How Prohibition Ruined Everything
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First month is $30. Bring your number and ID. Offer not available if with T-Mobile or with Metro in the past 180 days. Hello, everyone. Stuck with you here. And I'm Gabby. And welcome back to the podcast, my hoes. Welcome back, my friends. Oh, dear God, this episode is going to be ironic. I say that it's going to be ironic because you can already see from the title here right now that we're going to be talking about prohibition. How is that ironic? What is it you have in your hands right now? Bourbon. Uh-huh.

I may be drinking coffee, but I had a drink prior to this beforehand because I realized if it's late at night, I shouldn't be drinking something and then recording a podcast because I will be yawning the whole time versus coffee. So I've had both now at this point. Moonshine.

Yes, we are going to be talking about moonshine. Look, the reason we're doing this episode, my friends, is that just a few days ago, there was an important anniversary in terms of the U.S. Constitution. See, on December 5th, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt had signed the 21st Amendment, which officially brought an end to the period known as Prohibition in the United States. It was a very short period overall, but it was something that was filled with a lot of

iconic figures, we will say. Well, by doing that, they allowed a whole new set of crime to come to the surface. Oh, they did. It's actually kind of really funny. People built empires on bootlegging. They did. In fact, it's one of those things, like, you know how I am very anti-drug, like extremely anti-drug? Yeah. So it's one of those things that when you go and look at, say, the modern war on drugs that was launched, um,

People didn't really look at history and what happens with it, or at least with the way that they go about it with the war on drugs, considering that what they should have already learned from prohibition.

So it doesn't work out well. The interesting thing, though, about prohibition. So sorry, is that the IRS actually enforced it? Yeah. Yeah. Because that's how they were able to actually track. OK, I know it's probably going to come up here at some point. But for funny little detail for anyone, because if you listen to the episode that we did on Capone a while back, the fun fact that people talk about is that he was not caught for like smuggling or any of the other illegal activities.

He was arrested on tax evasion charges. And Gabby, what is it about the IRS? What do they have in their form about illegal goods? Oh, yeah. You have to let them know if the income that you bring in was from illicit activities, which we learned this year when we were like filling out the form and he was on the phone with a lady laughing about it. And she's like, no, seriously, you have to write that down. Yeah.

But I did an episode as well about like the prohibition era on my podcast. And it was they also got him on tax evasion. Mystery of everything. Plug everyone. Go listen to the mystery of everything. I know we do a lot of that type of stuff because we were looking for his missing goal.

Which, you know, a lot of stuff was probably buried or hidden or just shot away and all kinds of different things. Oh, yeah, that's definitely what the entire mystery was. It was like, oh, yeah, during this era, he got all this money, but he thought he was going to go to prison forever. So he hid his money.

You know how it goes. Yes. So, my friends, in recognition of this date, we are going to take a brief look back at the history of temperance, prohibition, and how people got around it. So, for those of you who are joining in with us, sit back, grab your favorite snacks and drinks, maybe even of the adult variety, if you will. He means water. Yes. Water is the real grown-up drink. Hydration is key. Dumbasses.

go and drink some goddamn water. I swear to God, the amount of people who complain about headaches and everything else. It's like, oh yeah, what did you eat today? Chips. What did you have to drink? Coffee.

Drink some goddamn water. Gabby, this is addressed to you. I don't drink coffee, so I'm good. Thank you. Got it. So a little side note before it is that we begin. Throughout this episode, you're going to hear me mention quite a number of different terms, and I want to unpack them for our international audience. Because we, I'm amazed actually when I go and look at the statistics on this podcast, we have quite a number of listeners from around the world. Okay. The land of the free band alcohol.

I'm just having a hard time figuring this out. Like, are we really free if you can just ban alcohol? The way I would have moved. You will understand why.

You will understand. See, here's the funny thing. People like to look at prohibition as a very isolated thing. They like to look at it as a movement from the late 1800s going into the early 1900s when this happened. No, there have been movements for this that went back way earlier. Hell, there have been temperance movements that go back into medieval Europe in different places. That's the thing. This is old. This is way older than people get a credit for, but people don't understand that. They only look at it in an isolated way.

So first, I need to explain that temperance. This refers to specifically the instance to the overall movement to limit or in most cases entirely restrict the production, sale and consumption of alcohol. Now, temperance is something that often came from religious groups. Not always, but these were like the big early pushers of it. And the second term is actually prohibition.

While in a general sense, this does refer to the restriction of alcohol, it also specifically refers to the period between January 17th, 1920 and December 5th, 1933. While this might be confusing, I'll try to use prohibition era to describe this period and prohibition to describe the movement itself, because it's a very different thing entirely. Like one is a very specific time period. The other is a general push that is much, much older.

Because the thing is, this is what I'm talking about. While we tend to associate prohibition with the early 20th century, the actual idea and notion of a temperance movement in the United States is way older. We're talking even back to the founding of the country itself.

