Good evening. Im lauren rosenberg. Im so glad that youre here tonight. F. You if youre joining us for a first time, welcome. Now is the perfect time to silence your cell phones or anything else that might make noise during the program. In addition to the many lectures and tours garret peck leads, he presented at the library of congress and the National Archives and temperature prance to the sites is on cspan book tv and ten things you didnt know about with punk rock legend henry rollins. He was featured on a documentary by the smithsonian channel. He is author of seven books including prohibition in washington, d. C. how dry we werent, the prohibition hangover. And the great war in America World war i and its aftermath which was published in 2018. Before we get started, i want to make sure to invite you all to join us in the lobby following his presentation to enjoy a sample of a prohibition era cocktail tanks to torrence swan and founding spirits gin. So now please welcome me in welcoming garret peck. 100 years ago today, six hours from now, 12 01, once the clock ticks over to january 17th that, is the exact moment when National Prohibition began. So today yeah, i know. A lot of sour faces in the room. Well have a chance to celebrate our right to drink with a french 75 cocktail out in the lobby. I appreciate everyone coming here tonight and for cspan to come out here tonight and to film this here for the national audience. So thank you so much. So this is i warned a few people here about this image here. You see this on the screen right now. This is rather triggering image, slishl for especially like a drinker like myself. Pouring beer into a sewer. So tragic. That is the most famous shots of prohibition. The Police Commissioner in the hat overseeing them pouring the beer down the drain. But i want to cover tonight how prohibition came to be and why it didnt last. Why it lasted less than 14 years and we ended up repealing the 18th amendment to where today were most drinking and we dont think anything of it. So prohibition didnt just appear magically on its own. There was actually a giant movement in American History that pushed this upon the country. And that movement was the Temperance Movement. And this is from the library of congress so when they have the beautiful refrescos painted on the inside and this is a century long social Reform Movement, part of the progressive era, intended to make americans better people and more middle class and, of course, sober. And their idea was initially was they would try to get people to drink more moderately, stop drinking so much whiskey and instead drink beer and wine but by the 1830s more radicals had seized charge of the moment and decided no one could drink anything at all. If you drink at all, youre on the slippery slope to being a drunkard, as they called alcoholism back then. And they really demonized drinking. From this propaganda poster from 1872 showing king alcohol and his Prime Minister. So you see the king there standing on top of a barrel full of distilled spirits and then the Prime Minister next to him, death. And then notice in the foreground showing the tragedy of this little occasion on here. You see for example there is a family over here to the right. Minus the father. And then you have a weeping widow over there right there in the foreground. Women were so important to the temperance union, for the Temperance Movement because oftentimes women were victimized because the fact that their husbands were drinking so much. So it didnt come out of nowhere. It was a legitimate societal response to the heavy drinking of the 1820s and on in American History. They just took it to the extreme that, hey, no one should drink at all. And hey, we should also change the constitution to ban alcohol. Which is what they did. Again, women are so important to this movement and in 1873 was the beginning of the womens christian Temperance Movement and the ground state was the state of ohio. Because you had a large number of german immigrants and they controlled the brewery and where the wctu was founded and the antisaloon was created and headquartered as well. So Francis Willard is the first woman to get a statue in statuary hall in the capitol. Shes from the state of illinois. And she was one of the leading proponents of womens rights in our history, in our countrys history. So i take my hat off to her. Even if i dont agree with her on the antialcohol stance. He motto with the wctu is do everything. So they took up every imaginable issue with family and womens rights. So domestic violence, children working in factories and what not. It is incredible the Different Things they took up. Unfortunately women didnt have the vote yet. And so women could only have influence but they couldnt actually vote on these different issues. And at its peek the wctu had a quarter of a million and they got into the classrooms and taught children to be ashamed of alcohol. My grandmother knew that because i come perfect a long line of methodists. Most of us dont drink. But they had heavy handed moralizing into the classrooms and also built numerous water fountains around the country. Here in d. C. We have a water fountain not put up by the wctu, a number still survive, one in Rehoboth Beach and ocean city, new jersey, and theyre all around the country and here in d. C. We have the cogswell temperance fountain which all of you have walked past, it is catty corner from Archives Navy memorial. And this is our temperance fountain. So it once was an active water fountain and the symbolism was to tell people to drink water instead of whiskey. So this was erected in the 1880s. Right when the Temperance Movement