SNAFU with Ed HelmsHow did alcohol come to be illegal and why, of all the agencies, was the IRS tapped to enforce it? One rising legal superstar from California becomes the highest ranking woman in government, but she finds her efforts impeded by the IRS's newly established—and rather corrupt—Prohibition Unit.
Previously on Snaffoo. In the nineteen twenties, New York City was facing a record number of unsolved murders.
There are death certificates that literally say, could be diabetes or possibly an auto accident.
You're just going seriously until unlikely. Duo Charles Norris and Alexander Getler teamed up to investigate.
They're like a buddy cop movie of like these two scientists in the trenches together.
And while America braced itself for the new normal of prohibition.
Georgia becomes the thirteenth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment.
Norris and Gettler issued a warning to the public as the bodies kept stacking up at Bellevue Hospital. The winter of nineteen oh one in Topeka, Kansas was a cold one. Temperatures hovered in the single digits. I imagine the wind howling down the streets. Too much snow for a car, although someone might bust out a horse drawn slay or two. But inside one saloon, the Senate Bar, the regulars got cozy. This was a favorite haunt for elected officials, situated not far from the state capitol, equipped with enough booze for the local elite to forget all about the cold weather, and also the fact that many of them had recently voted to ban the sale of alcohol statewide. At least that's how it was on most nights, but one freezing called dawn. Before the place opened up, a silhouette fills the doorway. It's a woman six feet tall and easily able to stand eyed eye with any corn fed man in Topeka. She wears a black dress and black ribbons in her hair, like she's attending a funeral, and she peers into the darkened saloon through little oval shaped glasses. It's highly unusual for any woman to enter a saloon in this day and age, let alone at five point thirty in the morning, but this is a highly unusual woman. Her name is Carrie Nation. There's one employee inside the closed bar as Carrie forces the door open. Even if he doesn't know her, by the look of righteous fury in her eyes, he can probably guess her intentions from the hatchet she's wielding in her hand. Carrie Nation didn't come here to crack open a cold one with the boys, or at least not the way you'd think. This hatchet is her signature accessory, and before the barman can stop her, she starts putting it to use. Carrie jumps behind the bar and smashes the liquor bottles. Carrie, no, she smashes the glasses. She smashes the faucets, the cash register, the slot machine. Oh my heavies.
Well at least I'm still looking.
Down, even the mirror on the wall my reflection. But all of this is prelude, because finally Carrie Nation lays into her number one tar target, the kegs.
What it was bear oclock.
She drives her hatchet into the beer kegs, flooding the bar floor with the devil's elixir. By the time the sheriff arrives, Carrie is soaked to the bone. Her behavior was extreme, but Carrie Nation was nothing if not a zealot. By nineteen oh one, she had become the axe wielding face of the Temperance movement. The Senate Bar is just the latest stop in her crusade to destroy every last keg in America, and in that crusade, Carrie is far from alone. Before she started smashing stuff up, Carrie was a devout Christian and felt compelled by God to do things like making clothes for the poor. Or opening a shelter for the families of violent alcoholics. Her first husband had been a severe alcoholic himself, dying of drink in eighteen sixty and leaving Carrie with their infant daughter. Influenced by her own experience and that of others around her, Carrie would later say that she felt personally called by God to rid the country of alcohol. Her devoted service to the poor earned her the nickname Mother Nation. At the same time, her manic attacks on saloons earned her the nickname hatchet Granny. Carrie referred to herself as.
A bulldog running along at defeated Jesus making it way he doesn't like you.
Call her a bulldog, Call her hatchet Granny, call her whatever you like. Carrie Nation was an impassioned anti alcohol activist. She and people like her were determined to remake America by any means necessary. I'm at Helms and this is SNAPFO, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is season three, the story of Formula six. How prohibitions wore on alcohol went so off the rails the government wound up poisoning its own people. Today we're taking a look at the people responsible for Prohibition. See, before the government set about watching the enforcement of dry laws, lone wolves like Carrie Nation had already been taking matters into their own hands for decades.
Even in the years leading up to Prohibition. I think half the states were already going dry. It was already starting as this ground swell.
