Usually when we talk about history, there's this
expectation of precision. Right, like it's engineering
or something. Exactly. Like a law is passed,
a war is won, and the historical timeline just
points and says, you know, there it is, cause
and effect. Yeah, but history is rarely that
clean. It really isn't. Because what happens
when a government decides to fundamentally fix
society, and in the process, they... Well, they
accidentally create the mafia, poison their own
citizens, and ironically, invent the modern nightclub.
I mean, you end up with a landscape that is just
incredibly murky. The straight lines of history
just completely shatter. And that is exactly
what we are unpacking today. Welcome to the Deep
Dive. We are so glad to have you with us today
sitting right here as the third person in the
room. Absolutely. Because today we're looking
at a comprehensive breakdown of prohibition in
the United States. And our mission is to take
you past that common, really simplistic narrative.
Right, the cartoon version. Yeah, forget the
flappers and gangsters and bathtub gin. We are
going to explore the immensely complex web of
political maneuvering, the baffling legal loopholes
and the honestly shocking unintended consequences
of what they call the Noble Experiment. It's
a very cinematic era, which makes it incredibly
easy to misunderstand. Totally. People tend to
look at the 1920s as this standalone decade of
madness. But to really understand the sheer scale
of this policy failure, you have to look at the
roots. Right. The sources make it very clear
that this wasn't just a bunch of puritanical
buzzkills deciding to ruin everyone's fun on
a whim. The temperance movement was a fragile,
complex alliance built on some very real societal
concerns. OK, let's unpack. Because before you
can ban something as ubiquitous as alcohol, things
had to be pretty dire, right? What was the actual
problem they were trying to solve? They were
targeting a very specific institution, and that
was the American saloon. In the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, the neighborhood saloon
wasn't just a place to grab a drink after work.
It was the center of a highly predatory business
model. How so? Well... The brewing industry operated
on what was essentially a tide house system.
Meaning the breweries actually owned the bars,
like outright. They owned the leases, the fixtures,
literally everything. A massive brewery would
set up a saloon keeper, but contractually obligate
him to exclusively sell their beer. Wow. And
because there were so many saloons competing
on the exact same block, the saloon keeper was
really squeezed for profit. To make rent, he
had to push massive, dangerous volumes of alcohol
onto his patrons. But how do you force people
to drink more than they actually want to? You
offer them a free lunch. Oh, I've heard of this.
Yeah, saloons became famous for these massive
spreads of free food. But the catch was that
the meats and juices were incredibly heavily
salted. Of course. It was a biological trap designed
to induce relentless thirst. Working class men
would go in for a cheap meal and end up, you
know, spending their entire week's wages on beer
just to wash it down. That's incredibly manipulative.
It was. Families were left starving, which led
directly to spikes in domestic violence and extreme
poverty. So the pre -prohibition saloon was almost
like a vertically integrated tech monopoly today.
Exactly. They controlled the product, the venue,
and the user's behavior. It wasn't just a moral
crusade against having a beer. It was an attempt
to break a predatory corporate machine. That
is a highly accurate way to look at it. And it
went beyond just economics, too. It was deeply
political. Right. These saloons were heavily
frequented by immigrant populations in growing
urban centers, and they became the literal headquarters
for political corruption. Oh, like the local
ward bosses? Yes. Politicians would hang out
in the saloons, offering job favors, legal help,
or even just baskets of food. all in exchange
for guaranteed immigrant votes. Wow. The saloon
was the engine of the corrupt political machine.
But if the saloon is the engine of a political
machine, how do you even dismantle it? You'd
need a political machine of your own just to
fight back. Which is exactly what the Prohibitionists
built. They found their architect in a man named
Wayne Wheeler who ran the Anti -Saloon League.
Right. I saw his name in the text. Wheeler is
a fascinating, almost ruthless historical figure.
When he was young, he was actually injured on
a farm by a drunk worker, which gave him this
deep rooted lifelong hatred for alcohol. So it
was personal for him. Very personal. But Wheeler
didn't just preach morality on street corners.
He realized that to win. He needed to control
the political narrative through raw pressure.
He pioneered a tactic that literally became known
as wheelerism. What did wheelerism actually look
like in practice? I mean, how did he pull this
off before mass? broadcast media and the Internet.
