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America's Hangover - The Failure of Prohibition · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: Hey Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, Kelly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_03: How are you?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: I'm doing well.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: I'm doing well.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: You and I uh got to hang out last night, got to go see a comedian, got to uh go to a bar, um, got to go uh have a few beers at my house, rode in an Uber.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what a night we had.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Great night.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, if this had been like uh exactly a hundred years ago, we couldn't have done that.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Which part?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh all the fun stuff we did with alcohol.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you mean because it was prohibited?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, prohibition.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: That was something that happened between 1920 and 1933.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: There was actually a amendment to the U.S.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Constitution.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: You know which amendment that was?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: 18th Amendment uh said that it was uh ratified in 1919, went into effect in 1920, and basically said you could not um sell or uh make alcohol in the US for 13 years.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: 13 years that went on, yeah.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: But what's really weird is that actually started the whole idea of prohibition came to be prior to 1920.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um it took place like in the 1800s.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: There were a lot of puritanical views, a lot of people that were um looking at alcohol as an evil thing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: There were a lot of saloons that only men really went to, and they were pretty seedy places.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: So this is post-Civil War.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Men would go to these saloons, they would gather, they would drink, um, they would sometimes gamble, they would sometimes uh engage in prostitution with uh ladies of the evening, as they called them.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and these saloons also were often kind of a almost like a um monopoly.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: So the saloon would have the same owner or some sort of a relationship with the distiller that made the whiskey that was there, or the brewer that made the beer or whatever, and then also were often associated with like the company store.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: So these men would work all day, go drink at the saloon, um, and then they would end up having a debt back to their employer because they drank more than they earned, right?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was kind of this vicious cycle of keeping people financially um uh obligated.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's kind of like joining the Columbia Record Club where you where where you where you get something for free.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: They might offer a free lunch, but guess what?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: That free lunch at the saloon, it's salty, it's gonna make you thirsty.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And saloons are hardcore.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's not where you go and get a Chardonnay.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you go in the saloon door itself is like, you know, that tells you it's gonna be a tough night.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like the saloon door is no joke.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because of those rotating doors.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: They'll hit you, yeah.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you've got to go through them fast, right?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you're drinking hard liquor.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, my grandmother and grandfather had saloon doors into their kitchen, like these swinging uh shuttered doors that would that were not even full size.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: They just and when you're a kid, you want to go under them.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to mess with hitting that having that thing hit you in the face.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: This practice of monopolies around the saloons and the breweries and the distilleries were called tidehouses back then.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: And people were kind of against that because they realized that these tidehouses, while they would offer free lunch, they were basically enticing you to purchase alcohol and become indebted to the company.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: And so from like 1890 to 1920, there was a ton of political um influence that started to spread that was against this practice of these tidehouses.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: And there was actually a group called the Anti-Saloon League.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: Have you heard of that?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: No, yeah, the Anti-Saloon Saloon League, um, the Prohibition Party, the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: I've heard of that one.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: And they were usually led by women, right?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, there was a woman who was pretty famous named Caroline Amelia Nation, but her uh nickname she was referred to was Hatchet Granny.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Oh gosh.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Hatchet Granny was a member of the temperance movement in the late 1800s.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: She died in 1911, but so prior to Prohibition, she would go into saloons with a hatchet and start chopping stuff, like like destroying the drinks off the table, destroying the the casks that they were served in, the bottles behind the bar.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um she actually got arrested like 30 times for for going in and doing this, but she was a big act activist um to stop people from going to saloons.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: What's crazy is that it it was almost all women that were ahead in the and women didn't even have the right to vote.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's it's interesting you say that because the um the women's uh uh temperance, what did I say?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: The the women's Christian temperance union um and all those groups kind of jumped on uh women's suffrage at that same time too.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: Because it all kind of came to be around the same time.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: The prohibition and the women's right to vote in the U.S.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: all kind of came together at one time.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: So there was a lot of um, you're right, women were very in influential in that area.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now, part of the other reason that people were against drinking was a thing called Blue Monday.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: You you heard you've heard of Blue Monday?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's a song by I think Blue Monday is a song by New Order, yeah.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Great song.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but you know what it's about?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: It's basically a hangover from the weekend.