April 5, 2025 • 29 mins
From 1920 to 1933, the U.S. government attempted to ban (recreational) alcohol throughout the nation. In a stunning -- we're being sarcastic here -- turn of events, people circumvented the law and found ways to keep drinking and organized crime blossomed in cities across the country. Listen in to learn just how far Uncle Sam was willing to go to stem the flood of illegal booze in this week's Classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we are returning to you with a
classic episode.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Look, Nolan and I did use to party. Uh we
don't party as much anymore, but we are we do.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
We like our booze non poisoned. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Tell us about this one.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
Oh man, I remember that time that the government, the
federal government tried to poison people to keep them from
drinking alcohol.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
That was a good one, man. How that work out?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
We'll see in this classic episode.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Let's roll it.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the
(01:06):
show everyone, I'm Ben Nol. Have you ever seen a
moonshine still kind of.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Looks like a glorified sort of fancy teakettle kind of right.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, it depends really on the parts that the bootleggers
or moonshiners are working with. They're pretty common. It's got
a curly cue part for distillation. They were more common
during the area of prohibition, but you can still see
a lot of old ones out in the mountains now.
They would use any available part to make us still.
(01:36):
For instance, car carburetors were used in moonshine distillation operations,
often to the detriment of the people who ultimately drank
the shine.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I wonder where that is. Yeah, what I'm.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Saying here is that due to prohibition, a lot of
quality control just took a dive.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Wait a minute, So you're saying that totally ban and
outlawing a substance doesn't just make people automatically magically stop
wanting to consume said substance.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I know it sounds like a broad brush, right, but
history has shown prohibition largely aside from any you know,
moral arguments, prohibition of a substance just doesn't work.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Speak of history, we.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Have to give a shout out to one of our
favorite parts of the show, super producer Casey pegram Casey.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Bootleg pegram Casey is history personified.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Yes, yeah to someone what you just said, though, Ben,
the heart wants what the heart wants.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Sure, sure, and Uncle Sam can't stop the heart from wanting. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, governments have very very little luck suppressing a chemical
substance of any sort, and alcohol is no different. Today's
story takes us to the world of prohibition, and I
think everybody across the planet and it is aware in
(03:01):
some vague way of the US's experiment with the Eighteenth
Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol. Right, people are vaguely
aware of that.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
I think they're vaguely aware of it. But let's make
them intimately aware of it, shall we?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Ben sure? Sure?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified
in nineteen nineteen, said the following the manufacturer, sale, or
transportation of intoxicating liquors, within the importation thereof into or
the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory
subject to this jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes. So it
(03:37):
prohibits all of that, and it goes into effect on
January seventeenth, nineteen twenty, and people thought the people who
thought this was a good idea were like, there's a
brand new America on the way.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I mean, there's no question that it was kind of
a puritanical way of looking at things, And it was
sort of this slightly misguided notion that getting rid of
the devil's juice was going to all of a sudden
make everyone into good people.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Getting rid of Lucifer's sippons would make people inherently better
and prevent the dissolution of the nation's moral character and
they would paint pictures of rampant crime, juke joints. I
don't know if they use the phrase juke joints at
that point, and alcoholism. They said, we will increase the
(04:26):
success of our economy, we will raise the moral character
of the nation, and will make the innocent people of
the country safe again.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Because we were also just getting out of a war,
and there was a sense that society may well be
on the brink of utter chaos. So you know, let's
let's get rid of people's thing that kind of makes
them feel better, right, right, So I'm not trying to
advocate for using alcoholic to numb yourself against the pains
of the world, but man, the world was full of
(04:57):
some pain around this time.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Things were pretty rough.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
A lot of poverty and a lot of divide between classes,
and the topic of today's story specifically affects the lower
classes almost exclusively.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah, this is a story of victimization and socioeconomic divides.
It's also a story wherein Uncle Sam is probably the
bad guy, the closest thing we have and to an antagonist.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Right, uncle Sam is such a jerk.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
So here we are in prohibition. We found this excellent
article on Vox. I don't know if we should do
the title yet because it might be a little bit
of a spoiler by German Lopez. So in this article,
Deborah Bloom, the author of the Poisoner's Handbook, Murdering the
Birth of forensic Medicine and jazz Age New York, explains
how even before Prohibition, the government had some particular requirements
(05:57):
for industrial alcohol manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Yeah, this is pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
It was actually a regulation that required these additives to
make this industrial alcohol unpotable, but it also separated them
from the potable alcohols, which were taxed differently. So I
think originally it was just an additive called methanol, which
is a wood alcohol that is, you know, in certain
(06:25):
doses toxic when consumed by humans.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Sure, yeah, absolutely, And we see I think you did
a great job outlining this. We see a couple of
concurrent motivations for this. Right, let's make sure that we
still get paid and we can separate the different types
of alcohol. But as prohibition was enacted and continued, First off,
(06:50):
the people who argued in favor for prohibition were completely wrong.
