Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Of Politics Prohibition 20240713

Only institution in america charted by congress to disseminate of the u. S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis. Beautiful. So great to hear those wonderful words who arent spying Mission Statements here in the beautifully renovated kimble theater. And just a few months ago we opened up this gorgeous new space, renovated with a great interpreter you or hear me hearing me from the stateoftheart cool ted top microphones and beautiful new seats. What a thrill to see so many people here to celebrate the opening of the return of our great exhibit, american spirits. applause i want you to go see it after the show if youve not seen it yet. Cspan viewers, i want you to come to philadelphia to see this beautiful exhibit which tells an amazing constitutional story that we are going to talk about tonight. That is the constitutional story that poses an incredible question. How did it happen . How did it happen . That america voluntarily hookup by a vote of 46 states and only two states the same thing in 1919 decided to essentially ban intoxicatingly kurz with the 18th amendment, and then only 14 years later, by an overwhelming majority of 46 states with only two states dissenting, changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment in the 21st amendment, the only time in our constitutional history that amendment has been repealed and took only 14 years. I hear a bravo from one of the celebrants and the crowd. There is a full bar, imagining its 1933 in the 1919. Everyone is enjoying their drinks. I had to crown to learn about it but we have to talk about two leading experts of historians. I will introduce them in one second, but before i do, i want to say again how thrilled every one of the Constitution Center is to welcome our new chair Vice President joe biden. applause it is so meaningful that President Joe Biden joins this incredible group. He was proceeded by bush and before him president clinton, and before him president george h. W. Bush. No other institution in america has brought leaders from both sides of the aisle to unite our shared love of the u. S. Constitution in the importance of teaching it to all americans. That is what tonights show is about and the exhibit is about. Educating ourselves about this history which is forgotten largely today, but so important. It can teach us so much about who we are as a nation and our constitution has changed. How we should think about constitutional change today. It is now my great pleasure to introduce our phenomenal coal panelists. Lisa anderson is a historian and julie yard. The politics of prohibition, and the Prohibition Party. Joshua is a historian, the author of a bunch of spectacular books including flapper, a madcap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made america modern. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Anderson and josh what sites. applause good to be here. So glad you can be here. Please. Let us jump right into it. Lets pretend its 1919. Here is a water bottle. It is only appropriate. You do not know if theres actually water in their. To a certain degree, we are going to spend the whole show talking about this question, but i want to begin by asking, how did it happen . But first part is that drunk people are annoying. Especially if you are not drunk. That really becomes the starting point. There is a few kind of pathways that people come to prohibition. One is employers. It is dangerous to have employees who are drinking on the job, which was pretty customary, and especially as america starts to industrialize. That danger becomes even greater. Then you have people who are coming from a fundamentally religious point of view. Part of it is a desire to restrict something they see as sinful, but part of it is also a sense that it is something that prohibits the process of salvation. You need Self Determination in order to have that. Part of it is political. As there is a growing movement of opposition towards scott corporations and trust, the liquor industry certainly seems to fit that profile and so there are a lot of people being pushed back and seeing is having infiltrated both the Political Parties to the extent that it is really messing with Party Politics and has overall the future of democracy in america, which seems like a big deal. Fascinating. Employers. There is a religious element, and the corporate element. There is also immigrants. In the urban areas versus people in rural areas. And those who we think of as liberal. If you zoom out, there is an incredible backdrop. Some of it will seem familiar to us today because we have rough parallels to it going on. This is a period, 20 or 30 years leading up to prohibition. Massive influx of immigrants from countries that today would be considered not particularly unusual, but at the time immigrants from italy, ireland, eastern europe, greece, they were considered quite foreign. Not necessarily part of the fabric of the old stop american populist. They had drinking cultures that came to kind of represent old stop american, something that was foreign and dangerous, and not part of the organic american nation. It is a period of rapid demographic transformation. Rapid urbanization. Who had quite a lot of political and cultural contests that grew up around that. It was also a period of cultural innovation, when generals are getting thrown up into the air, more women are moving into the workplace. People are moving into cities where there is anonymity which she did not have in the countryside. You put this together and like you think about alcohol or the prohibition of alcohol became representative of a numerous other cultural touch points that become the type of issue that people get latch onto in a representative way you if they did not always do consistently. You said many progressives would think of as reformers, as liberals. Many of them, not all of them latched onto provision for their own reasons, but by the same token, many anti progressives protectors of the old embrace prohibition for their own reasons. People look at the lens their reasoning for embracing antiliquor platform. Fascinating. Bipartisan movement uniting these urban progressives with evangelicals that are rule. Lets go to the progressive era and the question of whiskey taxes is really important. 