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: Okay they called.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: That was actually a phrase that was used back then to say that you drank so much over the weekend that you do a bad job on Monday.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like Monday's a wasted day at the factory or at the Why Blue, I wonder.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe because you feel blue, like blue, blue can be, you know, you're feeling blue, you're feeling bad.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: But the blue laws, you know about blue laws?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that means you can't buy beer or alcohol before a certain time or on a certain day of the week.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh which still is in effect in a lot of places.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: But but let's get back to um let's get back to the 18th Amendment.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um so there were these two groups of people.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: Back then, you know, kind of like you div we love to divide people into buckets.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: You had your dries and your wets.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: And the the dries, of course, wanted to get rid of alcohol in the U.S.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: They called it the dry dream.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now the wets wanted to keep alcohol in the U.S.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: Let's see where this is going.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: The wets included Did they really call it the dry dreamers?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is the first time.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, they did.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: They did.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: They did.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: They called it the dry dream.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know about the other one, but the um who do you think would be big wets back back then?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: Like what famous people?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, like what groups of people?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: Catholics.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: Catholics, Catholics were generally uh wine.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Wine is actually a part of their uh their their ceremonies.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: And Germans.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: Germans were also um wets because of their heritage, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, they had a uh uh song, it went Vernicht liebt wein wie und gesang bleibt einar sein Leben lang, which means who does not love wine, wife and song will be a fool his whole life long.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, wow.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: Germans tended to be wets and and northerners tended to be more wets, and big cities tended to be more wets, whereas sort of southern um southern states, southern places, you know, like Louisiana, Mississippi, uh, they were more dries.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like kinda kinda kinda some similar to today, how kind of we divide along social issues in certain places.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um so eventually what happened is they actually had the 16th Amendment, which predated the 18th Amendment in 1913.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: That one actually replaced alcohol taxes with uh federal funding in terms of income tax.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: So that was what instituted the 16th Amendment instituted the income tax, which allowed the government to get a resource of funds that wasn't from alcohol.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: Because before that, alcohol was a big form of taxation.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson, who was a wet, um, ignored the prohibition issue.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: He just said, I'm not even gonna talk about it because I don't want to I don't want to tick anybody off.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: Part of the reason that prohibition was able to happen was because of World War I.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: And there were a couple things that happened there.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: Number one, uh we were fighting with the Germans, so German Americans didn't have as much voice.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_03: They were considered, you know, part of part of the enemies from from the motherland or whatever.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then also um there was a repeal of um the ability to use grain to make alcohol because they had to save grain for the war effort.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: So so kind of alcohol was cut out, and that helped lead to the 18th Amendment and eventually prohibition.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: Now, there was the 18th Amendment, but what actually allowed prohibition to happen and and the legal part of it was called the Volstead Act.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think you've probably heard of that.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, oh yeah.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Pretty famous.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_03: High school history.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: So the Volstead Act uh was actually passed by Congress, even though Woodrow Wilson tried to veto it, they they did the two-thirds majority and over overran him.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: So the Volstead Act didn't completely outlaw alcohol, it just said you couldn't produce or distribute it.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: So people bought up when they heard this was going to happen.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of rich people bought up wine cellars and liquor places and just bought, you know, thousands of dollars worth of it, you know, which back then would have been millions of dollars worth of it, and stashed it.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: And then they would have parties and they would serve it to government people and they would serve it to And was that legal then?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: You could you could keep it if if it already existed, you could keep it and drink it.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_03: You could drink it.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: You just couldn't make it or distribute it.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So what about like there was no lobbying power of like Ann Husserbush or were those companies just not big yet?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_03: They were big.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and what they ended up having to do was make near beer.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: So so they had to actually drop the alcohol content.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think they were allowed to have like 1.2% alcohol or something in their beer.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but basically what happened is the Volstead Act went into effect and then they gave a lot of power to the states.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: So it depended on what state you were on, how much it was enforced.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um it depended on whether you could drink it at home or not, because some states didn't allow it.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Some states completely forbade alcohol 100%.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: You can't even drink it in your own private residence.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: Some states allowed it, some states turned the other way.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, um a couple of states, like Maryland and New York, actually refused prohibition.