Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Of Politics Prohibition 20240713

Up next, historians talk about the history and politics of prohibition in the u. S. The National Constitution center hosting this event, the moderator is jeffrey rosen. [ applause ] ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution center. [ applause ] i am jeffrey rosen, the president of this wonderful institution. The only institution in america chartered by congress to disseminate information about the u. S. Constitution on a n nonpartisan basis. Beautiful. So great to hear those wonderful words of our Inspiring Mission statement here in the beautifully renovated kimmel theater. Ladies and gentlemen, just a few months ago, we opened up this gorgeous new space renovated with the sydney kimmel foundation. And youre hearing me from these stateoftheart cool ted talk mics on these beautiful new seats. And its 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 you havent seen it yet. And 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. And this poses an incredible question. How did it happen . How did it happen that america voluntarily, by a vote of 46 states with only two states dissenting in 1919, decided essentially to ban intoxicating liquors with the 18th amendment, and then only 14 years later by a similarly overwhelming majority of 46 states with only two states dissenting changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment in the 21st amendment, the only time in our constitutional history that an amendment had been repealed and it took only 14 years . I hear a bravo from the crowd. Those who are here enjoying a full bar imagining that its 19 1933. We have to talk about it two of americas leading experts, phenomenal historians and i am going to introduce them in a second. But before i do, i just want to say, again, how thrilled everyone at the Constitution Center is to welcome ou new chair Vice President joe biden. [ applause ] and it is so meaningful that Vice President biden joins this incredible group. He was preceded by governor jeb bush before him and clinton and before him president george h. W. Bush. No other institution in america has brought together leaders from both sides of the aisle to unite around our shared love of the u. S. Constitution and the importance of teaching it to all americans. Thats what tonights show is about. And thats what the exhibit is about, educating ourselves about this history which is forgotten largely today but so important and can teach us so much about who we are as a nation, how the constitution has changed, and how we should think about constitutional change today. Its now my great pleasure to introduce our phenomenal copanelist Lisa Anderson is a historian at juliard. And joshua zeitz is the author of a bunch of spectacular books including flapper a mad cap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made america modern. Can you beat a book title like that . Please join me in welcoming Lisa Anderson and joshua zeitz. [ applause ] so glad to be here. Let us jump right into it. Lisa. Pretend its 1919 so we must have water. Thats only appropriate. You dont know that theres actually water in here. Thats true. It could be gin. It certainly is a possibility. It is. So to a certain degree, were going to spend the whole show talking about this question. But i want to just begin by asking the obvious one. How did it happen . Well, the first part is that drunk people are annoying, especially if youre not drunk. That really becomes the starting point. But theres a few kind of pathways that people come to prohibition. One is simply employers. Its really 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 its something that prohibits the process of salvation. Because you need selfdetermination in order to have that. And part of its political because as theres a growing movement of opposition towards corporations and trusts, the liquor industry certainly seems to fit that profile. And so theres a lot of people whod push back and see it infill traiting both of the Political Parties and its messing with politics and overall the future of democracy in america, which seems like a big deal. Wow, fascinating. So employers, theres a religious element. Theres an anticorporate element. Theres also immigrants in the urban areas versus dry people in the rural areas. And progressives who we think of today as liberal turned out to be quite antiimmigrant. So tell us about that. If you zoom out theres an incredible backdrop. Some of it will seem familiar to us today because we have parallels to it going on. This is a period 20 or 30 years leading up to prohibition of massive influx of immigrants from countries that today would be considered not particularly unusual, but at the time immigrants from italy and ireland and Eastern Europe and greece, they were considered quite foreign and not necessarily part of the fabric of the kind of old stock american populous. And they had drinking cultures that came to kind of represent many old stock americans something that was foreign and dangerous and not part of the organic american nation. Its a period of rapid demographic transformation. Its a period of rapid urbanization. So you had, you know, quite a lot of political and cultural contests that grew up around that. Its also a period of cultural innovation. Its a period when gender roles are getting thrown up in the air because more women are moving into the workplace, more people moving into the cities where theres anonymity that you didnt have in the countryside. And put together alcohol or the prohibition of alcohol became representative with a number of other cultural touch points. So it became the type of issue that people could latch onto in a representative way even if they didnt always do it consistently. So as you said many progressives that we think of as reformers as liberals, many of them latched onto prohibition for their own reasons. But by the same token, many antiprogressives kind of protectors of the old guard also embraced prohibition for their own reasons. People looked at the lens that they used to look at the question would influence, you know, their reasoning for embrag an anti liquor platform. Fascinating. A bipartisan movement uniting these urban progressives with rural evangelicals and, lets take us up to the progressive era and the question of whiskey is really important. 