At least in this case, the economy was not helped
in any shape fashion.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Or form.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
I'm sure law enforcement received some more money as they
were trying this impossible war on drugs mission, but the
moral character didn't exactly improve either because people kept drinking.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Well, not only did it not improve, it just kind
of fed the monster that is organized crime and all
of these underground distilleries and speakeasies and.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Just pure outright thievery.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Because that industrial alcohol we were talking about, that was
the stuff he needed to make the bootleg booze. So
you know, people were actively pulling off heists to get
this stuff. And here's the thing that's so cool, Ben,
this is something I didn't know. They call this this
topic of today's episode, the chemists wore, and it's for
good reason. It's because the methanol that was in that
(07:46):
industrial alcohol could actually be slightly removed or it could be.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Like redistilled, mitigating, mitigated.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And so that's what the chemists that the bootleggers or
the gangsters hired we're doing. And obviously they would pay
their chemist way better than the government chemist, so they
might attract better talent.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Absolutely, And we know there was this huge industry of
illegal alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It booms very.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Very quickly after prohibition, and what we find is kind
of this proto breaking bad situation. This really is a
chemist war. In an essay written in the twenties called
Our Essay in Extermination by a doctor named Charles Norris,
who was a Chief Medical Examiner of New York City
at the time, he details the size of this trade.
(08:44):
He says the federal government admits that while eighty million
gallons of grain alcohol are manufactured yearly under permit, only
about seventy million gallons of it turn up again in
legally manufactured products. That means ten million gallons estimated per
year are being taken by these groups of gangsters, handed
(09:06):
to their like evil wizard chemists, and they're cleaning it
out or making it less lethal hopefully, and then they're
selling it, you know, in the back rooms as speakeasies
across the nation.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yeah, and that's the thing too, Like, if you were
just an average workaday Joe trying to get your boose
fix on going one of these speakeasies, you didn't know
where it was coming from.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, you didn't know what.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
The It's like buying illegal street drugs today, Like, you know,
you have no idea what additives or impurities are in it.
You are trusting in your supplier to not kill you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Right, And even before.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The craziness let's loose that we're about to get into,
people were dying from alcohol poisoning because sometimes those chemists
didn't do a good enough job of getting this stuff
out of there, and it was always impure even if
they did do a decent job.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Absolutely, absolutely, And when we say the effected people's health,
we're talking about very dark stuff. People died, people encountered paralysis.
You know that old trope about drinking moonshine and going blind.
Some people did go blind. Yeah, not a whole ton,
but we have some spooky numbers for you.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yeah, it's crazy that I found this article or some
blog post about something called ginger jake.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Ginger Jake was a medicine.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
It was actually got around prohibition because it was sold
as a medicine and it had something in it called
tricrestal phosphate that actually helped kind of trick the government's
tests into, you know, seeing it as being a pure
alcohol or you know, having no medicinal value whatsoever. But
essentially it was just ginger flavored alcohol. But apparently this
(10:46):
additive they used, unbeknownst to the company, I imagine, was
a very very slow acting neurotoxin, so it took time
for it to take hold, and then eventually it actually
started to cause all kinds of leg muscular pains and weakness,
and it caused a type of paralysis. According to this uh,
(11:09):
this post would actually have a very distinctive walk associated
it with it where people would have to like lift
their legs up entirely, sort of like the Ministry of
Silly Walks from the Monty Python Show, you know, the Jakewalk,
the Jake Walk exactly, and we actually have a song.
The interesting thing about this is it was apparently baffling
to doctors and toxicologists in the US, but it was
(11:32):
actually a couple of blues singers who identified the source
of this in two different songs, one by Isham Bracy
called Jake Liquor Blues.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Hear a little clip of that.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Money.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
And then we also have Tommy Johnson who kind of
figured out the source of this condition in his Tongue
Alcohol and Jake Blues.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
When do a clip of that? Yes, please nog ho.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Y do no.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Fill? Let me that b Martin no home look you man,
let it one man, Oh, don't kid.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
No. So they're part They're not neurologists, obviously, but they
are part of the community where the people encounter this
stuff on a regular basis.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
That's right, Because you know, the rich, the swells, the
high society types, who weren't these kind of Bible thumping
prohibition pushers, they were able to get imported booze from
places like Europe or the Caribbean. You can get rum,
very expensive. You had to know people, but it could
be done. But the lower class had to rely on
(13:32):
this super cheap, dangerous street bootleg stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Absolutely. People would also buy things that were counterfeit spirits.
They were advertised perhaps as whiskey or they were advertised
as vodka, but instead.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
They were.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
You know, they were tarted up industrial alcol products, and
they contained a lot of terrible stuff, not just the neurotoxins,
which this was a really interesting story about Jake. I
think they didn't figure out the neurological damage it's capable
of until what the seventies.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah, and I think it was even worse than they
originally had even thought. Turns out that it actually damaged
the movement control neurons in the brain or the upper
motor neurons.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And thankfully, you know, this is about.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Fifty years later, but they had of course tracked down
all of the offending stuff and it was outlawed and gone.