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: They just said, no, we're not going along with it.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you've got the Volstead Act, but come enforce it, come try.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a big problem.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: It was very hard for the government nationally to just say, you know, we can't we gotta try and stop everybody from drinking alcohol.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: They couldn't do it.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: It was too big of a thing.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know that when in 1932, when the Olympics were in Los Angeles, was during prohibition, and the French team refused to they they stayed on a boat, on a ship, and they where they served wine and they refused to like stay in a hotel and they would just go on and off that ship, and then other people got to go on that ship too.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: And and it had to be a certain number of miles off the coast.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: So I think originally it was five miles off the coast, they could you they could um was considered legal to to have alcohol, but not on American ships.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Foreign ships who were coming in five miles off the coast, they could anchor and they could do it, but once they got within five miles, they weren't supposed to do it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: They were supposed to store and lock up all of their alcohol while they were you know at dock or whatever.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: Seems so silly, yeah.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_03: So some things that people did, like for instance, the Volstad Act actually allowed for religious um purposes.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: So you could make wine for you know sacraments and for drinking wine in a religious service.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um you could also make uh medicinal whiskey.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of doctors prescribed whiskey to people, and that was a way they got around it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: They were farmers were also allowed to grow grapes and make small amounts of grape wine.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, what happened is the the farmers started doing this thing where they would um make these concentrations of grapes called grape bricks or sorry, called wine bricks or wine blocks, and they would put a warning on these things on the package.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: They had to have this warning that said uh warning, after dissolving this brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away from the cupboard for 20 days because it will turn into wine.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: It it it basically gave the instructions in the warning.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: Don't do that, don't do this.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, all this is going on.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_03: There's the wets and the dries, and a lot of dirt knap city um alumni were involved in this.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: John D.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Rockefeller, he was a big dry.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't he he didn't believe in in drinking.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um he actually later realized it was sort of pointless because he felt like it was turning U.S.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: citizens into criminals.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um Eleanor Roosevelt was a dry, but FDR, Franklin Delano, he actually was more of a wet, but he couldn't really say that because of his wife.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: And uh but he's eventually the one that repealed the Volstead Act and the 18th Amendment.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: So that was under FDR's rule.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: But you know what the biggest problem with um well, one of the biggest problems, probably maybe the two biggest problems with the um uh prohibition were crime because Al Capone All of a sudden everybody was a criminal.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: And well, and and this gave a huge, huge amount of revenue to people like Al Capone because they organized, they were able to um they had the systems in place to smuggle things.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they were already smuggling other things, so they knew how to do this, they were rough, and they would open these places or sell alcohol in Chicago.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, a lot of um people in Chicago kind of let Al Capone get to where he was because they didn't want to be dry.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: They wanted the alcohol, and so the police were on board.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like, as a matter of fact, you've heard of the St.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Valentine's Day massacre.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_03: Like the they wore police uniforms when they shot up, uh, I think it was another gang um over alcohol and over territory and stuff like that.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the other big thing, though, in addition to um crime, was uh tax revenue went way down.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Because now instead of taxing alcohol, which was very lucrative prior to prohibition, it was all illegal, so none of it was getting taxed.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: So the US lost a ton of tax revenue through that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing a lot of it wasn't very good quality either.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, no.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Moonshine and nasty stuff and might have not even been safe in some because you don't have you don't have any government regulation of that stuff.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing that some people got sick.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's funny you say that.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: Not only was it not safe, but um a lot of so there was industrial alcohol that had to be made for machines and for cleaning things and for a lot of reasons besides drinking, but it could still get you drunk, right?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: You could still drink it and and and get a buzz from it.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: So people would do that.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: The government, in some cases, um ordered those industries that made it to put put some poisonous chemicals in it.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: So if you drank it, it would either taste really bad or it would kill you.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it's estimated that over 10,000 people in New York died from drinking industrial alcohol, not because of the alcohol, but because of the poison that was put into it.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: And there was a big debate about it.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, well, they shouldn't be drinking alcohol, it's illegal.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they're doing it, and you're putting poison in it, so you're basically killing them.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Especially that's really chilling, knowing what we know now about alcoholism.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: That yeah, some people couldn't stop.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um so a lot of this came down to also um at the time there were a lot of immigrants moving in, and and um a lot of people felt like these saloons where immigrants gathered were immoral.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they kind of saw them as uh places where corruption would happen, and so shutting down the saloons kind of became a thing.