40 of funding for the tax is a National Funding for the time of the founding when the whiskey tax on farmers, the 25 task tax at George Washington administration imposed. But all of a sudden, you do not need the whiskey revenue when the 16th amendment authorize a federal income tax. Tell us about that and about the Politics Around 1913, 14 during the administration of that great president , president William Howard taft. The subject of my next biography. Tapped is against the prohibition, because he thinks it will be really hard to enforce and tell us about the Politics Around 20 1912, at a time when more than half the states are dry but it is not obvious that a federal tax is going to pass. They were huge economic reasons to avoid it. Those reasons seem so significant, that particular the Beer Industry, because americans were starting to transition away from distilled alcohol and more and more towards beer. Partially because of refrigeration. You know, that technologically possible to transport and store. It is as that transition happens, all the people involved in the Beer Industry and they are particularly important because they are better organized in a lot of ways than the distilled liquor industries. They are actually feeling pretty good because the rates of sailor going up. Because they know that there is this long history of cooperation with the federal government and that the federal government really relied upon beer excise taxes as a means of gaining revenue, they actually do not organize particularly well to stop prohibition, simply because they cannot believe it could happen. It seems terribly naive, but the people who are pro prohibition also believe it was not going to happen anytime soon, so it kind of makes a little more sense. It was something, we can look at that amendment as something that seems to have ambushed both sides simultaneously. So there is a law in 1913 that would allow states to restrict the boos that is imported in to them and taft vetoes that law. He wants to be on the Supreme Court, he hates being president , he views everything in constitutional terms anythings congress has no power to regulate this. His veto is overwritten by a two thirds majority partly because of the intervention of a guy called wheeler, who is one of the political operatives of the state, the Anti Saloon League, who goes around individual congresspeople saloon districts and say he will mobilize activists against them. Tell us about his role and how a two thirds majority is building in congress around this time. I will start that and then hand it to you. You know, wheeler is this fascinating character. Arguably one of the first modern lobbyists. He is a product of this era, when we sort of mentioned the progressives earlier. There are a whole bunch of progressive causes that give rise to a kind of modern advocacy model. People going in organizing visits to congressman. There were no offices then, there were in the early 20th century, but organizing business to congressman, letter writing campaigns to congressman, organizing programs and public meetings. The kind of things that we think of today, and is an essential part of modern organized political action. It was really, in many ways the Anti Saloon League and it embodied that. It also sold other advocates other times intersecting them, a secret passage of anti child labor laws. A secret passage of immigration restriction laws, loosening immigration restrictions. Theres a period of heightened political activism. The Anti Saloon League was mobilizing Public Opinion and elite Public Opinion. Tell us more about the Anti Saloon League describes wheeler as basically an older version of ned flinders, from the symptom sins. I like that. Wheeler is if ned flanders was terrifying, that would be the best way to describe it. Wheeler has an insane organizational sense and a willingness to, lets just say pressure. If he had been part of the mob, he would have been very successful. It was one of those things where he was able to find just the right person, 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 by 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 talk about the Anti Saloon League. It is this idea that, for most historians, we call it the first major pressure. Its Something Different and special, related to Political Parties. There was a 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 are trying to create initiative and referendum to establish better procedures for bringing forward candidates. All sorts of regulations to try and make Political Parties better and more democratic. Then, all of a sudden, the Anti Saloon League comes in and theyre like, we do not need Political Parties, we can represent the people directly. That kind of became an overwhelming jolt to the entire way that people organized politics. No longer was it so dependent on Political Parties, there were also now special interest groups. Fascinating. Imagine a populist force is rising up and challenging the political establishment. They looked 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. Thats interesting. There were no gala polls. Not yet. We do know that by 1913, wheeler was able to persuade two thirds of congress to hold override tafts veto, even though he was against probation. Wilson i gather, which was taft 1912, is kind of not clear how he stands on the issue, but its 1917 and all of a sudden, world war one is starting and wilson gives this dramatic address to Congress Declaring War on germany. Two days later, on april 4th, congress by two thirds vote approaches opposes the prohibition amendment. Tell us the story about how part of that reflected xenophobic anger and socalled german brewers and what was the role of world war one and really pushing this amendment over the edge . I think world war one in this is true of a lot of wars. It capitalizes social economic demographic forces that have 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. It moves a lot more women and a lot more rural people into urban settings and the workforce. Like other wars, it necessarily kind of offends a lot of cultural, older cultural patterns. And it places into the spotlight this question about who is an american. It this has been brewing for some years. laughs brewing. You are killing me. In, german americans are going to be suspect during the war, but in the aftermath of the war, particularly in the context of a larger revolution, there are a whole people in the United States a become suspect. A larger discussion about whether they are fit for citizenship or fit to be part of the american nation. Whether they are italians, or suspected of being an artist, or jews who are suspected of being communists or socialists. These people all seem very suspect, particularly in the context in the immediate aftermath of a war that required immense amount of mobilization and a real focus on unity of the american spirit. It gives, it provides an opportunity for people who have for some time, been worried about these