Prohibition (2011) s01e01 Episode Script

MAN: Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky.
It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.
Mark Twain.
NARRATOR: One snowy evening in January of 1826, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Litchfield, Connecticut, rode out to visit a parishioner in need.
The young man had been among his very first converts to Christ, Beecher remembered, "always most affectionate and kind," but something was wrong.
His wife was weeping.
"What is the matter?," Beecher asked her.
She said that her husband's fondness for drink had overcome his love for her--and for God.
Beecher had heard the same sad story from parishioners again and again: jobs lost, life savings swallowed up, wives and children beaten and abused, all because of alcohol.
Now he resolved to do something about it.
MAN: Like slavery, the traffic in ardent spirits must come to be regarded as sinful let the temperate part of the nation awake and reform.
NARRATOR: The impassioned sermons Lyman Beecher wrote and delivered on successive Sundays echoed sentiments that had been heard for at least half a century in America.
But Beecher was so eloquent, and the scourge of alcohol had become so pervasive, that when those sermons were published, it set in motion events even he could not have imagined.
For the next 100 years, Americans would argue fiercely over what to do about the age-old problem of drunkenness.
The battle would eventually result in an amendment to the Constitution of the United States--prohibition.
It was meant to eradicate an evil.
Instead, it would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into law-breakers.
["King Porter Stomp" playing.]
MAN: It's this question of how much can we tell other people Can we really fix all the problems that we see around us? It's the great example of what happens when different groups have different ideas about what kind of behavior is acceptable.
NARRATOR: Prohibition would pit the countryside against the cities, natives against newcomers, Protestants against Catholics.
It would raise questions about the proper role of government, about individual rights and responsibilities, about means and ends and unintended consequences, and who is--and who is not-- a real American.
MAN: How the hell did that happen? How does a freedom-loving people, a nation that's built on individual rights and liberties, decide in one kind of crazed moment, it almost seems, that we can tell people how to live their lives? MAN: Virtually every part of the Constitution is about expanding human freedom except prohibition, in which human freedom was being limited.
When people cross the line between our essential character as Americans and some other superseding vision of what we should be, then we get in trouble.
MAN: They say that the British cannot fix anything properly without a dinner.
But I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink.
If you meet, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink.
They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold.
If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear.
They begin to drink early in the morning; they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.
Captain Frederick Marryat.
NARRATOR: For most of the nation's history, alcohol was at least as American as apple pie.
The hold of the "Mayflower," the ship that carried the first Puritans to Massachusetts, was filled with barrels of beer.
At Valley Forge, George Washington did his best to make sure his men had half a cup of rum every day-- and half a cup of whiskey when the rum ran out.
John Adams began each day with a tankard of hard cider.
Thomas Jefferson collected fine French wines and dreamed of a day when American vineyards could match them.
After Andrew Jackson's inauguration, so many drunken admirers crowded into the White House, the celebration had to be moved out onto the lawn to save the furniture.
Young Abraham Lincoln sold whiskey by the barrel from his grocery store in New Salem, Illinois.
"Intoxicating liquor," he later remembered, was "used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.
" A young Maryland slave named Frederick Douglass said whiskey made him feel "like a president," self assured "and independent.
" Physicians recommended whiskey-- and cider and brandy and rum and beer--as far better for their patients than water hauled from muddy rivers and stagnant pools.
Clergymen drank.
So did craftsmen and canal-diggers, and the crowds of men who turned out for barn-raisings and baptisms, funerals and elections and public hangings.
MICHAEL LERNER: It's part of ritual celebrations.
It's part of being social.
It's part of the gathering.
And it's always been there.
It just tells you something.
Maybe we'll never really have an answer for why we need it.
But if you look at the history, it's clear we do.
[Bell ringing.]
NARRATOR: Americans routinely drank at every meal-- including breakfast.
In many towns a bell rang twice a day to signal what was called "grog-time" so that men could stop whatever they were doing in factories and offices, mills and farm fields to raise a jug.
DANIEL OKRENT: In farm families, in New England particularly, there was a barrel of cider by the door, and you came in and you would have your ladle of cider.
Now this wasn't as powerful as whiskey, but, you know, it wasn't the kind of cider that we have with doughnuts today.
NARRATOR: For thousands of years, human beings had been fermenting fruits and grains to create mildly intoxicating beverages.
But by the 1800s, rum, whiskey, and other distilled spirits-- with significantly higher alcohol content--had become increasingly available.
WOMAN: All of a sudden, you have all of these people growing grain--growing corn, growing oats, growing wheat-- that can be distilled into whiskey.
And so all of these rituals that had been part of the human experience where farmers would get up and you would have beer with breakfast and beer with lunch and beer with your afternoon break and beer with dinner.
But you're talking about 2% beer.
But now all of a sudden, people are drinking whiskey instead.
And it took a while for the culture to recognize that, "Wait a minute.
There's something really wrong here.
" NARRATOR: By 1830, the average American over 15 years of age drank the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey every year, 3 times as much as their 21-st century descendants drink.
Americans spent more money on alcohol each year than the total expenditures of the Federal Government.
Inebriates filled the nation's poorhouses and workhouses and prisons.
More and more, people began to worry that the country was becoming a nation of drunkards.
And as the wages of many husbands and fathers and sons went to the grog shop, women and children became victimsâ€"mistreated, abandoned, deprived of food and shelter.
CATHERINE GILBERT MURDOCK: Alcohol consumption at that point was a sign of masculinity that took away masculinity.
So that you drank to show that you were a man, but you get drunk, and all of a sudden you can't provide for your family, you can't do your job.
You become violent.
There are so many references to the degradation of Saturday night.
Implicit that a man would go out, first of all, he would leave the home.
He would go to a saloon, He would get drunk, and he would come home and do whatever he wanted.
This is a time when there is no divorce; when the concept of police protection for domestic violence doesn't exist: the concept of marital rape can't be discussed.
But you can discuss it through alcoholism and what alcohol does to men.
NARRATOR: On April 5, 1840, 6 hard-drinking friends met in a tavern in Baltimore and pledged to one another that they would never take another drink.
They established what they proudly called a "society of reformed drunkards" and named it after the first president of the Republic.
Word spread.
Soon Washingtonian societies sprang up in every state.
At meetings across the country, thousands of alcoholics, many in tears, came forward to confess their own weaknesses to each other and sign the Washingtonian pledge.
Eventually more than half a million men would add their names to the rolls.
OKRENT: There was a way that the Washingtonians, by telling their own stories to each other and to people that they wished to recruit, there was a great deal of power to that.
It was very personal.
It wasn't some authoritative or authoritarian figure from on high telling you what to do.
It was one-to-one.
NARRATOR: But clergymen denounced the Washingtonians as ungodly because they dared claim drunkards could be reformed by their fellow sufferers without joining any church.
The young country was in the midst of a new era of reform, fueled by a Protestant great awakening, that called upon every believer to help cleanse the country of every sort of sin.