That's Terence Winter, TV writer and creator of Boardwalk Empire. His show, like Ours, takes place in the twenties, but the full story of prohibition begins a lot earlier.
I got where it came from. Alcoholism was devastating. You know, if you had the cliche as the data got paid on Friday and then you didn't see him and spent all his money at the bar, and your family went destined to This is been days before social programs or even before AA was a thing.
It was a real problem. Terry made himself an expert on this stuff for Boardwalk Empire, digging into the research.
You know, at the time we created National Prohibition, sixty five percent of America already lived in a dry town. Sixty five percent of Americans already couldn't buy liquor in town.
That's historian Paul Thompson. Anti alcohol sentiment, also called Temperance was a social movement. It eventually led to prohibition, the outright banning of alcohol, but it didn't start out that way.
What is called the temperance movement lasted over a century. It started by meaning simply, individuals should avoid drunkenness, and so it was temperate use of alcoholic beverages, with a particular focus on distilled beverages. So you're whiskey and your gins and your brandies.
Early temperance supporters urged people to abstain from drink, starting with liquor, but eventually also beer and wine. For them, it was a personal choice you could make to improve both yourself and society. Here's Tom Pegram, author of Battling demon Rum the Struggle for a Dry America.
Temperance is a self control movement not tied to legal restrictions.
Self control was all the rage in the early eighteen hundreds, and not just when it came to booze. Case in point, New England Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham.
Sylvester Graham was a diet and health reformer in the early nineteenth centuries, also a temperance guy. Sylvester Graham believed that meat was sexually stimulating, and in fact, he led an attack I think.
In somewhere in Massachusetts on butchers. Graham loved temperance in all its forms, you name it, he didn't want you to enjoy it. He encouraged a diet of vegetables and whole wheat in order to best suppress those bodily urges. Today, he's most famous for his cracker recipe. Yep, that's right, Graham. Crackers were designed to stop people from masturbating. But it wasn't all about self denial. Temperance advocates tended to believe in other types of social change, things which, even if they sound like basic human rights today, were actually quite radical in eighteen hundreds of America.
Guess what else they wanted. The people that wanted a prohibition party wanted to give women the.
Right to vote.
This is eighteen sixty nine, and that should tell you how radical these people were. Because women didn't get the right to vote to nineteen nineteen, so these people are decades ahead of the nation on women. There was a lot of temperance people that were not abolitionists, but every abolitionist was a teetotal.
Temperance could easily go hand in hand with blatant racism, in fact, put a pin in that for later. But in the eighteen hundreds, the likes of Frederick Douglass and Sojourn Her Truth were prominent figures in the Temperance movement. The people fighting hardest for causes like racial equality and women's rights were often supporters of Temperance as well.
It's very hard for people in the late twentieth and twenty first century to understand that Temperance and prohibition advocates were progressives.
Here's author Dan Okrant on what it meant to be a progressive back in the eighteen hundreds.
You believe in the betterment of society through government action and an expertise and turning things over to the people who really knew what they were doing. It was kind of an anti democratic impulse. It's not related really to the progressivism that we know today.
But the dries, as the Temperance advocates came to be known, didn't arise in a vacuum. In fact, Temperance started to gain steam at precisely the same time as immigrants from Europe streamed into American cities in record numbers, packed into unsafe tenement buildings. Compelled to work exhausting and often dangerous jobs, these newcomers were in desperate need of a place to unwind and throw back a few beers.
There were public houses, there were taverns, and colonial and Revolutionary America in the early part of the nineteenth century in rural areas, often serving as hotels as well. But the saloon was tied to urbanization and also tied to beer culture and the Germans, you know, as the Germans came in, they brought in lager beer. Americans had English type ales, but the lager beer Revolution really switched American drinking practices.
Reformers who wanted to improve society that they had their ideas of how to improve it, tended to associate the evils of urbanization, the evils of dust strialization, with immigration, because all of those things come together.
That's Annie polland the president of the Tenement Museum. In the heart of New York City's Lower East Side.
