Wisconsin Public Television University Place University Place Presents  Deborah Blum Prohibition: Choose Your Poison  August 30, 2011 UP618  cc >> 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.