The same reformers who were leading the crusade to abolish slavery saw drinking and the damage it did to individuals, families, and communities as no less sinful, no less corrupting.
They called their movement temperance, at first, advocates preached mere moderation-- only ardent spirits like rum and whiskey were off-limits.
But soon, many began demanding total abstinence from all forms of alcohol-- insisting on capital "T"-- Total--abstinence.
New church-based organizations sprang up: the Sons of Temperance, Knights of Jericho, Templars of Honor and Temperance; Independent Order of Good Templars.
Some temperance societies sponsored separate branches for African Americans.
Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, took the pledge of total abstinence, saying, " If we could but make "the world sober, we would have no slavery "all great reforms," he said, "go together.
" Tens of thousands of boys and girls pledged never to touch alcohol and enlisted in what was called the Cold Water Army.
MAN: Women were very big in these things.
The first expressive life of women in America was in these reform movements.
They were almost always what were called auxiliaries.
An auxiliary was to be something that was to be of help along the way.
But while the men are off working or drinking or goofing off, the women more and more organized.
NARRATOR: Although it was thought unseemly for women to work alongside men, even in the cause of moral reform, they would soon put themselves at the center of the struggle against alcohol.
When Susan B.
Anthony was refused permission even to speak at a Sons of Temperance meeting, she walked out and formed the nation's first women's temperance society in which men could neither vote nor hold office.
Her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the organization's first president.
For the next 50 years, temperance and a far more radical cause, women's suffrage, would be inextricably linked.
LERNER: The early temperance movement was not about getting everyone else to give up alcohol.
I mean, it was voluntary.
You never would have suggested that you force people to do it because then it wasn't sincere, it wasn't real reform.
You had to really have this come from within.
Then you start to get the argument that, well, maybe we do need to regulate this because maybe we have a lot of people in our society who don't have the strength or the moral fortitude to do this themselves.
MURDOCK: There is a belief in human perfectibility, that humans can be perfect.
And alcohol is the fly in the ointment.
You could have a perfect marriage if it weren't for alcohol.
You could have a perfect husband if it weren't for alcohol.
You could have a perfect community if it weren't for alcohol.
And alcohol, in a way, becomes the scapegoat for all of the failures in society.
If you didn't have alcohol you wouldn't have poverty, you wouldn't have domestic violence.
You certainly wouldn't have prostitution.
And the solution that the people in the temperance movement came up with is that the only moral solution to this problem is to get rid of the drink.
NARRATOR: Reformers petitioned state and local governments, demanding that taverns and hotels, groceries and apothecary shops be barred from selling alcohol.
Moderates warned they were going too far.
"Very little good," one clergyman wrote, "has ever been done by the absolute shall.
" MAN: It's not that sin is so terrible, it's that sin is very attractive.
And that's why we're always tempted to do it.
So what you need, then, is to help people to overcome this temptation.
And if necessary, sometimes, you have to make sin illegal.
There was a sense of the extraordinary difficulty of overcoming the hurdle, the idea that the temptation was so powerful that some people, at least, perhaps the least-advantaged people in society, just couldn't be trusted and that therefore someone needed to do something about it from the outside, not so much for the sake of those people as for the sake of their families and for the sake of their children.
NARRATOR: In 1851, Neal Dow, the wealthy mayor of Portland, Maine, gathered thousands of signatures on a petition demanding the state legislature enact a law to ban the sale of alcohol.
Few Americans drank more than the fishermen and lumbermen, mill-workers and hardscrabble farmers of Maine.
In Portland alone, home to fewer than 10,000 people, there were 200 licensed liquor dealers and perhaps 400 unlicensed ones.
But through Neal Dow's tireless efforts, the bill passed on June 2, 1851, and for the first time, the legislature of an American state voted to prohibit the sale and manufacture of intoxicating beverages.
WOMAN: A remarkable spectacle can be seen in Portland.
Temperate men, and nothing but temperate men, walk her streets.
A strange quiet prevails.
The clamor and rioting and fierce turbulence of drunkenness are nowhere to be seen.
NARRATOR: With the law now on his side, Dow personally led raids on liquor sellers, and when an angry crowd of 3,000 men, most of them Irish immigrants who saw nothing wrong with alcohol, turned out to protest his actions, Dow called out the state militia and ordered them to fire.
[Gunshots.]
7 men were wounded.
One was killed.
Mayor Dow's critics denounced him as "the sublime fanatic.
" His admirers insisted he was America's "moral Columbus.
" Meanwhile, many of his state's more enterprising citizens quickly found ways to profit from loopholes in his law.
Fishermen up and down Maine's long, rocky coast smuggled alcohol ashore in coffins, and barrels marked "sugar" and "flour.
" Forbidden to sell liquor, bartenders began charging handsome fees for salted crackers-- then threw in a drink for free.
Alcohol for medicinal purposes was permitted--so Maine physicians wrote prescriptions to boost their incomes.
Itinerant liquor-sellers roamed the streets selling swigs from pint bottles hidden beneath their pant-legs.
Their customers called them boot-leggers.
OKRENT: Over time the law decayed.
It didn't hold up.
And, in fact, many other states passed similar laws as the Maine law, but by 1860 every one of them is off the books.
NARRATOR: By 1860, the temperance movement, like women's suffrage and other reforms of the day, found itself overshadowed-- first by the mounting struggle over slavery and then by the Civil War fought to settle it.
[Explosions.]
Membership in temperance societies dwindled.
Soldiers and civilians alike continued to drink, in part to mask the grief and horror of the war raging around them.
And in 1862, the Federal Government itself, hungry for revenues to pay for the war, helped to legitimize the liquor trade by charging retailers a $20 license fee and taxing manufacturers 20 cents for every gallon of distilled spirits they produced and a dollar for every keg of beer.
Within a few years, fully 1/3 of the federal budget would come from taxing alcohol.
After the Civil War ended, hundreds of thousands of immigrants--Irish and Germans and Bohemians and others from central and northern Europ--began pouring into America's growing cities and spread out across the countryside.
They were eager to create new lives but unwilling to give up old ways, increasing tensions with native-born citizens, who thought they knew best how Americans should behave.
NOAH FELDMAN: New immigrants came with not only a different culture, but also with a different set of drinking habits.
And that immediately became part of the American debate about whether certain people were drinking the wrong kind of alcohol and too much of it.
NARRATOR: Eberhard Anheuser, Valentin Blatz, Adolphus Busch, Bernhard Stroh, Frederick Miller, Frederick Pabst, Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer, Joseph Schlitz--a host of German-American entrepreneurs made themselves rich satisfying the new immigrants' thirst for beer.
In 1850, they had brewed just 36 million gallons.
By 1870, their output had soared to more than 550 million.
To protect their business interests, they formed a lobbying organization-- the United States Brewers' Association, conducting their meetings and their communications in German.
Alarmed at the growing power of the brewers' lobby, and the steady increase in beer drinking all across the country, the forces of temperance, dormant since before the Civil War, began to stir again.
WOMAN: Every whirlwind has its first leaf, for the laws of motion oblige it to begin somewhere in particular.