So while alcohol often served as an important source of treated water through less strong forms of alcohol like cider and beer, changes in economies of the colonies also changed the ways in which colonials consumed. The triangle trade specifically made rum dirt cheap and accessible, with distilleries in New England taking in tons of sugar cane from the Caribbean to produce and bottle before shipping it off to the rest of the British Empire. In fact, the tax on molasses

which is the reduced byproduct of sugar, that was a critical factor in the War of Independence. It's really funny when you go back and look at this. This is why I always look at economics when talking about geopolitical issues, because it is always something that factors into things. After the American Revolution, this consumption primarily would switch to whiskey, but the access to alcohol remained a point of tension between Americans and their governments, either in Whitehall or Washington.

You might remember the whiskey rebellion that happened between 1791 and 1794. That was a direct result of a tax levied on the spare agricultural products of farmers that were then distilled into whiskey. Because if you were producing a bunch of corn and other stuff, and then it's like, okay, well, you don't have nearly as many people that are going to buy this produce, and it's going to go bad. What is the most efficient way to make a high quality product? Maybe not high quality. What's the term?

High value. There you go. Value added is a term that's oftentimes applied to economics for it's like when you have a base product and then you go and do something to it to make it more valuable. The value added effect of whiskey is huge because what it does is it not only makes it into a product that is on its base expensive, it also lasts. Corn will rot. What happens to whiskey, though?

It ages and it gets good as fuck. There you go. Sorry. Good as bleep. I'm trying to be PG. We're talking about alcohol and crime and a lot of other stuff. Many worse things will probably be talked about here. Okay. So that was very important.

Even as early as, you know, the immediate foundation of the United States, the access to liquor was seen almost as a kind of right of Americans. But this must be weighed against the temperance movements that also at the same time were occurring with these developments. Here's the thing.

Objections to alcohol really came from a few but very distinct and overlapping viewpoints. The first was the perceived moral decay, which is an often thing that varying different societies would claim about their own states. This being as a result of nearly daily drinking. Or, I say nearly daily drinking. Oh dear god, for many people it was daily constant drinking. Constant? Yeah.

I'm going to need to explain this here. It had to be like lower alcohol content, right? Because there's no way. So for the most part, yes. So remember the whole thing with like tea and beer and cider and all this other stuff? Yeah. It's like for water, for the most time, for stuff to be safe, right? Water wasn't safe, especially in places like cities. Wasn't that back in the day, like back in the day, like ancient Egypt?

That's throughout basically all human history. Gabby, this is one of those things when we talk about the history of tea, why tea and other drinks like that that require things to... Are you okay? Sorry. Is the bourbon hitting already? No.

So this is the thing is why tea and other products were so important, because now you had a drink that wasn't alcoholic that people would drink. In fact, it was caffeinated, which meant to increase people's alertness and productivity. OK, but did people were people just actually drinking alcohol for all of human history like it was water? Yes. Like.

They were fine? Literally, yes. Surely that couldn't be healthy because alcohol makes you sluggish, bloated. This is your mind fog. Do you remember when we did the episode on beer? Like, I think that was like a year and a half ago at this point. We did that. That's one of the early middle episodes that we did. Yeah. So one of the things is that the primary source of nutrients that people got back in the day were based off of carbohydrates. You had bread.

You had maybe some vegetables and other things that were foraged and done or grown in a garden. And then you drank water. Yeah, you could. But the big thing that people got their nutrients from, in some cases, I think some studies showed that like a third of the nutrients that people got specifically came from beer. So I know those homies were not shredded because how on earth were they drinking alcohol and then drinking?

No, that wouldn't even work. Well, they were working constantly for laborers. And that's the thing. The thing is, when you have alcohol in your body, it's going to met up. So like you can't burn anything else because it's going to focus on metabolizing the alcohol first before it metabolizes like anything else. But what also remember when we talked about. I guess I didn't have a surplus of food. So that helps. Yeah, this is one of those big things. And remember, what is it you told me about some alcoholic drinks in Trinidad? Like for anyone who's curious right now, my wife is from Trinidad. Yeah.

What was it? Remember we were talking about low alcohol content for a lot of drinks that even kids could have at different points? Like 3%, 2%. Exactly. I don't even know what the point of the alcohol in the drink was at that point. So the majority of alcohol that people would be drinking on the daily would be weak, like weak ale, something along the lines that would be 2% or 3%. I know, but I feel like even if you drank enough weak ale, it would still affect you negatively because alcohol, no matter in what quantity, is bad for you. Yes, correct.

Correct. Like there's no safe consumption amount. Correct. But do you know what it is safer than? Getting some waterborne illness bacteria that rips your guts out from the inside. You don't want a little dysentery as a tree? For those who are curious, this is my favorite statistic. In warfare, the majority of people have died from shitting themselves to death.

