tribune ran a great
editorial in which they said the 18th Amendment is the
only US amendment that carries the death penalty with it.
And nevertheless, we're right in the middle of the
Coolidge/Hoover administrations, you get a push back from what
I'm going to call the drys, and the drys are saying you're
breaking the law, aren't you? You're drinking
an illegal substance. We're telling you it's
poisonous. If you're stupid enough and if you are
immoral enough to have to get drunk and go out so that
you're willing to risk drinking poisoned alcohol,
too bad for you. And that was really their
answer. And you actually see this in some newspapers
too, the kind of, does the US government have
to protect the life of every American self.
There's some really angry discussion about it.
Eventually it just kind of dies out.
They never took those formulas off the books, but they quit
enforcing those too, mostly again because it's not working.
People are dying but people are drinking.
Well, of course, in the 1920s compared with today, even today
if there were a campaign of that kind to tell people that such
and such is poisoned, there would still be at least the
occasional person who didn't get it, whether it was by
television, Internet, email, newspaper, radio, but in the
1920s where access to that kind of media was so much more
limited it would be even more likely that people just
wouldn't get the word in the first place. Right.
And one of the points that Charles Norris, who was the chief
medical examiner in New York City, made was that a lot
of these campaigns were most harmful to the uneducated
and the poor. The people who weren't reading
newspapers or couldn't afford them.
The people who, we have this image of the high life of
prohibition. Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. Oh, sure, yes.
And they're drinking their bootlegged cocktails and
having a fine old time. Although both of those guys were
serious alcoholics. But the poor people, they
weren't doing that. They didn't have these high-end
bootleggers. Some of these really wealthy guys,
they'd have their bootleggers at their parties so
they were guaranteed to get good stuff.
Down in the poor neighborhoods people would drink a drink
called smoke which was just fuel alcohol mixed with water.
It was five cents a glass but you could afford it.
People drank, rail riders drank Sterno.
They drank Sterno and water. You still hear of that
occasionally. And there was a drink called Ginger Jake. Jamaican ginger which was a
bootleg approximation of an old drink that used to be sold, it
was a cheap drink of Jamaican ginger and alcohol that used to
be sold in pharmacies. And they came up with an
approximation of that that actually involved a compound,
it's a plasticizer. It attacks your nervous
system the same way Lou Gehrig's disease does.
Literally, they had 30,000 to 50,000 people who were
crippled and damaged by the Ginger Jake episode.
And they tracked it down to bootleggers operating
through a system of pharmacies around the country.
Kind of the ultimate corruption there.
Yeah, that's exactly right. These were poor people and so
the worst effects of prohibition, the people who were most
likely to be poisoned, the people who were most likely to
be suffered, were the people who didn't have the money to buy the
good stuff or were distilling their furniture or their weeds
because that's what they could get their hands on.
So it was very much a little bit of a class warfare thing going
on. So what were the drys saying by 1926? By 1926 what you have is this
incredible level of frustration. You've had six years for
the country to shape up and straighten out and start
exhibiting good moral behavior, and instead you've got
thousands of speakeasies and people distilling their trees.
And they were just despairing of the moral character
of the country. It wasn't that they were giving
it up, they were just trying to figure out how to get
people to do this. And you start seeing, they're
almost hilarious, but dry recipe books.
Here's how you can make something that tastes like
alcohol but isn't. Here's a good party punch, it's
beautiful but nonalcoholic. And you see these things.
They're desperately trying to make this somehow be fashionable.
And not to say that they gave it
up, but what you see is them trying different
ways to persuade people that this is better.
And the wheels continue to turn. There were people who quit drinking.
When I was talking about the 1920s as an anarchistic decade,
and it was because so many Americans basically said to the
government never mind you and your Constitutional
amendments, I'm drinking. You can't tell me what to do.
You can't tell me. And that's really the argument.
You, the government, can't tell me how to live my life.
And there's such a long-running theme in American
history, anyway. Anytime, you could even say the
Civil War was a matter of well you can't tell me that I
can't do this or that. You can't tell me that I can't
have slaves, I live in the south. That's exactly right. And so there is that long
history of every time the government imposes
something, even, let's say, medical insurance.
You can't tell me how to spend my money.
You can't tell me what to eat. You're not my mother or my
father or my nanny. People talk about nanny rules.
And the government today gives all kinds of advice, say, about
what's healthy and what's not and makes recommendations about
how you should live but it doesn't legislate what's on your
dinner plate. Do you know off hand how prohibition
came in and what's its trajectory was in terms of
presidential politics? You know, the prohibition
crusade started in the teens and, boy, I'm trying
to remember, so you're talking about... You have Wilson in 1913. Right.
And it was like faltering around until World War I.
What really pushed it over, you saw the final ratification was,
I'm thinking, 1919, so what really pushed it was
that whole sense of the world falling apart.
I've asked myself if we hadn't had World War I would the final
ratifications have come in? But there was such a feeling
that we had to rebuild our country as something better that
the prohibition forces really took advantage of and you did
have a situation where the saloon culture, it wasn't
Al Capone, but the saloon culture was a nasty culture.
And there was a lot of arrogance around that.
You're never going to be able to get rid of us.
We're a part of American life. That sort of also put people's
backs up at the time. And I had an argument, actually,
with one of my cousins about this who said it was
women, women who pushed through prohibition.
It was the women's vote. I said it can't have
been the women's vote. It was too late for that.