The whirlwind of the Lord began in the little town of Hillsboro on the 23rd of December, 1873.
NARRATOR: Hillsboro, Ohio, was the home of a frail wife and mother named Eliza Jane Thompson, the daughter of an Ohio governor.
Like so many temperance workers, she had experienced the impact of alcoholism first-hand: her eldest son, a clergyman, had become addicted through a doctor's prescription and then died in what was called an inebriate asylum.
All she had been able to do was grieve until the evening of December 23, 1873, when a visiting temperance lecturer urged the town's wives and mothers to take to the streets in protest.
If they did that, he said, they could destroy the liquor business forever.
Thompson's husband, a local judge, thought the idea of women marching in public sheer tomfoolery.
WOMAN AS ELIZA JANE THOMPS ON: I ventured to remind him that the men had been in the tomfoolery business a long time, and suggested that it might be God's will that the women should now take part.
NARRATOR: On Christmas Eve, Eliza Jane Thompson joined nearly 200 other women at the First Presbyterian Church.
After prayers, she led them outside, lined up two by two, all dressed in black and singing her favorite hymn, "Give to the winds thy fears.
" The women's first stop was William Smith's drug store on East Main Street.
He was a licensed physician, so they asked him to sign a pledge, promising never again to fulfill any other doctor's prescription for alcohol.
He signed.
Two other druggists assured the ladies of their good wishes and agreed to stop selling alcohol entirely.
MURDOCK: What you see in one community in Ohio is that the women snap.
They go out and they gather in front of a saloon and they go down on their knees and they start praying, blocking the entrance praying, which is this act of radical civil disobedience but that is also completely within the parameters of accepted female behavior.
And the movement takes off like wildfire.
NARRATOR: Within days, what came to be called the woman's crusade seemed to be erupting everywhere in Ohio.
MAN: From London, Ohio, comes the news that an absolute stagnation of all business exists, that the schools have closed, and everybody's mind is wholly absorbed with the war.
Portable tabernacles in which the women pray and sing are transferred from the front of one saloon to another.
WOMAN: Coshocton, Ohio.
It is easy enough to conquer a man, if you only know how.
I wish you could see me talking to some of these saloon men that I would never have spoken to before.
I employ my sweetest accents; I exhaust all the arguments I am possessed of; I look into their eyes and grow pathetic; I shed tears, and I joke with them--but all in terrible earnest.
And they surrender.
Eliza Hackett.
NARRATOR: But bigger towns, like Dayton, with their large immigrant populations, presented bigger challenges.
MAN: A large, turbulent rabble followed them from place to place.
Swearing crowds of beer-drinkers pressed into the saloons and drank as fast as they could, mocking the praying women with loud blasphemy.
The "New York Times.
" NARRATOR: In Cincinnati, fire companies sprayed the praying women with freezing water.
Bartenders pretended to welcome them inside, drenched them with buckets of beer, then drove them back out into the snow.
The owner of a German beer garden hauled a cannon up to the entrance and threatened to blow away the first crusader who tried to get past him.
One woman climbed onto the cannon and led her sisters in song.
After an hour or so, the owner surrendered.
The crusade soon spread beyond Ohio's borders--all the way west to San Francisco, where an angry mob, spurred on by the San Francisco Saloon-Keeper's Society, hurled stones at a band of peaceful, praying women.
Women eventually marched in 911 communities in 31 states and territories.
They closed down some 1,300 liquor sellers.
For the thousands of women who took part in the crusade and who had never before felt they could act on their own outside their homes, it had been what one temperance worker called a "baptism of power and liberty.
" WOMAN: It can scarcely be possible that these women can again settle back in the old ruts and betake themselves once more to hemming flounces, as if the issue of life depended on the amount of stitches they stowed into each garment.
They can hardly ever again persuade themselves or others that they are content to let the men attend to the politics of the country, while they play pretty Polly or Bridget.
MURDOCK: But all of a sudden, it sort of hits you how much work civil protest is.
And if you're out there praying, you're not feeding your family, you're not doing all of your housework.
And the momentum of the movement breaks down, and gradually these saloons start reopening.
NARRATOR: No laws had been changed.
Men still wanted a drink.
Within a year or two, most liquor dealers were back in business, alongside a steadily growing number of competitors.
MURDOCK: Everything that they had worked so hard for sort of falls apart.
And it becomes increasingly clear to them that this model of moral suasion, of setting a good example, isn't going to cut it.
WOMAN: It has come and it has gone--this whirlwind of the Lord--but it has set forces in motion which each day become more potent, and it will sweep on until the rum power in America is overthrown.
Frances Willard.
NARRATOR: Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was herself a whirlwind.
Called Saint Frances by her most ardent admirers, she was a master strategist who would come to command a nonviolent national army-- 250,000 strong-- against alcohol, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
MURDOCK: Frances Willard is one of the great unsung heroes of American history.
There was a time when every schoolchild in America knew her, and she was sort of on par with Betsy Ross.
She was that important to American history.
NARRATOR: A pioneer in women's education and a champion of women's rights, Willard took the reins of the WCTU in 1879 and did not relinquish them until her death 19 years later.
At Rest Cottage, her home in Evanston, Illinois, she rose at 6:00 each day and for 8 hours straight dictated letters, speeches, articles, and books to her secretary and longtime companion, Anna Gordon.
But the two women were rarely at home.
During the first 9 years of her presidency, Willard claimed she had spoken in more than 1,000 American towns, including every single city with more than 10,000 citizens--- and most of those with only 5,000.
She took her struggle abroad as well, founding a world's WCTU that gathered nearly a million signatures on a canvas petition addressed to all the rulers of the world, imploring them to join hands in a global ban on alcohol.
WOMAN AS FRANCES WILLARD: There is a war about this in America, a war of mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, a war between the rum shops and religion, a war to the knife and the knife to the hilt.
Only one can win.
The question is which one is it going to be? NARRATOR: Willard forged an alliance between the WCTU and the women's suffrage movement, bringing thousands of women into the struggle for the ballot.
To appeal to women still too timid to assert themselves.
Willard coined a consciously conservative slogan--"home protection.
" A woman who found it unseemly to demand the vote solely as a right could justify calling for the ballot as what Willard called "a weapon of protection from the tyranny of drink.
" And concerned that a growing number of housewives were becoming addicted to popular patent medicines that often contained as much alcohol as whiskey, she established homes for inebriate women.
As a pure and wholesome alternative to alcohol, the WCTU installed public water fountains in village squares and city parks across America.
But getting rid of alcohol was not Frances Willard's only cause.
The WCTU eventually had more than 45 departments organized on behalf of a host of causes--street children and fallen women, female matrons for women's prisons, and free kindergarten for every child, equal pay for equal work, and raising the age of sexual consent from 10 to 16.
OKRENT: And she would move from alcohol to votes for women to orphanages to asylums to what she called Christian socialism--all these things put together.
It was sort of promising a heaven on Earth, an idealized society at a time when utopian wishes were not at all uncommon in American society.
