December 15, 2008 • 15 mins
The alcohol prohibition of the 1920s was known at the time as 'the noble experiment.' Check out this podcast from HowStuffWorks to learn more about this constitutional amendment banning the sale and production of alcoholic products.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candy Skipson, joined by staff writer Jane mcgrandy. Jane,
It's funny when someone tells you that you can't do
something and makes you want to do it even more. Totally.
(00:23):
One of my favorite movies maybe not currently, but when
I was a kid was Pollyanna. Have you ever seen Pollyanna?
I have. It was Haley Mills, right, yeah, yeah, I know.
It's toward the end of the movie. She wants to
go to the carnival, and her aunt says that she
can't go, so she climbs out the window and she
makes just the carnival just fine. You know, she's virtually unscathed.
But it's the coming home when she gets in trouble
(00:44):
and she ends up plummeting to the ground and becoming paralyzed.
I'm like, well, yeah, that's just too bad, because if
her AUNTI let her go in the first place, that
wouldn't have happened. It's an interesting argument. Yeah, that's true,
and that's sort of what happened with the prohibition. I
guess you could say. Indeed, and uh, we're talking about
is the alcohol prohibition of the nine twenties in the US,
(01:05):
and it was called at the time the Noble Experiment,
which I find really interesting that it was called that
because it sort of had the idea that, um, well,
obviously it's noble. It's like it's an important thing of
morality wise, but also that it might not work. It's
just an experiment and we're not sure what's going to happen,
and it actually it kind of failed. It did, And
(01:27):
it's so funny that term noble. I think that that
really brings up the question of morality and ethics in
terms of alcohol. And even today I may be out
of line saying us, but I feel like in America
it's it's a really hot debate about whether or not
drinking is wrong or right, or how old should you
be when you drink, how much should you drink? Should
families introduce their children to alcohol at a younger age.
(01:49):
I feel like in other countries or other places where
there isn't a drinking age or it's you know particular
where they let them drink it. Yeah, it's like, you know,
it gradually is inter used into your life, and that's
as part of the culture and it's not this taboo issue. Yeah,
it's interesting difference. And even today in America we have
plenty of towns and counties that are dry, so called
(02:10):
dry and then and that they they don't sell alcohol
at all. And I would argue that prohibition forever affected
the American point of view about alcohol. And even though
it was repealed, I think we still look on it
as you know, an object that is taboo. Yeah, and
it's interesting. I mean, it had its roots before the
twentieth century. Is interesting to look back as far back
(02:32):
as eighteen forty six, main actually as a state, uh
was the first state to pass a statewide prohibition law,
and so they and they and so they sort of
set a precedent that that gained some some fever. And
before that, in thirty eight there was a lawn massa
chose has passed that only allowed people to buy alcohol
in really large quantities. And the idea behind that was
that the poor people couldn't get to it. And that's
(02:54):
what's so funny about prohibition are these ideas that people
held about alcohol, the idea that only um Irish and
German immigrants were the ones who abused it, or the
idea that it was evil or that if you drink
it would lead to insanity or abuse or poverty. And
even Henry Ford was one of the more famous advocates
(03:15):
of prohibition, and he had the idea that it decreased
worker productivity. And I know, even today there are people
who suggests that when you're buying a car, you should
ask to see the manufacturing report and if that particular
car was manufactured on Monday or Friday. Don't get it
because people are either you know, getting drunk for the
weekend or they're hungover from the weekend for the Yeah.
(03:35):
Or even people who say that they won't eat out
in restaurants the day after holiday because the people are hungover.
It's just so funny to me. But anyway, back to
the point, Um, so we have this idea that alcohol
is bad, and we're coming off of World War One
and we're seeing, you know, a larger influx of immigrants
to the United States. Yeah, And to your point, of
World War One is where we get a lot of
(03:57):
the anti German sentiment. At least it came to boiling
point at that point. Obviously the United States was fighting
against Germany and the war and so um uh. Non
Germans in the United States would look on Germans as
sort of like are you they're suspicious, like are you
favoring German in this Germany and this war and etcetera.
