The only information chartered beautiful. So great to hear those wonderful words of our Inspiring Mission statement here in the beautifully renovated theater. Just a few months ago, we opened up this gorgeous new space, and you are hearing me from these stateoftheart mikes on these beautiful new seats and i am thrilled to see so many people to celebrate the opening of the return of our great exhibit american spirits. [applause] it afteru to go see the show. Cspan viewers, i want you to come to philadelphia and see this beautiful exhibit which tells an amazing constitutional story. Incredible question how that happen . That america voluntarily by a vote of 46 states with only two states dissenting in 1919 decided to ban intoxicating liquors with the 18th amendment , bythen only 14 years later an overwhelming majority, changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment, the only time in our history and amendment has been repealed and it took only 14 years. I hear a bravo from one of the celebrants in the crowd. Those here enjoying a full bar. Everyone is enjoying their drink. Leadingtwo of americas experts of phenomenal historians and i will introduce them in a second. I want to say how thrilled everyone here is to welcome our new chair, Vice President joe biden. [applause] meaningful that Vice President biden joins this incredible group. He was preceded by governor jeb bush. Educating ourselves about this history, which is forgotten. Teach us so much about who we are as a nation and how the constitution has changed and how we should think about constitutional change. It is my great pleasure to introduce our phenomenal panelists, lease or Anderson Lisa Anderson is in a story and at juilliard. Historian at juilliard. Historian, the author of a bunch of spectacular books. Please join me in welcoming lisa and joshua. [applause] so glad to be here. Lisa, let us jump right into it. To a certain degree, we will spend the whole show talking about this question how did it happen . Lisa the first part is that drunk people are annoying, especially if youre not drunk. That really becomes the starting point. There are a few pathways that people come to prohibition. One is simply employers. It is dangers dangerous to have employees drinking on the job. Especially when america industrialized, that becomes greater. You have people coming from a fundamentally religious point of view. Part of this is the desire to restrict something they see essenes will as sinful. Part of it is something that prohibits the process of salvation. You need selfdetermination to have that. Part of it is political. There is a growing movement of opposition towards corporations and trust. The liquor industry fits that profile. A lot of people pushed back seeing it as infiltrated politics for both parties. It could affect the future of democracy in america. Jeffrey fascinating. Employers, religious element, anticorporate element. Joshua, tell us about more. There are also immigrants in the urban areas versus dry people in the rural. Progressives, who we think of today as liberals, turned out to be quite antiimmigrant. Joshua there is an incredible backdrop and some of it may seem familiar today. This is a time 30 years leading up to prohibition. The massive influx of immigrants from countries that would be considered not particularly unusual, but at the time immigrants from italy and ireland and eastern europe, and greece were considered quite foreign and not necessarily part of the fabric as old stock american populace. They had drinking cultures that came to represent something that was foreign and dangerous and not part of the organic american nation. It was a time of rapid demographic transformation. Rapid urbanization. You had quite a lot of political and cultural contests that grew up around that. It was also a time of Cultural Innovation and a time when gender roles were getting thrown in the air because women were moving into the workplace and more people were in the cities. You put all of this together and Something Like alcohol, or the prohibition of alcohol became representative of a number of cultural touch points. Became the type of issue that people could latch onto in a representative way, even if not always consistently. As you said, many precedents we think of as liberals, many of them latched on to prohibition for their own reason. By the same token, many antiprogressives, protectors of the old guard also embraced prohibition for their own reasons. Host a bipartisan movement uniting these urban progressives with rural. Lets take us up to the progressive era. The question of, whiskey tax is important. 40 of funding the National Government since the time of the founding when the whiskey tax the 25 tax George Washingtons administration imposed created the whiskey rebellion. All of a sudden you dont need the whiskey revenue when the 16th amendment authorized a federal income tax. Tell us about that and the Politics Around 1913, 1914, during the administration of that great president , taft, the subject of my next biography. He was against the prohibition because he thought it would be hard to enforce and would lead to a trampling of state rights. Tell us about the Politics Around 1912, at a time when more than half of the states were dry. Lisa there were huge economic reasons to avoid it. Those reasons seem so significant, for particularly the beer industry. Americans were starting to transition away from distilled alcohol and more towards beer, partially because of refrigeration. It made that technologically possible. All of the people involved in the beer industry, they are important because they are better organized than the distilled industries. They are feeling good because their rates