September 6, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, while in modern times, we often view prohibition as a failure and even a misstep by fanatics, it’s far more complex than that. Travis Spangenburg, Creative and Production Manager for the American Prohibition Museum in Savannah, GA tells the story of this complex time in America’s past.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
And we continue with our American stories. While in modern
times we often view Prohibition as a failure and even
a misstep by fanatics, it's a more complicated tale today.
Travis Spendenberg, creative and production manager for the American Prohibition
Museum in Savannah, Georgia, tells us the complicated story behind
(00:33):
Prohibition as well as humanizing it all through the story
of Carrie Nation. And she was famous for smashing illegal
saloons up with an axe from the streets of Savannah.
Here's Travis.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
It's so easy to approach history really academically, even with
things I'm very interested in, like US presidents, and it's
very easy to say, well, you know, John F. Keldy
was the thirty fifth president. He served from then to
then until his assassin. But I always got really into,
kind of hooked by the human stories behind people. I
just read the other day. I do a series on
(01:08):
our Facebook called Presidential Drinking, where I look into the
drinking habits of the presidents and you know, all your
life you hear Franklin Pierre's precipitated Civil War. He kind
of failed to These were his policy Failarliers regarded as
one of our worst presidents. But then you look at
the man was a heavy drinker, alcoholic. He on the
(01:28):
way to Washington to get inaugurated, he gets in a
train accident. His son is the only casualty from his family.
His wife and him are president. They see their little
boy decapitate it and then he has to go be president,
already having a drinking problem, and he essentially drinks himself
to death. So you know, we still can't absolve them
(01:48):
of what the presidency, what his failures in the presidency were.
But it really fits with what we do in the
museum when you start to realize, oh, there were real
human cost problems driving this man into this, and maybe
he shouldn't have been. It was the worst possible time
in his life to be president. So those human stories
behind history. So I've always tried to look deeper and
(02:08):
see what is the story we're not telling. It's not
the best, you know, it doesn't give you the widest
scale of information from just like an academic history perspective,
but as a storyteller, as somebody interested in creation and
enlightening stuff, I think it's the stuff that connects to
people the best. When I do guided towards of the museum,
(02:29):
which is when I take people kind of from the
beginning of the movement, through prohibition through the end of it.
The first thing I have to lay down is, don't
view this through your modern drinking. This is even looking
at alcoholism as a problem. We still have problems with
it today, but there's an entire infrastructure and understanding of
alcoholism and a way to get people help. Back then,
you were basically on your own. If you were drunk,
(02:51):
it was your own moral failing and treatment. There were
a few thinkers who were starting to go, hey, maybe
this is something that we need to treat instead of
punished them for. Some of the early temperance propaganda was
specifically like lock out the saloon keepers. Lock them up,
but don't lock up the drunks. They can be productive
members of society if not for this negative influence. So
(03:11):
the industrial Revolution essentially creates a situation where a lot
of alcohol is You're able to make it easier, You're
able to move it around easier. People are just able
to acquire stronger liquor easier. Up until that point, it's
easiest to just make your own beers, your own ciders.
But the strong stuff gets really easy and eighteen thirty.
(03:31):
By eighteen thirty, the average American is drinking seven gallons
of pure alcohol a year. That amounts to about ninety
bottles of whiskey across the entire year. That's the average American.
That's not the average American drinker. So there's plenty of teetotalers,
totally sober people that never drink anything factored into that number,
skewing it downwards. The average American drinker is drinking more
(03:54):
than that, maybe four or five bottles of whiskey a week.
And so you basically have this blind, drunk popular of
men who are supposed to be the sole breadwinner. Not
only are they spending all their money on this alcohol,
but they're also spending their health and when they die,
you have a whole family network that was depending on them.
You know, best case scenario, he had plenty of sons
that are older that can take his place. But if
(04:16):
he's just got a bunch of girls or a bunch
of young kids and his wife, they're done for. Women
have no way to get their own income that equals
the men that they've just lost. They have no property,
they can't divorce their husbands, and they can't vote to
change how any of it works. So at a certain point,
the only option is a massive cultural movement to change
the way America fuse alcohol. And you know, we all
(04:39):
regard prohibition as kind of a failure today. There are
things that did well. It did eliminate it did change
your drinking culture for the better, I think, But I
think generally, historically it's seen as a failure, and people
tend to look at the Temperance movement and deride them
and scold them and condescend to them for doing it,
for making it happen. And while I agree that maybe
(05:01):
it wasn't the right solution, there was a problem worth solving.