40 of fundings of National Governments since the time of the founding, when the whiskey tax on farmers, the 25 tax that George Washingtons administration imposed created a whiskey rebellion all of a sudden you dont need the whiskey revenue when the 16th amendment authorized federal income tax passes. Tell us about that and about the Politics Around 1913, 14, during the administration of that great president , president william howard. Subject of my next biography. Taft is against the prohibition because he thinks it will be hard to enforce. It will lead to trump link of the states rights. Tell us about the Politics Around 1912, at a time when more than half the states, a drive, but its not obvious that the amendment will be passed. There were huge of comic reasons to avoid it. Those reasons seem so significant that particularly the Beer Industry because americans were starting to transition away from distilled alcohol and more towards beer. Personally because of refrigeration. That technologically made it possible to transport to stores. As the transition happened all the people involved in the Beer Industry, they were particularly important because they were better organized than the distilled liquor industries. They are feeling pretty good because their rates of sale are going up. They know there is this long history of cooperation that the federal government and that the federal government really relying upon beer excise taxes as a means of gaining revenue. They actually dont organize particularly well to stop prohibition simply because they cannot believe it could happen. Which seems terribly naive but the people who were pro prohibition also didnt believe it was going to happen anytime soon. So im a little more sense. Its something that we could look at an amendment at something that seem to have ambush both signs simultaneously. There is a law in 1913 that would allow states to restrict booze that is imported into them and taft vetoes that law. He wants to be on the Supreme Court. He hates being says the president. He thinks congress has no power to regulate this under its power of regulating commerce. His veto is over written by two thirds of the majority, partly because of the intervention of wheeler who is one of the political operatives of his day. Anti saloon lead. He says hes going to mobilize the activists against them. Tell us about his role and how two thirds of the majority is building in congress around this time. I will start that and handed to. Wheeler is this fascinating character because he is one of the first modern lobbyists, and he is a product of this era when the progressives causes that give rise to a kind of modern advocacy model. People are going in organizing visits to congressman, there were no offices then. Organizing visits to congressman, letter writing campaigns to congressman. Public meetings. The kinds of things that we think of today as being an essential part of modern organized political action. I was really in many ways the anti solution that embodied that. You also other advocates oftentimes intersecting with them, people trying to secure passage of anti labor laws. People were trying to secure passage of immigration restriction laws or loosening immigration restriction. The anti saloon was particularly innovative in a way that it mobilized for Public Opinion and elite Public Opinion. Tell us more about the anti saloon wheeler and the great book which we relied on an american spirits. It describes wheeler as an older version of flounders like in the some sense. I like that. Wheeler net flinders was terrifying. I think i would be the best way to describe. It wheeler has an insane organizational sense. He has a willingness to pressure. If you had been part of the mob, he wouldve been successful. He was able to find just the right person and just the right position and figure out exactly how to persuade that person that there was an enormous Popular Support for prohibition. Even if this involved trying to remove people from office by circulating things that were kind of unsavory. Making it appear that people who were merely neutral on the issue actually had a close relationship to the liquor traffic. He was not above such techniques. He did use them quite a bit. That is when we talked about the eye tie saloon lead. For most historians, we call it the first major pressure. Something different and special in comparison to politics regulated by Political Parties. There was this whole movement happening at the same time where people were trying to clean up Political Parties. They were trying to make primary elections run legitimately. They were trying to create an initiative and referendum to establish better procedures for bringing candidates. All sorts of regulations. He tried to make Political Parties better and more democratic. Then all of a sudden, Anti Saloon League comes and says you do not need a Political Party, we can just represent the people directly. That became an overwhelming sort of jolt to the entire way that people organized politics. No longer with it so dependent on Political Parties. There were also special interest groups. Imagine a populist forces rising up and challenging the political establishment. It looks like populist forces and he said they were populist forces, but we are not quite sure if he was actually representing all that many people because they kept very secret records. There were no valid polls then no ballot polls. We do know that by 1913, wheeler was able to persuade two thirds of congress to override tafts veto even though he was against prohibition. Wilson i gather who vanquishes taft in 1912 it does not clear where he stands on the issue. 1917 and world war one is and he gives an address to congress on april 2nd 1917 declaring war in germany. April firth, Congress Proposes the prohibition amendment. Tell us the story of how part of that reflected xenophobic anger, german brewers and what was the rule of world war one and pushing the amendment over the edge . World war one and this is true of a lot of wars. It capitalizes social economic Democratic Forces that had been in play for many years. Many wars, including world war one put the economy on steroids which in effect will in this particular case accelerate patterns of urbanization and industrialization, a lot more women, a lot more people into urban settings and the workforce. Like other wars, it necessarily kind of ends a lot of cultural older cultural patterns. It places into a sharp spotlight the question of who is an american. This is been brewing for some years. Brewing. Ive got bureau my mind. German americans are going to be suspect earring the war, that may be the aftermath of the war, particularly in the context of the revolution, there are a whole