of sale are going up. There is a long history of cooperation with the federal government. They dont organize particularly well to stop prohibition simply because they did not believe it could happen. The people who were proprohibition also believed the same. It made more sense, it was something we could look at the amendment as something that ambushed both sides. There is a law in 1913 that allows states to restrict the booze imported and taft the vetoes that law. He wants to be on the Supreme Court. He Things Congress has no power to regulate this. His veto is overridden by a two thirds majority because of the intervention of a guy called wheeler, one of the political operatives of his day. About his role and how the two thirds majority is building in congress. Joshua i will start that and handed to you. Wheeler is a fascinating character, arguably one of the first modern lobbyist. He is a product of the era where you mentioned the progressives earlier, but there are a lot of progressive causes they gave rise to a modern advocacy model. People calling and organizing visits to congressman, not offices, there were not any then, well there were. Letter writing campaigns, letter to the editor programs, Public Meetings the kinds of things we think of today as being a central part of modern organized political action. That was really the antisaloon league. You also saw other advocates oftentimes intersecting with them. People trying to secure passage of antifederal labor laws, people trying to secure passage of immigration restriction or laws loosening, it was a time of heightened for political activism. Jeffrey wheeler was described as an older version of net flanders ned flanders. Lisa i kind of like that. Flanders was terrifying, that would be the best way to describe it. He has an insane organizational se and a willingness to lets just say pressure. If he had been part of the mob he wouldve been successful. It was one of those things where he was able to find just the right person in just the right position and figure out exactly how to persuade the person. Even if this involves them removing people from office by circulating things that were unsavory, by making it appear that people who were neutral actually had a close relationship with the liquor traffic. He was not above those techniques. He used them quite a bit. That is when we talk about the antisaloon league, for most historians we call it the first Major Pressure group. Something different and special in comparison to public politics related by 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 were trying to create initiative and referendum to establish better procedures for bringing forward candidates. All sorts of regulations to try to make clinical parties Political Parties better and more democratic. All of a sudden, the antisaloon said, we doin and not need Political Parties. We can represent the people directly. That became an overwhelming sort of jolt to the entire way that people organized politics. No longer was it so dependent on Political Parties. Jeffrey imagine a populist force rising up in challenging the political establishment. Lisa they looks like populist forces, and he said they were, but were not quite sure he was representing that many people. He kept very secret records. Jeffrey and there were no gallup polls. We do know that by 1913, wheeler was able to persuade two thirds of congress to override the veto, even though taft was against prohibition. Wilson who vanquished taft in 1912 is not clear how he stands. Gh and wilsons ni gives systematic address to Congress Declaring War on germany. Two days later on april 4, congress by a two thirds vote proposes the prohibition amendment. Tell us the story about how part of that reflected the xenophobic anger at socalled german brewers and what was the role of world war i in pushing this amendment over the edge. Joshua i think world war i catalyzes social economic demographic forces that have been in play for many years. Many wars, including world war i put the economy on steroids, which in effect will, in this case, accelerate patterns of urbanization and industrialization. Moving a lot more women and rural people into urban settings into the workforce. Like other wars, it offends a upends a lot of older cultural patterns. It places into a spotlight this question of who is an american, brewing for some years. Lisa brewing. Joshua german americans would be suspect during the war, but immediately after the war, and in context of the revolution, a lot of people in the u. S. Became suspect. There is a larger discussion whether they are fit for citizenship. Whether they are italians who are suspected of being an artist being anarchist or Eastern European jews suspected of being communist or socialist, these people all seem very suspect particularly in the context of the aftermath of the war that required immense amount of mobilization and a focus on unity of the american spirit. 