was becoming this Massive National movement and trying to again trying to use moral persuasion to keep people from drinking alcohol. So after about 20 years or so of the wctu, that moral persuasion thing wasnt really taking root. People were still drinking. It wasnt having a whole big effect other than americans had shifted after the civil war away from drinking whiskey and now theyre drinking beer and since the civil war beer has been our national beverage. And in 1893 in ohio is founded this organization known as the Antisaloon League. They only existed for 40 years. They disbanded in 1933. And this is the organization that gives us the 18th amendment. The prohibition amendment. One of the early hires was a college student, you see a of him, named Wayne Wheeler. Anyone here know of Wayne Wheeler . Probably the most powerful lobbyist in American History. He invented this term pressure politics because he figured out how to squeeze the politicians to force them to vote dry even if they were wet in their personal lives. So every politicians first job is to get reelected and so he made sure that if anyone bucked him on prohibition issue on the wet dry issue, he made sure they didnt get reelected. And he leveraged the base of the Antisaloon League which were the protestant faithbased initiative and it was a progressive initiative. So we tend to think today in terms of like dry counties that kind of stuff, as being very conservative. This was a progressive movement. This was really about making americans better people and using the power of the government to make us into better people. Very importantly here, for the Antisaloon League, they formed a new alliance and this alliance really engendered two amendments that went into effect in 1920. One of them is prohibition and the other one you could probably guess from this particular photo which is the suffrage amendment. Again the 18th and then the 19th amendment. This is from january 1917 showing the suffrage from the National Womens party, the protest in front of the white house because president Woodrow Wilson was not he had not come out yet supporting the suffrage amendment. And so they began the 7 by 24 protest. Wayne wheeler had this alliance with the Suffrage Movement so both could get their way and this alliance fell apart after 1920 once younger women got the right to vote and decided they wanted to go visit the speakeasy too. So there is one thing in American History that really makes prohibition come about. And i should back this up quickly here. The Antisaloon League recognized and in fact Wayne Wheeler said in a Public Statement at some point in 1917 in saying we need to change the constitution really quickly because this is our very, very last chance. Because 1917, considering where the country was, in 1920 there was going to be a census taken and they could see how much the cities were starting to think of this like a teetertotter. The cities were starting to outnumber the countryside and theyre expecting in 1920 the census majority of americans would be in cities and that would outweigh the Temperance Movement which was more rural based. And up until 1920 we have the highest portion of immigration into the country. A third of the americans were foreign born or had a parent who was born overseas. So highest proportion ever in our history. So in many ways the Temperance Movement is a nativist movement. Because many of the immigrants coming in the 1880s and beyond are catholic overwhelmingly or theyre russian jews. All of the people are bringing in drinking habits with them which the protestants are tut tut, they have to conform to how we are living. They shouldnt be drinking alcohol. So prohibition is targeted at the catholic immigrants coming into the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s. What makes prohibition a reality is the event that leads up to this poster. World war i. We declare against germany on april 6th, 1917. And you all know who the biggest ethnic group in the country at the time were . German americans. And guess who the brewers were. The germans. Exactly. And of course they were the biggest bulwark against the Antisaloon League. And right away, as soon as we declared against germany, Wayne Wheeler and the other agents within the Antisaloon League began spearing beer drinking into treason. This is a very famous and effective propaganda poster because it tugs at your heartstrings. They had the Brewers Association had been funding newspapers and so on. And they brought out a lot of the shenanigans through senate hearings. This is all about embarrassing the wet cause and embarrassing the brewers and further marginalizing them all during world war i. So they spun beer drinking into treason at this time. And thus the in 1917 they brought forth the 18th amendment and it fairly sailed through Congress Without a whole lot of debate. Most of the American Public as the polls were going to ratify the amendment, it only took 13 months, by the way, to ratify this amendment. The majority of the stays ratified this amendment during the war itself. Because part of the selling point was we need to save grain to feed our soldiers during the war and we need sober soldiers to fight the german army, which ignores the fact that the german was drinking beer and the french army was drinking brandy and wine and the english army was drinking everything. So it is all part of the propaganda of selling the dry cause to the country in this emergency of the war efforts, everyone was like, yeah, we need to do this. We need prohibition to win the war. And most people thought when they were voting for this that they were simply outlying liquor, not realize that beer