He weaponized the telegraph and the printing
press to manufacture a sense of overwhelming
unified public consensus. Wheeler didn't need
to convince every single American to support
prohibition. He just needed to convince lawmakers
that his supporters were the only ones who mattered.
So it was an illusion of a majority. Exactly.
If a politician spoke out against the temperance
movement, Wheeler would orchestrate thousands
of telegrams to flood that politician's desk
the very next day. That is brilliant. He coordinated
with local churches to mobilize massive voting
blocks on a dime. He made politicians believe
that if they didn't support a dry America, their
careers would end tomorrow. He became an absolute
political powerhouse, and people started calling
him the dry boss. OK, so you have anti -corruption
reformers partnering with a brilliant, ruthless
political strategist. Yeah. But the sources point
out there was a third pillar to this alliance,
right? Like an economic argument that brought
in the business elite. Oh, yeah. The economists
were a major piece of the puzzle. Prominent figures
like Yale economics professor Irving Fisher were
incredibly influential dry advocates. Fisher
popularized this concept. of Blue Monday. Let
me guess. Workers drinking all weekend and showing
up completely useless on Monday. Completely useless.
The argument was that factory workers would spend
the weekend binge drinking in those predatory
saloons and Monday would be a day of massive
industrial inefficiency. Right. Machines sitting
idle, accidents on the factory floor, sluggish
production due to severe hangovers. And Fisher
actually put a dollar amount on it. It was a
number. He claimed that an acting prohibition
would save the United States $6 billion annually
in lost productivity. $6 billion in the early
1900s. That is a staggering economic incentive
for factory owners to get on board. Huge. So
you have the moral crusaders worried about families,
the reformers fighting political corruption,
and the industrialists chasing efficiency. That
is a massive, incredibly diverse coalition. It
was. But it still wasn't quite enough to push
it over the edge into a constitutional amendment.
Yeah, the final catalyst came from a completely
different direction, and that was World War I.
When the U .S. entered the war against Germany
in 1917, the political landscape shifted overnight.
First, a major force against prohibition, the
German Americans who ran almost all of the massive
breweries, were suddenly viewed with intense
suspicion and politically sidelined. So the brewing
industry essentially lost its lobbying power
just because of their heritage. Precisely. And
second, the movement brilliantly reframed the
issue of alcohol production. The war effort required
massive amounts of grain to feed soldiers, right?
Sure. The Anti -Saloon League argued that taking
precious grain and fermenting it into beer wasn't
just wasteful, it was borderline treasonous.
Wow. So prohibiting the production of alcohol
became a patriotic duty to conserve resources
for the troops. It really is a fragile alliance
of totally different interests. Yeah. Morality,
corporate efficiency, anti -German sentiment,
and wartime conservation. But they actually pulled
it off. They did. In 1919, the 18th Amendment
passes. And logically, you know, you would think,
boom, alcohol is completely illegal across the
board. You'd think so. But the text of the law
itself, the enabling legislation called the Volstead
Act, wasn't a solid wall at all. Here's where
it gets really interesting. It was more like
a sieve designed to catch the poor while letting
anyone with a bank account slip right through.
The wording of the law is one of the most glaring
hypocrisies in American legislative history.
The 18th Amendment prohibited the manufacture,
sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.
It says nothing about possession or consumption.
Not a single word. It was not a federal crime
to drink alcohol, nor was it a crime to keep
it in your home, provided you had legally acquired
it before the law went into effect in January
1920. Which means if you had the fiscal space
and the capital, You just bought a lifetime supply
before the deadline. Exactly. Wealthy families
emptied out wholesale warehouses. Private clubs
moved their inventories into the basements of
the richest members. It even reached the absolute
highest levels of government. Like the president.
Yes. President Woodrow Wilson legally moved his
own massive private supply of alcohol to his
residence after his term ended. And his successor,
Warren G. Harding, moved a huge stash of liquor
right into the White House. You're kidding. Nope.
He continued to serve it to his guests while
his own Justice Department was supposed to be
enforcing the ban. That is wild. Historian Elizabeth
Cohen points this out brilliantly in The Sources.
She says this was a law that fundamentally targeted
the working class poor. If a rich family had
a sprawling cellar full of imported wine, they
were law -abiding citizens. Right. If a poor
family in a tenement apartment fermented a single
bottle of homebrew, they were criminals subject
to federal raids. Wait, so hoarding was the loophole
for the elite. Yeah. But what if you were moderately
wealthy and I don't know, ran out of your stash.