And U So in Germans, obviously, we're also associated with beers.
(04:20):
I mean you look at the names of beers like
Budweiser and like all different names, it's it's all German basically,
So many beers are German. And in the United States
at this time, a lot of the breweries were actually
owned by Germans. Ais are Bush for instant that was
a German ren brewery. So there's this idea. Some historians
say that prohibition was a result of this idea of
of wasss white Anglo Saxon Protestants wanting to suppress people
(04:43):
who are not like them. So, whatever the cause, if
we look at a rough timeline of how prohibition came
into existence, we see that there were a lot of
local and state level laws passed first outlawing alcohol. Main
went dry, like Jane said in eighty six, and real
areas went dry in the West and the South, but
urban areas were a little bit more resistant. Yeah, it's interesting.
(05:05):
It's also interesting that this was often associated with women's
movements throughout the nineteenth century. Women were a strong force
along with the progressive movement obviously of getting women the
right of vote. There was also this this corresponding idea
of prohibition. Right in eighteen seventy three, the Women's Christian
Temperance Union formed, and they were famous in Ohio, especially
of going to saloons and and praying on the saloon floor.
(05:27):
You know, they wanted men to abstain because they were
the people that that the nation turned to to be
lawmakers and leaders, and women didn't have a voice at
this time, like you were saying. And so if men
were drunk and they were able to carry out those duties,
who was the nation looked to. And one really famous
female pro temperance figure was Carrie Nation, and she was
fimous for a hatchet and walking around wielding the hatchet
(05:50):
to discourage people from going into saloons. And her husband
was an alcoholic and so she witnessed firsthand the so
called dangerous of alcohol. And in eighteen sixty and a
couple of years prior to this union really taking off,
the Prohibition Party actually formed alongside the Republicans and the
Democrats because people felt like they weren't getting a voice.
Their voice wasn't being heard by the Republicans or Democrats.
(06:12):
And we can think about this so like the third
party system and the idea that it will come up
over a certain idea in particular, and hopefully one of
the party's Republican or Democrat will will adopt it. And
they weren't doing anything at the time. So that's why
the prohibition movement where got fed up with it and
formed their own party. And they pointed out that there
was a link between alcohol abuse and child abuse and
(06:32):
crime and violence in the cities. And so finally, by
nineteen nineteen, sixty percent of the United States had banned
alcohol at the local level. Yeah, and by nineteen nineteen,
the Congress actually passed the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
which gave the government the power basically to enforce prohibition
(06:53):
among all the entire country, all of the states. And
the funny thing about prohibition is this, the eighteen Amendment
outlawed the sale, all the manufacturer and the importation of alcohol,
but it never outlawed drinking it or possessing it. And
so if you already had a lot of alcohol in
your storehouse. You can keep it. You know, if you
had a flask and he had somewhere to fill it,
(07:15):
you could do that. You could bring it around with you.
You just couldn't import it, and you can sell it.
And I guess sort of the idea behind that is
to enforce the drink, like to enforce prohibiting the drinking
of it would be too difficult. I guess. Obviously, if
someone's one seller is stocked, you can't go into their
their house and destroy their property. That would be going
too far. And there wasn't enough manpower to do that either.
(07:38):
And that's what was so tricky about prohibition in the
thirteen years that it lasts, which is that it was
so hard to enforce. And the Volstead Act followed the
Eighteenth Amendment, and this is what was outlining the different
enforcement policies that the government had in terms of prohibition.
So it discussed the penalties to drinking UM, the exceptions
(07:58):
like if you were using it for religious purposes that
was okay, and also to find the legal limits of
the alcohol content for beverage. Azz yahai I said it
about zero point five percent alcohol was over the legal
limit UM and to give you a point of reference,
I think like an average like a week beer basically
is four percent. So that's a pretty low limit right there.
(08:20):
So you could drink. I guess it's just that whatever
you were drinking wasn't going to get you drunk, especially imagining.