Right, because they couldn't vote. But you did have
a lot of women, famous women crusaders who were
going to improve their men. I don't think that
was as powerful as the effect of the war.
The war was sort of the thing that tipped us into prohibition.
And this deep sense for normalcy and a better world and the fact
that people did, at some level, even in states like Wisconsin
that had a long-time drinking culture, people really believed
that they needed to do this, they needed to set the country
back on a different path. So that's really what I believe
drove prohibition. And also, perhaps, this whole general
I'll call it a health and hygiene movement that seemed
to spring forth early in the 20th century. That's right. And you saw the pure food
movement in the 20th century. Right, your Upton Sinclair.
That's exactly right. The jungle, you had Harvey
Washington Wiley, who was the first enforcer of the pure
food movement, actually sued Coca-Cola over whether it had
cocaine in the drink. Sure, a notable case.
You're right. So you have all of that need to
sort of purify society coming together and driving
prohibition. And then almost as soon as it
passes, this sort of higher calling comes into conflict.
It's not so much that people are desperate to drink, although
people drank a lot, it's that people don't want the
government telling them what they can put in their glasses.
It's a personal thing. It doesn't affect anybody else.
That's exactly right. And that's even deeper rooted.
So you have those kind of two forces pushing all the time.
I'm going to make you a better individual.
You can't tell me how to live my life.
And that's the real battle ground of prohibition.
And eventually the you can't tell me how to live my life
wins because basically they just wore the other side out.
The country has not received any higher moral ground.
Crime has gone up. Alcoholism has gone up.
People are losing money because, except for the bootleggers and
the crime syndicates, because the government is losing money,
it can't tax alcohol. And the other thing that put an end
to it was in fact the crash of 1929 because now you're
starting to see really desperate financial times, and a major
source of income for the government and for the country.
Tax. Right. And all of the jobs that were lost at the breweries.
People are saying bring it back. Hire me again.
And so that was probably one of the other major sort of nails in
the coffin for prohibition was you had the black
market crash of 1929. By 1933 things are still a
disaster in terms of the economy.
People are drinking like fishes still, and it's like enough
already. So FDR is actually coming into the 1932 election spousing the repeal of the
18th Amendment. That's right. Happy days are here again. And it took years for the
amendment to be ratified, but it was gone in a year.
The states just went tumbling like dice to get rid of it.
I can't remember, was it New Jersey? Wisconsin was the second, I think.
Wisconsin was in there early. It was somewhere around number
38 to ratify the 18th Amendment. Right, kicking and screaming.
After it was already a done deal with the 36th state to ratify. But it was top five on
repeal. It was pretty hasty to repeal, and in some of the celebratory pictures of the
repeal of prohibition you'll see pictures of FDR, in fact.
People were spilling into the streets.
They were lining up for drinks. It was major
rejoicing nationwide. What do you hear or what do
you think when you hear people compare the prohibition
of alcohol to the prohibition of, say, marijuana?
Are their parallels there? Well, there was, in fact, a
government campaign in the, I'm thinking, late '60s, early '70s,
in which they sprayed marijuana crops with paraquat,
which is a defoliant. However, those crops were still
harvested and people were getting this slightly or possibly majorly poisoned marijuana.
The government's approach was the same.
You're going to smoke this or eat or however going to take in
this marijuana, too bad for you. It got clobbered as a policy.
I mean really clobbered. I thought about it with the
comeback of heroin. We're seeing a tick up of heroin arrests and heroin deaths, right?
Heroin is illegal. Heroin is a really dangerous drug. What I've thought about when we
see heroin come back is that government can outlaw anything it
wants to, and you can tell people, as certainly they did in
prohibition, this is a really dangerous thing.
In the end it's still going to be the individual choice or the
peer group choice. And so you see heroin becoming
trendy again, totally illegal, and you see this uptick.
Now, nationwide you're not seeing anything like...
The scale that was during prohibition.
The scale. But you see it as a microcosm of the same
kind of behaviors. And you do see more and more
questioning about the failure of the illegal drug program the way
that it's fed and made wealthy very dangerous crime syndicates.
I know there's discussion in Mexico about making marijuana
legal entirely there. I was just in Colorado where
medical marijuana is widely legal.
People were telling me that college students from around the
country are choosing Colorado campuses... To get that legal medical marijuana.
That's exactly right. Doctor's prescription. For a hangnail is what I was told.
So you can look at it at that level and say did it work.
No, right? Marijuana is a better comparison
because it is... So much more widespread in its use. And it's maybe even worth
revisiting that discussion again. Does it work? Is it a source of income?
Would we be better off if we... Taxed it.
Taxed it and regulated it legally the way we do alcohol?
Is alcohol legal, grain alcohol still a huge problem? Sure. Is ethanol a poison?
Sure. Do people die from drinking alcohol now? Sure.
And it goes back to the same thing. You really can't
get right into someone's kitchen cupboard and
personal bar and dinner plate and tell them how to live their
life because people are just not going to let the government do
that. Prohibition is a great example of its
failure, and we do see how difficult that is on a
smaller scale today with everything. Deborah Blum, always a pleasure.
Thank you for filling us in about prohibition and its
weaknesses and perhaps its strengths, too, somewhere in
there. Yes, perhaps a few. Thank you for having me here. It's always a pleasure.
I'm Norman Gilliland. Thank you for joining us.
I hope you can join me the next time around for University Place
Presents.
Funding for this program provided in part by
Bank of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.