There were five hundred and twenty six lager beer saloons in the neighborhood then known as kleindutsch Lund. Now we think of the Lower east Side and the East Village, and so saloons were everywhere, and saloons were the living rooms of the community.
Take us inside, Annie.
You would take a few steps down from the street into a lower level opening an all wooden door. It would probably be lit very well, with beautiful lanterns and lamps, wooden tables filled with different foods, pretzels, hard biled eggs, cheeses, sauer kraut, different kinds of meat. You'd have musicians there because it was a place for musicians together.
Welcome to yummytown. That almost makes all the turn of the centry typhoid and dysentery worth it.
It would be noisy, lots of the sounds of people singing or talking. Maybe there'd be newspapers out, maybe there'd be different games out. You'd probably see children coming downstairs with a growler to fill to bring back upstairs to the family.
Our man, Alexander Getler, chief toxicologist at Bellevue Hospital and himself an immigrant, would have been quite familiar with places like this. His family actually brewed their own beer in their bathroom, and their social lives would have been intimately tied to the saloons around them.
Of course, the smell of beer, but also the smell of cooking and the smell of tobacco. You might also have people conducting business in a saloon. One of the things that the Germans and the Germans speaking immigrants did a lot was form associations, mutual aid associations, political associations, associations for singing, for dancing, for gymnastics, like you name it.
Hitler was more workaholic than alcoholic, and there's no record of him joining any associations for singing, dancing, or gymnastics. But this was his world. People like Gettler worked their asses off to make a life for themselves and their families in the US, but as they did, they faced discrimination from the blue blooded Protestants of this country. Ironically, people quite similar to Gettler's partner Charles Norris, who were fed up with immigrants, their foreign cultures, and their pernicious booze.
The native born white middle class by late eighteen hundreds that's already bought into abstinence Seese. These what they called hordes state of Jews and Catholics coming in, who are also a lot of times halfway literate in English, and living conditions aren't great. And somebody called it the working man's palace and these places are quite elaborate. By the turn of the century.
Saloons became the primary targets for the Carrie nations of the world, as did the immigrants who frequented them. Prohibition was not technically an anti immigrant policy.
Prohibition developed as a movement to change laws to prevent access to alcohol.
As its proponents began trying to force it on the country, the battle lines became clear. On the dry side was the Temperance movement, zealous and all too willing to throw in their lot with outright racists. On the other side a whole lot of German, Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants. Here's historian David Goldberg.
Well, Prohibition played a huge role in what you might call the culture the nineteen twenties.
We can only get in touch with David over the phone, which is why it kind of sounds like he's calling. From the nineteen twenties.
Prohibition had been favored by those who were Protestant, and the major organization that had pushed for the Prohibition amendments, the Anti Saloon League, was tied to the Protestant churches, and prohibitions had been motivated by great deal of anti immigrant sentiment because many of those who were members of this organization, the Anti Saloonwig, were especially hostile the immigrants, specially immigrants from Catholic backgrounds.
David's not exaggerating in the slightest. Before long, Catholics across America were being smeared as not only drunkards, but traders as well. Alexander Gettler was born Jewish but married an Irish Catholic girl and then converted. That means he left one faith targeted by the dry movement, only to join another. The Anti Saloon League's efforts were one of the first instances of single issue lobbying to dramatically influence American politics.
They drafted model legislation and said, you support what we do, here's a sample law. Maybe you could write a law like this that still goes on with interest groups. They created mailing lists of people they knew who would vote for dry candidates. People do that today, Every interest group does that today.
Your position, if you were a politician on other issues, was me meaningless to them if you were okay on the prohibition issue.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti Saloon League were the two main organizations carrying the torch and or occasionally hatchet for prohibition. They were the definition of single issue voters, and when they found a candidate willing to vote for prohibition, they would go all in to get their guy elected. I think one of the.
Key things that one has to know about prohibition there was never any education that a majority of Americans believed in it.
In other words, when dry candidate it's won, it didn't necessarily mean they'd won a majority of voters' hearts and minds. It just meant that the WCTU had an influential group of voters who could swing elections, and it worked time and time again. State after state went dry.