trends, to actually zero in on particular issues, like Alcohol Consumption, but also on sexual morals and religious practices. It allows them to grab these issues and use them in a representative way to kind of talk about a larger consolation of concerns. And it kind of all comes to a head really around 1919, 1920. Fascinating. So the amendment is proposed on april 4th, 1917 and is ratified in 1919, about a year and a half later. The ramifications is by three quarters of the state legislators. Ladies and gentlemen, a quick reminder about how you can amend the constitution. Two ways to propose and two ways to ratify. An amendment can be proposed, either by two thirds vote of both houses of congress, which is what happened with the 18th amendment, or by a convention called at the request of two thirds of the state legislators. People who are calling for a balanced budget, a convention of the states today, have now gotten seven states short of the two thirds that are necessary to call a new constitutional convention. That will be the first time that proposal mechanism would be used in American History. To ratify, you need three quarters of the state legislators or ratification by three quarters of special conventions called in the states. The 18th amendment, for prohibition was ratified by the legislative method, well see that it was repealed in the 21st amendment by the convention method. The only time in American History that ratification by state convention has ever been used. So, thanks for indulging me on that brief article five. Its good to refresh. We have some great Old School Kids here today for the opening exhibit and i quiz of about that and they got each of them. They actually got, it was wonderful. Give those teacher super gold stars. Thats amazing. Okay, sorry, and cspan viewers, if you have further doubts about how you can learn the amendment constitution, check out the thrilling interactive constitution that the National Constitution center has created with the Federalist Society and the american constitutional society. You will see the leading liberal and conservative scholars in america right about every clause of the constitution. We have a great explainer on article five where scholars explain. Back to the ratification, it takes three quarters of the state legislators, how did ratification go . Obviously well since, in the end, 46 out of the 48 states ratified, but world war one is going on, so what was the ratification process . It was fast, and thats probably the most important thing. This is where a lot of the later critiques come into play about how democratic essentially was this amendment. The speed is important because of two factors. One, it means that soldiers who are in world war i are having difficulty communicating with their representatives in a state legislator. So they are having trouble communicating in ways that voters want to articulate to their representatives. That has a factor, they do not have enough time, they do not have enough means. The other thing that comes into play is that the speed means that many of the people in the state legislators, who are voting on ratifying a particular amendment, 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. So there are two ways in which the process is very speedy, which seems to be a demonstration of enthusiasm and might later be seen as indications that it failed, but to me 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. Its the idea that the liberation pulp has to be thought of deeply before the constitution can be amended. That is a fascinating process failure. Tell us about how some of the state legislators are now apportioned. That means that rule votes accounts for more than urban votes. Thats actually right. Voting in throughout i would say the middle part of the 19th century got liberalized for the most part. There were many states in which, residents who declare their intentions to become american citizens could vote. By and large, very few registration processy, residency requirements. Americans had long done away with requirements that veto tax players on land. That kind of liberalization peaked immediately after the civil war with the enfranchisement for some great time of African Americans. There is that a period between the 18 seventies and 18 eighties in the 1920s when voting, we cannot always go, we do not always move in this country toward kind of a liberalization. It retreats, in large part because of the influx of the large number of immigrants who are seen as being suspect and not part of the proper body of politics. The rise of a very vocal working class. Working class and cities, the rise of a Union Movement that many middle class employers became to embrace. Prohibition saw as suspect. You see an 18 eighties, on to the 1920s, a rash of laws at the state and local levels that make it harder to vote. That also tilted the vote toward more traditional rural counties. You see laws requiring strict registration processes, voter ideologues for the first time in American History, more or less. Residency requirements, the states that previously allowed non citizens who declared their intent to become citizens, they were no longer allowed to vote. It becomes a much harder time for working people, who are very transient and not always have the ability to document the residency to actually register and participate in elections, which effectively meant that a large part of the electorate, if you look at Voter Participation as a ratio of eligible, meaning of age adults drops off precipitously in the late 19th, early 20th century. After that, a lot of states are portioning legislative districts and congressional districts, either at large in a way that they lose the urban population, or they are relying on census numbers from 1900, rather the 19 to 1920, that do not reflect the movement to cities in the arrival of new americans. So, there is a anti democratic strange things that are going on here. They are not always done with the intention, necessarily, of limiting the franchise or embracing some sort of regressive type agenda. Progressives, who you were pointing out earlier, were attempting to improve the electoral process, or instituting process that also make it more difficult to vote and they are doing it with the best of intentions. I think there is a good case to be made, certainly, that a lot of the sort of, the compulsiveness of this argument in the 1920s over the fact that a lot of people simply never viewed prohibition as having been a never legitimate exercise of the democratic process. Fascinating. This process it was to speak for the deliberation sense of the people may have failed for these mel portioned and other reasons. So, the