That is true. Dysentery and shitting yourself to death has killed more people in warfare than any other wound, disease, or anything else in the history of the world. You do what you will with that fact. Carla only has the best tech. Can't connect to network. But she didn't have the best internet. So she got Cox Multigig Spades to power all her...

Now, all her tech is connected. Exactly. Step it up with multi-gig speeds. Available everywhere, only from Cox. Two gig download speeds, individual speeds vary. See cox.com for details. So yeah, by some accounts, American colonists were drinking nearly four gallons of rum per person per year in 1773.

That is to say nothing. That is literally just rum. That is nothing about the lighter drinks like cider or beer, which, you know, had the twofold effect of getting the drinker maybe a little bit boozed up while also providing safe and clean water.

But this drinking oftentimes went to the point of excess with your typical American essentially drinking from pretty much dawn till dusk. Like that is you would have a alcoholic drink with basically every single meal. This is giving me like a headache, like just thinking about that. Correct.

And so this led to a perception, and I don't really think it's entirely out of the line to say this, that the new republic, the American dream from the very get go was to be a nation of drunks.

Wait, that was what they said or that was a joke? That was the joke is that pretty much everyone was drinking all the time. That's pretty much what it was. I'm not saying that as an insult. I mean, that's also true for so many places. It's just when you have a lot more money, agricultural produce and freedom to do things, you have a tendency to drink.

So that's what happens. So the temperance movement officially enters the scene in 1784 with the publication of, quote, an inquiry into the effects of ardent spirits upon the human body and mind, which was a short text by founding father Benjamin Rush. And this text describes the impacts of long term alcohol abuse, which includes such thing as, and I quote, and I quote, number one, talking more than usual, right?

Yeah, that is that. Yeah. OK, but guess what? Number two is talking less than usual is also it's like the happy drunk versus sad drunk. Like some people are like bubbly and happy and then some people will literally rock your shit for no reason. It's true. I become the kind of philosopher wild person when I've been drinking and I it could go either way. Actually, if I drink red wine, somebody is catching these hands. If I drink bourbon,

Girl, we're going to have a good time. We're going to be singing like songs on a table, you know? Number three, Gabby, prone to quarreling. Red wine. They should just ban red wine. The opposite. Being in a uncommonly good mood, including things like laughing, telling body jokes and boisterous laughter. Number four.

It's also just contradictions of each other, depending upon the drunk. Number five, swearing. I do that for $3.99. Yep. Six, telling other people's secrets or telling strangers your own secrets. That is true. Like, why do you turn into a certified yapper? Seven, immoral and immodest activities, especially in women. Gabby!

Hi there. There's a deep side. Eight. Pointing out your friend's flaws in public or being generally unpleasant. Me pointing out your monobrow every time I've had a sip. Uh-huh.

nine slurring or clipping your words okay nobody listen guys fighting especially those resulting in black eyes or other bruises damn 11 certain extravagant acts that including things such as singing hallooing imitating the noises of brute animals jumping tearing off one's clothes and dancing naked breaking glasses and throwing your furniture everywhere i'd love a good check swatch um

I mean, checks notes, throwing up my couch. All of these. This is a whole thing that is a part of a list of common behaviors of drunks. And that is a broad list. I just want to say slurring or clipping your words. Like if you've had that much, just stop. You know, like just don't don't continue down that path. It leads to nothing good.

So this is a publication that came out in the 1700s, and as a result of this publication, temperance societies quickly sprang up across the United States. They would lobby for the scourge of booze to be addressed by the government, and they were successful to a degree. Societies continued to spring up and develop, and

and Maine even became the first state to be a dry state in the 1850s, severely curtailing alcohol for most. Was there like not a lot going on in the 1850s? Like, were there just like... Oh my God, no, there was. There absolutely could be. It's literally the years leading up to the Civil War. There were a lot of things that were going on at that time. Okay, but then they turned all of their...

into this? Mm hmm. Yeah. See, here's the thing. The temperance movement didn't just seek to remove alcohol for personal benefit. Sometimes it was more altruistic, like Pennsylvania Quakers opposed alcohol for the sole purpose of undermining chattel slavery. The Quakers avoided the substance at all costs to protest the further development of sugarcane cultivation in the Caribbean, because go figure, if

If people aren't buying sugar, then that means that there is going to be less demand, which means there's going to be less profit, which means there's going to be less slaves that are imported to the Caribbean in order to be able to grow said sugar cane. Because pretty much in order to grow that, like you could have small farmers that made it, but it wasn't really profitable unless you had slaves. Guess what my country was so good at? I guess what we were enslaved for? Sugar. Yeah.