lot people in the United States who become suspects of larger discussions of whether they are fit for citizenship or fit to be part of the american nation, whether they are italians or anarchists. European jews were suspected of being communists or socialists. These people all seem very suspect, particularly in the context of aftermath of a war that required immense amount of mobilization. A real focus on unity of the american spirit. It provides an opportunity for people for sometime who had been worried about these trends to actually zero in on particular issues like Alcohol Consumption. But also on sexual morales, religious practices. Allows them to grapple this and use them in representative ways to kind of talk about a larger constellation of concerns. It kind of all comes heavily around 1919 and 1920. Fascinating. The amendment is proposed on april 4th 1917 and it is ratified in 1919, about a year and a half later. The ratification is about three quarters of the state legislatures. Ladies and gentlemen, time for a quick reminder about how you can amend the constitution. There are two ways to oppose and two ways to ratify. An amendment can be proposed either by two thirds, both houses the congress which is what happens with the 18th amendment or by a convention, call at the request of two thirds of the state legislatures. People who are calling for a budget and convention of the states today have now gotten seven states short of the two thirds that were necessary to call a new constitutional convention. That would be the first time that proposal mechanism will be used in American History. To ratify any three quarters of the state legislatures or ratification of three quarters of special conventions called in the states. The 18th amendment for prohibition was ratified by the legislative method. We see that we was repealed in the 21st amendment by the convention method. The only time in American History that ratification by States Convention was ever used. Thanks for indulging me on that brief article finding. It is good to refresh. We have some great school kids for the opening of the exhibit. I quiz them about how you amend it. They got they actually got it. It was wonderful. Give them super gold stars. That is amazing. I cant resist. If you have further doubts about how you should learn to amend the constitution, check out the thrilling interactive constitution that the national Constitution Center has created with the Federalist Society and the american constitution society. You will see the leading liberal and conservative scholars writing about every clause of the constitution and have a great explainer on article five with scholars disk griping with the agree and disagree about. Legislatures outed ratification obviously well since in the end 46 out of the 48 states ratified but world war one is going on. It was fast. That is probably the most important thing. This is for a lot of the later critiques coming to play about how democrats says essentially was this amendment. The speed is important because there are two factors. Soldiers who are in world war one are having difficulty communicating with their representatives in the state legislatures. They are having trouble communicating and ways that voters want to be able to articulate to their representatives. That has a factor. They dont have the time or means. The other thing that comes into play is that the speed means many of the people in the state legislatures were voting on ratifying particular amendments. They were elected before prohibition was set as a national issue. In many cases, they were elected by constituents who did not know that representatives position on prohibition. There are two ways in which the process is very speed. It seems to be a demonstration of enthusiasm. It might later be seen as indications that it failed to meet that standard of deliberation. That is a critical prerequisite for democracy to take place. It is critical. That is the whole point of the ratification process. The idea of deliberation where people have to deliberate about an issue before the constitution can be amended. That is a fascinating process failure. Tell us how the state legislatures malfunction which means that rule count for more than urban votes. Is that a factor . Yes. Voting throughout the middle part of the 19th century got liberals for the most part. Many states in which residents declared their intention to become american citizens by and large. There were very few registration processes. There were a few residency requirements. Americans had long done away with requirements that voters be taxpayers. That kind of period of liberalization peaks after the civil war during reconstruction would be enfranchisements for a time of African Americans. There is than a period between 18 seventies or 18 eighties and the 1920s when voting actually we do not always go move in the country in a direction of liberalization. It retrench is. In large part because of the influx of a large number of immigrants who are seen as being suspect im not part of the proper politics. Or working class in cities, the rise of union movements, where many middle class employers came to embrace prohibition. 18 eighties on to the 1920s, a rash of laws at the state local never make it harder to vote. That also tells the vote toward more traditional rural counties. Laws requiring strict registration processes, voter ideologues, more or less. Residency requirements. The states that previously allowed non citizens who had declared their intent to become citizens. They are no longer allowed to vote. It becomes much harder for working people were very transient, did not always have the ability to document their residency to actually register and participate in elections, which effectively meant that a large part of the electorate you look at Voter Participation as a ratio meaning like of age adults. It drops off persists epistolary in the 20th century. Add to that a lot of states legislative districts and congressional districts that large in the reducing the urban population or relying on census numbers from 1800 rather than 1910 and 1920 that do not reflect the move to cities and the arrival of new americans. There is definitely an anti democratic strain to the kinds of things that are going on here. They are not always done with the intention necessarily of limiting the franchise or of embracing some sort of progressive type agenda. Progressives who you are sort of pointing out earlier, were attempting to improve the electoral process or instituting processes that make