That's true. And it was interesting about the Volstead Amendment.
I didn't know this until I started researching for this podcast,
was that Woodrow Wilson actually vetoed it. And UM, it
was interesting to me because I I know Wilson in
history are sort of a progressive. He was one of
the most progressive um uh presidents in the United States,
(08:42):
and prohibition was a progressive movement. But um, apparently some
story would say that Wilson found it unnecessarily authoritarian basically,
and you can make that case because um, the idea
of enforcing the Volstead Act became a huge headache, and
obviously it showed how how authoritarian the law really was,
and it was progressing the nation in a strange direction.
(09:05):
And today I don't know if there are still people
who advocate prohibition, or at least there are people who
probably do promote temperance. But prohibition led to some really
nasty stuff. And it's again, like we were saying at
the beginning of the podcast, if someone tells you can't
do something, you're going to find a way around it.
And usually the way around it is going to lead
(09:25):
to breaking some other rules. And organized crime took off exponentially.
I can't even begin to, you know, describe how bad
it got. You know, you look at someone like al
Capone and the speakeasy said he ran, and all the
gangs that resulted from this, and all the bootlegging, and
even European rum flights, like people would ride out to
the different bodies of water around the U. S and
(09:47):
and meet European ships that had rum waiting for them
and they would bring them back. And speaking of speakeasies,
obviously those were there was you legal bars during the prohibition,
um they actually surged and if you look at the numbers,
there were more speakeasies during prohibition than there were legal
bars before prohibition. And that just boggles me. It is.
And so you look at all this crime that came
(10:08):
about as a result of prohibition, and when the depression
on set, people started getting really ticked off because you
know that the money that came from the legal taxation
of alcohol could have been supporting the country's economy, and
instead this money was going to gangsters like al Capone
who were making a mint off something that was a
link all. And it's interesting to look at the money
(10:29):
aspect of this. I actually had researched, um the I
R S for an article I was doing, and the
I R S was actually charged with basically enforcing prohibition.
And I was really interested to learn this because you
would never think that. But it was the idea of
there was revenue passing hands and and um, it was
not being taxed, and that was the main way that
we could track down the government could track down illegal transactions,
(10:52):
was the idea of money being around in it and
there's no proof of taxation. And so that was the
way that obviously al Capone was called right exactly after
all the murders that he oversaw and all the gay activity,
it was on the tax fraud essentially or tax evasion
that he was he was canned essentially. Yeah, and sorry,
it's it's interesting that, um that also the dangerous things
(11:14):
that came as a result of prohibition was that, um,
this whole atmosphere of criminal activity actually exposed more people
to dangerous drugs. People like historians look back and they're like, oh,
these people are hanging around uh, illegal crowds, basically criminal crowds,
and and so it exposed everyone to more dangerous things.
And one thing that got me as well was the
idea that there was still liquor around that needed to
(11:36):
be used for industrial purposes during the prohibition, and so, uh,
the the government started contaminating this liquor and and so
that people wouldn't drink it. And and I guess they
didn't get the word around enough because it resulted in
lots of deaths. I think adulterated liquor caused fifty deaths,
isn't that wild? Yeah, with more people trying to manufacture
(11:58):
their own liquor or sometimes to be made really really
dangerously and so ingesting it could mean death and bethlub Yeah,
And that was one of those strange things about prohibition
is that for every pro there was a con So
the number of deaths related to services of the liver
from drinking too much alcohol went down, but like you
were saying, the number of deaths from drinking contaminated liquor
(12:20):
or home manufactured liquor went up, and oddly enough alcoholics.