The sugar plantations, they would take you out on like the field trips and you would see like where the slaves, sorry, indentured laborers would work. I mean, for the most part with Trinidad, I mean, they did have slavery I think in the beginning, but it largely did switch over to indentured laborers, did not? Well, they brought over Indian laborers and that didn't work out. So then they brought over African laborers and then I guess that worked out for a while and then they gave everybody their freedom and then

Then the country became like splintered between Indians and Africans. And it kind of still is to this day. And I'm one of the, for lack of a better word, this is what I've been called quite a bit, a mutt between the Indian and African laborers because they, of course, would commingle. But then people would be mad about it. Yeah. Crazy work. Which is going to happen, which is a better turnout than what happened in places like Haiti.

where we've covered that. If you all want to know about the absolute disaster that has been Haitian history, you should check out one of the previous podcast episodes that we did on it. I can't believe sugarcane cultivation is tied into...

This. Prohibition. Yeah, no, literally some people would just straight up not buy alcohol because they didn't want slavery. That's actually so sweet. Like supportive. Think about it like this, right? Think about modern boycotts. What happens with the people? You know how there's a bunch of like, oh, hippies or it's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to boycott Starbucks because I don't appreciate the specific stance. No, Starbucks was completely boycotted for a fully different reason. And it was a failure.

It was not a hippie thing. No, no, no. I'm not talking about just that. I mean, like literally any number of other companies or products. Yeah, I know what you mean. People will do this for targeting any specific one. But the problem is they're usually not addressing the specific thing that is actually... Well, it's also because a lot of companies are owned by other companies. Like three of the same company would be owned by one overall company, which I don't understand how that is legal. But then you're boycotting the wrong thing because it'd be like this other one specific branch that did this thing.

And the same umbrella company, like the same overall company would have three companies, each with different ideologies. I'm baffled to this day. There are again, there are a lot of things that relate to this, but it's even more complicated nowadays when you look at how things are related. Dear God, I have so many videos that I have to do in the future when it comes to geopolitics, like the stuff related to the cobalt mines and everything else.

It's really messy. When you buy iPhones, apparently it's supporting slavery in the Congo. Sort of. Yes.

Is that a yes or no? Well, it's estimated, I think, what was it, that a quarter or a third of the cobalt that comes out of it is done by illegal mining. So not that that is affiliated with official companies. And when I say affiliated, I mean direct employees. A bunch of these people are actually paid by people within the company, but they are they end up getting paid like cents on the dollar.

you could say, in order to be able to do this because there's then no safety regulations or anything surrounding it. And it's a really messy thing. And that's where a bunch of the material that goes into the rare earth elements that create iPhones and other products in the first place, like the really advanced electronics coming from what is essentially not quite, but almost slave labor. It's

Really messy. Again, I'm going to have to do a deep dive in on that. And this is something that the Quakers, again, they were doing in order to be able to protest and try and reduce the impact or the demand for sugarcane. And so from that, the demand for slavery. Now, while this did not significantly undermine the trade, it does mark a very interesting confluence between abolition and prohibition in early America.

As the 19th century closed, the temperance movement had a great deal of strength. States began to adopt laws that intended to curb the production and consumption of alcohol, with some being far more draconian than others. For example, Indiana and New York had some of the harshest of any of the laws, with prohibitions against the sale of alcohol on Sunday.

I want to hear the Kentucky laws because we still have a lot of prohibition era laws where you can't have like...

You can't sell alcohol on Sundays until like 1 p.m. or something or after 1 p.m. I don't know. But there's like a lot of laws. Like if you try to buy alcohol on Saturday nights, everywhere will... Like even if the store is open, they will not sell to you in certain counties. It's so wild. Because one time we wanted to buy gin. Remember? Yes. Before we wanted to go to the Ren Faire on the Sunday. And so Saturday night, we were looking for like a floral gin. And everyone was like, sorry, we can't sell you that. Like...

What? Because everything was shut down because of horse burrow. I think you can buy beer sometimes, but not in a dry county. And I went to school. This county we live in actually was a dry county. I don't know if they made...

I remember last, like a few elections ago, they were like, the whole campaign was make County wet again. Oh my God. I know. I know. Everywhere you went. Oh shoot. I just gave away our County. Okay. We literally, they're like, make X County wet, make X County wet again. And it was like, okay, please, please. I have the brain of a middle schooler. This is not okay.

And of course, everyone was making those jokes. Yeah. And you think about it because that's the thing. There have been campaigns to change these kind of laws very recently. The one that we just talked about with Indiana. Indiana would not repeal its dry Sunday policy until the 2010s.

That's yeah, that sounds all right. Yeah. So with craft breweries able to sell on Sunday starting in 2010 and mostly repealing the law in 2018, those sales are only allowed between 12 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Sunday. So there's still some restrictions. Just increase weekday drinking because like if you're an athlete or you train, you don't want to drink like every day. So then you pick like a day or something. And then if you can't drink on the weekend, you'll just end up drinking on like

Wednesday afternoon. Wine Wednesday, you mean?

Oh, Thirsty Thursday, if you're in college. Do you remember Thirsty Thursdays in college? No. You'd be studying for an exam on Friday, like you're 8 a.m. and your roommate will come back throwing up in your room and you're like, please, dear God. Actually, you know, I do actually remember that. I went to center college in Danville, Kentucky, and it's very good school. But there is, and I'm saying this very bluntly, jack shit to do in Danville, Kentucky. Except drink. My school was Bellarmine and we had too much to do.