it more difficult to vote. Now were doing it with the best of intentions. There is a good case to be made certainly that a lot of the convulsive nurse of this argument in the 1920s the fact that a lot of people never viewed prohibition as having been illegitimate exercise of democratic process. Fascinating. This process that is supposed to speak for the deliberate sense of the people may have failed for these mile fortunes and other reasons. The amendment is ratified in 1919. It becomes law and its up to congress to say what it means. Congress quickly proposes the civil steady act which sets for permissible spirits at an incredibly low percentage, surprising many people said dont worry it wont cover beer but it did. Wilson is so upset by this. He vetoes the bull stacked. Tell us about the whole stack and basically did people feel they were sold a bill of goods and got a much more draconian restriction. People who were paying attention thought that way. Despite the fact that voting turnout is significant. We are getting numbers between 85 and 90 voting turnout and just some actions during that era. Nonetheless, the amount of educated voting is not always extremely high. People mostly voted for whatever Political Party there wasnt necessarily a lot of attention to intricacies of what exactly they were setting into play. You see with the votes that act that people suspected oh maybe 2 . We will have to pull back some of the alcohol content and then that quickly. Became clear that that was not going to be the. Case so a lot of people hoped that congress would interpret the new amendment that was generous for liquor providers, they saw themselves as friends to the federal government took. They had been funded for such a long time. They were shocked to find out that that was in the case. They had a year to kind of amazingly, because of the way the amendment was written, you could purchase as much alcohol as you wanted in that year before and you could store it. They did very good sales leading up to prohibition. A lot of basements became very full. Anybody here go to yale . The yale club had a 16year supply of liquors and the 20. Membership had its privileges. How effective was the prohibition . The drinking fell by 70 and yet at the same time enforcement there were only 3000 federal agents. 10 were dismissed for corruption. How is it possible that drinking could have decreased . Ive seen numbers close to 30 , but it drops off quite a bit. In part, because it becomes more expensive. It is more difficult. It was always possible for people who belong to clubs or near the secret password to get into the 21 club. It was always possible to get alcohol, but with the supply being shut off so to speak, it became much more expensive. To be fair, we think back on prohibition as being somehow regressive, but Alcohol Consumption in the 19th century was by todays standards pretty obscene. People drank too much. They drank too much, so it was necessarily that for americas health. It set us on course for normal Alcohol Consumption. It was interwoven with patterns of work and family community. Particularly for certain ethnic groups. Working class, working men, solutions. It does kind of sharply interrupt some of those patterns. One of my colleagues, we were talking today. He said marijuana, if it werent illegal i might use it. But the fact that it became illegal decreased consumption. Tell us about that. 30 sounds like a big figure. It was a lot. It was signed the 19th century and it went down minimum that back up in the 1970s. The 19th century people drank a lot. At the beginning of the exhibit, it takes 18 1830 as a reference point. 1830 is generally seen as a high point in american consumption habits. We are talking a lot because most of the consumption is described in terms of all americans, age 14 and over. When those numbers are usually produced it includes women who have lower rates of consumption and hopefully the 14 year olds have lower rates of consumption. When you think of it, it is not just on average in recognizing that a certain part of the population is drinking a whole lot. We are pretty sure historians that those numbers went down because there are lower lights of recorded liquor disease. This is the kind of thing we have to come up with a proxy measure. Few arrests for public drunkenness. Then after prohibition, when the commodity is legalized again and taxed, at that point, the rate of the amount of liquor that gets taxed is lower than the rate that did preprohibition. For how it affected peoples habits, i think part of it is an argument that prohibition is that if something is legal it seems respectable. When alcohol became illegal, it became less respectable. For some people, that made it better, and more exciting, especially when accompanied by jazz. For some people, that made it even less acceptable and kind of unseemly and grossed. Part of that has to do with what the drinking culture was really like. With public drinking was like in the 19th century, which was mostly the equivalent of dive bars. Imagine only dive bars would not allow other options except for some ethnic communities that had other traditions. I would not mind to go to a beer garden. I would not go to the 19th century solutions. That is just gross. What about the era of the sixties. People were getting plastered all the time. They were very functional. For working men in the 19th and three, you would work, you are during, you would work, you are doing and then you would get higher rates for industrialization. You had a saloon culture that grows up. In the early 19th and 20th century public drinking culture was very much gender segregated. Mostly male. You would not see women going into a saloon. They would not have been welcomed. There was a sharp divide between public sphere which was four men that was work and politics and the salute, and women, which was childbearing. It is fascinating that prohibition is arguably the first era in which drinking becomes a head arose social activity, and it comes to kind of embody the sophisticated set that is slamming all these conventions in the 20s including the law. They are doing it men and women together. You do not get that until he becomes illegal. We have in the exhibit, a powder room which is made out of a broom closet. You had to create powder rooms for women in these bars. Is it right that it became an unwitting engine for gender integration . It definitely had that role. We never talk about particular classes. In a particular kind of ethnic group. Irish women had traditions that even