The number of alcoholics went up as well. Yeah, so
more alcoholics, but pro less people drinking alcohol. And so
finally people could see the prohibition was not working, there
was no way to enforce it, and so in n
three the amendment was overturned, and so far it's the
only amendment in the Constitution to be overturned later again
(12:44):
by another constitutional amendment. And it's interesting also the the
amendment that overturned prohibition, UH made sure to make allowances
that states could at the local level, you can ban
liquor as much as you want, um and one story
and noted that there's only two ways for an individual,
just a single person, to aviolate the constitution. One is
(13:06):
to enslave someone and the other is to bring alcohol
through a dry county. And that's to think about the
opposing and the spectrum and ideas of temperance continue to
pervade our national culture, especially in places in the South.
We see that temperance is really strongly advocated, and you
see that most dry counties are in the South today.
(13:29):
And something interesting that I was reading, um I love
Love of Love, Leticia Baldredge I think she's a great writer.
She was Jackie Kennedy's social secretary during the Kennedy years
and in Camelot, and she was recounting in one of
her memoirs that there was a big formal event that
Kennedy was hosting. It was one of the first ones,
and she was, you know, helping a planet, and she
didn't think anything of it. But she had little station
(13:51):
set up in the ballroom where people could go over
and and mix their drinks. And everyone looked at the
White House and they decried Kennedy as someone promoting you know,
revelry and alcoholism. It was just a mess, and Kennedy
got really mad and he was like, Leticia, next time
you mixed the drinks. In the back day, it might
not be as big of a deal, but you know,
(14:11):
during that time, it certainly was because, you know, think
about it, only a few decades had passed since prohibition
have been overturned, and people were still learning how to
be temperate with alcohol. And that's that's the main thing
that people have to do. I think in our cultures,
you know, you set your own levels for temperance, and
there are laws that dictate the legal drinking age, and
you know which counties are dry, but you know, it
(14:33):
really is a personal choice in the end. That's true,
and it makes sense now this local level. I wanted
to give a shout out to Maryland, my home state, UM,
because during Prohibition it got the name of free state
and nickname is free state because they weren't they didn't
really like enforcing prohibition and it's sort of ticked off
the government at the time, and in Maryland is known
as sort of free liquor place. Oh, lady Jane Goodness,
(14:56):
that's where I get it from. Well, if you want
to learn more about prohibition and temperance and alcohol in general,
will be sure to check out how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com. Let us know
what you think. Send an email to podcast at how
stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candy Skipson, joined by staff writer Jane mcgrandy. Jane,
It's funny when someone tells you that you can't do
something and makes you want to do it even more. Totally.
(00:23):
One of my favorite movies maybe not currently, but when
I was a kid was Pollyanna. Have you ever seen Pollyanna?
I have. It was Haley Mills, right, yeah, yeah, I know.
It's toward the end of the movie. She wants to
go to the carnival, and her aunt says that she
can't go, so she climbs out the window and she
makes just the carnival just fine. You know, she's virtually unscathed.
But it's the coming home when she gets in trouble
(00:44):
and she ends up plummeting to the ground and becoming paralyzed.
I'm like, well, yeah, that's just too bad, because if
her AUNTI let her go in the first place, that
wouldn't have happened. It's an interesting argument. Yeah, that's true,
and that's sort of what happened with the prohibition. I
guess you could say. Indeed, and uh, we're talking about
is the alcohol prohibition of the nine twenties in the US,
(01:05):
and it was called at the time the Noble Experiment,
which I find really interesting that it was called that
because it sort of had the idea that, um, well,
obviously it's noble. It's like it's an important thing of
morality wise, but also that it might not work. It's
just an experiment and we're not sure what's going to happen,
and it actually it kind of failed. It did, And
(01:27):
it's so funny that term noble. I think that that
really brings up the question of morality and ethics in
terms of alcohol. And even today I may be out
of line saying us, but I feel like in America
it's it's a really hot debate about whether or not
drinking is wrong or right, or how old should you
be when you drink, how much should you drink? Should
families introduce their children to alcohol at a younger age.