And all everyone did was drink. Yeah. So in my case, I never drank actually until the age of 25. But you. OK, here's the thing, though. So he is seven months older than me. I went to a conservative. They can't take away my degree, right? They already gave it to me. No.

They can't do that now. So I can keep it even if I wrote. Okay. So I went to a conservative Christian college, right? And you're not allowed to drink at all. You could be 21. You could be 25. As long as you go to the school, you are not allowed to drink alcohol. But I started dating him when I was 19. So when he turned 21 and I was 20, he bought the cheapest vodka he could find. Like

sparsky vodka it was so cheap it was so disgusting and i was like oh my god it's your 21st birthday we should drink something and he was like i don't want to do that no absolutely disgusting but i'm like i'm gonna make screwdrivers so he buys this gross ass cheap vodka and orange juice and i start drinking it thinking you know it'll just be like regular vodka

No. So he's drinking it and he is not having a good time. Like he is pissed off. He's like, this is disgusting. And I'm drinking the same amount as him. He is just playing Call of Duty. And I start throwing up in his shared bathroom. Like he had like suites. So two rooms, shared a bathroom. And I was like in the shower, just throwing up for like three hours. And yeah, anyway, that was his 21st birthday. Happy 21st.

belated 21st birthday. I think I was too hungover to wish you that. I did not have a lot of good experiences with alcohol, both from my family history and simultaneously for me personally. And so it was something that I never got into. But I will say this firmly again, this kind of goes from an unrelated thing in Danville, Kentucky. There is jack shit to do like nothing. And so people would just drink. And I remember being like 19 and 20 and just so annoyed at everyone around me because they were so drunk all the time.

OK, so here's the thing, guys. I'm like, I'm not even joking. If we had met a year earlier, we would not be married. We would not have dated because when I went to Bellarmine, my roommate was from Danville, Kentucky, and that was in 2014. He was in Japan in 2014. His school was in Danville, Kentucky. So the entire like his entire freshman year of college, I was hanging out at his campus. Literally, I was on your campus.

But I was throwing up all around her campus because we would come to town on the weekend to go to my roommate's church. And the night before, like Saturday night, we'd go out because all the college guys were older and we'd be like, you know, in town, we'd be outside. Okay.

Yeah, if you had met me in 2014, we would not have dated. I fear. Yeah. Like, I don't think we would have dated. But it's okay. It's okay. Because you met me after that in my Christian girl era. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And then you fell in love. Yes. Forever. Yes. Congrats. Yes.

This is a bit of a tangent. People are learning lore about us that they probably did not expect. Why would you do an alcohol episode and not expect lore drops? Fair enough. Yes, a lot of secrets get revealed. Hey, that was one of the symptoms. Oh my god, you're right.

We need prohibition. So this, my friends, then brings us to the 1910s, when the movement really gets its political legs. Now, the American legislature was already divided amongst wet or pro-alcohol and dry or pro-prohibition lines. Societal ills like violence, abandonment and unemployment were associated with the free flow of alcohol. And so the movement continued to gain strength in the economic and cultural turmoil at the beginning of the century.

But one event played a key role in the passage of the Prohibition Amendment. Can you guess what that is? World War I. Yes, indeed. See, here's the thing. With the outbreak of war against Germany, public opinion shifted. And German-Americans, who were some of the most outspoken supporters for consumption of alcohol, because, you know, the association with beer and everything else, very German things, well, they found themselves sidelined as the war reached on.

But now a new argument was available for the prohibitionists, one that touched on patriotic, economic, and purely practical points. Blocking the future production and sale of alcohol would free up a massive supply of grain, metal, and other materials that could be used for the war effort, because it's not being wasted on drinking. Now, while this was by no means an entirely fair argument, as evidenced by American production during the Second World War alongside liquor production, it's a convincing argument to people.

In fact, the 18th Amendment was already through the legislature and to the states by the time the war ended. While it was not passed during the war, it had enough support by January of 1919 that it was enacted as law, with only two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, declining to pass it.

In October of 1919, the Volstead Act would pass, officially enshrining prohibition into the laws and constitution of the United States. Beginning in January of 1920, federal agents started enforcement of the law, much to the delight of anti-alcohol groups. They were confident in the longevity of the law, and they had every right to be. Looking back, they could see a long-fought campaign that slowly but surely turned the American people, or at least a decent majority it seems, against alcohol.

with the incremental legal support throughout the late 18th and all the 19th centuries. In fact, Senator Morse Shepard from Texas was quoted as saying, quote, here is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail. Basically impossible.