home sales and things like that. Here we are talking about women who could pay to go into a nice nightclub and where someone they knew could pay and let them have cocktails. This is the birth time of cocktails. I theyre called the girly drinks. Anything that has pink and sparkles it was very popular. It was to try to deliberately welcome a woman clientele who most of the time in the 19th century solutions, you either came in as a women through a back door into a ladies lunch area which was kind of not so well looked upon. Then you had prostitutes. There is a reason why i was so shocking in the 18 seventies, you would have large groups led by ministers white star storming the saloon and trying to disrupt all these patrons by praying lightly in the middle. You never saw women in the solutions except for the naked women on the wall. It was this idea of the transformation of an environment that had been unseemly into an environment that is stylish. That transformation is mindboggling because it does create a whole new set arose social world in which men and women can enjoy each others company. It is not a fluke that the 1920s was the area where we had first started seeing dating as a customary practice. Much to my great grandmothers she used to call cars bedrooms on wheels. Apparently it was with other peoples grandmothers called. There is a whole culture of young people, both sexes coming together and just enjoying each others company. The euphemistically as well. Ive heard that equation that in texas in the 20s, drivers were having sex and driving at the same time. Husband and wife sociologists went to indiana in the mid twenties. They spent a year studying the town. They published their ethnography so to speak of the town. It was called middle town. It later called it monsey. The kind of cluster of concerns the parents had in this era where more kids were going to high school. It is the first decade where you had a kind of discernible adolescent subculture. These were things they were concerned about. Sex, alcohol and the car. They thought the automobile had a lot to do with the other two. He was giving people literal freedom to go out boys and girls together, go out and do things that were elicit including drinking. In the revolution of the 60s was driven was the revolution a the twenties driven by prohibition . I think that they are all related factors. They go together. There is just certain aesthetic a young peoples aesthetic in the 1920s. Clearly identifiable with everything from fashion to how to spend leisure time. What expectations are before marriage. All of that was coming together. It is still an environment in which the womens storms had curfews and the mens storms didnt. That would last a while. It is different. In some ways. There is intimacy, people know each other better before they get married. You can look at trends over the 19th century and bring it back to prohibition. When you go from an Agrarian Society to urban society, there is no longer an economics that up to have seven children to help you on the farm. Rather there is an incentive to have two children because they are no longer an economic help but they are liability. They have to go to school later into their lifespans. Children are less profitable. You have to invest more in. Them you want them to do well. You want them to have high school and some college. People begin to disassociate gradually, sex from procreation. Once you do that, you are acknowledging that there are reasons to have sex that have nothing whatsoever to do with having a family. That is sort of a back door to having there is a lot that flows from that. It converges in the 1920s where the public Leisure Culture have now electric street lights. Public amusements. People are working a fixed eight day or tenday hour rather than a continuous sort of cycle and pattern on the farm. They expect to have a Leisure Culture out of work. It is possible now in the cities to do that in public and to do it with men and women together. It happens that prohibition maps itself over these developments and it means that alcohol is going to be a theme behind that. For people who are alarmed about the first sexual resolution revolution alarmed about the confluence of public and private spheres for men and women. Alcohol becomes a powerful representative problem or virtue. There are some people who think it is very sophisticated and they embrace it for the same reasons they embrace it certainly seems like its cross cutting forces. The morals of prohibition to sexual revolution which is undermining its enforcement. That is the constitutional story. It is not illegal to drink. It is just illegal to sell, so enforcement is really infective and all these raids. Tell us about the failure of the enforcement. It turns out to be much harder than you would think. The long story short. In the actual amendment, i think most historians are most inclined to place the blame on concurrent enforcement clause. It says basically that either state or federal Law Enforcement can take responsibility in any given place. The idea here, was that people who lived and states where the state was not terribly supportive on probation could request assistance from the federal government in order to make those areas dry. Importance for Law Enforcement being evenly applied, otherwise you would just cross a state line to get alcohol and drive back, which you can now do in your car. This was more of an issue. The problem was, akin however to what happens in many of you might remember this, of having a toddler and going to a party with your spouse. Both of you take the toddler with you to the party. Everyone is watching the toddler. No one is watching the toddler, the toddler pulls down the tablecloth and there is a mess all over the floor. With everybody has the responsibility, nobody has a responsibility. With the maximum of about our best guesses about 2500 prohibition agents at any given time. It just was an oasis official into the task that the federal government alone could take responsibility for this. The state and local governments just did not want to. Especially at the wettest areas. They did not have to be on the take. They had to decide that this was not interesting to them. Wow. Some of the 10 were dismissed for corruption. Taft had warned about this failure. The concurrent enforcement was necessary to reinjure states that their prerogatives would not be tempered. Would you say that was the failure of enforcement . One of the ironies is that some of the laws proponents would also have been some