NARRATOR: But no single program had more impact than the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, meant to train generations of boys and girls dedicated to eradicating alcohol-- and to do it through the public school system.
WOMAN: Childhood saved today from a saloon and the nation thus saved tomorrow is the stake played for in this desperate game.
All that is holiest in mother love, all that is purest in patriotism that would save the country from the saloon, enters into our support of these textbooks.
Mary Hanchett Hunt.
NARRATOR: Frances Willard placed Mary Hanchett Hunt in charge of the department.
Hunt lobbied state legislatures and the Congress to require anti alcohol indoctrination in the schools, forced textbook publishers to conform to the WCTU's message, and sometimes demanded kickbacks in exchange for her stamp of approval.
She also directed women from chapters all over the country to pressure local school boards.
Before long, public school children in every state-- 22 million of them--were sitting through temperance classes 3 times a week.
Kindergartners were taught to chant, "Tremble, king alcohol, We shall grow up.
" Older children studied texts filled with lurid misinformation calculated to terrify: Just one drink, some books alleged, could burn away the lining of the throat and stomach and begin eating away at the liver and kidneys.
MURDOCK: You know, little Johnny has one drink, and the next picture he's lying in the gutter unconscious.
One of their most notorious things is they had diagrams of body parts.
You would have a diagram of a stomach.
And then they had a diagram of an inebriate's stomach and what happens to you.
Well, the inebriate's stomach was full color.
NARRATOR: Alcohol caused deafness, dropsy, lunacy, they claimed--not only in those who swallowed it, but in their children and their children's children.
And always, some textbooks warned, there was the fearful possibility that drinking could spark spontaneous combustion-- bursting suddenly into fatal blue flame.
Millions of children came to believe it all, and it would not be too long, Willard prayed, before they all were old enough to vote.
WOMAN AS FRANCES WILLARD: In America, ballots are bayonets.
You think maybe the crusade is dead and its banner trailing in the dust? I tell you no.
MAN: In the saloons, life was different.
Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than the common everyday where nothing happened.
Here life was always very live, and sometimes even lurid.
Terrible saloons might be, but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful.
Jack London.
NARRATOR: Despite the Washingtonians, despite the woman's crusade and the WCTU, despite legions of clergymen and temperance lecturers and school books meant to terrify, more and more saloons were opening every day in America.
By the turn of the new 20th century, there would be some 300,000, as varied as the people who patronized them.
For millions of working men, saloons were a refuge-- from long hours at a clerk's desk or on a factory floor or deep in a coal mine-- and from the responsibilities represented by the family waiting at home.
"The brass rail was more than a footrest," one man remembered.
"It was a symbol of masculinity emancipate, of manhood free to put its feet on something.
" PETE HAMILL: They were places where people got up and sang songs.
They were places where the laughter went on and on.
And the assumption was, they worked so hard during the week if they thought Friday night belonged to them and the boys, why not? You know, that was part of the deal.
It was essential to their survival, that to get through a tough life and hard times, particularly for the immigrants in a strange country, you know, that's not quite yours, I think it was essential to them that they had this.
LERNER: The saloon is so many different things to different people.
If you lived in a squalid tenement house, it was your living room.
It was your social club.
It was maybe where your translator was.
Your bartender was there to watch out for you.
Your bartender might have done a lot more for you than the local priest did or the local cop.
NARRATOR: Beer and whiskey were not the saloon's sole attraction.
A man could cash his paycheck, pick up his mail if he didn't yet have an address of his own, read the paper, learn English, play cards or billiards, find out who was hiring, even get himself a city job.
Big-city saloon-keepers often doubled as politicians, doling out patronage positions.
In 1890, 11 of New York's 24 aldermen ran bars.
In East Boston's ward two, an Irish immigrant's son named Patrick J.
Kennedy used profits from two saloons and a wine and spirits import business to begin to build the political machine that would one day help put his grandson into the White House.
Unions met in saloons.
So did veterans' groups, fraternal organizations, and immigrant associations.
Ballots were cast in them: wakes were held, and so were christening parties.
HAMILL: They were the working-class private clubs.
The uptown white Anglo-Saxon Protestants had their clubs for the same reasons, you know, except that they were talking about, how would you like to buy Venezuela? But it was the same essential thing--that there were contacts going on in these rough places, and the majority of them were not buckets of blood, as they called them.
They were not places where you walked in and you were hauled out by an ambulance.
They were much more clubs.
Most of them had basic rules: pay your debts, vote the straight ticket, that sort of thing.
NARRATOR: Regulars may have seen their corner taverns as familiar neighborhood businesses, but more often than not they actually belonged to one or another of the big brewers.
OKRENT: Brewing companies owned the saloons, and if Pabst opened a saloon on this corner, Busch was going to have one on this corner, and somebody was going to have one on this corner and this corner, and the cities were overwhelmed by the brewery-owned saloons.
NARRATOR: By agreeing to sell just one brand of beer, almost anyone could go into the saloon business.
The brewery paid for his license, provided the pool table and artwork, the bar and barstools, even the spittoons-- everything needed to keep its beer flowing.
OKRENT: They would do anything to sell beer.
The free lunch--you say there's no such thing as a free lunch? Well, in the 1890s and the couple of decades thereafter, the free lunch was something that was served in nearly every saloon.
You would go in, and you would get your cheese and your salami and your sardines and your saltines, and what did these things have in common? They're incredibly salty, and so you would drink a lot of beer.
It was a wonderful marketing device.
NARRATOR: Decent citizens were appalled that most big cities had a carefully delineated district in which vice, although technically illegal, was tolerated, a place where pimps and thugs and strong arm men worked hand-in-hand with corrupt cops and accommodating politicians.
And all of them were centered around saloons.
In Manhattan, it was the midtown tenderloin, denounced by reformers as Satan's Circus.
New Orleans had its Storyville.
San Francisco-- the Barbary Coast.
In Seattle, it was named for the street along which lumbermen skidded logs to the docks before looking for a place to have a drink--skid road.
In Chicago's notorious levee district--20 square blocks on the South side--there were said to be 500 saloons, 500 whorehouses, 56 poolrooms, 15 gambling halls, and too many peep shows and cocaine parlors and bawdy theaters to count.
All of it was overseen by a flamboyant saloon-keeper and Democratic committeeman, Mike "Hinky-Dink" Kenna.
MAN: He had a tavern, and he was the alderman of the first ward.
Of course if you don't think that's a conflict--to own a tavern and be the alderman at the same time.
But he controlled the levee, and, of course, if you control the levee you controlled all, the votes.
They could elect Mickey Mouse because they'd tell you who to vote for, and they did.
LERNER: It fostered a lot of corruption.
The bar became completely intertwined with politics in a lot of cities, so you could buy votes with a whiskey and a cigar.
You could always make the argument that the saloon was a place where morals were loose, where prostitution was a danger, where people were taken advantage of.
MURDOCK: My great-grandmother remembers as a child walking the streets of Philadelphia and crossing the street so she would not have to cross in front of a saloon because it was so scary--the noises that were coming out of it, the men lying in the gutter drunk in front of it.