As the police swarmed distilleries, breweries, wineries, the American alcohol industry crumbled in just a few short months. Or at least that's what the temperance movement hoped would happen. As is the case in many instances when a conditional ban is placed on something,

Loopholes quickly dominate the consumption market. With the introduction of prohibition, the brewing industry faced a life-or-death struggle. In 1915, the United States had more than 1,500 breweries. When the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, there was only 100 left standing. The survivors are now staple names in American booze culture, so let's see how they fared, or at least what it is they did to survive.

One of the most interesting things that happened because of the official prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s was that major manufacturers of toxicants would switch their production to either comply or just barely skirt around the law. Putting their industrial might to work, manufacturers would transition into newer lines or similar lines of businesses.

Anheuser-Busch, you know, like Bud Light, would create something that they called near beer in addition to soft drinks like ginger beer. 25 different types of soft drinks, frozen egg products, and they even dabbled in vehicle manufacturing.

It's a very interesting combination. In Colorado, Coors, like, you know, Coors Light, they started producing malted milk, which it sold to the iconic American soda fountain industry, in addition to candy companies. But they didn't stop there. They would even branch out into new avenues of business, including the Coors Ceramic Company, which still produces home and industrial products today. Yeah, so when they did that, did they account for all of the jobs that would be

impacted? Or did they just fucking do whatever they wanted? See, there's the problem. Also, isn't that like government overreach? Oh, severely. Yeah. Because I feel like as Americans, how the fuck did that occur? Like, I understand the downsides of like, and it feels like people back then drank a lot more than people do today. And I get that. Fully understand they needed the product for World War I. They couldn't just be wasting good food on drink. Like, I totally get it. But

Still, that is insane government overreach, which is like literally everything growing up as a non-American. That is literally everything you would think the American government wouldn't do. You would think you would think. But then every time I say surprised. What did Wendigo say? Next time you think the government wouldn't do that. Oh, yes. That's one of the jokes of the Internet is like that's the thing. When everyone talks about conspiracies or other stuff and you're like, oh, next time you think that the government wouldn't do this.

Yeah, they would. Yeah. That's the thing. When talking about anything with governance, and I'm not trying to go on a political rant when I say this for anything here, my friends, I absolutely am not. The overwhelming majority of the time, you can't really factor in stuff for morality when it comes to governance. That's just not something that really works. When it comes to prohibition,

A lot of this, though, was done specifically along moral lines. Like even people have made justifications that doing something, even if it hurts one economically, even if it hurts one in other ways, the morality of it is so good that it's going to justify the pain that is brought. And in some cases, that is true. That is true. The problem is it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work.

Because, look, while this seems like reasonable courses for companies to take, given the economic climate of the U.S. during the Prohibition era, there were less scrupulous products that were developed as well. Anheuser-Busch and a number of breweries decided to be very good corporate citizens and produce malt syrups and yeast for home use, but made sure to warn their customers that they should be baking staples to be combined with water and left to age that they could produce horror of horrors beer.

They gave people basically a step-by-step ability to produce beer at home and then told them, hey guys, but don't do that. This is to use for other baking goods, not beer. Yeah.

Vineyards were less able to transition to other outputs due to the overwhelmingly agricultural nature of their industries. Most wineries would close, but a few managed to stay in business through creative means. While general consumption of wine was forbidden, religious wine was still in production, keeping some wineries afloat until 1933.

But most either closed or switched to other forms of fruit, including pears, prunes or peaches. But they kept a few acres of vines for the day prohibition was appealed. So during prohibition, do you remember when we toured the Four Roses distillery, which guys were from Kentucky? So if you guys ever want to do the bourbon trail, you must. It's actually quite fun. You day drink. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not even joking. They give you a bourbon tasting at like noon and you're like, this is like four shots. And then you just keep going. And you're like, I can't do this. And we did this with his family last year, but didn't Four Roses, a lot of the distilleries, they actually just

Yeah. Most of them shut down, but a couple were allowed to stay active because of what it is they produced for, you know, the medicinal or like the prescription purposes among them. And Four Roses is one of the ones. And they were able to kind of stay more alive for production purposes by still exporting it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's like special like prohibition bottles of it, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah.

Yeah. So these wineries would keep at least a few vines active. And like breweries, they too would produce some do-it-yourself booze kits in the form of cakes of raisins. With the hopeful warning for the law-abiding citizen, caution, we'll ferment into wine. Sorry, wait. I also remember, do you remember Four Roses? They also sold it as a medical whiskey. Yes, literally. Yeah. Because you would go to your doctor and you could get prescribed a prescription for alcohol.

Gosh, what a tie. Okay. Yeah. But to be fair, when you go back and look at tonics and other kinds of things that people were producing. It was alcohol, wasn't it? I kid you not. There was one that I found the other day. I have a video of it that I actually need to do a response to because I found one of these on TikTok where it was showing a medicinal medicine, a wonder tonic that was given to children for cough syrup, mind you. And it was 46.6% alcohol. 46%.