of the sharpest opponents of a more liberal reading and the Commerce Clause which would actually allow a larger role for federal loan line enforcement. This is a period where you have a relatively small federal state. There is not struck strong Law Enforcement apparatus. Their entire sections of the country where there is a big Democratic Political change underway. You take a city or state like new york where political participation turnout in elections shoots up dramatically between 1920 and 1928. It is a whole new generation of ethnic americans who have come of age. Their citizens, theyre voting. You get entire jurisdictions where you effectively had the equivalents of nullification, basically, where the state or local authorities refused to enforce it or just simply declared that it is not a priority and they will not. We have lots of great questions. We have a lot more to talk about including the constitutional revolution of the failure of prohibition and the repeal in the 21st amendment. Would you allow me to just quickly tell the story of the homestead case . This is the central constitutional Fourth Amendment case of the early 20th century. It unites my two heroes, chief justice taft and louis brand ice for the dissent. And for most important privacy dissent of the 21st century. You cannot come to the Constitution Center without getting a homework assignment. Your assignment is to read the dissenting opinion. If you go to the exhibit, you will see the original telephone for the bootlegger where homestead used to make his phone calls to make all these incredibly profitable illegal booze from British Columbia and canada. Really fast. Here is what happened. He is a lab bootleg or making phone calls on the telephone. Federal agents put wiretaps on the sidewalks leading up to his office. They listened in on his conversation. They convict him. He says the wiretap was illegal because there was no warrant. The evidence should be excluded. In an opinion by chief to justice staffed, the court holds no trespass, no warrant required because it was public property and the wiretaps were on public sidewalks. Taft said you dont need a warrant. I really want you to read it. He envisions new technologies. He has an ace desk drawer a new technology called television. He misunderstands television. He sees its a twoway technology where you can see each other from both ends of the camera. He anticipates skype and webcams, but you cant just look at a tv camera and see someone on the other side. Now of course you can. He salutes to it and in his hunting prophetic passage he says, waves may someday be developed but it can it be possible without physically intruding into the home to extract secret papers from yours and introduced them in court, a far smaller intrusion at the time of the founding was held to violate the Fourth Amendment. The general warned of the American Revolution revealed less of our thoughts and emotions and wiretapping which reveals the conversation on both sides of the wire. You have to translate the constitution so it protects the same amount of privacy in the age of the wires as it did. An incredible opinion please read it. See how these two great constitutionalist, taft is the original list he did not like prohibition. Brand i. C. E. Says that privacy not property. I was quite amused. I love teaching this because they are all prohibition cases. The case and barr being car search and the prohibition case with they would rip open the upholstery and find the boos, there is a lot to learn about the constitution through prohibition, just as there is a lot to learn about we have seen this groundswell about prohibition. Franklin roosevelt is inaugurated. Theres the depression and all of a sudden you need the money from liquor tax again. Somehow, in 1930 to the repeal amendment is proposed and by 1933 it is passed, not by the state legislatures but its unique procedure never used again from before in American History special conventions called in the state to ensure the state legislatures would not get undermined. How did that happen . The idea all along there have been people who because they were invested in the liquor industry had been opposed to prohibition. But justice prohibition was about to come up all of a sudden you start having people who arent invested in alcohol at all. Financially. They start to become really concerned about the amendments implications. Those implications get amplified when the amendment is not you get someone like Pierre Dupont who switches sides or wilbur brent. You get figures in business. My my classes i teach people, or the women where pearls and men wear hats. It is a very collected professional highly connected sorts of people. Both men and women. As they start to kind of advance the ideas of repeal, they keep emphasizing both the way in which it seems to be teaching a disrespect for the law and the fact that it is impressionable about its democratic character in the first place. They tried making that complaint first through courts. It did not get the traction they wanted. It did have the idea that somehow the enactment of this amendment had not been reflective of the popular will. Something that was at least an arguable point based on how people responded to it. That translated into a campaign for repeal that had to be consistent. If the critique was that the prohibition amendment had not been democratic, then you would need to find a method for repeal that looked as democratic as possible. Going to state conventions seemed to do that. And theres the tricky point where we talked about earlier. The idea of state convictions as ratification methods meaning everybody whos selected. The voters knew exactly how that person was going to vote before they walked in the door to do the vote. That also means they would not be deliberation as part of that process. Any deliberation was only going to be between constituents and in this case, the delegates who would represent them. It was not going to happen among the delegates themselves. You wind up leading to a version that was arguably more democratic but was also just differently democratic. I think that is a tension we still work with. The referendum. A referendum put also passed very quickly. Even faster. It went faster. These two amendments are unusually speedy. I think the repeal, doesnt it have the record . Maybe you know. I wish i remembered off the top of my head. It is in this thrilling copy of the constitution. I think its under a year if i remember correctly. Yes. I just cannot read it. Its the ranking of them