I was reading about the medical exemptions, and
my mind is still blown. How did doctors get away
with prescribing alcohol during a federal ban?
You'd think the government would have outlawed
medicinal use too, but the medical lobby was
incredibly powerful. Congress actually held formal
hearings on the medicinal value of alcohol. And
the doctors won. They successfully fought to
retain the right to prescribe medicinal liquors
for ailments ranging from anxiety to the flu.
And the scale of this was just absurd. I mean,
the sor - says that after only six months of
prohibition, over 15 ,000 doctors and 57 ,000
pharmacists had applied for licenses to prescribe
or sell alcohol. It was massive. They estimate
that throughout the 1920s physicians wrote roughly
11 million prescriptions a year. It became an
entire shadow economy. From 1921 to 1930, doctors
earned an estimated $40 million just for writing
whiskey prescriptions. Wow. The going rate was
about $3 for the doctor's visit and another $3
or $4 to the pharmacist to fill the prescription.
Which was a lot of money back then. Definitely.
And bootleggers caught on quickly. They would
just buy massive stacks of signed prescription
forms from crooked doctors to run widespread
distribution scams. It was such an open, lucrative
secret. that it transformed the retail landscape.
Didn't Walgreens get huge during this time? Yes.
Charles R. Walgreen, the founder of the Walgreens
pharmacy chain, expanded his business from 20
stores to a staggering 525 stores during the
1920s. That is exponential growth. A massive
driver of that unprecedented expansion was the
legal sale of medicinal alcohol. Take two shots
of whiskey and call me in the morning, and suddenly
you have a national retail empire. Okay, I understand
the medical loophole. That's just a doctor signing
a pad. But how on earth did the agricultural
sector get away with selling actual fermentable
grapes? Tell me about this. wine brick situation.
This is one of the funniest parts. The Volstead
Act contained a provision intended to allow farmers
to naturally preserve fruits. It permitted the
home production of non -intoxicating cider and
fruit juices. Okay, I see where this is going.
Enterprising grape farmers in California read
the fine print and realized what they could do.
They increased their vineyard acreage by roughly
700 percent. 700 percent. Yeah, and they started
producing these semi -solid dehydrated blocks
of grape concentrate known as wine bricks. And
they sold them. with what has to be the most
hilarious warning label in commercial history.
It was pure, unfiltered, malicious compliance.
The packaging included a highly detailed warning
label that essentially functioned as a step -by
-step recipe. Like reverse psychology. Exactly.
It would read something to the effect of Warning,
after dissolving this brick in a gallon of water,
do not place the liquid in a jug and store it
in a dark cupboard for exactly 20 days, because
then it will turn into illegal wine. Whatever
you do, don't follow these precise fermentation
instructions. It's absurd. But you know, it also
highlights the central tragedy of this era. You
have wealthy politicians drinking in the White
House, upper middle class people buying doctor's
notes and suburbanites making wine from mail
order bricks. Right. They all had a safety valve.
But for the masses, the everyday working people
access was brutally restricted. And when you
have massive demand among millions of people
and the only legal avenues are priced out of
their reach, where do they turn? They turn into
the criminal underground. And this is where the
narrative shifts from quirky regulatory loopholes
into a very dark, very lethal reality. Yeah,
the black market. Because the federal government
was entirely unequipped to police a shadow economy
of this magnitude. To enforce prohibition across
the entire continental United States, the federal
government initially assigned a total of 1 ,520
prohibition agents. 120 agents. For a nation
of over 100 million people, that's a statistical
rounding error. It's mathematically impossible,
especially when you factor in the sheer geography
of the American borders. Take the Detroit River,
for example, which forms a watery border with
Canada. It was a smuggler's paradise. Right,
because alcohol was still legal over there. Exactly.
Distilleries legally operating in Canada, Mexico,
and the Caribbean ramped up production because
it was incredibly easy to just load up a speedboat
in the middle of the night and run the alcohol
right over the border. Even with all those speedboats,
smuggling wasn't enough to meet the sheer volume
of American demand, right? Bootleggers needed
a massive domestic supply, and they found it
in the industrial sector. They did, and this
was the turning point that cost thousands of
lives. Bootleggers realized they could bypass
the long, complicated fermentation and distillation
process entirely by stealing industrial alcohol.