But this is interesting because this is a company that's
doing this. This is a company that's trying to make
a buck by cheating the system during prohibition.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Right, right, And they're not the only one. This also
affects pharmacies. They were allowed to dispense whiskey with a prescription,
So who runs the prescription pad? Right?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Interesting?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, And religious authorities that require or i should say
institute religious institutions that required alcohol or ceremonies also came
under the control of criminal organizations. And it was it's
similar to how when marijuana was legalized or decriminalized medically
first in California, a lot of people developed nebulous medical conditions. Yeah,
(15:19):
so they could get their prescriptions.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
A hard time sleeping. Are you got you know, restless
leg syndrome or something?
Speaker 1 (15:25):
And there were a lot more people claiming to be
adherents of certain churches or religious organizations.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
People found Jesus, are you saying al Capone was running
communion line.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
My man people like him were involved for sure, and
this this was helpful because these were sources of alcohol
that was less likely to be contaminated. But while this
was happening, the government realized that all the predictions they
had made were wrong. Turned out alcoholism and health problems
(15:59):
do true. Alcohol consumption were not going down, they were
going up, right, Like alcohol declined a little bit, but
a ton of restaurants closed because, as you know, many
restaurants make their largest amount of profit off of spirit sales. Sure,
and then the markup right right because of the markup,
and then the government figured out that there was a
(16:23):
massive leak they could not plug somewhere along the production
line of industrial alcohol manufacture and legal use, Like millions
of gallons were disappearing, and so they made a pretty brutal,
ruthless decision.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
It really did ben So earlier we alluded to the
chemists War during Prohibition, and I would argue that's something
that was kind of ongoing even before this brutal move
we're about to talk about. But it really kicked in
the high gear when the US government decided to require
these industries manufacturers of this industrial alcohol to start adding
(17:07):
all kinds of horrible stuff to their product, and I guess,
to the government's credit, that's not really the right way
to put it at all. But they were transparent about it.
They wanted people to know. It was in the papers.
In fact, in the Vox article, the headline from a
clipping reads government to double alcohol poison content and also
(17:27):
add benzene smell warns drinkers, So they knew.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
What people are doing. Yeah, they wanted them.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
To know, we're gonna make this stuff even more poison
than it already is. And the assumption there was that
people were going to look out have some sort of
self preservation instinct, not the case. People already were showing
that they lacked that entirely when they were drinking this
stuff off the streets that was already very, very dangerous
and adulterated.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, this was in nineteen twenty six, and as you say, Noel,
to their credit, they were very public about this. But
the reason we call this a brutal, ruthless thing is
that it was clearly an indefensible, illogical statement. It was
both trying to punish people for a moral decision and
then also remove any perceived culpability from the inevitable consequences
(18:17):
of this terrible decision. Yeah, they put benzene in there.
They also put mercury in there, I.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Think a Canda Strych nine, I believe.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
But the biggest one was that they doubled that methanol
that was in there. And the reason that that one
was the doozy is because it was so similar to
the alcohol itself atomically that it bonded with it in
a way that was very difficult for the chemists to
fully get rid of it by redistilling it or whatever.
(18:47):
I'm not an alcohol chemist, but whatever they went there
to do, it was hard.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, because it was so closely intertwined with the drinking alcohol. Right.
And Charles Norris, who we mentioned earlier in that essay,
he and Alexander Gettler, who was the chief toxicologist of
New York at the time, they both told the government
not to do it. The government did it, and instantly
(19:14):
people started dying. It was called this was called the
alcohol of the Country by Bloom because it was very
easily accessible stuff. We have a lot of information about
this in New York City especially, but we know that
at this time bootleggers had nationwide transit infrastructure. So this
stuff was going everywhere. And the estimates for the deaths
(19:36):
are a little bit fuzzy because some of the deaths
were were just the result of alcoholism. But the problem
is that at the time alcoholism like drinking oneself to
death from regular old alcohol that was listed as a
natural death in obituaries. This was something very different. This
(19:56):
was death by poison.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Yeah, and this got Charles Norris, who you read from
his essay earlier, who was the chief medical Examiner in
New York City, was just wholesale against this. He's like,
this is a really bad idea. Government, please don't do this.
And of course they didn't listen to him, and so
he referred to this and actually ties in with the
title of that essay, he referred to this as quote
our national experiment in extermination. So it really is almost
(20:22):
like this idea of like they call them souses, you know,
the drunks or whatever. It's almost like the government actively
wanted to kill them.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
And in this.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Slate article, it describes an event that happened on Christmas
Eve of nineteen twenty six when a man goes into
Bellevue Hospital in New York and is terrified that Santa
Claus is coming after him to kill him with a
baseball bat. As it turns out, he was in fact
experiencing hallucination as a result of this poisonous stuff.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And again, you know the government knew, I mean, I
don't know.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It just seems like so ill informed, Like obviously prohibition
wasn't working.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
They knew prohibition wasn't working.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
They wanted up the anty by doing this, But did
they really think this.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Was going to stop people? They had to know people
were going to drink it.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
The approach they appear to have taken here, or rather
the stance would be that you have to break a
few drunk eggs to make a sober omelet, or the
dangerous argument we've talked about before, the belief and the
greater good. But yeah, almost one hundred people died, as
you said, in December nineteen twenty six, the week of Christmas,
(21:38):
due to this, the same year that the government passed
these regulations, and hundreds would die in the following years.