The Anti Saloon League, the main lobbyist organization for temperance, used this moment really to the emptent degree.
That's historian Garrett Peck.
They stigmatized alcohol, they turned beer drinking into treason, and they basically question the patriotism of every German American.
Here are a few actual lines from the Anti Saloon League's propaganda.
The breweries and the saloons of the country continue to waste foodstuffs, fuel, and manpower to impair the efficiency of labors. In the malliance factories and even immunitions plants near which saloons are located. German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men inefficient and thus crippling the Republic in its war on the Prussian militarism. How can any loyal citizens vote for a trade that is eighty a pro German alliance. Everything that is pro German is anti American. Everything that is pro German.
Must go to me. This is starting to sound like just good old fashioned prejudice and alcohol just the latest convenient issue to inflame people's fears. The war unleashed a tidal wave of immigrant and ethnic hate, all dauled up in red, white and blue. As one Wisconsin politician put it, we.
Have German enemies across the water. We have German enemies in this country too, and worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing. Perhaps Schlitz Blats and Miller turns out.
Fear mongering beer boycotts are as American as hot dogs, which incidentally got their name around this time too, because Frankfurter sounded a little too German. I'm assuming sauerkrawd also became liberty cabbage and German breweries became targets, paps, twits, blats and killer, watch your glass godug.
Killer, don't eat that rot, don't drink those shuts.
Or don't check you out in few rob DUTs. In nineteen seventeen, the US entered the war. That year, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, which gave the government the power to ban alcohol sales. All that was left was for Congress to actually use its new power. Finally, after almost a century of organizing, sloganeering, and hectoring, the dries got their way. Prohibition became law with the Volstead Act. But that raises a very critical question. Who the hell's going to enforce it? Will meet them after the break. In a nondescript office building somewhere in the nation's capital, a man stands over a beaker of liquid. He's white, middle aged hair starting to thin, heavy circular glasses, peering over his experiment like the eyes of doctor tj Eckelberg. And not to get all middle school English teacher on you here, but just like those famous eyes from The Great Gatsby, James Duran was looking down on nineteen twenties America with more than a little bit ofjudgment. Duran is a chemist and an avid supporter of the dry movement. Mild mannered, methodical, a hard worker with a keen scientific mind. He busies himself with government work, while his wife dedicates her time to the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In fact, she'll go on to author a book of non alcoholic cocktail recipes. There are even substitutes for baking recipes that happen to involve alcohol.
Mince pie is delicious without brandy if made properly.
Not to nitpick here, missus Duran, but the alcohol bakes away. People aren't out here getting drunk off pie. But in the Duran's defense, people in nineteen twenty can find a way to get drunk off just about anything. In fact, that's precisely James Durant's problem. See James is a chemist for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the predecessor to the IRS. If you're wondering why the IRS needs chemists, you're not alone. But as Thomas Peck says, it's something that still happens today. You see evidence of it. Anytime you walk into a liquor store.
You go get your rum or whiskey, and it's got that tape on it at the top that that's a sign that the federal excise tax has been passed. So there is a tradition of internal revenue regulating alcohol.
The thing is, alcohol has a lot of different uses. In addition to being a wonderful social lubricant, it's commonly used as a solvent in industrial chemistry, a medical disinfectant, and as fuel. But I bet you've never been offered a medical alcohol swab as an apparative, at least I hope not. And there's a really good reason for that. It's not the same stuff. Alcohol you're not supposed to drink gets denatured. In other words, it's made unnatural by adding a lot of really bad chemicals. These chemicals don't diminish the alcohol's industrial value, but they make it really hard to drink, which is the whole point you're not supposed to drink it. All of this allows the IRS to draw a chemical distinction between industrial alcohol and all that other yummy stuff you're supposed to drink. And the reason all this matters to the IRS is because different types of alcohol get taxed differently, and Uncle Sand needs a way to ensure nobody skirts the tax code by making drinking alcohol out of the stuff you're supposed to be using to sterilize needles. Since nineteen oh seven, James duran has been proudly polluting, sorry, denaturing, industrial alcohol in service of our nation's tax code. But with the passage of the Volstead Act, James job suddenly becomes crucial not only to tax enforcement, but to enforcement of the new nationwide dry law.