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 sexual mores and religious practices. It allows them to grab these issues and use them in a representative way to talk about a larger concern. It comes to a head around 1920. Jeffrey the amendment is proposed on april 4, 1917, and it is ratified in 1919, about a year and a half later. The ratification is by three quarters of the state legislatures. Time for a reminder about how you can amend the constitution. There are two ways to propose and ratify. An amendment can be proposed 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 would be the first time that proposal mechanism would be used in u. S. History. To ratify any three quarters of to ratify, you need three quarters of the state ofislature or three quarters special conventions called in the states. Thanks for indulging me on that brief article five primer. We had some Great Middle School kids here today. I quizzed them about how you amended. They got it. It was wonderful. Lisa give those teachers gold stars. Jeffrey and cspan viewers, if you have further doubts about how you should learn about how to amend the constitution check out the interactive constitution that the National Constitution center has created with the Federalist Society and the american constitutional society. You will see scholars writing about the constitution. We have a great explainer on article five. Back to the ratification. It takes three quarters of the state legislatures. How did ratification go . Since 46 of the 48 states ratified. World war i is going on. Lisa it was fast. That was 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 means that soldiers in world war i were having difficulty communicating with their representatives in a state legislatures. Theyre having trouble communicating in ways that voters want to be able to articulate to their representatives. That is a factor. The other thing that comes into play is that the speed means that many people of the state legislatures voting on ratifying this 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. There are two ways in which the processs speed might later be seen of indication it failed to meet the standard of deliberation. That is a critical prerequisite for democracy. Jeffrey it is critical. That is the whole point of ratification. People have to deliberate an issue before the constitution can be amended. That is a fascinating process failure. Tell us about how some of these state legislatures are apportioned. R malapportioned. That means that rural votes count for more than urban. Joshua voting in the middle part of the 19th century that got liberalized for the most part. There were many states in which alien residents who declared their intention to become an american citizen can vote. There were very few registration processes. There were very few residency requirements. Americans had long done away with requirements that voters be taxpayers. There was a time between the 1870s and aim 1920s where we dont always move in a direction towards liberalization. It retrench is, in large part because of the influx of the immigrants who are seen as suspect and not part of the upper body politic. The rise of a very vocal working class in cities. The rise of the Union Movement that many middleclass employers who came to embrace prohibition follows suspect. You see a rash of laws of the at the state and local level that make it harder to vote. They also tilt the vote to more traditional rural counties. Laws requiring voter id laws for the first time in american history. Requirements. The states that previously allowed noncitizens who had declared their intent to become citizens, they were no longer allowed to vote. It became much harder for working people who were transient, and did not always have the ability to document the residency to participate in elections. If you look at Voter Participation as a ratio of eligible, of age adults, it drops off in the late 19th centurys. A lot of states are apportioning legislative districts and congressional districts at large in a way to lose the urban population or they are relying 1900 thatnumbers from do not reflect the movement to cities and the arrival of new americans. There is definitely an antidemocratic strain to the kinds of things. Theyre not always done with the intention necessarily of limiting the franchise or embracing some sort of regressive type of agenda. Progressives, who you are pointing out earlier, attempting to improve the electoral process are instituting processes but that also make it more difficult to vote but they are doing it with the best of intentions. There is a case to me made that a lot of the sort of compulsiveness of this argument in the 1920s is the fact that a lot of people never viewed prohibition as a legitimate exercise of the democratic process. Jeffrey this process that is supposed to speak to the deliberate sense of the people may have failed for this malapportioned meant and other reasons. The amendment is ratified in 1919. It becomes law and it is up to congress to say what it means. Congress proposes an act which sets the limit for permissible spirits at an incredibly low percentage. Surprisingly low. Many people said, it will not cover beer, it turned out it did. Wilson is so upset that he vetoes the act. Did people feel they were sold a bill of goods . Lisa the people who were paying attention probably felt that way. Despite the fact that voting turnout is significant. We are getting numbers between 85 and 90 voting turnout in some elections. Nonetheless, the amount of educated voting is not always high. People mostly voted for whatever Political Party their neighbor voted for. There was not necessarily a lot of attention to the intricacies of what exactly they were setting into play. You see with the ball stud act you see with the act, people suspected the level would be 2 . They would have a near beer product. That quickly became clear that would not be the case. A lot of people who had hoped that congress would interpret the new amendments in a way that was generous 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 was not the case. Reorient. Year to because of the amendment was written, you could purchase as much alcohol as you wanted in that year before. You could store it. They did very good sales leading up to prohibition. A lot of basements became very full. Did anyone here go to yale . Lisa and willing to admit it. They had a 16 year supply of liquor in the 1920s, membership had its privilege