amendment is ratified in 1919. It becomes law and it is up to congress to say what it means and Congress Quickly proposes the act, which sets the limit for permissible spirits at an incredibly low percentage. Supplies are really low. Surprisingly, many people said it would not cover beer, but it turned out it did. Wilson is so upset by this, that he vetoes the act, because he said they had to wait a year. Tell us about the act and basically to people feel that they got a much more draconian restriction . I think that the people who are paying attention probably thought that way. There is a large part, despite the fact that voting turnout is significant. We are getting numbers between 85 and 90 voting turnout in some elections during this era. Nonetheless, the amount of educated voting isnt always extremely high is the way i put it. People mostly voted for whatever Political Party your neighbors voted for. It was not necessarily a lot of attention to the intricacies of what exactly they were setting into play. You see with the volstead act, people had suspected declared maybe 2 would have to pull back some of the alcohol content, but we will still be able to have a near beer kind of product. That quickly became clear that that was not going to be the case. So a lot of people who had hoped that congress would interpret the new amendment in a way that was generous to, you know, for liquor providers, they saw themselves as friends to the federal government. They had been funding it for such a long time. They were rather shocked to find out that that was not the case. But, they had a year to kind of reorient. Of course, 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. So they did very good sales leading up to prohibition and a lot of basements became very full. Did anybody here go to yale . Okay, because it was a good place, the yale club in new york had a 16year supply of liquor in the 20s. They stocked up especially. Membership had its privileges. Well, how effective was prohibition . I think i saw statistic in the exhibit that drinking fill something by like 70 , yet at the same time, enforcement was really lacks because there were only 3000 federal agents, 10 were dismissed for corruption and it was not enforced. How is it possible that drinking could have decreased but enforcement lacked . I have seen numbers closer to 30 , but it drops off quite a bit. In part, because it becomes more expensive. It becomes more difficult. It was always possible for people who, if you belong to the yale club, or you know the secret password to get into the 21 club. It was always possible to get alcohol, but with the supply being shut off, it became much more expensive. To be fair, we think back on prohibition as being somehow regressive and Alcohol Consumption in the 19th century was, by today standards pretty obscene. People trying to much. Yes. This was not necessarily bad for americans. It did actually set us on a course of more normal Alcohol Consumption. A lot of this is because it was interwoven with patterns of work and family and community, particularly for certain ethnic groups, immigrant groups, working class, working men, working saloons. It does kind of sharply interrupt some of those patterns. Just another question, one of my colleagues we were talking to today, you know marijuana is illegal, if it were legal, i might use it. But the fact that it became illegal, it decreased construction. It was a lot. It was high in the 19th century, they went down and then went back up in the 1970s. Yes, so the 19th century, people drank a lot. So at the beginning of the exhibit, take 1830 is a reference point. I think 18 thirties generally seen as the high point in american consumption habits. We are talking a lot, especially 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. So when you think of, it is not just on average, its recognizing that a certain part of the population is drinking a whole lot. We are pretty sure, historically, that those numbers went down because there is lower rates of reported liver disease. This is the kind of thing we have to do to kind of come up with a proxy measure. Or there are few arrests for public drunkeness. After prohibition, when the commodities legalize, it can be taxed. At that point, the amount of liquor that they get tax is lower than the rate they did preprohibition. So how it affected peoples habits, i think part of it is an argument that prohibition is long made, which that if something is legal, it seems respectable. So when alcohol became illegal, it became less respectable and for some people, that made it better, and more exciting, especially when a company would buy jazz. For some people, that made it less acceptable and on seemingly gross. Public drinking was like in the 19th century, which was mostly the equivalent of dive bars. So imagine only dive bars, with not a lot of other options, except for some ethnic communities that have other traditions. I would not mind going to a beer garden, that would be great, but im not going to one of those 19th centuries saloons, thats just grows. So was it like the 1960s mad men area . If you look at patterns. Very functional. Yes, for working men in the 19th century. You would work, you would drink, you would work, you drink. And then, as you got higher rates of organization and industrialization, you had a saloon culture that rose up. Remember, in the late 19th, early 20th century, that public drinking culture was very much gender segregated and mostly male. You would not see woman going into saloons. They would not be welcome. There was a sharp divide between the public sphere, which was four men that was work in politics in the saloon in then woman, which was home, hearth, childbearing. Its fascinating that the era of prohibition is arguably the first era in which drinking becomes a head hedgerow social activity and it comes to kind of embody the sophisticated set that is flouting all of these conventions in the 20s, including the wall and they are doing it men and women together, but you do not get that really actually until it becomes illegal. We have an exhibit, a powder room which is made out of a broom closet. Powder rooms are, is that right that it became an unwitting engine for gender . It definitely had that role. They were talking about particular class of women and the particular ethnic group. Irish women have had traditions of even home sales and things like that, but here we are talking about women who could pay to go into a nice nightclub and someone they knew could pay to have them come into a nice nightclub and have cocktails. This is the birth time of cocktails and what i am now going to call, what we all know are called the girl drinks. Anything that is pink or has sparkles or anything like that. They all become very popular and part of it is to try and deliberately welcome women clientele, who most of the time in the 19th century saloons, you either came in as a woman through a back door, into a ladies lunch area, which was kind of sketchy, or there were prostitutes. It was not an environment in which, theres a reason why it was so shocking in the 18 seventies when you would have large groups led by the ministers wife storming the saloon and trying to disrupt all of its patrons by praying loudly in the middle. Its because you never saw a woman in saloons, except for the naked women on the wall, but that was another thing altogether. It was this idea of the transformation of an environment that had been unseemly into environment that is stylish and that transformation is mindboggling because it does create a whole new hetero social world, in which men and women can wqwq . 