(01:49):
I feel like in other countries or other places where
there isn't a drinking age or it's you know particular
where they let them drink it. Yeah, it's like, you know,
it gradually is inter used into your life, and that's
as part of the culture and it's not this taboo issue. Yeah,
it's interesting difference. And even today in America we have
plenty of towns and counties that are dry, so called
(02:10):
dry and then and that they they don't sell alcohol
at all. And I would argue that prohibition forever affected
the American point of view about alcohol. And even though
it was repealed, I think we still look on it
as you know, an object that is taboo. Yeah, and
it's interesting. I mean, it had its roots before the
twentieth century. Is interesting to look back as far back
(02:32):
as eighteen forty six, main actually as a state, uh
was the first state to pass a statewide prohibition law,
and so they and they and so they sort of
set a precedent that that gained some some fever. And
before that, in thirty eight there was a lawn massa
chose has passed that only allowed people to buy alcohol
in really large quantities. And the idea behind that was
that the poor people couldn't get to it. And that's
(02:54):
what's so funny about prohibition are these ideas that people
held about alcohol, the idea that only um Irish and
German immigrants were the ones who abused it, or the
idea that it was evil or that if you drink
it would lead to insanity or abuse or poverty. And
even Henry Ford was one of the more famous advocates
(03:15):
of prohibition, and he had the idea that it decreased
worker productivity. And I know, even today there are people
who suggests that when you're buying a car, you should
ask to see the manufacturing report and if that particular
car was manufactured on Monday or Friday. Don't get it
because people are either you know, getting drunk for the
weekend or they're hungover from the weekend for the Yeah.
(03:35):
Or even people who say that they won't eat out
in restaurants the day after holiday because the people are hungover.
It's just so funny to me. But anyway, back to
the point, Um, so we have this idea that alcohol
is bad, and we're coming off of World War One
and we're seeing, you know, a larger influx of immigrants
to the United States. Yeah, And to your point, of
World War One is where we get a lot of
(03:57):
the anti German sentiment. At least it came to boiling
point at that point. Obviously the United States was fighting
against Germany and the war and so um uh. Non
Germans in the United States would look on Germans as
sort of like are you they're suspicious, like are you
favoring German in this Germany and this war and etcetera.
And U So in Germans, obviously, we're also associated with beers.
(04:20):
I mean you look at the names of beers like
Budweiser and like all different names, it's it's all German basically,
So many beers are German. And in the United States
at this time, a lot of the breweries were actually
owned by Germans. Ais are Bush for instant that was
a German ren brewery. So there's this idea. Some historians
say that prohibition was a result of this idea of
of wasss white Anglo Saxon Protestants wanting to suppress people
(04:43):
who are not like them. So, whatever the cause, if
we look at a rough timeline of how prohibition came
into existence, we see that there were a lot of
local and state level laws passed first outlawing alcohol. Main
went dry, like Jane said in eighty six, and real
areas went dry in the West and the South, but
urban areas were a little bit more resistant. Yeah, it's interesting.
(05:05):
It's also interesting that this was often associated with women's
movements throughout the nineteenth century. Women were a strong force
along with the progressive movement obviously of getting women the
right of vote. There was also this this corresponding idea
of prohibition. Right in eighteen seventy three, the Women's Christian
Temperance Union formed, and they were famous in Ohio, especially
of going to saloons and and praying on the saloon floor.
(05:27):
You know, they wanted men to abstain because they were
the people that that the nation turned to to be
lawmakers and leaders, and women didn't have a voice at
this time, like you were saying. And so if men
were drunk and they were able to carry out those duties,
who was the nation looked to. And one really famous
female pro temperance figure was Carrie Nation, and she was
fimous for a hatchet and walking around wielding the hatchet
(05:50):
to discourage people from going into saloons. And her husband
was an alcoholic and so she witnessed firsthand the so
called dangerous of alcohol. And in eighteen sixty and a
couple of years prior to this union really taking off,
the Prohibition Party actually formed alongside the Republicans and the
Democrats because people felt like they weren't getting a voice.
Their voice wasn't being heard by the Republicans or Democrats.