that quickly that is the hard part to do. I love that you took out the constitution. It makes me so happy. I always take out the constitution. After i read this i will give you this copy so you can share it with your friends. The 18th amendment is hereby repealed, passed by congress on february 20th 1933 and ratified on december 5th. That is speedy. Really speedy. Thank you. There was no one year delay as there has been with previous amendments. You said repeal was challenged in court as anti democratic. And law school i came upon an article that said the 18th amendment be itself unconstitutional. The idea that unconstitutional amendments sounds like a solid system. Did some argue that in court and what was the argument . Im trying to remember. I think it was Charles Evans hughes but im not sure. Basically made this argument that the process itself, because of its expedited rate and the fact that the legislatures had not worked the way with the election cycle was inconsistent with the rule of law which require deliberations. I would have to read it in order to be precise. More homework. Cspan viewers check out what the arguments were if it was Charles Evans hughes. I love old law review articles. They are so meticulous. They are. Theres that beautiful typeface. I was looking at some from the 1890s the other day and it was great. They were so precise. About what . These ones were about civil damage laws. This actually ties in. There was a use of civil damage laws preprohibition since women were not allowed to own property if they were married, therefore if a woman had a husband who had become a drunkard which was the category used at the time, that she could file an official report with bartender and police were part mint department. If they continued serving her husband they denied her means of support. The fact she relied on her husband as a means of support translated into the fact that she was entitled to that support. If it was denied to her than she could sue the bartender, the saloon owner and anyone else up and down the line for the right of means to support and they would have to pay for her. There was sometimes an extra payment depending on the number of days in jail the husband had to serve. Wow. Awesome . Totally awesome. Read lured eagles. The fact that so many women were the forefront of this movement as well as other Progressive Movements. You saw a fascinating sort of dynamic in the late 19th and early 20th century. Women were politically active rhetorically would not challenge the idea that there were separate spears spheres. The private and public. They would argue in a more complex urban industrial society, for women to be protectors of home and earth, that they needed a role and voice in politics. Because there were solutions they could not control without the vote, there were Public Health and safety issues, there were school issues now the children were probably attending public schools. The favorite for political enfranchisement was if you want us to safeguard our homes and provide nurturing environments for our children and husbands, we actually need a voice and a say. We actually have to have some sort of input we as women. It became a powerful wedge for women to say we will not challenge separate spheres but we would argue that we cannot actually do our job as mothers and wives unless you allow us some input into the discourse. Its an amazing way to leverage weakness for strength. Right . A powerful way of putting that. So one of our questions about repeal, which two states did not ratify . It was north and south carolina. For the original prohibition amendment was long island and connecticut . I remember the first two, not the second to. It was connecticut and rhode island. Ive not been able to track it down. Ive looked at the Prohibition Party in rhode island, its the longest living minor party in American History. They had a movement in rhode island and were very upset about it. Connecticut. This is speculation but connecticut was the u. S. Supreme court case that said one man one voter. I think they were still doing at large elections. They probably had a pretty and representative sample. Im not sure about the referendum system but it was still fairly undemocratic by choosing representatives. And the Southern States theres also the ways in which recent segregation dramatically reconfigured the way people processed prohibition. In a lot of Southern States, African Americans become completely and utterly disenfranchised and taken the right to vote away. All of a sudden prohibition comes up as an issue because the people who are remaining as voters feel secure that they can have debates amongst themselves. Race always plays a role when you are looking at that. It is so complicated, the fisheries and cross cutting interests. Prohibition is repealed and happy days are here again. The depression is here but people can drink. But again they cant because it goes back to the states and they can decide whether what kind of drinking they want to allow. Many of them retain draconian dry loss. Tell us about those . Some states do it. The localities are even more interesting. We were talking about some contemporary examples where cities still have dry statutes or there can be a large variety of what are called blue laws. Those are sorts of regulations. Not being able to obtain alcohol after 10 pm in college. They seem arbitrary but they are historical relics that are part of the contemporary legal situation. My family has a house in jersey shore and it is still a dry town and the town, the land is held by the campaign meeting, so those of us who are centers have to walk across the bridge to buy a drink. Pasadena. Ive written about a city in tennessee. Theres a variety of these places that was established as dry communities. In tennessee they stayed dry way into the 20th century because in part the original land deeds had locked into the very deed that you received when you purchased your house. If you ever bought, sold or consumed liquor on site that your house actually reverted back to the land company. Theres all sorts of creative ways to keep an area dry if that is your aspiration. I cannot resist asking. As the Supreme Court is held up and the reproductive autonomy cases. Have any of these dry laws been argued as constitutional autonomy cases . People sort of do what theyre gonna do. I cant remember any. The sense that this would be the investment of rigorous enforcement i think has largely lost. They are mostly symbolic and a lot of cases. Im sure we can find an exception to that. In