This had intentionally been rendered fatal, and Calvin Coolidge was
the president at the time, and under his administration these
deaths were not seen as a problem. It was kind
(21:59):
of like shrug, things happen, but overall it is getting
drunks off the streets.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Well, it's sort of like the is it the president
of the Philippines who basically advocates for murdering drug dealers
in the streets?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Similar vibe, only a little more roundabout way of doing it.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I mean, at least de Terte says what he means
and isn't trying to hide behind some kind of puritanical
curtain like these guys.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
You know, it's very, very troubling.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Norris is walking a thin line on this prohibition issue
at the time, you know, because he is the chief
Medical Examiner, so he has street cred and he's I
think in a little bit of a safer place to
argue against prohibition. And he says that something must be
added to grain alcohol to prevent it being all drunk
(22:52):
away and thereby deny it to legitimate industry and business.
So he says, Okay, we have to add some kind
of contaminate, but methanol. Seriously, that's going to kill people.
He didn't really propose a different additive, or I couldn't
find a different additive that he proposed. But he also
(23:14):
he also mentioned something that was really powerful and pressing
it for his time. He revealed how the New York
administration of the twenties looked at certain populations as disposable alcoholics,
certain types of immigrants, the poor, as we mentioned at
the top of this episode, and there were a couple
(23:37):
of different rules, like two sets of rules, one for
the wealthy people who are drinking a lot and one
for the quote unquote degenerates. And Norris points out that
private physicians will rarely expose their deceased customers to the
indignity of a post mortem examination, and then they'll just
call those deaths those alcohol related deaths deaths by some
(24:00):
sort of natural cause. They still look upright and respectable
even in the afterlife.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Yeah, Ben, and I think there's this quote from the
Chicago Tribune that was cited in the Slay article. It
really sums up this whole problem that we're trying to
kind of wrap our heads around for nineteen twenty seven.
It says, quote, normally, no American government would engage in
such business as poisoning its own citizens. It is only
in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous,
(24:27):
are considered justified. So, I mean, I think that really
sums up the mindset of like this whole era some
moral crusade, a total moral crusade that did eventually come
to an end.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yes, luckily, luckily for everyone involved. Teetotalers and boos enthusiasts.
A like, prohibition of alcohol was repealed in nineteen thirty three,
so it didn't last that long, just a span of
about thirteen ridiculous years now were there were there plus
(25:00):
to alcohol prohibition. Sure, for certain parties, it was great
for organized crime, right, Yeah, it was great for law enforcement,
that's job security because it's an unending war. But for
the majority of the country, it was demonstrably a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Yeah, sure sounds like it to me. But I don't
really see too much of a silver lining here.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
So, and it's interesting the way we're seeing this kind
of repeat with marijuana prohibition and the way the tide
is turning with that. It's really interesting to kind of
be quite a time to be alive just to see
these things kind of change and see the kind of
puritanical attitudes kind of making their way out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, which is strange because in the current situation regarding marijuana,
especially in the US. There's some states where it's completely legal,
and there are some states where it's still a very
serious offense to what possess it carried around grow it.
And one of the huge factors in the turning tide
(26:01):
regarding marijuana legislation has honestly been not so much the
science behind the substance itself, but the economic benefit to
governments and businesses of making it legal.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Oh for sure, I mean that's certainly.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
You see dollar signs in some of these formerly teetotalin officials,
right and yeah, And you would think that with all
this concern about the economy with this original prohibition, that
would have been a little bit more on people's minds
instead of just funneling all that money into the.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Abyss that is the black market, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Right, right. And after prohibition on alcohol ended on the
federal level in December fifth of thirty three, some states
decided to stay dry states for up to a third
of a century longer.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Well, we still have dry counties in the US.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I know Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is a there's really
beautiful mountain cabins you can rent there.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
That is a dry county. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah,
and it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
I want to point out there's something that I noticed
as a correction in one of these articles. I think
it was in the Slate article. They mischaracterized the eighteenth
Amendment as prohibiting the consumption of.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Alcohol that was not illegal.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, it was just the manufacturer, manufacturing, and distribution, right,
import exports.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
It's an interesting distinction there.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, yeah, right, it's kind of like the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
That's right, you can go after it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Currently, as we record here in the US, there are
still hundreds of dry counties across the country. About ten
percent of the country is still what would be considered dry,
and about eighteen million people or so live live in
that area.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Nobody knows how dry I am, Ben, No one.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Knows the dryness you've seen.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Isn't it weird that the always see drunk people singing
that song? I know I'm talking about like in cartoons.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody nobody.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Right, don't story yourself, sir, Lari.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
And on that note, feel free to send us your
favorite drunken single longs if you find them online. We
want to thank you so much for taking this strange
journey with us. If you would like to learn more,
we can recommend reading Charles Norris's essay and Extermination in full.
Deborah Blooms Poisonous Handbook is a great thing, and it's
(28:45):
not just about prohibition. Sure, if you liked our arsenic episode,
you'll also love Poisoner's Handbook absolutely.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
And we would of course like to thank our super
producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, our
research associate Christopher Hasiotis, who hiped us to today's topic.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
And I want to thank you right well, you Ben,
I'm looking at you.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh, and thank you Noel.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
See you next time.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we are returning to you with a
classic episode.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Look, Nolan and I did use to party. Uh we
don't party as much anymore, but we are we do.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
We like our booze non poisoned. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Tell us about this one.