Like cleaning supplies. Basically, we're talking
about industrial ethyl alcohol used in factories
to manufacture ink, cleaning chemicals, cosmetics,
and fuels. It was being produced in massive quantities
stateside, and criminal syndicates found it relatively
easy to steal, hijack, or buy off the books.
But humans can't just drink printer ink solvent.
I mean, how do they get it to the speakeasies?
Well, the federal government had long required
manufacturers to denature industrial alcohol,
meaning they legally had to add foul -tasting
chemicals to it to ensure it couldn't be consumed
as a beverage. Makes sense. But the bootleggers
just hired their own rogue chemists. These chemists
developed processes to wash or redistill the
industrial alcohol, stripping out the bitter
additives, adding some artificial flavoring and
food coloring, and selling it as gin or whiskey.
Wow. So when the government realized the bootleggers
chemists were successfully cleaning the industrial
alcohol, what did they do? Did they just increase
security at the factories? No, they escalated
the chemistry war. Oh, no. The Treasury Department,
deeply frustrated by their inability to stop
the bootleggers, mandated the addition of deadly
lethal poisons into the industrial alcohol supply.
Wait, lethal? Yes. They required manufacturers
to add chemicals like methyl alcohol, which is
wood alcohol, which is catastrophically toxic.
At the time, there was no reliable, cost -effective
way for the bootleggers' chemists to completely
remove it from the stolen supply. Wait a minute.
The government intentionally mandated putting
lethal poison into a liquid supply that they
absolutely knew was being diverted to human consumption.
Yes. They used the toxicity as a deterrent, assuming
people would simply stop drinking. But they didn't.
They didn't. The results were devastating. A
very small amount of undiluted methyl alcohol
can cause blindness, paralysis, and death. By
the end of Prohibition, historians estimate that
as many as 10 ,000 Americans died from drinking
poisoned denature alcohol. That is horrific.
In 1926, in New York City alone, 585 people died
from this. I mean, what does this all mean? It's
as if the government today tried to stop people
from speeding on the highway by secretly rigging
their car engines to explode. That's a very apt
comparison. It is a massive, horrifying ethical
line to cross. You are essentially enacting the
death penalty on citizens for a misdemeanor drinking
offense. The New York City medical examiner at
the time, a man named Charles Norris, was absolutely
horrified by the influx of bodies arriving at
his morgue. He publicly accused the U .S. government
of being an accessory to murder. His quote from
the source material is chilling. He said, It
completely shatters the idea of a noble experiment.
I mean, you have bodies piling up in the morgue.
from government -mandated poison. You have bootleggers
adding tar, tree oil, and even dead rats to moonshine
just to give it color. Yeah, it was grim. You
have organized crime exploding into heavily armed
syndicates like Al Capone's outfit in Chicago,
practically fighting wars in the streets, and
the government is burning tens of millions of
dollars a year, failing to enforce it. The system
is fundamentally broken. Right. What finally
forced them to abandon it? A total economic collapse.
The Great Depression struck in 1929, and it completely
altered the political math. How so? Well, before
Prohibition went into effect, approximately 14
% of federal, state, and local tax revenues came
directly from alcohol commerce. 14 %? Yeah, 14
% of the nation's budget vanished overnight.
When the Depression hit, the government was starving
for capital. The opposition movement, the Wets,
seized the narrative. They argued that we're
in an unprecedented economic crisis. crisis.
We desperately need the tax revenue that is currently
lining the pockets of violent criminal syndicates,
and we need the jobs that legal breweries would
provide. The economic reality of the Depression
just crushed whatever was left of the moral argument.
Completely. And once the tide turned, it moved
incredibly fast. In March 1933, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt signed the Cullen -Harrison Act,
legalizing low alcohol beer and wine. He famously
remarked upon signing it, I think this would
be a good time for a beer. Classic FDR. And then
by December of that same year, the 21st Amendment
was ratified, completely repealing the 18th.
Which remains the only time in American history
that a constitutional amendment has been passed
for the sole purpose of repealing another constitutional
amendment. It's an incredible reversal. But as
we look at the complete picture of these 13 years,
we can't just write it off as 100 % failure,
can we? The sources point to a truly bizarre
paradox when you look closely at the data. It
is a profound paradox. If you isolate the specific
public health metrics regarding severe alcohol
abuse, prohibition was actually a surprising
success. Wait, really? Yeah. Studies, including
retrospective analyses from the National Institute
on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, show that death
rates from cirrhosis of the liver plummeted.