(06:12):
And we can think about this so like the third
party system and the idea that it will come up
over a certain idea in particular, and hopefully one of
the party's Republican or Democrat will will adopt it. And
they weren't doing anything at the time. So that's why
the prohibition movement where got fed up with it and
formed their own party. And they pointed out that there
was a link between alcohol abuse and child abuse and
(06:32):
crime and violence in the cities. And so finally, by
nineteen nineteen, sixty percent of the United States had banned
alcohol at the local level. Yeah, and by nineteen nineteen,
the Congress actually passed the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
which gave the government the power basically to enforce prohibition
(06:53):
among all the entire country, all of the states. And
the funny thing about prohibition is this, the eighteen Amendment
outlawed the sale, all the manufacturer and the importation of alcohol,
but it never outlawed drinking it or possessing it. And
so if you already had a lot of alcohol in
your storehouse. You can keep it. You know, if you
had a flask and he had somewhere to fill it,
(07:15):
you could do that. You could bring it around with you.
You just couldn't import it, and you can sell it.
And I guess sort of the idea behind that is
to enforce the drink, like to enforce prohibiting the drinking
of it would be too difficult. I guess. Obviously, if
someone's one seller is stocked, you can't go into their
their house and destroy their property. That would be going
too far. And there wasn't enough manpower to do that either.
(07:38):
And that's what was so tricky about prohibition in the
thirteen years that it lasts, which is that it was
so hard to enforce. And the Volstead Act followed the
Eighteenth Amendment, and this is what was outlining the different
enforcement policies that the government had in terms of prohibition.
So it discussed the penalties to drinking UM, the exceptions
(07:58):
like if you were using it for religious purposes that
was okay, and also to find the legal limits of
the alcohol content for beverage. Azz yahai I said it
about zero point five percent alcohol was over the legal
limit UM and to give you a point of reference,
I think like an average like a week beer basically
is four percent. So that's a pretty low limit right there.
(08:20):
So you could drink. I guess it's just that whatever
you were drinking wasn't going to get you drunk, especially imagining.
That's true. And it was interesting about the Volstead Amendment.
I didn't know this until I started researching for this podcast,
was that Woodrow Wilson actually vetoed it. And UM, it
was interesting to me because I I know Wilson in
history are sort of a progressive. He was one of
the most progressive um uh presidents in the United States,
(08:42):
and prohibition was a progressive movement. But um, apparently some
story would say that Wilson found it unnecessarily authoritarian basically,
and you can make that case because um, the idea
of enforcing the Volstead Act became a huge headache, and
obviously it showed how how authoritarian the law really was,
and it was progressing the nation in a strange direction.
(09:05):
And today I don't know if there are still people
who advocate prohibition, or at least there are people who
probably do promote temperance. But prohibition led to some really
nasty stuff. And it's again, like we were saying at
the beginning of the podcast, if someone tells you can't
do something, you're going to find a way around it.
And usually the way around it is going to lead
(09:25):
to breaking some other rules. And organized crime took off exponentially.
I can't even begin to, you know, describe how bad
it got. You know, you look at someone like al
Capone and the speakeasy said he ran, and all the
gangs that resulted from this, and all the bootlegging, and
even European rum flights, like people would ride out to
the different bodies of water around the U. S and
(09:47):
and meet European ships that had rum waiting for them
and they would bring them back. And speaking of speakeasies,
obviously those were there was you legal bars during the prohibition,
um they actually surged and if you look at the numbers,
there were more speakeasies during prohibition than there were legal
bars before prohibition. And that just boggles me. It is.
And so you look at all this crime that came
(10:08):
about as a result of prohibition, and when the depression
on set, people started getting really ticked off because you
know that the money that came from the legal taxation
of alcohol could have been supporting the country's economy, and
instead this money was going to gangsters like al Capone
who were making a mint off something that was a
link all. And it's interesting to look at the money
(10:29):
aspect of this. I actually had researched, um the I
R S for an article I was doing, and the
I R S was actually charged with basically enforcing prohibition.