Speaker 4 (00:21):
Oh man, I remember that time that the government, the
federal government tried to poison people to keep them from
drinking alcohol.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
That was a good one, man. How that work out?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
We'll see in this classic episode.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Let's roll it.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the
(01:06):
show everyone, I'm Ben Nol. Have you ever seen a
moonshine still kind of.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Looks like a glorified sort of fancy teakettle kind of right.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, it depends really on the parts that the bootleggers
or moonshiners are working with. They're pretty common. It's got
a curly cue part for distillation. They were more common
during the area of prohibition, but you can still see
a lot of old ones out in the mountains now.
They would use any available part to make us still.
(01:36):
For instance, car carburetors were used in moonshine distillation operations,
often to the detriment of the people who ultimately drank
the shine.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I wonder where that is. Yeah, what I'm.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Saying here is that due to prohibition, a lot of
quality control just took a dive.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Wait a minute, So you're saying that totally ban and
outlawing a substance doesn't just make people automatically magically stop
wanting to consume said substance.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
I know it sounds like a broad brush, right, but
history has shown prohibition largely aside from any you know,
moral arguments, prohibition of a substance just doesn't work.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Speak of history, we.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Have to give a shout out to one of our
favorite parts of the show, super producer Casey pegram Casey.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Bootleg pegram Casey is history personified.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Yes, yeah to someone what you just said, though, Ben,
the heart wants what the heart wants.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Sure, sure, and Uncle Sam can't stop the heart from wanting. Right.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, governments have very very little luck suppressing a chemical
substance of any sort, and alcohol is no different. Today's
story takes us to the world of prohibition, and I
think everybody across the planet and it is aware in
(03:01):
some vague way of the US's experiment with the Eighteenth
Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol. Right, people are vaguely
aware of that.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
I think they're vaguely aware of it. But let's make
them intimately aware of it, shall we?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Ben sure? Sure?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So the eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified
in nineteen nineteen, said the following the manufacturer, sale, or
transportation of intoxicating liquors, within the importation thereof into or
the exportation thereof from the United States, and all territory
subject to this jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes. So it
(03:37):
prohibits all of that, and it goes into effect on
January seventeenth, nineteen twenty, and people thought the people who
thought this was a good idea were like, there's a
brand new America on the way.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
I mean, there's no question that it was kind of
a puritanical way of looking at things, And it was
sort of this slightly misguided notion that getting rid of
the devil's juice was going to all of a sudden
make everyone into good people.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Getting rid of Lucifer's sippons would make people inherently better
and prevent the dissolution of the nation's moral character and
they would paint pictures of rampant crime, juke joints. I
don't know if they use the phrase juke joints at
that point, and alcoholism. They said, we will increase the
(04:26):
success of our economy, we will raise the moral character
of the nation, and will make the innocent people of
the country safe again.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Because we were also just getting out of a war,
and there was a sense that society may well be
on the brink of utter chaos. So you know, let's
let's get rid of people's thing that kind of makes
them feel better, right, right, So I'm not trying to
advocate for using alcoholic to numb yourself against the pains
of the world, but man, the world was full of
(04:57):
some pain around this time.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Things were pretty rough.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
A lot of poverty and a lot of divide between classes,
and the topic of today's story specifically affects the lower
classes almost exclusively.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah, this is a story of victimization and socioeconomic divides.
It's also a story wherein Uncle Sam is probably the
bad guy, the closest thing we have and to an antagonist.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Right, uncle Sam is such a jerk.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
So here we are in prohibition. We found this excellent
article on Vox. I don't know if we should do
the title yet because it might be a little bit
of a spoiler by German Lopez. So in this article,
Deborah Bloom, the author of the Poisoner's Handbook, Murdering the
Birth of forensic Medicine and jazz Age New York, explains
how even before Prohibition, the government had some particular requirements
(05:57):
for industrial alcohol manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Yeah, this is pretty cool.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
It was actually a regulation that required these additives to
make this industrial alcohol unpotable, but it also separated them
from the potable alcohols, which were taxed differently. So I
think originally it was just an additive called methanol, which
is a wood alcohol that is, you know, in certain
(06:25):
doses toxic when consumed by humans.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Sure, yeah, absolutely, And we see I think you did
a great job outlining this. We see a couple of
concurrent motivations for this. Right, let's make sure that we
still get paid and we can separate the different types
of alcohol. But as prohibition was enacted and continued, First off,
(06:50):
the people who argued in favor for prohibition were completely wrong.