5y each others company. Its not a fluke that the 1920s are the era when we first start seeing dating as a customary practice. Much to my great grandmothers heart attack. She used to call cars bedrooms on wheels, which evidently was a thing other peoples grandmothers call called them. There is a whole culture of young people, of both sexes coming together and just enjoying each others company. I mean, that euphemistically as well as accurately. I have heard that equation in texas in the 20s that said the drivers and sex act were at the same time. There weres husband and wife sociologists and they went to indiana in the mid 20s and they spent about a year studying the town. They published ethnography, so to speak of the town that was called motel. The kind of cluster of concerns that parents had in this era when more kids are going to high school, its the first decade where you had a kind of discernible adolescent or teenage subculture and the things they were concerned about worst sex, alcohol and the car. They thought the automobile had a lot to do with the other two because it was giving people literal freedom to go out. Boys and girls together, to go out and do things that were illicit, including drink. Its said that the sexual revolution of the 60s was driven by the pill. Was the sexual revolution of the 20s driven by prohibition . I do not know if i would call it driving. Im just throwing out a thesis. I think that they are all related factors. They go together. There is a certain aesthetic, a young peoples esthetic of the 1920s. It is clearly identifiable with everything from fashion, to how one spends leisure time, to what expectations are before marriage. All of that was kind of coming together. It is still an environment in which the womens dorms have curfews and the mens dorms dont. That will last a while. But its different in some ways. There is an intimacy, people know each other better before they get married. Yes. You can look at trends over the 19th, 20th century. I will bring it back to prohibition. When you go from an Agrarian Society to an urban society, there is no longer an economic incentive to have seven children to help you on the farm. There is an incentive to have two children because children are no longer an economic help, they are a liability if you have too many of them and all they have to go to school later into their lifespan. Children are less profitable. Thats right. You have to invest more and if you want them to do well, they probably need to have high school, maybe a little bit of college. People begin to disassociate sex from procreation. Once you do that, you are also acknowledging that there are reasons to have sex that have nothing whatsoever to do with having a family. That is the sort of backdoor to having, theres a lot that flows from that. It converges in the 1920s with a culture with a public leader culture, there are now electric street lights, that allow people to stay out later, public amusements. People are working a fixed a day, tenday hour, rather than a continuous cycle and pattern on a farm. So they expect to have a Leisure Culture out of work. It is possible now in the city used to do that to do public and to do it with men and women together. It happens that prohibition kind of maps itself over these developments and it means that alcohol is going to be a theme behind that and for people who are alarmed about the first sexual revolution of the 20s, who were alarmed about the creeping kind of confluence of the public and private spheres for men and women. Alcohol can become a very powerful representative problem or virtue. There are some people who think it is very sophisticated and they embrace it for the same reasons they embraced it around the. Ive certainly seen cross cutting forces that led to prohibition of the sexual revolution which is undermining its enforcement, so back to the constitutional story, it is not illegal to drink. It is just illegal to sell, so enforcement is really an effective and there are all these raids. Tell us about the failure of enforcement. It turns out to be much harder than you would think. The long story short on there, so in the actual amendment, i think most historians are most inclined to place the blame on the concurrent enforcement clause, part of it says that basically either state or federal Law Enforcement can take responsibility in any given place. The idea here was that people who lived in states where the state was not terribly supportive of prohibition could request assistance from the federal government in order to make those areas dry. The importance for Law Enforcement being, even being dry, you could drive and go get alcohol drive back. The problem was, akin to what happens, many of you may remember this of having a toddler and going to a party with your spouse, which is that both of you take the toddler with you to the party. Everyone is watching the toddler, so no one is watching the toddler. The toddler pulls down the tablecloth and there is a mess all over the floor. Everybody has the responsibility, nobody has the responsibility. With a maximum, our best guess is around 2500 prohibition agents at any given time, that just was in no way sufficient to the task that the federal government alone could take responsibility for this. The state and local governments just did not want to, especially in the wettest areas, where they did not have to be on the take, they just had to decide that this was not interesting to them. Wow. Some are more on the take and summer for corruption. Taft had warned about this failure of enforcement, even though the current enforcement was necessary to ensure states that their prerogatives were not going to be trampled. What do you say about the failure of