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only 14 years later, by an overwhelming majority of 46 states with only two states dissenting, changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment in the 21st amendment, the only time in our constitutional history that amendment has been repealed and took only 14 years.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 Afric