That was the face of alcohol consumption.
MAN: One of the terrifying stories of my childhood was my mother telling me what it was like.
She was an Irish immigrant growing up in Hell's Kitchen on the West side of Manhattan.
Of the men who would be paid on Saturday afternoon, and taking it directly to the saloon, coming home drunken, abusive, with all the money gone and the mother trying to figure out how she was going to hold the family together, how the children were going to be fed.
And as a little boy, identifying myself with those children, I wondered how I was going to be fed.
NARRATOR: The only way to solve the problem of drunkenness, many believed, was to get rid of the saloon.
WOMAN: When I went to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, there were 7 dives where drinks were sold.
I began to ask, Why should we have the saloon, when Kansas was a prohibition state and our Constitution made it a crime to manufacture, barter, sell or give away intoxicating drinks? These dive-keepers really were not as much to blame as the city officials who were in league with this lawless element and could see the wicked walking on every side and the vilest men exalted.
Carry Nation.
NARRATOR: Carry Nation's life was filled with tragedy.
Her mother died in an insane asylum, convinced she was Queen Victoria.
Her first husband drank himself to death.
A second unhappy marriage would end in divorce.
She determined to give herself over to the struggle against what she called "the place where the serpent drink crushed the hopes of my early years"--the saloon.
Kansas had already banned the sale of alcohol in every one of its 105 counties, but the state's dusty cow towns and large cities alike were filled with thirsty men, and no one paid much attention to the law.
As president of the Barber County WCTU, Carry Nation had led peaceful marches that had had little effect.
wrote letters to legislators and lawmen that were never even answered, and eventually became convinced God wished her to do more.
WOMAN AS CARRIE NATION: On the 6th of June, 1900, before retiring, I threw myself downward at the foot of my bed and told the Lord to use me in any way to suppress the dreadful curse of liquor.
I told him I wished I had a thousand lives that I would give him all of them, and I wanted him to make it known to me some way.
The next morning, before I awoke, I heard these words very distinctly, "Go to Kiowa, and I'll stand by you.
" NARRATOR: The next morning, with an armload of what she called "smashers"--rocks and bottles wrapped in paper to look like harmless packages--she strode into a saloon in Kiowa.
WOMAN AS CARRIE NATION: I told the owner, Mr.
Dobson.
"Get out of the way.
"I don't want to strike you, but I am going to break up this den of vice.
" [Glass breaks.]
I began to throw at the mirror and the bottles below the mirror.
Mr.
Dobson and his companion jumped into a corner, seemed very much terrified.
From that I went to another saloon, until I had destroyed 3.
The other dive-keepers closed up, stood in front of their places and would not let me in.
By this time the streets were crowded with people.
One boy about 15 years old seemed perfectly wild with joy.
I have since thought of that being a significant sign.
For to smash saloons will save the boy.
NARRATOR: She dared the sheriff to arrest her.
He did not.
She moved on to Wichita to attack the most opulent saloon in town, the bar in the Hotel Carey.
[Glass breaks.]
When a policeman arrested her there for defacing property, she shouted at him, "I am defacing nothing! I am destroying!" "You put me in here a cub," she said from behind bars, "but I will go out a roaring lion, and I will make all hell howl!" Her exploits were front-page news.
Hundreds of congratulatory telegrams arrived from all over the country.
As soon as she got out, she attacked another saloon, this time with the weapon that would become her symbol--a hatchet.
Jailed and released once more, she moved on to the town of Enterprise, did further damage there, and then appeared in Topeka, the state capital and home to dozens of flourishing saloons, all of them illegal.
The leaders of the Topeka WCTU declared themselves "not in accord with her methods.
" "I tell you ladies," she answered, "you don't "know how much joy you will have until you begin to smash, smash, smash.
" The governor implored her not to do any more damage.
She told him that if he didn't enforce the law, she had no choice.
"You are a woman," he said, and "a woman must know a woman's place.
" She walked out of his office and called for a "hatchetation.
" Many Kansans believed Nation was at least half-mad, but hundreds of women and a smaller number of men rallied to her, bringing their own stones and bricks, sticks and hatchets, and calling themselves the home defenders' army.
Proprietors of the local saloons tried and failed to stop them.
She and her followers tore apart a joint favored by state legislators called the Senate, then went on to smash a second bar, a barn filled with saloon fixtures and a warehouse stacked high with barrels of beer.
That day Carry Nation was jailed and released 4 times.
Within the month, her admirers would attack more than 100 saloons in at least 50 Kansas towns.
Anxious state legislators rushed through a bill to strengthen enforcement of the law and pacify her and her home-defenders' army.
It was a remarkable victory.
Carry Nation hoped her movement would spread across the country and sweep away all of the nation's saloons.
But once again, like the woman's crusade, it died almost as quickly as it had arisen.
Carry Nation never stopped crusading--in saloons and churches, lecture halls, even on the vaudeville stage.
For many, she became a figure of fun, even ridicule.
But so long as she lived, bartenders never stopped keeping a wary eye out for her and her dreaded hatchet.
MARTIN MARTY: Every movement needs some people to call attention to itself by bold action.
She knew that you had to draw attention and you needed the press following you.
You had to make the right enemies.
I don't think she's at all representative of the movement.
She's simply the one who called attention to it.
And then patient, hardworking people followed through.
NARRATOR: In 1893, in Oberlin, Ohio, a new organization had been established to fight the evils of alcohol: the Anti-Saloon League.
It would turn out to be the most effective political pressure group in American history.
The founder of the League was the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell.
Unlike Frances Willard and the WCTU, Russell was determined that his organization would focus on a single goal: to get rid of alcohol, period.
Town by town, county by county, state by state, they would force America to go dry.
"The Anti-Saloon League is not in politics as a party," one leader said, "nor are we trying to abolish vice, gambling, horse-racing, "murder, theft or arson.
"The gold standard, the unlimited coinage "of silver, free trade and currency reform do not concern us in the least.
" The League liked to call itself "the church in action against the saloon.
" Baptists and Methodists formed its heart, but every Protestant denomination signed on, except the Episcopalians and the Lutherans.
MARTY: I am of Lutheran heritage, German Lutheran.
It wouldn't have occurred to them to oppose beer, and they really resented the Methodists and the Baptists who imposed prohibition on them.
So a lot of smart cracks came from both sides.
And one of them was that Lutherans drank openly and praised God secretly.
And the Baptists praised God openly and drank secretly.
NARRATOR: The Anti-Saloon League was more or less modeled on the modern corporation that was already transforming American business.
It had a national headquarters to direct its campaigns; a salaried full-time staff to oversee thousands of volunteers: ample financing from millions in annual dues, as well as church collections: and a printing plant at Westerville, Ohio, that churned out 300 tons of propaganda every month.
MURDOCK: The Anti-Saloon League was one of the first modern political movements in the United States.
Like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, like most suffragists, they truly believed that alcohol was a drug that was being pushed on consumers, that once you eliminated the pusher that people would stop drinking because temperance was the natural state of humans.