At least in this case, the economy was not helped
in any shape fashion.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Or form.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
I'm sure law enforcement received some more money as they
were trying this impossible war on drugs mission, but the
moral character didn't exactly improve either because people kept drinking.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Well, not only did it not improve, it just kind
of fed the monster that is organized crime and all
of these underground distilleries and speakeasies and.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Just pure outright thievery.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
Because that industrial alcohol we were talking about, that was
the stuff he needed to make the bootleg booze. So
you know, people were actively pulling off heists to get
this stuff. And here's the thing that's so cool, Ben,
this is something I didn't know. They call this this
topic of today's episode, the chemists wore, and it's for
good reason. It's because the methanol that was in that
(07:46):
industrial alcohol could actually be slightly removed or it could be.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
Like redistilled, mitigating, mitigated.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
And so that's what the chemists that the bootleggers or
the gangsters hired we're doing. And obviously they would pay
their chemist way better than the government chemist, so they
might attract better talent.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Absolutely, And we know there was this huge industry of
illegal alcohol manufacturing, transportation, and sale.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
It booms very.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Very quickly after prohibition, and what we find is kind
of this proto breaking bad situation. This really is a
chemist war. In an essay written in the twenties called
Our Essay in Extermination by a doctor named Charles Norris,
who was a Chief Medical Examiner of New York City
at the time, he details the size of this trade.
(08:44):
He says the federal government admits that while eighty million
gallons of grain alcohol are manufactured yearly under permit, only
about seventy million gallons of it turn up again in
legally manufactured products. That means ten million gallons estimated per
year are being taken by these groups of gangsters, handed
(09:06):
to their like evil wizard chemists, and they're cleaning it
out or making it less lethal hopefully, and then they're
selling it, you know, in the back rooms as speakeasies
across the nation.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yeah, and that's the thing too, Like, if you were
just an average workaday Joe trying to get your boose
fix on going one of these speakeasies, you didn't know
where it was coming from.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, you didn't know what.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
The It's like buying illegal street drugs today, Like, you know,
you have no idea what additives or impurities are in it.
You are trusting in your supplier to not kill you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Right, And even before.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
The craziness let's loose that we're about to get into,
people were dying from alcohol poisoning because sometimes those chemists
didn't do a good enough job of getting this stuff
out of there, and it was always impure even if
they did do a decent job.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Absolutely, absolutely, And when we say the effected people's health,
we're talking about very dark stuff. People died, people encountered paralysis.
You know that old trope about drinking moonshine and going blind.
Some people did go blind. Yeah, not a whole ton,
but we have some spooky numbers for you.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Yeah, it's crazy that I found this article or some
blog post about something called ginger jake.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Ginger Jake was a medicine.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
It was actually got around prohibition because it was sold
as a medicine and it had something in it called
tricrestal phosphate that actually helped kind of trick the government's
tests into, you know, seeing it as being a pure
alcohol or you know, having no medicinal value whatsoever. But
essentially it was just ginger flavored alcohol. But apparently this
(10:46):
additive they used, unbeknownst to the company, I imagine, was
a very very slow acting neurotoxin, so it took time
for it to take hold, and then eventually it actually
started to cause all kinds of leg muscular pains and weakness,
and it caused a type of paralysis. According to this uh,
(11:09):
this post would actually have a very distinctive walk associated
it with it where people would have to like lift
their legs up entirely, sort of like the Ministry of
Silly Walks from the Monty Python Show, you know, the Jakewalk,
the Jake Walk exactly, and we actually have a song.
The interesting thing about this is it was apparently baffling
to doctors and toxicologists in the US, but it was
(11:32):
actually a couple of blues singers who identified the source
of this in two different songs, one by Isham Bracy
called Jake Liquor Blues.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Hear a little clip of that.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Money.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
And then we also have Tommy Johnson who kind of
figured out the source of this condition in his Tongue
Alcohol and Jake Blues.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
When do a clip of that? Yes, please nog ho.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Y do no.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Fill? Let me that b Martin no home look you man,
let it one man, Oh, don't kid.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
No. So they're part They're not neurologists, obviously, but they
are part of the community where the people encounter this
stuff on a regular basis.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
That's right, Because you know, the rich, the swells, the
high society types, who weren't these kind of Bible thumping
prohibition pushers, they were able to get imported booze from
places like Europe or the Caribbean. You can get rum,
very expensive. You had to know people, but it could
be done. But the lower class had to rely on
(13:32):
this super cheap, dangerous street bootleg stuff.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Absolutely. People would also buy things that were counterfeit spirits.
They were advertised perhaps as whiskey or they were advertised
as vodka, but instead.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
They were.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
You know, they were tarted up industrial alcol products, and
they contained a lot of terrible stuff, not just the neurotoxins,
which this was a really interesting story about Jake. I
think they didn't figure out the neurological damage it's capable
of until what the seventies.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah, and I think it was even worse than they
originally had even thought. Turns out that it actually damaged
the movement control neurons in the brain or the upper
motor neurons.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
And thankfully, you know, this is about.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Fifty years later, but they had of course tracked down
all of the offending stuff and it was outlawed and gone.
But this is interesting because this is a company that's
doing this. This is a company that's trying to make
a buck by cheating the system during prohibition.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Right, right, And they're not the only one. This also
affects pharmacies. They were allowed to dispense whiskey with a prescription,
So who runs the prescription pad? Right?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Interesting?
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, And religious authorities that require or i should say
institute religious institutions that required alcohol or ceremonies also came
under the control of criminal organizations. And it was it's
similar to how when marijuana was legalized or decriminalized medically
first in California, a lot of people developed nebulous medical conditions. Yeah,
(15:19):
so they could get their prescriptions.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
A hard time sleeping. Are you got you know, restless
leg syndrome or something?