And so you had this prohibition unit, it was originally called this tied to the Internal Revenue Service in the Treasury Department, you know, not Justice, you know, which usually enforces the laws.
Yep, And it's infinite wisdom. Congress has decided to make alcohol illegal and to make the irs enforce it. James Durant's job is about to get a whole lot more interesting. And he's not the only one you ever see. Mister Smith goes to Washington. It's an old Hollywood classic, A scout troop leader from the American West played by a yet again Jimmy Stewart. What's with this guy? Hi, I'm Jimmy Stewart, and basically I just play every American archetype under the sun. You see. Anyway, he gets hand picked for a Senate seat by a bunch of fat cats. He comes into Congress still brushing the Oregon trail dust off his necktie. The political bosses think he's such a rube, they can pull his strings and he'll be none the wiser. Of course, they get him all wrong. Why well, they think loving the founding fathers and reciting their speeches by heart makes him a naive bumpkin. But that turns out to be exactly what lets him see right through their greedy schemes. He's got principles. God damn it. Oh wait, I mean nabbit, and that means something. In America, all you people don't know about lost cause the only cause is worth fighting. But two decades before mister Smith, another plucky Westerner arrives in DC for real. Her name is Mabel Walker Willebrandt. She's a rising legal star, the first woman in Los Angeles to serve as a public defender, and the parliamentarian of the city's Women Lawyers Club. She made a name for herself providing free counsel to sex workers, and she's already proven that she can captivate a courtroom. Mabel is a trailblazer, a crusading attorney who never hesitates to stand up for women, definitely not easy. In nineteen twenty, she has a well earned reputation for defying men's expectations. So when President Warren G. Harding begins searching for someone to lead the charge for federal prohibition, a host of California lawyers and judges tell him we want Walker Willy Brandt. Harding offers an interview, Mabel says farewell to her parents in Cali and rides the rails across the country full of confidence she'll be hired as Assistant Attorney General of the United States. And when I think of her stepping off the train with her big canvas bag and her hair and tight braids over her ears, I see a lot of that mister Smith story. I mean, Jimmy may not have had the braids. But as Mabel catches a trolley through the busy streets of DC, she's also riding into a world she doesn't know. At just thirty two, Mabel has a resume that would make most lawyers in Washington green with envy, but enforcing prohibition remains an unenviable and largely untested task, because by nineteen twenty, the national experiment in prohibition is going pretty much exactly like Gettler and Norris had predicted. Enterprising Americans find all sorts of ways to skirt the law, from making moonshine out in the boonies to smuggling in the good stuff from across the Canadian border, to going full mad scientist and making Franken cocktails out of industrial alcohols. If this thing's going to actually last, the Feds are going to need a steady hand at the helm of the brand new prohibition unit.
She didn't particularly believe in prohibition, but she believed in the law, and she believed in her assignment. And if this is what you want me to do, damn it all, I'm going.
To do it. So despite her reservations, Mabel aces her interview with the Attorney General. Then, with his stamp of approval, she catches a cab to the White House for a face to face meeting with President Warren Harding. Harding and his Attorney General had a long history together. They were something of an old boys club, backroom deals, etc. Mabel was a buy the book's West Coast lady trying to break in. All that is to say that whatever her principles. She needed to know how to play ball if she wanted this job.
Give me the authority and let me have my pick of three hundred men, and I'll make this country as dry as is humanly possible.
As the story goes, President Harding told Mabel, there's only one thing against you. You're too young. Mabel takes what Harding gives her and sends it right back at him.
I'll outgrow it.
She knocks the interview out of the park. She gets the job. It's a huge moment for Mabel and for the country. Mabel Walker Willebrandt is now the highest ranking woman in government. She's young and ambitious, and in all likelihood she's thinking that if she plays her cards right, she could get herself a federal judge ship or even become America's first female Attorney general. But the reaction in the press is sadly predicted the bull These are actual headlines from the time.