NARRATOR: Any politician who dared oppose the League, Howard Russell promised, would live to regret it.
"The Anti-Saloon League," he said, "was formed for the purpose of administering political retribution.
" OKRENT: Because they had such a devoted following, a following that was moved by religion, and there's no more powerful force to get people to act, they were able to say to politicians, "Are you with us, or are you against us? "And if you are against us, we will defeat you.
And if you are with us, we will elect you," and they were able to do it in state after state after state.
FELDMAN: What a wedge issue that's effective does is it forces you to stand up and say, "I'm for this, or I'm for that.
" "I'm for alcohol," or "I'm against alcohol," and this kind of a position that you were required to take can be a tremendously powerful political tool, but it's also profoundly divisive because that's the whole point of it.
The whole reason you have a wedge issue is to drive a wedge between people and make them stand up and take a stand on one particular issue.
And this elevates that issue in importance above everything else, no matter how important the other issues really are.
NARRATOR: The man who made it all work was Wayne Bidwell Wheeler, the Anti-Saloon League's ablest commander-- the person, one associate said, "who can make the Senate of the United States sit up and beg.
" OKRENT: He looked like a bank teller, Wayne B.
Wheeler, a name that, at his death in the twenties, people said, "he will be remembered forever as one of the most important people of our time.
" He was the one who figured out that if you stick to an issue and you really sell that issue, you can get what you want.
NARRATOR: Wheeler was an Ohio farm boy who had lost an uncle to alcohol and had himself been injured by a drunken farmhand wielding a pitchfork.
He liked to say that "God made the country, but man made the town.
" He was ideally suited to lead what became, at least in part, a crusade by rural Americans against the big cities.
Recruited by Howard Russell at Oberlin, he began his work on a bicycle, spinning from door to door to defeat an anti prohibition candidate for the state senate.
As the organization grew, Wheeler quickly moved up in the ranks.
He was a skilled lawyer and a shrewd, calculating political operative, willing to work even with politicians who drank, so long as they were willing to vote to keep others from doing so.
Some old-time temperance crusaders were horrified at the tactics he used and the company he kept.
He didn't care.
OKRENT: He didn't need to win majorities; he needed to win at the margin.
So if Wheeler could get for the Anti-Saloon League 10% of the voters in that state to vote wherever he told them to vote, he could control the state.
He didn't need 51%.
He only needed the margin that one party needed to control the legislature.
NARRATOR: Wheeler targeted 70 state legislators in Ohio who opposed the league and by 1903 had driven every one of them from office.
In 1905, when Ohio's popular Republican governor, Myron T.
Herrick, himself a reformer, dared try to weaken a so-called local option law that allowed each community to decide for itself whether to prevent alcohol from being sold, Wheeler denounced him as "the champion of the murder mills," unleashed the full fury of the League, and crushed him at the polls.
Throughout the country, anxious politicians in both parties began warning one another.
"Remember what happened to Herrick.
" "The lessons that have been taught by this contest are important," Wayne Wheeler said.
"Never again will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.
" The league's power spread steadily, eventually reaching into all 46 states-- overshadowing the women's groups that had been working for temperance for decades.
MAN: The old prohibition weepers and gurglers were quite incapable of this enterprise, but the new janissaries of the Anti-Saloon League-- they understood the soul of the American politician.
They knew that his whole politics, his whole philosophy, his whole concept of honesty and honor, was embraced in his single and insatiable yearning for a job, and they showed him how, by playing with them, he could get it and keep it, and how, by standing against them, he could lose it.
H.
L.
Mencken.
NARRATOR: In 1909, Wheeler had help from an unexpected quarter.
City dwellers with a nickel to spare could see something new in the world, a motion picture version of "Ten Nights in a Bar Room," an old stage melodrama that had been the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the temperance movement and a staple of small-town entertainment since before the Civil War.
The film embodied every temperance fear: a drunken husband squandering his pay, the tragic injury of the daughter sent to bring him home, the last ghastly stage of alcoholism-- the agony of delirium tremens.
The film helped to reinforce the belief that even one drop of alcohol could destroy not just individuals, but whole families.
When Lyman Beecher first began to preach against drink, fewer than one in 10 Americans had lived in a city.
Now almost half of them did.
The country's population had grown more than 10 times as millions of immigrants continued to crowd into cities.
They went to work in steel mills and slaughterhouses and on assembly lines, transforming America into an industrial powerhouse.
New circumstances and a new century seemed to demand a new kind of reform, progressive reform, righting wrongs through legislation rather than persuasion: to stop child labor and win votes for women: to end sweatshop conditions; break up monopolies, combat political corruption; and do something about the crowded, squalid slums.
WILLIAM E.
LEUCHTENBURG: People commonly think of prohibition as being a conservative movement.
Not at all.
It was a movement that was embraced by progressives who thought of this as a fundamental kind of reform, in part because alcoholism was such a terrible problem and particularly a terrible problem for the working class, for the immigrant poor.
LERNER: There really is a genuine concern for the well-being of the immigrant, the immigrant family, the immigrant worker.
It's just kind of funny that the way that they wanted to improve their lives didn't include asking them what they wanted done.
And they went after one of the things that actually meant a great deal to them.
And that's what you hear over and over again from immigrants during Prohibition, that this is important to them.
This is not just some vice.
This is part of their life.
HAMILL: People found it necessary to believe that this was an Anglo-Saxon white country.
And suddenly here were all these Catholics, these Irish and Italians, here were all these Eastern Europeans including large numbers of Jews, who were not like them.
And they were changing the nature of the country.
They made an alloy, a mixture of metals that was tougher than any individual metal.
Obviously they made a better country out of it.
But they didn't want to believe that.
OKRENT: And in the small towns-- particularly the Midwest-- where native-born Protestants lived a very-- relatively speaking-- a stable life, they saw the city as these cauldrons of sin and debauchery and of large numbers of votes that were going to change the nature of the country.
LERNER: The Anti-Saloon League, for all its talk about getting rid of the saloon, really was thinking mostly about the immigrant.
It was a concern about, Who does the saloon cater to? "Those are the people we're worried about.
" There's a sense that they're not real Americans.
That's always a very strong part of the Anti-Saloon League's message, that real Americans don't need a saloon.
They're better than that.
NARRATOR: The Anti-Saloon League was perfectly poised to exploit small-town concerns, and their opponents seemed incapable of seeing how serious they were.
OKRENT: It's very hard for people on the other side-- the Wets--to organize around anything.
What was the common cause? "I'm going to go march in the street so I can keep my gin?" It doesn't have quite the same ring as the morally inspired movement that many of the people on the Dry side had.
NARRATOR: For nearly half a century, the brewers had been holding their own against temperance forces.
Their industry was now one of the largest in the United States, producing 900 million barrels of beer a year.
In some years, taxes on alcohol comprised 70% of federal internal revenue.
One brewer's letterhead boasted, "Uncle Sam is our partner.
" The best-known and most powerful brewer was Adolphus Busch.