Speaker 1 (15:25):
And there were a lot more people claiming to be
adherents of certain churches or religious organizations.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
People found Jesus, are you saying al Capone was running
communion line.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
My man people like him were involved for sure, and
this this was helpful because these were sources of alcohol
that was less likely to be contaminated. But while this
was happening, the government realized that all the predictions they
had made were wrong. Turned out alcoholism and health problems
(15:59):
do true. Alcohol consumption were not going down, they were
going up, right, Like alcohol declined a little bit, but
a ton of restaurants closed because, as you know, many
restaurants make their largest amount of profit off of spirit sales. Sure,
and then the markup right right because of the markup,
and then the government figured out that there was a
(16:23):
massive leak they could not plug somewhere along the production
line of industrial alcohol manufacture and legal use, Like millions
of gallons were disappearing, and so they made a pretty brutal,
ruthless decision.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
It really did ben So earlier we alluded to the
chemists War during Prohibition, and I would argue that's something
that was kind of ongoing even before this brutal move
we're about to talk about. But it really kicked in
the high gear when the US government decided to require
these industries manufacturers of this industrial alcohol to start adding
(17:07):
all kinds of horrible stuff to their product, and I guess,
to the government's credit, that's not really the right way
to put it at all. But they were transparent about it.
They wanted people to know. It was in the papers.
In fact, in the Vox article, the headline from a
clipping reads government to double alcohol poison content and also
(17:27):
add benzene smell warns drinkers, So they knew.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
What people are doing. Yeah, they wanted them.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
To know, we're gonna make this stuff even more poison
than it already is. And the assumption there was that
people were going to look out have some sort of
self preservation instinct, not the case. People already were showing
that they lacked that entirely when they were drinking this
stuff off the streets that was already very, very dangerous
and adulterated.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, this was in nineteen twenty six, and as you say, Noel,
to their credit, they were very public about this. But
the reason we call this a brutal, ruthless thing is
that it was clearly an indefensible, illogical statement. It was
both trying to punish people for a moral decision and
then also remove any perceived culpability from the inevitable consequences
(18:17):
of this terrible decision. Yeah, they put benzene in there.
They also put mercury in there, I.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Think a Canda Strych nine, I believe.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
But the biggest one was that they doubled that methanol
that was in there. And the reason that that one
was the doozy is because it was so similar to
the alcohol itself atomically that it bonded with it in
a way that was very difficult for the chemists to
fully get rid of it by redistilling it or whatever.
(18:47):
I'm not an alcohol chemist, but whatever they went there
to do, it was hard.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, because it was so closely intertwined with the drinking alcohol. Right.
And Charles Norris, who we mentioned earlier in that essay,
he and Alexander Gettler, who was the chief toxicologist of
New York at the time, they both told the government
not to do it. The government did it, and instantly
(19:14):
people started dying. It was called this was called the
alcohol of the Country by Bloom because it was very
easily accessible stuff. We have a lot of information about
this in New York City especially, but we know that
at this time bootleggers had nationwide transit infrastructure. So this
stuff was going everywhere. And the estimates for the deaths
(19:36):
are a little bit fuzzy because some of the deaths
were were just the result of alcoholism. But the problem
is that at the time alcoholism like drinking oneself to
death from regular old alcohol that was listed as a
natural death in obituaries. This was something very different. This
(19:56):
was death by poison.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
Yeah, and this got Charles Norris, who you read from
his essay earlier, who was the chief medical Examiner in
New York City, was just wholesale against this. He's like,
this is a really bad idea. Government, please don't do this.
And of course they didn't listen to him, and so
he referred to this and actually ties in with the
title of that essay, he referred to this as quote
our national experiment in extermination. So it really is almost
(20:22):
like this idea of like they call them souses, you know,
the drunks or whatever. It's almost like the government actively
wanted to kill them.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
And in this.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Slate article, it describes an event that happened on Christmas
Eve of nineteen twenty six when a man goes into
Bellevue Hospital in New York and is terrified that Santa
Claus is coming after him to kill him with a
baseball bat. As it turns out, he was in fact
experiencing hallucination as a result of this poisonous stuff.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And again, you know the government knew, I mean, I
don't know.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It just seems like so ill informed, Like obviously prohibition
wasn't working.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
They knew prohibition wasn't working.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
They wanted up the anty by doing this, But did
they really think this.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Was going to stop people? They had to know people
were going to drink it.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
The approach they appear to have taken here, or rather
the stance would be that you have to break a
few drunk eggs to make a sober omelet, or the
dangerous argument we've talked about before, the belief and the
greater good. But yeah, almost one hundred people died, as
you said, in December nineteen twenty six, the week of Christmas,
(21:38):
due to this, the same year that the government passed
these regulations, and hundreds would die in the following years.