And I was really interested to learn this because you
would never think that. But it was the idea of
there was revenue passing hands and and um, it was
not being taxed, and that was the main way that
we could track down the government could track down illegal transactions,
(10:52):
was the idea of money being around in it and
there's no proof of taxation. And so that was the
way that obviously al Capone was called right exactly after
all the murders that he oversaw and all the gay activity,
it was on the tax fraud essentially or tax evasion
that he was he was canned essentially. Yeah, and sorry,
it's it's interesting that, um that also the dangerous things
(11:14):
that came as a result of prohibition was that, um,
this whole atmosphere of criminal activity actually exposed more people
to dangerous drugs. People like historians look back and they're like, oh,
these people are hanging around uh, illegal crowds, basically criminal crowds,
and and so it exposed everyone to more dangerous things.
And one thing that got me as well was the
idea that there was still liquor around that needed to
(11:36):
be used for industrial purposes during the prohibition, and so, uh,
the the government started contaminating this liquor and and so
that people wouldn't drink it. And and I guess they
didn't get the word around enough because it resulted in
lots of deaths. I think adulterated liquor caused fifty deaths,
isn't that wild? Yeah, with more people trying to manufacture
(11:58):
their own liquor or sometimes to be made really really
dangerously and so ingesting it could mean death and bethlub Yeah,
And that was one of those strange things about prohibition
is that for every pro there was a con So
the number of deaths related to services of the liver
from drinking too much alcohol went down, but like you
were saying, the number of deaths from drinking contaminated liquor
(12:20):
or home manufactured liquor went up, and oddly enough alcoholics.
The number of alcoholics went up as well. Yeah, so
more alcoholics, but pro less people drinking alcohol. And so
finally people could see the prohibition was not working, there
was no way to enforce it, and so in n
three the amendment was overturned, and so far it's the
only amendment in the Constitution to be overturned later again
(12:44):
by another constitutional amendment. And it's interesting also the the
amendment that overturned prohibition, UH made sure to make allowances
that states could at the local level, you can ban
liquor as much as you want, um and one story
and noted that there's only two ways for an individual,
just a single person, to aviolate the constitution. One is
(13:06):
to enslave someone and the other is to bring alcohol
through a dry county. And that's to think about the
opposing and the spectrum and ideas of temperance continue to
pervade our national culture, especially in places in the South.
We see that temperance is really strongly advocated, and you
see that most dry counties are in the South today.
(13:29):
And something interesting that I was reading, um I love
Love of Love, Leticia Baldredge I think she's a great writer.
She was Jackie Kennedy's social secretary during the Kennedy years
and in Camelot, and she was recounting in one of
her memoirs that there was a big formal event that
Kennedy was hosting. It was one of the first ones,
and she was, you know, helping a planet, and she
didn't think anything of it. But she had little station
(13:51):
set up in the ballroom where people could go over
and and mix their drinks. And everyone looked at the
White House and they decried Kennedy as someone promoting you know,
revelry and alcoholism. It was just a mess, and Kennedy
got really mad and he was like, Leticia, next time
you mixed the drinks. In the back day, it might
not be as big of a deal, but you know,
(14:11):
during that time, it certainly was because, you know, think
about it, only a few decades had passed since prohibition
have been overturned, and people were still learning how to
be temperate with alcohol. And that's that's the main thing
that people have to do. I think in our cultures,
you know, you set your own levels for temperance, and
there are laws that dictate the legal drinking age, and
you know which counties are dry, but you know, it
(14:33):
really is a personal choice in the end. That's true,
and it makes sense now this local level. I wanted
to give a shout out to Maryland, my home state, UM,
because during Prohibition it got the name of free state
and nickname is free state because they weren't they didn't
really like enforcing prohibition and it's sort of ticked off
the government at the time, and in Maryland is known
as sort of free liquor place. Oh, lady Jane Goodness,
(14:56):
that's where I get it from. Well, if you want
to learn more about prohibition and temperance and alcohol in general,
will be sure to check out how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com. Let us know
what you think. Send an email to podcast at how
stuff works dot com. M
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