And at that point, I ask you, what solution is there,
What solution other than getting rid of the nefarious influence
is there. They had tried moderation laws, they had tried
laws to kind of limit serving, but the power of
the saloon was just so much so that people were
drinking themselves regardless. So at a certain point I understand them.
(05:24):
You know, you don't have to condone every bit of
the temperance movement, but I think it's unfair to say, ah,
Prohibition ruined certain parts of the country, and it's all
these ladies fall faced with the destruction of their family.
What else? I am a noted Carrie Nation apologist. That
is one of my strongest missions when I'm working the floor,
when I'm telling stories in the museum, is to get
(05:46):
I always say there's three stages of learning about Carrie Nation. First,
you think she's a nutcase because she's a woman with
a hatchet destroying bars. It seems insane. The second, you
understand her, even if you don't condone her. And the
third you admire her. And I'm way past that at
this point. But really it's you know, at because at
first glance, it's a woman running into bars that you
(06:07):
think are perfectly legal. You know, if you're just learning
about her, it seems like they're perfectly legal, and she's
smashing them up and she's insane and she's ruining people's property.
It's vandalism. But then you learn that Kansas, where she
was doing most of her smashing, had been dry for
twenty years before she finally snapped off. From eighteen eighty
one to nineteen forty eight, it was illegal to sell
alcohol in Kansas sixty seven years. And then she helped
(06:31):
get this stuff passed. She was instrumental in the movement.
I'm not sure if she was in Kansas yet when
it would pass, but basically, her like minded friends had
gotten this, had worked very hard to get the Constitution
of Kansas change to include prohibition. Good work is done.
Nineteen years go by, and there's still bars everywhere operating
with impunity. The first one she smash us up is
(06:52):
owned by the brother of her county sheriff. So it's
definitely this situation where yeah, there's laws on the books,
but nobody's enforcing it. Well, if they're not going to
do the job, who is any attempt to paint carry
as this crazy person. You look at her, Everything she
did was completely rational. She wasn't indiscriminate, She wasn't smashing
up bars that were obeying the law. She was destroying
bars that were in dry areas. She was methodical, she
(07:15):
was smart, she was funny. She knew how to control
the crowd. She'd get this huge army by the time
she marched on Topeka. In the early parts of her smashings,
she had it was reported as two thousand people were
marching in the streets of the capital of Kansas, protesting,
not all smashing bars, but they were basically following her around.
Nobody gets hurt. She controls this entire army. They're all
(07:38):
on her side. And then they take her to jail. Finally,
because they're sick of her. Where you can havoc, they
take her to jail. She goes to jail and immediately
fight start breaking out and a guy shot and killed.
Without her influence around, so she was this very smart
Everybody whoever this is kind of what changed me on her,
is like, you know, we can all can look back
(07:58):
and go, ah, this crazy woman, But as soon as
you look at anything anybody who actually knew her said
about her. They never said she was unhinged. They talked
about her being motherly and funny and kind. She was
kind to a fault. She'd give you the shirt off
her back. A lot of the money that she was
making off of her celebrity was put right back into
helping people from a temperance perspective, and she wanted her
(08:22):
last big venture in life. She purchased a home in
Eureka Springs, Arkansas, called She named it Hatchet Hall, and
it was her dream was to make it into a
like a boarding house with a shelter for specifically abused women,
widows of alcoholics, a church on staff, a school where
(08:43):
she could teach kids. So essentially, she wanted this entire
complex to help communities, and she was thrown all her
own money at that.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
And you're listening to Travis Bendenberg tell the story of
Carrie Nation and the story of Prohibition. And when we
come back, more from this passionate man. And by the way,
he also happens to be the creative and production manager
for the American Prohibition Museum in Savannah, Georgia. And we
love taking into these kinds of museums across this great country.