This had intentionally been rendered fatal, and Calvin Coolidge was
the president at the time, and under his administration these
deaths were not seen as a problem. It was kind
(21:59):
of like shrug, things happen, but overall it is getting
drunks off the streets.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Well, it's sort of like the is it the president
of the Philippines who basically advocates for murdering drug dealers
in the streets?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Similar vibe, only a little more roundabout way of doing it.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I mean, at least de Terte says what he means
and isn't trying to hide behind some kind of puritanical
curtain like these guys.
Speaker 3 (22:23):
You know, it's very, very troubling.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Norris is walking a thin line on this prohibition issue
at the time, you know, because he is the chief
Medical Examiner, so he has street cred and he's I
think in a little bit of a safer place to
argue against prohibition. And he says that something must be
added to grain alcohol to prevent it being all drunk
(22:52):
away and thereby deny it to legitimate industry and business.
So he says, Okay, we have to add some kind
of contaminate, but methanol. Seriously, that's going to kill people.
He didn't really propose a different additive, or I couldn't
find a different additive that he proposed. But he also
(23:14):
he also mentioned something that was really powerful and pressing
it for his time. He revealed how the New York
administration of the twenties looked at certain populations as disposable alcoholics,
certain types of immigrants, the poor, as we mentioned at
the top of this episode, and there were a couple
(23:37):
of different rules, like two sets of rules, one for
the wealthy people who are drinking a lot and one
for the quote unquote degenerates. And Norris points out that
private physicians will rarely expose their deceased customers to the
indignity of a post mortem examination, and then they'll just
call those deaths those alcohol related deaths deaths by some
(24:00):
sort of natural cause. They still look upright and respectable
even in the afterlife.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Yeah, Ben, and I think there's this quote from the
Chicago Tribune that was cited in the Slay article. It
really sums up this whole problem that we're trying to
kind of wrap our heads around for nineteen twenty seven.
It says, quote, normally, no American government would engage in
such business as poisoning its own citizens. It is only
in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous,
(24:27):
are considered justified. So, I mean, I think that really
sums up the mindset of like this whole era some
moral crusade, a total moral crusade that did eventually come
to an end.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yes, luckily, luckily for everyone involved. Teetotalers and boos enthusiasts.
A like, prohibition of alcohol was repealed in nineteen thirty three,
so it didn't last that long, just a span of
about thirteen ridiculous years now were there were there plus
(25:00):
to alcohol prohibition. Sure, for certain parties, it was great
for organized crime, right, Yeah, it was great for law enforcement,
that's job security because it's an unending war. But for
the majority of the country, it was demonstrably a bad thing.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Yeah, sure sounds like it to me. But I don't
really see too much of a silver lining here.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
So, and it's interesting the way we're seeing this kind
of repeat with marijuana prohibition and the way the tide
is turning with that. It's really interesting to kind of
be quite a time to be alive just to see
these things kind of change and see the kind of
puritanical attitudes kind of making their way out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, which is strange because in the current situation regarding marijuana,
especially in the US. There's some states where it's completely legal,
and there are some states where it's still a very
serious offense to what possess it carried around grow it.
And one of the huge factors in the turning tide
(26:01):
regarding marijuana legislation has honestly been not so much the
science behind the substance itself, but the economic benefit to
governments and businesses of making it legal.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Oh for sure, I mean that's certainly.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
You see dollar signs in some of these formerly teetotalin officials,
right and yeah, And you would think that with all
this concern about the economy with this original prohibition, that
would have been a little bit more on people's minds
instead of just funneling all that money into the.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
Abyss that is the black market, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Right, right. And after prohibition on alcohol ended on the
federal level in December fifth of thirty three, some states
decided to stay dry states for up to a third
of a century longer.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Well, we still have dry counties in the US.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
I know Blue Ridge, Georgia, which is a there's really
beautiful mountain cabins you can rent there.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
That is a dry county. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah,
and it's interesting too.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
I want to point out there's something that I noticed
as a correction in one of these articles. I think
it was in the Slate article. They mischaracterized the eighteenth
Amendment as prohibiting the consumption of.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Alcohol that was not illegal.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, it was just the manufacturer, manufacturing, and distribution, right,
import exports.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
It's an interesting distinction there.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, yeah, right, it's kind of like the pursuit of happiness.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
That's right, you can go after it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Currently, as we record here in the US, there are
still hundreds of dry counties across the country. About ten
percent of the country is still what would be considered dry,
and about eighteen million people or so live live in
that area.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Nobody knows how dry I am, Ben, No one.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Knows the dryness you've seen.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Isn't it weird that the always see drunk people singing
that song? I know I'm talking about like in cartoons.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody nobody.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Right, don't story yourself, sir, Lari.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
And on that note, feel free to send us your
favorite drunken single longs if you find them online. We
want to thank you so much for taking this strange
journey with us. If you would like to learn more,
we can recommend reading Charles Norris's essay and Extermination in full.
Deborah Blooms Poisonous Handbook is a great thing, and it's
(28:45):
not just about prohibition. Sure, if you liked our arsenic episode,
you'll also love Poisoner's Handbook absolutely.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
And we would of course like to thank our super
producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, our
research associate Christopher Hasiotis, who hiped us to today's topic.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
And I want to thank you right well, you Ben,
I'm looking at you.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh, and thank you Noel.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
See you next time.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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