OKRENT: If you were to imagine an emperor of beer, that was Adolphus Busch.
He built the family firm into the largest brewery in the Western hemisphere.
And he was the leader of the wet movement, such as it was.
NARRATOR: An immigrant from the Rhineland, the youngest of 21 children, he entered the brewery supply business in St.
Louis in 1857, went into partnership with his father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser, and soon became the first brewer to succeed at bottling beer for shipment.
His brewery on the St.
Louis riverfront sprawled across 70 acres.
He owned railroads, ice factories, bottling plants.
Busch had 5 lavish homes on two continents.
His children's playhouse had 3 floors.
Tiffany designed the stained-glass windows in his stable.
On the occasion of his 50th wedding anniversary, customers in 35 cities raised a glass to the happy couple.
Politicians sought his support.
Presidents befriended him.
He liked to wear medals and awards, including the Order of the Red Eagle, personally presented to him by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
As the Anti-Saloon League steadily gained ground, other members of the brewers' association looked to Adolphus Busch for leadership.
OKRENT: When one side of a movement is people inspired by passion and the other is people inspired by commerce, passion is likely going to win.
However, commerce, in the form of Adolphus Busch and the other brewers and the distillers, can hold off passion for many, many years.
And that's what he did.
He threw himself in front of the prohibition movement, and he was going to stop it single-handedly, he thought.
NARRATOR: Busch and his allies fought back, buying legislators and election officials whenever and wherever they could.
They bribed newspaper editors to write editorials favoring their cause--even paid the poll-tax for Mexican and African American voters in Texas because they were thought likely to favor the sale of beer.
But the brewers were painfully slow to understand the revulsion many Americans felt at the worst excesses of the saloons they owned.
And they engaged in pointless quarrels with whiskey distillers.
OKRENT: One of the things that weakened the wet side of the debate is that the brewers, trying to preserve their right to sell beer, they turned on the distillers and said, "The distillers are doing really horrible things.
"It's terrible for the American family.
"This is a poison that's being poured into people, where beer that's liquid bread"-- was actually a term that they used to define it-- it was a healthy beverage.
They published pictures of little babies with steins, you know, and mothers who drink beer are gonna build better babies.
Babies should sip some beer, as well.
They tried to turn it into a health beverage.
NARRATOR: The brewers also poured money into a national organization called the German-American Alliance.
It had been founded simply to encourage German culture, but the brewers turned it into an anti-prohibition army, pledged to defeat what it called the prohibitionists' assault on "German manners and customs and the joviality of the German people.
" Nearly two million German Americans would eventually join the Alliance, helping to ensure that states with large German populations like Pennsylvania and New York, Illinois and Iowa, would not vote themselves dry.
But it also deepened small-town America's suspicion of brewers and the saloons they controlled.
FELDMAN: If you really don't want people to drink, it's not enough just to ban alcohol in this town.
You have to ban it at least in the next town over, or people will cross the town line and go and drink there.
The same problem is true, of course, at the state level.
It became increasingly clear that you needed national regulation, that something needed to cover the whole country if it was going to prohibit alcohol in a general way.
To outlaw alcohol nationally, then, what you needed was a law that would reach everybody, and that had to come from the Constitution.
NARRATOR: By 1913, thanks largely to the tireless efforts of the Anti-Saloon League and the WCTU, Georgia and Oklahoma had joined Maine and North Dakota and passed laws restricting liquor state-wide.
So had Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
The brewers and distillers were suffering.
County by county, state by state, they were being forced to close down.
But they still believed that any kind of national restriction on alcohol was impossible because the United States government was so dependent on the taxes they paid.
Then for the liquor industry, the unthinkable happened.
In early 1913, the 16th amendment to the Constitution was ratified, authorizing the Federal Government to impose an income tax.
The Anti-Saloon League had helped bring it about, shrewdly allying itself with progressives and populists who favored the redistribution of wealth.
The government would no longer have to rely on alcohol to fund its operations.
OKRENT: The prohibitionists knew that they could never, ever have prohibition until they could find something to substitute for the tax collections that came through the excise tax.
So therefore they supported the income tax.
NARRATOR: "Prohibition is no longer a local issue, " warned the American Brewers' Review.
"Prohibition is now a national danger.
" The Anti-Saloon League pounced.
"The time is now," it said.
MAN: We therefore declare for alcohol's national annihilation by an amendment to the federal constitution which shall forever prohibit throughout the territory of the United States the manufacture and sale and the importation, exportation, and transportation of intoxicating liquor to be used as a beverage.
NARRATOR: On December 10, 1913, the citizens of Washington, D.
C.
, saw something they had rarely seen before: a mass march sweeping toward the Capitol-- two parallel streams of people: several hundred women, representing the WCTU, and a thousand men, members of the Anti-Saloon League.
They were there to demand a prohibition amendment to the United States Constitution.
A number of other countries were also considering prohibition statutes, but these marchers wanted an amendment rather than a mere law because if they succeeded, the prohibition of alcohol would be enshrined in the Constitution of the United States forever.
No amendment had ever been repealed.
FELDMAN: From the earliest days the Constitution came to be seen by Americans as something much more than what the people who wrote it imagined it would be.
It was not just a framework for government, but it came to be seen as capturing the values and ideals that were essential to what made a person an American.
NARRATOR: The same day as the march on the Capitol, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas sponsored an 18th amendment to the Constitution of the United States--prohibition.
Representative Richmond P.
Hobson of Alabama introduced it in the House.
Enacting it would be a tall order.
They would need to win 2/3 of the House and Senate before the amendment could be submitted to the legislatures of the 48 states--and then would need to persuade 36 of them to ratify it.
OKRENT: They had to get it passed before 1920 because in 1920 there was going to be a new census, and when the census changed, the cities, which were the wet part of the country, were going to have more representation in Congress, and the small towns were going to have less representation in Congress.
NARRATOR: In 1914, Drys won a first vote in the House, 197 to 190, nowhere near the 2/3 they needed, but a serious sign of which way the wind was blowing.
It was clear that millions of Americans had now come to support prohibition for all sorts of reasons--Democrats as well as Republicans, progressives as well as conservatives, freethinkers as well as churchgoers.
Some of the richest industrialists in the country, including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, backed prohibition because they believed alcohol undercut the output of their workers.
The radical industrial workers of the world were for it, too, because they thought alcohol was part of a capitalist plot to weaken the workingman.
So was Booker T.
Washington because he believed alcohol undermined black progress, while hundreds of thousands of southern whites supported it, as well, in part because they believed alcohol turned black people into brutes.
OKRENT: There was a lot in the temperance movement and the prohibition movement that was really temperance and prohibition for somebody else.
It was the peak of Jim Crow, and the prohibition movement in the South--much of it was fear of this double combination, the scariest thing to a white southern racist: a black man with a ballot in one hand and a bottle in the other hand, and they would do anything to keep the black man from having either one.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the Anti-Saloon League intensified its efforts, sending some 50,000 trained speakers into the field, collecting tens of thousands of signatures on petitions, working to defeat any senator or congressman unwilling to offer unqualified support for the amendment, and dispatching secret operatives to infiltrate the opposition and ferret out its plans.