and wine was also going to be outlawed. So people were in for a rude surprise come january 16th, 1920. Now, everyone here has gotten a handout of eight prohibition era cocktails. I want to talk about the first one which is the one well sample afterwards which is one of my alltime favorites. It is the french 75. This is a cocktail invented during world war i. It has a couple of different origin stories behind it. One of which features a British Army Unit getting together with a french unit and kind of like the reeses Peanut Butter cup and they blended together and they blended together to make this cocktail. Other people say it was invented in new orleans and who really really knows. I was an artillery officer myself in the army and this is an incredible top secret project for the french. The germans called this thing the devil gun because it was so accurate and had a design on it that it could fire off six shots a minute and every shell would land in the same spot. So deadly. And a very small gun so two men could transport it around. So very, very effective. And because the u. S. Had almost no armament capability during the war, we had to borrow everything from the french. So all of the tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces we had to borrow from the french. That is what we used for the u. S. Army. In fact, the very first artillery shell is at the wood row wilson house, im on the board by the way to come visit over in coloramma and here it is. President wilson felt such a responsibility for sending off 2 million soldiers to fight in the trenches of france, so he kept it there in his bedroom. You could see it there on the mantel piece. He felt the responsibility of sending the nation to war. Another famous a one day famous american commanded a battery of french 75s during world war i and it is this man. The only future president to fight in world war i. Harry s. Truman. He was 35 when he let the battery of misfits and they were catholic and came out of Reform School and an illdisciplined group and he whipped them into shape. In part because he was so much older than the rest of them. And he led them very effectively during the war. And again he let the battery of french 75s. Now his unit was mostly catholic and the soldiers that were in his battery that became life long friends and political supporters of him, and so they were getting to talk. They saw that the prohibition amendments had passed. The 36 state nebraska ratified it on january 16th, 1919 and so five days later harry writes his fiancee bess walls and i love this because hes been talking to soldiers and anyway, it looks to me like the moon shine business is going to be pretty good in the land of liberty and Green Trading stamps an some of us want to get in on the ground floor. At least we want to get there in time to lay in a supply for future consumption. I think a quart of bourbon would last about 40 years. He was talking with soldiers and catholics and they were making plans to bootleg and if you have been out to kansas city, it was as wet as detroit and chicago and so on. It is just like what were they thinking this was ever going to work. So, again, the 18th amendment was ratified by the state of nebraska on january 16th, 1919. In fact it has three parts of the amendment but ill put up the first part to you so read it. And i highlighted the most important parts of it which is that the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors, dot, dot, dot, is hereby prohibited. That is what the amendment states. Now you now have to have a law to define what do they mean by intoxicating liquor. And Wayne Wheeler said anything with alcohol is going to be made illegal. So he crafted a law together with the minnesota congressman with this amazing mustache, ill show this to you here next, named Andrew Volstead and he was a republican and chaired the House Judiciary Committee and hence he had charge of writing this bill. I think it had 67 parts in the bill called the volstead act and he went down innin egg anyonomy for this. And so anything above. 05 alcohol was now illegal. That was considered to be intoxicating. So they were they forbade anyone from calling near beer, near beer. They had to come up with names like bev othat you wouldnt want to drink. And this act had a number of loopholes. Many of which are quite famous. Youve heard of for example medicinal whiskey. Before prohibition the American Medical Association just like today, said, uhhuh, alcohol is not medicine. We know it is not medicine. During prohibition on the other hand all of the doctors could prescribe, make 100 prescriptions of a pint of whiskey per month and all of the doctors wanted to get in on the game so the a. M. A. Changed tact during the prohibition. So this is one of the major loopholes widely abused during prohibition. You had sacramental wine because the catholic church, the jews, the lutherans, the episcopalians they still needed to have wine for their services. And so that was one of the loopholes. You had many, many people suddenly declaring themselves to be jewish rabbis to distribute alcohol or wine especially. They gave a huge license to the mid western farmers who everyone could take 200 pounds of fruit, you could take all of the fruit you waned and make up to 200 gallons of preserved fute if you preverve fute. By the way, it is going to ferment. If you leave an orange on your counter, i discovered this a couple of days ago. I had it on the counter for a couple of days an i bit into it and i was like, oh, it fermented. You notice it right away. Leave any fruit and it will ferment. And it is a natural it is a natural process, furmentation. So that was a carve