enforcement . One of the ironies is that some of the laws staunchest proponents would also have been some of the sharpest opponents of a more liberal reading of the congress laws, which would actually allow a larger role for federal Law Enforcement. But this is a period when you have a relatively small federal state. There is not a strong Law Enforcement apparatus. Their entire sections of the country where there is a big demographic political change. Underway. You take a city or a state like new york where political participation in turnout in elections, just by sheer numbers, shoots out dramatically between 1920 1928. It is a whole new generation of ethnic americans who have come of age. They are citizens, they are voting. You get entire jurisdictions who effectively have the equivalent, the equivalency of nullification basically. The state or local authorities refused to enforce it, or simply declare that it is not a priority and wont. Wow. We have lots of great questions. We have a lot more to talk about, including the constitutional revolution of the failure prohibition and the repeal in the 21st amendment. Would you allow me to just quickly tell the story of the on stead case . This is the central constitution Fourth Amendment case. Unites my two heroes, chief justice staff and louis brand eyes for the dissent. It is the most important privacy dissent of the 20th century. I want all of you, you cannot come to the Constitution Center without getting a homework assignment. Your homework assignment is to read dissenting opinion on on stead. If you go to the exhibit, you can see the original telephone used to make his telephone calls to record all of his incredibly profitable booze from british columbia, canada. Really fast, heres what happened. He is a wild bootlegger, hes making these phone calls on the telephone. Federal agents put wiretaps on the sidewalks leading out to his office. They would listen in on these conversations, he says, the wiretap was illegal because there was no want and should be excluded. In an opinion by chief justice taft, the court told no trespass, no requirement. The wire traps were under public sidewalks and it did not go into the guise office, taft said you do not need a warrant. That is the most important privacy dissent of the 20th century. He envisions new technologies, he has in his desk drawer a clipping about a new technology, television. He misunderstands televisions. He thinks its twoway technology. Basically hand dissipates skype and webcams. His law says you cannot just look at a tv camera and see someone on the other side. Now, you can. He salutes to. This haunting prophetic passage, he said these may someday be developed, by which is possible without physically intruding into the home to extract secret paper from drawers and introduced them in court. A small intrusion at the time of the founding was helped to violate the Fourth Amendment. The general warns that sparked the American Revolution revealed less of our thoughts, sensations, emotions and wiretapping, which reveals the communication on both sides of the wire. You have to translate the constitution, so it has the same amount of privacy as a wires. Incredible opinion, please read it and see how these two great constitutionalist, taft is the original list. He did not like prohibition, but thinks it has to be enforced. Brand ice, the profit, he says that privacy, not property. Back to our regularly scheduled programming. I love teaching criminal procedure, because they are all prohibition cases, and it is not just homestead. Carol, the case was a probation case where they ripped open the upholstery to find the boos. Theres a lot to learn about the constitution in criminal procedure through probation. Just as theres a lot to learn about the war on drugs in the 1990s. We have seen this crowned shell of down about prohibition and Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated and there is the depression. All the sudden need the money from the liquor tax again and somehow, in 1932, the repeal amendment is proposed and by 1933 it is passed, not by the state legislators, but by this unique procedure never used again or before an American History of special ratifying conventions called in the states to ensure the state legislators did not undermine it. What we started the idea all along there have been people glued, because they were invested in the liquor industry had been approached prohibition. But just as prohibition was about to come up all of a sudden you have people who are not invested in alcohol at all. Financially. They start to become really concerned about the amendments and the implications. Those implications get amplified when the amendment is intended to you get someone like Pierre Dupont who switches sides. You get these figures and business. My class i teach them that people where women wear pearls and men wear hats. Very collected professional and 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 its impressionable about its democratic character in the first place. You try making that latter complain through reports, and it did not get the traction they wanted. But it did have appeal popularity. The idea that somehow the enactment of this amendment had not been reflected from the popular will. Something 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, they need to they needed to find a method for a repeal that looked at its as democratic as possible. Going to state convention seem to do that. The tricky point we were talking about earlier is the idea of state conventions as a ratification method means everybody who is selected the voters knew exactly how that person was going to vote before they walked into the door to do the vote. That also means that there would 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, so it wound up leading to a version that was arguably more democratic but also differently democratic. I think that is the tension we still work with. It was a referendum. But also passed very quickly. Even faster. It went faster. These two amendments or just unusually speedy. I think that the repeal maybe remember, doesnt have the record . No. Okay. I wish i remembered off the top of my head. It is right in this thrilling copy of i think it is under a year if i remember correctly. I just cant read it. It is the ranking of them that quickly, that is the hard part to do. A proposed i love that you took out the constitution. It makes me so happy. I always take out the constitution, and after i read it i will give you a copy so you can share with your fans. The 18th amendment is hereby repealed passed by congress on february 20th 1933 and ratified on the somber fifth. Very speedy. Thank you. There