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um have you I think we talked about this on the drinking fountain episode, the temperance fountains.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because a lot of people drank beer or wine, wine was more expensive, or whiskey because the quality of water was pretty bad in the 1800s and such.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: So these um religious organizations, and a lot of women were involved in this too, would create these temperance fountains, which gave you clean drinking water as an alternative, and they would often put them outside of saloons.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think we did talk about that.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's that that's interesting.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: So all of this kind of um was going on, and you asked about um the the quality of the alcohol.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Well, basically there was this guy named Bill McCoy, and Bill McCoy was what you call a rum runner.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: Rum runner came from people who were bringing rum up from the Bahamas and bringing them up to like Florida.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um so a lot of people would add water or add other types of um liquids to this alcohol when it was being brought in and it would become not as good.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: It wouldn't be as strong, it might be diluted, it might be polluted with something.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's kind of the way they I think cut drugs with other drugs, like cut cocaine with I don't know, bleach or whatever they use.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um but this guy, Bill McCoy, he actually did not do that.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: He was known as a rum runner that would bring in authentic, uncut alcohol.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how they got the phrase the real McCoy.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: So if you got a drink that was uncut during prohibition, that was the real McCoy because it might have come from Bill McCoy.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: So it's funny, we talked about this last night.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: There were there were a lot of things we were talking about that was kind of reminding me of this, and I was excited because very relevant.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um they would call alcohol that was not um good, you know, that had been diluted or cut.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: That's where the term booze came from.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: Booze, hooch, rotgut, those were all different types of alcohol that had been tainted.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: What what is booze?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: Booze is is uh alcohol that's been tampered with.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean, why why do they call it booze?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: It was just the name that it was bad.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: Booze.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: You didn't want booze.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: You want booze like that?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_03: May it maybe.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Where does the word come from?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know where the word comes from.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_03: I just know what it meant was if you say booze today, you're talking about any alcohol, right?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: You're talking about booze could be beer, beer booze could be.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: I always think of booze as being liquor.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: But it could be it could be any liquor, right?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we're talking about good liquor that that you you have.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: Back then, to say it was booze was to say it was bad liquor that someone had added water to or added other things to.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was tampered with.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: It wasn't the pure thing.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Got it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: You either had booze or the real McCoy.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's the opposite.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the real McCoy was was the good stuff.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, still, I wouldn't say booze.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: You don't see that on signs, like you know.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's kind of an older generation.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: Specs isn't gonna say we have booze.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: They might.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: They might.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a great word, right?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a fun word to say.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, so you know, there was a lot of resentment around the world um about this.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_03: They also did try prohibition in other countries, like Norway tried prohibition, it didn't work.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: They tried it in Canada, it didn't work.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: But they still have it today in like Saudi Arabia has prohibition.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of that is religion-based, uh, like it, like it was here.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um there were at the time though, uh, there was a senator named Morris Shepherd.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: He was one of the people that kind of helped get um the 18th Amendment through.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: He said, uh, this is a quote there is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington monument tied to its tail.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is not likely to happen.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: So so this guy was very confident it wasn't gonna happen.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_03: But then there were people like um uh the Prince of Wales, who returned to um the United Kingdom after his tour of Canada and recounted to his father, King George, a little ditty that he had heard.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: Four and twenty Yanks feeling very dry went across the border to get a drink of rye.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: When the rye was open, the Yanks began to sing God bless America, but God save the king.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: Nice.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: Because they were able to get it from Canada through England.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, this all kind of went on for a long time.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Medical prescriptions rose, like people could get a prescription for it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the alcohol was um being brought in by uh rum runners over the Detroit River, right?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: They were coming across from Canada, they were coming up from the Bahamas, they were coming over from Britain, and there was It's a big country.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's lots of coastlines, so lots of places for them to land.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Winston Churchill thought that the Americans were crazy and that was an that prohibition was an affront to the whole history of mankind.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's a quote from Winston Churchill.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: Constantly drinking Winston Churchill, though.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: And just I guess maybe that's a little bit of a context for him.