8 more states passed dry laws: Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Arizona.
Because of local option laws already on the books, more than half the American people now found themselves living under some version of prohibition.
Many of the state laws still permitted package stores to sell liquor for home consumption.
It was the saloon the Drys were after, and most Americans went along, certain any national law wouldn't really affect them.
President Woodrow Wilson found himself trapped between the two wings of his Democratic party--the wet cities of the East and Midwest, and the very dry South and West.
In part to placate the Drys, he had appointed Josephus Daniels, a tee-totaling North Carolina newspaperman, as secretary of the Navy.
Daniels promptly banished alcohol from the entire fleet.
Wilson's secretary of state was a far more celebrated champion of prohibition, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, 3 times a failed candidate for president.
OKRENT: He was a progressive populist.
His enemies called him "the fundamentalist pope.
" He at first was a temperance guy but not a prohibitionist, and I think that it's fair to say that he saw which way the movement was going, and when he saw that there was a possibility of a prohibition amendment, he jumped into the front of it because he was this major, major figure in the United States.
NARRATOR: On April 2, 1917, President Wilson traveled to Capitol Hill to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.
The Great War had begun in Europe almost 3 years earlier, and over the intervening months, German submarines had sunk American vessels and enraged the American public.
The war--and the anti-German propaganda produced by the Wilson administration's newly created Committee on Public Information-- set off a wave of hysteria about Germans and German-Americans.
Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage.
" Dachshunds were stoned to death.
School children destroyed their German textbooks, and an Illinois mob lynched an American citizen whose only crime had been speaking German over a neighbor's fence.
The frenzied atmosphere was a disaster for the German-American brewers-- and tailor-made for Wayne Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League.
OKRENT: There's an office of the government that is created to propagandize and to build up hatred for all things German.
Well, to the prohibitionist, this was the home run.
This is the thing that they needed to finally win.
MAN: We have German enemies across the water.
But we have German enemies in this country, too.
And the worst of all of our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.
NARRATOR: Wayne Wheeler persuaded the Senate to investigate links between the brewers and the German-American alliance, which had trumpeted the German cause until the moment America entered the war.
Wheeler would see to it that beer and treason were now linked in the public mind.
The Anti-Saloon League immediately called for a temporary wartime ban on the sale of precious grain to brewers and distillers-- and eventually saw it passed by both houses.
For the first time in history, every American was subject to federal restrictions on alcohol.
There had been 1,000 American breweries before the United States entered the war.
Within months, half would be out of business.
Meanwhile, Wayne Wheeler was at work behind the scenes, determined to seize the moment and win adoption of the prohibition amendment.
Boies Penrose, the formidable Republican boss of Pennsylvania and one of the Senate's leading Wets, mindful that passage of the amendment in Congress was inevitable, threatened to mount a filibuster unless the Drys agreed to a time limit for ratification by the States.
They would have 6 years.
No more.
Penrose was sure that 36 states would never be able to ratify the amendment in the time allotted.
But to the surprise of the Wets, Wheeler agreed to the limit.
The Senate voted in favor of the amendment on August 1, 191 Afterwards, convinced they had outwitted Wheeler and the Drys, the Wets went out for a celebratory drink.
The final House version of the bill allowed the dry forces 7 years to achieve ratification.
The Wets still remained confident that it would never happen.
When the vote in the House came on December 18th, Wayne Wheeler was watching from the gallery.
OKRENT: One of his opponents said, they would look up to him as if he were the Roman consul.
Was he going thumbs-up or thumbs-down? And they would vote the way that he told them to vote.
No matter what your position was on other issues, if you were not OK with Wayne Wheeler, you were in trouble.
NARRATOR: The amendment passed the house easily--282 to 128-- and was sent to the States for ratification.
The Anti-Saloon League and their allies had only 84 months to convince more than 5,000 legislators in 36 states to ratify.
They would do it in less than 13.
On January 16, 1919, Nebraska, the home of William Jennings Bryan, became the 36th state to ratify the 18th amendment.
It would go into effect one year later.
HAMILL: Here were all these evangelical Christians, familiar figures today, who decided to pass a law that would imprison Jesus if he turned water into wine.
They'd say, "There he goes.
Lock him up.
" NARRATOR: As midnight neared on the night of January 16, 1920, the First Congregational Church in Washington, D.
C.
, was packed with people eager to celebrate the moment when the 18th amendment came into effect.
OKRENT: It's the First Congregational Church in Washington, interestingly the church that Frederick Douglass prayed at, and gathered there are all the leaders of the prohibition movement.
NARRATOR: Anna Gordon, Frances Willard's long-time companion, now the president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was there.
So was Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League.
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels told the crowd that "no man living will ever see a Congress "that will lessen the enforcement of that law.
"The saloon," he said, "is as dead as slavery.
" OKRENT: And giving the crowning speech after many hours of people waiting for it, out comes William Jennings Bryan, his great bald dome gleaming, his eyes filled with the fire that made him the greatest orator of his time.
And he gives the speech that ends at the stroke of midnight, and he cries, "They are dead, they are dead who sought the young child's life.
" taken from the book of "Matthew.
" "Those who would kill us and who would destroy us, we have killed them.
" And it is this galvanic moment when absolute triumph of working toward this moment finally arrived.
NARRATOR: Millions of Americans were jubilant.
"The slums will soon be a memory," the evangelist Billy Sunday said.
"Men will walk upright, women will smile and the children will laugh.
" Hell, he was sure, would "forever be for rent.
" LERNER: There really was this overly optimistic sense among Drys that through the stroke of a pen suddenly everyone was going to change their habits and change their ways.
There were a lot of people who said, "Let's give this a try.
" But it wasn't going to be the easy transformation of America that the Drys imagined.
NARRATOR: After nearly a century of hard work by clergymen and women's groups, reformed alcoholics and single-issue lobbyists, the United States of America was officially dry.
Those who had insisted on the "absolute shall" had won.
What had been the fifth-largest industry in the country was now illegal.
Tens of thousands of workers-- mostly immigrants--would lose their jobs, and so would hundreds of thousands of others in related industries: truckers and barrel makers, bottlers and grain growers, waiters and bartenders.
At first, most Americans, even many of those who had initially opposed prohibition, would do their best to obey the new law.
OKRENT: There was a lot of the dry movement that was idealist, and one of the ideals was a belief in law, that if we have this in the Constitution, in the organic law of the nation, and if we have an enforcement law that has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, people will obey that law.
You know, we don't murder each other, either.
NARRATOR: But in Chicago, just a few minutes after prohibition went into effect, 6 masked bandits with pistols emptied two freight cars full of whiskey, another gang stole 4 casks of grain alcohol from a government bonded warehouse, and still another hijacked a truck loaded with bourbon.
Making prohibition the law of the land had been one thing.
Enforcing it would be another.
The devil would turn out to be in the details.