was no one year delay as it happened with the previous amendment. Can i just pick up on one point we made before . You said the repeal was challenged in court as anti democratic. I was a law student and i came across a wild article that said the 18th amendment by itself might be unconstitutional. The idea of a non constitutional amendments sounds like a its some actually argue that in court . Im trying to remember im not 100 sure. Basically he made this argument that essentially, that the process itself, because of both its expedited rate and the fact that the legislatures the way that the election cycles had worked, was that it was inconsistent with the ideas of rule by law which require deliberation is a greater part of the process. I would have to read it in order to be very precise. We all have to do our homework. Cspan viewers, check it out. Check out the arguments. Trying to find that really cool article that i read as a kid. They are so meticulous. Just like the old books. I was looking at something from the 1890s the other day and it was great. It was so precise. These ones were about civil damage laws. This actually tides in. There was a use of civil damage laws, preprohibition where since women were by virtue not able to own property if they were married. Their husband owned the property in their name. 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 the bartender and the police department, and if they continued serving her husband, they had denied her her means of support. The fact that she relied upon her husband as a means of support, because the law only gave her that as a choice, translated into the fact that she was entitled to that means of support and if it was the night to her, and she could sue the bartender, the saloon owner and anybody up and down the line for the right of means to support. They would have to pay for her. Sometimes there was even an extra payment depending on the numbers of dale stays in jail her husband had to serve. Isnt it great . Read it. The fact that so many women were at 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 culminating the progressive era. Women who are politically active they rhetorically would not challenge the idea that there were separate spheres, private sphere at home, public sphere politics with men. They argue that a more complex urban Industrial Society the women to be protectors, they needed a voice and politics because they were solutions that they could not control unless they had the vote. There were Public Health and safety issues. There were school issues. Now that their children were probably attending proper public schools. They were in favor of political inch franchise mint, in order for us to be guardians of our homes and provide these nurturing environments for our husbands and children, we need a voice, we need to say to be women as you understand women, we actually have to have some sort of input into whether solutions are allowed to serve alcohol at certain hours or whether people should be able to consume alcohol. It become became a powerful wedge for women to say, we are not going to challenge separate fears, but we cant actually do our job as mothers and wives unless you allow us some input into these portions. It is an amazing way to leverage weakness for strength. That is a powerful way of putting. For the repeal, one of our questions is, which why there were different states, there was north and South Carolina original prohibition amendment it was, connecticut . I remember the first two. I dont remember the second. For the 18th it was connecticut and rhode island. I have no idea why. I tried to look at up. I have not been able to fully track it down. For rhode island, ive done a lot looking at the Prohibition Party which was the minor party in American History. They actually had a movement in rhode island and were very upset about it. There is a speculate speculation that connecticut had really bad proportion and going into the 1960s. I think it was connecticut that was the u. S. Supreme court case that said when men, one voter. One of the court cases that led to it. There was they were still doing at large elections. They probably had a pretty and representative sample i dont know about the referendum system, they were fairly still a non democratic system and choosing representatives. In the Southern States there is also the ways and which race and segregation dramatically reconfigured the way people profit process prohibition. And a lot of Southern States it as African Americans become completely and utterly disenfranchised and denied their legitimate rights to votes as that gets kind of locked into position, all of a sudden prohibition is able to come up as an issue, simply because the people who are remaining as voters feel secure that they can have debates among themselves. Race always plays a role in when you are looking at that. It is so complicated, the fishers and cross cutting interests. The bipartisan on both sides. Prohibition is repealed. Happy days are here again. The depression is here but people can drink again except they cant, because it goes back to the states. The states are allowed to decide what sort of drinking to allow. Many of them retained short comey and bylaws. Tell us about those. Some states did do it. The localities are even more interesting. We were talking about some very contemporary examples where cities still have dry statutes. Or there can be a large variety where they are called blue laws, all sorts of different sorts of regulations. Not being able to obtain alcohol after 10 pm that seemed at times arbitrary, that our historical relics that are still part of the contemporary legal situation my family has a in ocean grove. They had this camp meeting and they say it is still a dry town. Technically the land is owned by the camp meeting so for those of us who are sinners, we had to walk across the bridge and buy a drink. In new jersey and pasadena, same thing. Tennessee. There is a whole variety of these places that were actually established as dry communities. For herman, they stayed dried way into the 20th century in part because the original land deeds have locked into the very deed that you received when you purchased your house, but if you ever bought, sold, or consumed liquor on site, that your house actually reverted back to the land company. There are all sorts of creative ways to keep an area dry. If that is your aspiration. I cant resist asking, if the Supreme Court is held in the reproductive the right to privacy, the right to define your own conception of meeting, have any of these dry lives i cant think of any. I think most of the time it winds up being less repeal and more just, whatever. People