(09:14):
More on the story of Prohibition and Carrie Nation. Here
on our American story, and we're back with our American
(09:40):
stories and the story of Prohibition as told by Travis Spendenberg,
creative and production manager for the American Prohibition Museum. And
that's in Savannah. If you're ever in that part of Georgia,
pay Travis a visit. Travis was just telling us about
the notorious prohibitionist Carrie Nation, a woman famous for smashing
(10:01):
illegal saloons up with an axe. We're back to Travis
on the streets of Savannah, Georgia to tell us more
of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The biggest way I can get people on her side,
so to speak, is you look into her past. She
fell in love young. She's twenty twenty one years old.
She fell in love with a na a man named
doctor Gloyd. She fell in love with him, and it
was this storybook romance. Against the wishes of her parents.
They had somebody else in mind for her to marry.
(10:30):
She does it anyway, and quickly finds out that he's
got a problem with alcohol. Over the course of their
year or so of being married, she gets pregnant, but
before the kid's even born, it's clear to her that
this isn't sustainable. She leaves him, goes back to live
with her parents, and when she finally decides to separate
from him entirely, she goes back to get her things
and he says he looks her in the eye and says, pet,
(10:53):
if you leave me, I'll be a dead man. In
six months she left. She was right. Almost six months
to her leaving him, he died, drank himself to death. Charlene,
her daughter, was born. Throughout Charlene's life, she had a
whole host of physical and mental illnesses. Carrie blamed herself
for procreating with a drunkard. She said that it was hereditary,
(11:14):
that she essentially was. The quote is Charlene was the
product of a drunken father and a distracted mother that
she wasn't able to properly parent her because she was grieving,
and she blamed herself. She spent the next years of
her life going through their own love letters and reading
(11:35):
and thinking about what could have been. She even named
her daughter Charlene after her husband Charlie. And it's deeply sad.
And she eventually marries David Nation. Not out of love.
She had that once she had her chance at that
she lost it. She marries David Nation because a woman
can't get by in Frontier Kansas on teaching jobs and
on hotel jobs. She didn't like him, she says in
(11:57):
her autobiography, I shall speak very little of my time
with mister Nation. He and I agreed on few things.
She's very short about it. She calls him at times
like bad at his faith, like not really good at things.
She boasts herself as a better preacher than him. She
(12:17):
talks about how bad they were at ranching. They try
to start a farm in Texas. They move back to Kansas,
and she's in this unhappy marriage. He belittles her when
she starts hiring religious visions. He basically mocks her, says,
and she's you know, by the time she starts smashing
up bar, she's embraced this. But in eighteen eighty or so,
(12:37):
when it starts twenty years prior, she hears this voice
in her head and it scares her, and she goes
to her husband for comfort, and he goes, oh, what's
God saying now? Carry ah making fun of her, and
eventually he divorces her. He divorces her in nineteen oh one,
about a year into her bar smashings, and at that
(12:58):
point she's making all this money on the road doing
these sermons in the Temperance movement, and her reaction is basically,
see you later. Fine, she got what she needed out
of them. So she had this chance at a love life,
at a real fulfilling marriage that was ruined by drinking,
and then she spent. So he dies in the late
(13:19):
eighteen seventies, died. She spends twenty years musing on what
could have been and who took it from them? The
saloon and the what do you call him? She blamed
the Mason Lodge. He would go off to the Mason
Lodge and just get blitz drunk. Saloons didn't have a
there was no incentive to stop serving somebody. There were
(13:40):
no laws in the books where you would get in
trouble for anything they did or anything that happened to
them because of what they drank. So you just served
him until they were out of money or they couldn't
literally ingest it anymore. So saloons were making a boatload
up money, all at the expense of the local citizens.
And they knew what they were doing, and they made
they made themselves the center of communities. You could get
(14:02):
your mail at the saloon, you could vote at the saloon,
you could sleep in the saloons. So essentially they made
men come there. Not they weren't just targeting men who
were coming in expressly for a drink. That would almost
be fine if it was the case where it's like, Okay,
these guys are coming for drink, and they gave them drink.
They may be coming to pick up their mail and
they get tempted into the bar or into the brothel
section of some saloons and they were seen as a
(14:24):
real societal ill by this temperate It wasn't just the
alcohol problem that was the worst thing, but it was
the control that they had and what they did with
that control. In the eyes of the temperance movement, It's complicated.