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: That was his Instagram handle.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um so yeah, as I said, they they would put poison into it to keep you from using the industrial stuff.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then there were these people that made it themselves, and they would um they would make their own alcohol.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: This has been going on actually for a long time in the South, and you know what that's called, right?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: Moonshine.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, of course.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: So they had moonshine runners and they had shine runners, these people they would actually take um vehicles, they would take muscle cars, like the Model T was really popular back then.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: Dodge was known for having really fast cars.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: They would basically um modify them, create hidden places in the floorboard where they could put all this stuff, and then they would use them to outrun the cops.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_03: So they would they would uh use these muscle cars, and that was kind of the beginning of things like NASCAR and in the South.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: And and these these muscle cars became uh faster and able to outrun the the cops if they ever got busted for it.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, all these things were going on, and even somebody like Charles Walgreen supposedly made a ton of money and expanded his stores greatly because of uh medicinal alcohol sales.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: Like Walgreens was was doing it.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: The other people that got involved that was kind of a weird mix was the Ku Klux Klan.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: They would actually go and threaten um kind of vigilante justice, they would threaten distillers, they would threaten these rum runners, these moonshiners with uh violence, and then they would steal their alcohol and drink it.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say they weren't dries, were they?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they were in name, but but not in not in deed.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: So after um all of this had kind of gone down, uh by the 1920s, there was a lot of opposition.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: People were like, hey, don't um don't, you know, let some people in the rural uh religious belt uh tell us what we're gonna do.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: And so in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Cullen Harrison Act, which legalized beer with an alcohol consumption of 3.2% alcohol.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: And the 21st Amendment was um ratified on December 5th, 1933, which repealed the 18th Amendment.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the 21st Amendment was the only amendment ever made to repeal another amendment.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: Only time we've had to do that.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um in the 1930s, about 40% of the Americans still wanted prohibition, about 60% didn't, so it didn't work out there.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: And John Rockefeller wrote a letter that was published and it said, um, when prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion, and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: Instead, drinking has generally increased.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: The speakeasy has replaced the saloon, a vast army of lawbreakers have appeared, many of our best citizens have openly ignored prohibition, respect for the law has lessened, and crime has increased to a level never seen before.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Just another example of how laws don't necessarily change people's behaviors, right?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you can't you can't really litigate things like this.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: It has to be um done in a different way.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, the 21st Amendment came in.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: Other things that kind of kind of uh blossomed because of um uh prohibition.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we talked about the speakeasy.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: We went to a speakeasy last night, you know, it's kind of a uh book bookcase you had to walk through.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's not not you don't there's no sign on the outside, right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: We walked in.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: Did you know where where we were going?
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: You just were you like, where where are we?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_03: What are we doing?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I just follow you anywhere.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, ultimately jazz.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_03: Jazz became more popular because it was really big in the speakeasies, and a lot of people um from like New Orleans and Chicago and New York and places where they would go to drink, and these speakeasies were into jazz, and that became uh kind of a side result of prohibition pulling pulling people together.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know the evils of or the the harmful effects of uh drinking and the harmful effects of cigarette smoking.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And those two things were handled in different ways, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the people that wanted cigarette smoking curtailed did a great job.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now smoking is not very common, you don't see it very much anymore.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: People that smoke smoking isn't necessarily seen as a cool thing to do anymore, it's seen as kind of a dirty habit.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that all came kind of organically.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of probably a lot of messaging and influencing that made that happen, but it kind of worked.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Rather than just outlawing it.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: If we had outlawed cigarettes, uh, we'd probably be more people smoking today than ever, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these this doesn't work to to to try to change people's behaviors by putting in laws.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and take a look at uh the way marijuana is perceived now, right?
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, 20, 30 years ago, it was highly illegal.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was very taboo, it was you know something that if if uh you even mentioned it, everybody kind of gasped, and now it's become less of a big deal.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, it feels like the legalization in some ways has also uh made it less taboo.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: So people can make their own choice.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's what we're all about.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_03: Save a little dram for me and Alex.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: We'll be there in the morning when it's Blue Monday.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_03: Hit me with the dram.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: The dram jam.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: When they passed that bone dry along, I was the best bust to say it never would stay.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Neither did I think the law could regulate our birth.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I ain't got none of it thrown away.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Bring it up with the collection.