do what theyre going to do. The sense that this would be, where the investment would be rigorous and reinforce, they would be largely lost. Theyre mostly symbolic. In a lot of cases. Im sure we can find an exception to that, but in most cases it seems to be mostly symbolic. Alcohol consumption by the 1970s went up to its preprohibition. At the same time, those numbers can be interpreted differently. Even though the average american by the 1970s its consuming as much as the average american in say 1915, nonetheless, since that is being shared more widely between men and women, it is distributed more evenly and because we are no longer counting people who are 14 to 21 and that number. Between those two things, the rates of consumption are not necessarily as damaging is the way i put it. In other words, we are learning to drink much better. Im delighted and hope the National Constitution will help us drink very well tonight. What gender case involving women and men that Justice Ginsburg criticized, where women who were found to have been driving under the influence were chivalrous sly escorted home by the police, whereas young men were supposed to be arrested. That was a challenge of the gender discrimination. Are their constitutional issues involving gender and alcohol throughout the sixties and seventies . Looking at the 19th and 20th century, there is no doubt that mens and womens drinking were perceived differently. Probably the opposite, where women who drank in a public way were dismissed and that was a signifier for a whole world of mesquite and criminal activities verses consequences for men were nowhere near as high. The double standard operating throughout the law is pretty consistent. I cannot think of anything through the sixties and seventies. Except college dorm regulations, really. I think its the lens of the parenthesis law that came crashing down in the early sixties and seventies. The 1960s certainly and local princess laws treating College Women very differently than they did college men. There were curfews in schools like monitored. They had these bizarre rules where they said men and women could be in the same dorm room if the door was open and three or four were on the floor. Clearly there was a sense that women were to be treated as sort of words of the college and men were to be treated as creatures who needed to be kept away from these women under prescribe circumstances. Not in local parentheses structure comes crashing down in the seventies at which point men and women are treated equally. 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 during prohibition, the key thing is that context to 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. Nobody has the money to start big factories at the same rate again. All of the capital that is required to do that is can be in place. Marijuana legalization, how it works in terms of business economies a little bit different in part because the development of mass agribusiness in terms of marijuana cultivation does not have the camp on it, that the Great Depression had put on that same prohibition for alcohol. One, marijuana come consumption pales in comparison to marijuana conception you dont have the same social structure in place that you did in the early 20th century. George organizations its a different context. There was no saloon equivalent. There is no opium den. There is no sense that this is tied up with other big interests that are the occasional laser show. Several of our guests want to know about the relevance of the prohibition story today. The amendment that seems most likely to get some kind of conventional two thirds of the majority is balanced budget what is the story of prohibition tell us of a balanced budget of it actually being proposed or 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 want to do. It is much easier to tweak a federal statute. Not that it is easy, but what is involved in trying to tweak retweet for the amendments is really a logistical nightmare. A lot of the work was done through the whole step act, but having an amendment that was so difficult to repair or moderate largely constricted to its failure. At some point citizens have to exert trust that the process itself of negotiating of deliberation, its going to yield out it will be better in some ways then that permanent kind of status of using the constitution as a lawmaking instrument. The progressive era was an era of constitutional change. The 16th amendment, federal income tax, the 17th amendment, the 18th prohibition, the 19th womens suffrage. Yay. Yes yay. All reflected popular movements. They did not spring out of nowhere. But they have been percolating for decades, often, were bipartisan movements that were eventually qualified as the law. What does that tell us about seeing the minutes of the constitution today . The similarities between then and now today are as you say, was a period of incredible Political Engagement and a confusing period of Political Engagement where you had ideological blocks where it would coalesce together when it was convenient and coalesce against each other when it was less convenient. A historian wrote this famous article 30 years ago saying was there even a Progressive Movement . Did it exist . You had people who were in favor of prohibition on one day, working with you genesis and on a particular set of issues and the next day theyd be battling each other on the immigration reform. It was a kind of Ideological Coalition Building Block type world. They were sharply polarized. The sanders and trump phenomena shows us there is a whole bunch of voting blocs out there driven by ideological questions that dont necessarily matchup neatly to partisan politics. The question is does that lend itself to law making via a constitutional vehicle . Potentially, but it is messy and i think the lesson is that it will be very difficult to predict which groups lineup with each other in order to actually support such initiative. I think it would be surprising, you would be surprised to see who actually aligns with him. Its not just the issue. It is also a question of whether you think the constitution is the best vehicle for it so people who might align and one way on the issue will align another weighs about that particular strategy. On that wise note of caution, i have to thank you both for a superbly engaging and spectacular discussion applause thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen thank you for joining us. Lets go out and see the american spirits exhibit. Cspan viewers, come to philadelphia and see the exhibit. Lets go have some great drinks. Thank you very much. applause . Our goal today is to think about what progressive