It's you know, I'm a drink I drink cocktails like now,
I'm gonna go home make one today. But and I
get it. But I live in twenty twenty one. I
(14:45):
get to be a guy who if I did develop
a problem, I have people who would support me. I
have methods to get better. I have disposable income people.
You can't view it as you are today and as
you drink today, and the problems that you have, you
have to view it through history. History happens when it happened.
I may very well have voted for probition. You know
(15:08):
I wouldn't today. But you know, nineteen fifteen, if I
knew a bunch of men in my community who had
been ruined by it, if I watch women struggle, and
I don't want to keep too bad on the men
for becoming drunks, like it was all their choice. They
were they had been off to any messes of wars
we'd all just been through the Civil War, economic panics,
(15:30):
economic problems, backbreaking factory jobs. You know, when I talk
about prohibition as a complex issue, there's no heroes here.
There's no villains for every good thing that the temperance
people went after. They got the crazy things done. Labor laws,
they got the age of consent rates to sixteen from ten.
(15:51):
They were they were legitimately honest about protecting the people
that they wanted to protect. However, it also meant throwing
other people down the bus. And in the late nineteen century,
it's Italians and it's Germans, and it's the Irish coming
to town, and it's really easy for the temperance people
to go, oh, look, they're bringing all their whiskey and
their wines and their beers, and they're going to fundamentally change.
(16:11):
You think that in temperance problem is bad, now imagine
what it's going to be like when all these guys
show up. So we need to get to Ellis Island.
We need to Americanize them as soon as they come in,
get them to give up these drinking habits. And then, yeah,
World War Prohibition was already the work was already being
done in that by the time we had in World
War One that I think it probably would have happened anyway,
(16:33):
But that is the last home run in the game.
That's a silver platter. All these Germans that they'd spent
decades demonizing, and that's what it is. They demonize them.
They suddenly we're in a war with them. And it's
really easy to say, oh, well, if you give your
money to the Brewers, they're going to send it home
to their family and they're going to use it to
kill your sons, your uncles, your brothers, your dad's And
(16:55):
it didn't matter that these American German American brewers like
Adolphus Bush were fiercely American, especially in their capitalism. They
were real innovators, and they were donating to American causes.
They were building infrastructure in American society, they were innovating
new technology. They had definitely been paying their way in
(17:16):
this country. It didn't matter. Their names were Bush and
Papst and all these German names, and it was really
easy to say, hey, look they will ultimately, they will
side with Germany every time, despite their being not really
any evidence, you know, so much gets made of the gangsters.
It killed each other the poisoned alcohol, the racism of
(17:36):
it all all definitely, you know, you can't tell this,
to tell the story without all that would be nonsense.
But it is very easy to lose sight of what
changed about culture. You know, women get the right to
vote right at the beginning of prohibition, less than seven months.
In seven months into prohibition, women get the right to vote.
And suddenly it's like a switch being flipped. Life changes
for women overnight. So women becoup journalists and lawyers, and
(18:00):
they're working in speakeasies. You know, this whole thing started,
like we talked about, because women couldn't contribute to their
household income. Now they're lawyers, Now they're journalists. They work
in speakeasies, as bartenders, as sugar girls, as waitresses, as performers.
Not to mention, Black performers in America finally have a
time where they can say, oh, we work for ourselves.
(18:21):
You know, back in the Jim Crow era, they were
basically carted around and made to perform for people the
things that white people told them to during Prohibition, these
jazz performers one get to create their own genre that's
born out of African American influences and traditions, and they
get to perform it themselves, They get to write their
own music, and they get to tell club promoters, I'm
(18:43):
not playing for your segregated clubs anymore. This is people
like Bessie Smith and Joseph E. Baker, Louis Armstrong, King,
Oliver Duke Ellington does play for the segregated club but
he's making a bunch of money as his own band leader.
He is the most famous band leader in America at
the time. Bessie Smith has their own private train car
when she travels, and essentially they can muscle promoters around
(19:07):
rather than the other way around, and say, okay, you
want me and your club integrate it. And if they
don't do it, they don't get to perform, and they
don't get all those ticket sales, and a lot of
club promoters they immediately bow and the music is so good.