They dropped by nearly two -thirds during the
Prohibition years. A two -thirds drop in liver
disease. That is an undeniable public health
victory. And remember Irving Fisher's Blue Monday
argument about factory efficiency? Right, the
six billion dollars. The data actually backed
him up. During the era, rates of factory absenteeism
decreased from 10 percent to roughly 3 percent.
Companies like Ford documented massive drops
in Monday no shows. That's fascinating. Because
alcohol was suddenly expensive, dangerous and
hard to get, the casual drinker largely stopped
drinking. So for the individuals who truly struggled
with severe alcoholism and the families suffering
from the domestic violence that the temperance
movement originally targeted, the reduced supply
did have a tangible life saving impact. So it
was an abject failure of criminal justice and
civil liberties, but a bizarre measurable success
for targeted public health. Exactly. And the
legacy doesn't stop at health statistics. It
fundamentally rewired American social culture,
specifically around gender in music. Paint a
picture for me of the transition from the old
saloon to the speakeasy. It's a total paradigm
shift in public life. The pre -prohibition saloon
was, by design, an overwhelmingly male -only
establishment. It was rough, filled with sawdust
and spittoons. And if a respectable woman drank
publicly in a saloon, she was viewed with deep,
lasting social stigma. Right. But when the legal
saloons were boarded up and the illegal speakeasies
took over, the physical spaces changed. Speakeasies
had to operate in secret. They were smaller,
often hidden in basements or behind storefronts.
So they needed a different business model. They
did. To cover the exorbitant costs of bribes
and smuggled liquor, they needed to attract a
wealthier clientele. They couldn't rely on selling
high volumes of cheap beer to factory workers
anymore. They needed people willing to pay top
dollar for cocktails. Exactly. And to attract
that wealthier crowd, speakeasies became glamorous.
They brought in high end decor. They required
a softer, more refined atmosphere. And crucially,
they welcomed women. Oh, wow. Public drinking
lost its rough macho connotation. It became fashionable
and daring for men and women to socialize and
drink together in these semi -public environments.
So by pushing alcohol underground, the government
accidentally birthed the modern mixed gender
night They absolutely did, and because these
speakeasies needed to entertain this new, sophisticated
mixed -gender crowd, it served as a massive catalyst
for the spread of jazz. That makes total sense.
Jazz was already thriving in New Orleans, but
the explosive demand for speakeasy entertainment
during Prohibition drew musicians north to cities
like Chicago and New York. Right, looking for
gigs. And because the speakeasies were already
operating illegally, they were far more willing
to ignore segregation laws. They became melting
pots, mostly black jazz musicians with mostly
white affluent audiences, pushing racial integration
forward in social spaces during an otherwise
deeply segregated era. It is just staggering
to look at the massive web of cause and effect
over this 13 -year period. I mean, you pass a
law to stop men from drinking away their paychecks.
The result. You get a poisoned industrial alcohol
supply, the rise of the mafia, a constitutional
crisis, but also a massive drop in liver disease,
the birth of the modern nightclub, and the nationalization
of jazz music. Yeah, it's wild. How do we synthesize
all of this? Why does this specific piece of
history matter to you, the listener sitting here
today? Prohibition is the ultimate masterclass
in the unintended consequences of sweeping public
policy. Absolutely. It demonstrates that when
a government tries to forcibly legislate morality
or dramatically alter human behavior through
restriction, it rarely achieves a clean result.
Right. You might solve the initial problem, but
the pressure you apply to society will inevitably
blow out the sides of the container, creating
entirely new, unpredictable structures. It proves
that in policy, a straight line between intent
and outcome almost never exists. It brings us
right back to that historical expectation of
precision we talked about at the beginning. It's
never just a clean break. It's a spider web of
fractures that reshape the entire bone. Well
said. And it leaves me with this lingering question
for you to ponder as you go about your day. If
a failed deeply flawed law from the 1920s accidentally
created the modern mixed gender nightlife scene
and accelerated the spread of jazz, What restrictive
laws or sweeping policies happening right now
might be secretly architecting the cultural norms
of our next century? It's a fascinating thought.
We are almost certainly building something completely
by accident right now. We'll leave you to think
on that. Thanks for joining us on this Deep Dive.