And that was their tonic? And that was a type of tonic. So they weren't feeling better. They were just turned up. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Love that for them. Now, I know some of you are saying at this point, but Stack, what about the mobs? Where are the bootleggers? Yeah, that is something that's going to happen. But look, the criminal underbelly of society would quickly fill in the gap to be experts in procurement, transport and consumption of illicit fermentation.

A disparate network of street gangs and crime syndicates would capitalize on the opportunity and would soon develop an expansive network of producers, transporters, and sellers of alcohol that would span religious, racial, and ethnic divides. While there was never truly peace between gangs in the major cities, the violence would subside over time as mob bosses like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano would realize that the money that was on the table from illicit booze far outpaced the gains they made previously.

So utilizing their knowledge of legitimate business and financial institutions, the gangs would manage to develop speakeasies, transportation groups, and other companies that facilitated the sale of contraband, while using money to bribe or simply eliminate people who got in their way. And it's really hard to overstate just how much money was on the table here. Like in one instance, a mid-sized operation was reported to have made the modern equivalent of $190 million in one year alone.

Gangs with existing operations used booze as an economic multiplier, with Al Capone taking in almost $1.6 billion per year in modern money. And you have to imagine that there is a network like this in almost every city. You almost see a kind of parallel economy form in the criminal underworld in the 1920s. Booze was either spuckled in or produced in remote areas and then transported into cities for sales.

Smugglers would have then a profound impact on athletics as well. The government, or at least those not on the payroll of criminals, were keen to stop the movement of liquor and did their best to raid, disrupt, and destroy stocks of the stuff wherever it is that they could find it. This forced the transportation arm of the booze to start trading a, well, how do I even phrase this? It forced them to start a kind of arms or engine race with the law.

This is where it gets really confusing. Particularly in Appalachia, smugglers would modify smaller, faster cars to carry their product in a way that they could simply outrun or outmaneuver police interception. Like people, you know when you'd see those things of like modern gang movies of these gang members and their souped out muscle cars and all different kinds of things they would have, but they're pretty much just to show off. They're not for any actual purpose other than literally showing people, hey, look at how rich and powerful and awesome I am. When

In reality, most of the time it looks goddamn stupid, in my opinion. In their case, they were actually modifying getaway vehicles because this is back in the day, right? Where vehicles, it's not like what you would see in 50, 60, 70 years.

This was like, this was the Wild West of automobiles. This was something where how good a vehicle you got oftentimes depended not on just like the manufacturer, because anyone could kind of buy, even if it was expensive, a base model of something. The good cars were ones that were handcrafted and modified by engineers. Those are the ones that could actually do something.

And so utilizing dirt roads or even going off-road to avoid the police was a hallmark of smuggling operations, and people would modify their cars to be able to do this. You wouldn't really know it, but drivers decided driving fast cars at high speeds was pretty fun. Lawmen aside. And so even before the end of Prohibition, racing leagues started to form, which eventually led to organized racing like NASCAR that you see today. It's funny. But as the 1920s turned into the 1930s, that hummingbird looked like he was about to land on Mars.

Simply put, prohibition soured in the mouth of the United States. There were a lot of issues pushing for the repeal of the 18th Amendment. And let's boil them down. First is the economic impact. Remember how you said like, oh, hey, wouldn't this cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Hey, wouldn't this cause a lot of people to lose their jobs? Yes. And now that you've said that for a second time, yes.

Brewers, winemakers, and distillers played a key role in local economies. Their absence from the job and tax market of these economies made a Great Depression that was already hitting and destroying much of the United States even worse. Because think about it this way, right? You had all of these new programs, all these new things to try and drag things out of the Great Depression that were funded based off of tax dollars.

What happens when you remove huge chunks of your economy out of the economy and taxable income? You have less money to work with. Yep. Yeah.

Socially, the argument for temperance kind of fell flat in the face of a massive spike in organized crime that resulted as well. So you're talking about a scenario where you have less taxes going into the system, less jobs that are supporting people, more organized crime that people are getting rich and committing violence, which in turn is degrading society even further. Yeah.

It was really hard to argue that societal ills were addressed by removing booze when Al Capone was using violence, bribery, and prostitution to line his pockets in an amount that totaled about 2% of the American budget. Like, think about that. By today's standard, that would make him among the richest men in the entire world. Lastly, there was just the issue of enforcement.

Criminal syndicates, home brewers, and even established companies also found ways around the law, meaning that the police had to keep an eye on everyone all the time, and by today's standards, that might seem easy. In the 1920s, that's impossible.

Only 1,500 agents originally received assignments to enforce prohibition. But here's the gag. Okay, so yeah, they had agents enforcing it. But what they did, if you look at the way that they assigned the agents, those agents could make a lot of money just looking the other way. Just being like, oh, you're driving from Canada with bottles of, huh, cider? Maple syrup? Cool, cool, cool, I guess.