most cases it seems to be mostly symbolic. Alcohol consumption in the 1970s went back up to its preprohibition rates . Yes. But at the same time those numbers can be interpreted differently. Even though the average american by the 1970s is consuming as much as the average american in say 1915. Nonetheless since that is being shared more widely between men and women, distributed more evenly and because we are no longer counting people who are 14 to 21, between those two things the rates of consumption are not necessarily is damaging. In other words we are learning to drink much better. Im delighted and hope. Gender case involving women and men that Justin Justice ginsburg criticize where women were found to have been driving under the influence or shovel recently escorted by the police where young men were supposed to be arrested. Other in constitutional issues involving gender and alcohol during the sixties and seventies . Looking at the 19th and 20th century theres no doubt that men and women drinking are perceived differently. Probably the opposite of that. That women who drink in a public way were dismissed. That was a signifier for a whole world of misdeeds and criminal activities. Four men, the consequences were nowhere near as high. The idea of a double standard operating throughout the law i think is pretty consistent. I cannot think of anything through the sixties and seventies in the same way. Perhaps college dorm regulations. I think its the lens of local laws that came crashing down in the local sixties and seventies. College women were treated very differently than college men. There were curfews imposed. There were schools with bizarre rules that said that men and women could not be in the same dorm room if the door was open. Women were treated as wards of the college and men were treated as creatures who needed to be kept away from those women under prescribe circumstances. Those structures come crashing down in the seventies at which point men and women are treated on equal footing. Time for just a couple of questions from our audience. Several about marijuana. Are there parallels to prohibition issues to the legalization of marijuana today . I have a take on that. For understanding the repeal that happens under prohibition, the key thing is the context of the Great Depression. With the Great Depression and legalization happening at that moment, it does not immediately inflate to preprohibition levels simply because there is no apparatus. No one has the money to start big factories at the same rate again. All of the capital required to do that will not be it put in place. The question about Marijuana Legalization and how it works with an Business Economy is a little different. In part because the development of mass agribusiness in terms of marijuana cultivation does not have the cap on it that the Great Depression had put on the same modification for alcohol. I think also marijuana consumption pales in comparison to Alcohol Consumption in the early twenties. You do not have the same social structures in place that you had in the early 20th century. Church organizations, reform organizations, its a different context. There is no salute equivalent. Theres no opium den. There is no sense that this is tied up with different behaviors. As we close up, several of our guests want to know about the relevance of the prohibition straight to today. The amendment that seems most likely to get some kind of convention of the states, two thirds majority is the balanced Budget Amendment. What is the story of prohibition tell us about the likely pop of a balanced Budget Amendment being adopted today . I would say the overall lesson from prohibition is do not make a constitutional amendment if a federal law will do what you wanted to do. Its much easier to tweak a federal statute. What is involved in retweeting a amendment is a logistical nightmare. A lot of the work was done in the full state act. Having an independent that was so difficult to repair or moderate largely contributed to its failure. So at some point citizens have to exert some amount of trust that the process itself of negotiating of deliberation is going to yield outcomes that are going to be better in some ways then that permanent kind of status of using the constitution as a law making is tremendous. Progressive era was an error of constitutional change. The 16th amendment federal incan tax, 17 and 18th prohibition, 19th women suffrage. All reflected popular movements. They did not spring out of nowhere but they had been percolating for decades. We are bipartisan movements that would eventually what does that tell us about seeing amendments about the constitution today . The similarities between then and now 100 years ago today, as you say, is a period of incredible Political Engagement and a confusing Political Engagement we had ideological blocks with coalesce together when it was convenient and then they would coalesce against each other when it was less convenient. I think peter wrote this article 30 years ago, was there even a Progressive Movement . They did exist . You have people who are in favor of prohibition on one day, working with you genesis on a particular set of issues and the next day theyre battling each other on immigration reform. It was an Ideological Coalition Building Block type world. We were sharply polarized today to some extent. There are a whole bunch of rolling blocks out there driven by ideological questions that dont necessarily matchup to partisan politics so the question is does that lend its state to lending a constitutional video vehicle but potentially it is messy. It would be very difficult to predict which groups lineup with each other in order to actually support such initiatives. It would be surprising, we would be surprised to see who actually aligns with him. Its not just the issue. It is also the question of whether you think the constitution is the best vehicle for it. People who might align and one way on the issue will align another way about that particular strategy. On that wise note of caution, i have to thank you both for superbly engaging and spectacular discussion. applause thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us. Lets go see the american spirits exhibit. Cspan viewers come to philadelphia and see american spirits and lets go have some great drinks. Thank you very much. applause cspan has unfiltered coverage. We are so honored tonight to welcome susan achiever, bestselling and highly esteemed memories biographer and novelist and she launches her newest book, drig