LA Woman to fight wets man's job is given to missus Willibrandt by Harding, California. Woman gets federal plumb may want to primp up extra extra woman swayed by logic. New Assistant Attorney General is not emotional.
The media was already on Harding's case for handing out jobs to his friends and political allies, and now they were going to turn that anger on Mabel with an extra layer of misogyny just for kicks. When she announces to the papers that she's not giving interviews until she's gotten her feet under her, one paper proclaims.
A woman who was not ready and willing to talk or be photographed has been found.
Mabel probably saw this coming. There's no question she's hit with snide remarks every time she steps into the spotlight. But what she can't have prepared for is the resistance she'll meet from her colleagues and the corrupt she'll find around every corner. All Right, prohibitions the law of the land, and President Harding has hired Mabel Walker Willebrandt to come to DC and get to work enforcing it. Just one problem, the apparatus that's supposed to enforce this law is less a finely tuned machine and more like, well, what's the nineteen twenties equivalent of a shit show? I guess it's also a shit show for starters. There's her boss, the Attorney General.
He was a a drunk and be corrupt.
That doesn't make it easy, thanks Dan Achrant. Then there's her staff. You'd think the newly created Prohibition Unit would be designed to resist the corrupting influences of the booze business. After all, most civil servants at the time had to pass a series of tests confirming their aptitude and an integrity. But this new unit was made exempt from those tests.
Which is another way of saying we're going to use it for political.
Payoffs, which means Mabel is essentially the meat in a corruption sandwich. She's more or less the only person anywhere in the chain of command who isn't interested in taking bribes to look the other way. The guys enforcing this law, and the guys overseeing the whole enterprise, they're all in somebody's pocket.
The Secretary of Treasury who was directly in charge of enforcement, Andrew Mellon, He owned Old Overholt.
That's Old Overholt, the bourbon. Yeah, it's bad enough for any member of the cabinet to own a liquor company. But as Secretary of the Treasury, Melon has a major role to play in prohibition enforcement. He's supposed to work closely with Mabel's office, and he's James Durand's boss. Drunks, bribe takers, liquor magnates. These are the people Mabel's supposed to work hand in glove with in the fight to enforce prohibition. Whatever the IRS gets wind of some alcohol related skull duggery, they're supposed to investigate, gather evidence, and package it all up so the Assistant Attorney General, Mabel Walker Willebrandt can swoop in and make the arrests. Mabel then wins the case. The bootleggers get tossed in the clink rints, and repeat until the country goes drier than an anti masturbatory cracker. Again, that's how it's supposed to work, but in practice, most of the people around her are either uninterested in enforcing dry laws or actively breaking them.
There's one way it can be done, get at the source of supply. I know them, and I know how they could be cut off. I have no patience with this policy of going after the hip pocket and speak easy cases. That's like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.
So it must come as a huge relief to Mabel when she finally finds someone in the irs bureaucracy, who takes the law as seriously as she does James Doran. She's an ambitious lawyer in the Department of Justice. He's a behind the scenes chemist in the Department of Treasury. Fate has brought them together. Mabel Walker Willebrandt and James Duran will enforce prohibition despite the corruption all around them. As such, they'll both quickly realize enforcement is going to require some new approaches, a new formula, if you will. But they're determined, they're idealistic, and together these two dedicated bureaucrats are about to unleash hell on American drinkers. Next time on Snafu, we meet the defiant bootleggers who were already making life a nightmare for the prohibition bureau.
He didn't give a shit who you were, where you were from, what you did, or any of that stuff.
Come on up, have a drink with me. And meanwhile, our pal Alexandria Geitler was back on the case in New York and making some shocking discoveries.
Unless you're rich, you're drinking whatever you can get your hands on. So one of the cocktails of the Bowery, which is a really poor neighborhood in New York was called Smoke and that was Fuel, Alcohol and Water.
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapoly, Stephen Wood, Carl Nellis, and a kemeny Ekpo, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapoly and a kimmedy Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound designed by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker Willa Brandt was played by Kerrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and ben Ryzak