Go on through. Yeah. I mean, I'm not even joking, dude. No, absolutely. It also goes to show there from the agents. Yeah, they would have one person to monitor every single business. It's like, okay, so you have 1500 agents. So that means that each person was responsible not for monitoring all the businesses in an area, but about 80,000 individuals on top of that.

You can't do that. You simply can't. There simply wasn't the mechanism to enforce a law this specific and draconian. In fact, politicians and business leaders who just a decade earlier supported the ban now supported its repeal simply because of just how untenable the position was. It was basically impossible.

Names like Rockefeller, Pont, Roosevelt all pushed for its repeal. In fact, that was one of FDR's campaign promises during his first campaign. With the pressure building like a champagne bottle, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution would pass and was ratified in 1933, officially bringing an end to the ban. Producers who had in no way spent the last decade breaking the law produced stockpiles of booze, and it's said that the hangover lasted well into 1934.

All jokes aside, the U.S. would breathe a collective sigh of relief now that their woes were over. Prohibition ended and the American alcohol industry started to find its footing once again. Honestly, when I go and talk about this, this is really such an interesting period in American history. And it is fun to talk about it. You essentially have a second kind of Wild West across the U.S. because it really is. It was so interesting because also after Prohibition ended, all of these big like people like Dutch Scholes and everyone who like had alcohol

a lot of money made from like bootlegging and then what were the places called where people can go? The speakeasies? Yeah. So they had to like

pivot essentially to gambling and other things like that. But then there were already people who were running gambling. So now they're like intruding on some other kingpin's turf. Dude, it was so messy. Like they had the criminal world in turmoil. Exactly. Because you have this whole kind of separate area where once things end in the 30s, you have these

It's mafias, mafias that have been created during this time. And exactly as you said, they get into gambling. They get if they don't go legit. Some people at that point went legit and they invested their stuff into other businesses and then they stopped. But the thing with, you know, when you make a bunch of money doing crime, it's so much easier to make money doing crime. I've heard. I've heard. I think the biggest crime I've ever done was I stole an eraser from my brother one time and he was really mad. Yeah.

It was really mad. So yeah, it's just, it's one of those things. So a lot of people find a difficult time, you know, giving it up or at least the mob bosses that made a shit ton of money, give it up and they retire. But the ones underneath may continue. And this, I think we covered about it in a short video is something that then helped lead to the rise of Las Vegas. Because when you look for anyone who's curious, when you go and look at Las Vegas, holy crap, the rise of the mobs and the gambling halls and everything, it is crazy.

Oh, messy. We could probably do an entire episode on that. On Vegas? On Vegas. Let's go to Vegas, do an episode on Vegas. I feel like it'd be more realistic. And then write it off under taxes like Al Capone.

Is that legal? I feel like Al Capone is not the pinnacle of legal tax code. No, he just avoided paying any taxes whatsoever. In this case, we would actually just cite, yeah, no, we went to Vegas for an episode. No, we just, we have like, we posted and we're like, hey, let's all, let the hoes go to Vegas. You know, the history of everything. Just a bunch of hoes in Vegas doing what hoes do.

I feel like a history of everything, a hose, if you will, of Vegas trip would be detrimental to our health. From everything I've seen in comments and such. Gabby, we're saying this as a joke. I have a feeling that there will be pressure built up behind this to actually do a meetup in Vegas specifically because of this. Oh, God.

I want to like, okay, we're already married. So there's no risk of us like getting married in Vegas. But can you get divorced in Vegas? Yes. God, it's going to be such a fun night. Oh my Lord. We get divorced specifically just to get married again by a guy dressed up as Elvis. No, no, no. So we get divorced not to get married in Vegas. We get divorced to throw like a big wedding. Like we eloped before. So we throw like a massive wedding. Like just like we never got married before.

And then everyone's going to be like, why are you doing this? Well, we got divorced. So now we actually can like throw this ridiculous shindig. And then we'll just invite the hoes. And nobody we know. We just invite people for the podcast. I have a plan and we're sticking with it. Dear God.

Oh, yeah. This really was a Wild West period. You basically got all these everyday average people just getting into criminal activity. Literally crime. Yeah. And so the era sticks with us to this day. There are speakeasies that are visible across the bar scene in many cities and gangster movies set in the era that still go into the movie theaters every year.

the us seems to have not forgotten prohibition but rather enshrined it in the popular consciousness and i think we may return to some of these moments in prohibition to talk about al capone like we did before the italian mob famous rum runners all kinds of stuff but either way for those of you that have listened let us know send us an idea that there's things that you want to hear about there's so many things that we could talk about from this era and more and i really hope that you all enjoyed listening to this episode thank you i'm

my friends, my hoes, for listening to our rants that I am not even inebriated to be going on as much as I have. No, like literally. About different things. You gave me like one little sip of bourbon and I've just been yapping like it was a whole bottle. My bad. My friends, thank you for listening. I appreciate all of you and we will see you next time. Goodbye, guys. Bye.