So yeah, it's this wild time where I like to
say that it is freer for more Americans than any
decade in American history prior, and actually for several decades after.
(19:30):
A lot of it tightens up after the thirties, you know,
through the Great Depression, through World War Two, but it
is a time where you start to see those glimmers
of people getting to have their own influence in society
and their own say about who they are and what
they do and what they don't do.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
And a special thanks to Robbie for his work on
the story, and a special thanks to Travis Benngenberg. Travis
is the creative and production manager for the American Prohibition
Museum in Savannah, Georgia. And by the way, go to
all American Stories on the website and listen to our
Duke Ellington story. That story is available on our American
stories dot com. The story of Prohibition and the people
(20:05):
behind the movement, including Carrie Nation here on our American
Stories
And we continue with our American stories. While in modern
times we often view Prohibition as a failure and even
a misstep by fanatics, it's a more complicated tale today.
Travis Spendenberg, creative and production manager for the American Prohibition
Museum in Savannah, Georgia, tells us the complicated story behind
(00:33):
Prohibition as well as humanizing it all through the story
of Carrie Nation. And she was famous for smashing illegal
saloons up with an axe from the streets of Savannah.
Here's Travis.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
It's so easy to approach history really academically, even with
things I'm very interested in, like US presidents, and it's
very easy to say, well, you know, John F. Keldy
was the thirty fifth president. He served from then to
then until his assassin. But I always got really into,
kind of hooked by the human stories behind people. I
just read the other day. I do a series on
(01:08):
our Facebook called Presidential Drinking, where I look into the
drinking habits of the presidents and you know, all your
life you hear Franklin Pierre's precipitated Civil War. He kind
of failed to These were his policy Failarliers regarded as
one of our worst presidents. But then you look at
the man was a heavy drinker, alcoholic. He on the
(01:28):
way to Washington to get inaugurated, he gets in a
train accident. His son is the only casualty from his family.
His wife and him are president. They see their little
boy decapitate it and then he has to go be president,
already having a drinking problem, and he essentially drinks himself
to death. So you know, we still can't absolve them
(01:48):
of what the presidency, what his failures in the presidency were.
But it really fits with what we do in the
museum when you start to realize, oh, there were real
human cost problems driving this man into this, and maybe
he shouldn't have been. It was the worst possible time
in his life to be president. So those human stories
behind history. So I've always tried to look deeper and
(02:08):
see what is the story we're not telling. It's not
the best, you know, it doesn't give you the widest
scale of information from just like an academic history perspective,
but as a storyteller, as somebody interested in creation and
enlightening stuff, I think it's the stuff that connects to
people the best. When I do guided towards of the museum,
(02:29):
which is when I take people kind of from the
beginning of the movement, through prohibition through the end of it.
The first thing I have to lay down is, don't
view this through your modern drinking. This is even looking
at alcoholism as a problem. We still have problems with
it today, but there's an entire infrastructure and understanding of
alcoholism and a way to get people help. Back then,
you were basically on your own. If you were drunk,
(02:51):
it was your own moral failing and treatment. There were
a few thinkers who were starting to go, hey, maybe
this is something that we need to treat instead of
punished them for. Some of the early temperance propaganda was
specifically like lock out the saloon keepers. Lock them up,
but don't lock up the drunks. They can be productive
members of society if not for this negative influence. So
(03:11):
the industrial Revolution essentially creates a situation where a lot
of alcohol is You're able to make it easier, You're
able to move it around easier. People are just able
to acquire stronger liquor easier. Up until that point, it's
easiest to just make your own beers, your own ciders.
But the strong stuff gets really easy and eighteen thirty.
(03:31):
By eighteen thirty, the average American is drinking seven gallons
of pure alcohol a year. That amounts to about ninety
bottles of whiskey across the entire year. That's the average American.
That's not the average American drinker. So there's plenty of teetotalers,
totally sober people that never drink anything factored into that number,
skewing it downwards. The average American drinker is drinking more
(03:54):
than that, maybe four or five bottles of whiskey a week.
And so you basically have this blind, drunk popular of
men who are supposed to be the sole breadwinner. Not
only are they spending all their money on this alcohol,
but they're also spending their health and when they die,
you have a whole family network that was depending on them.
You know, best case scenario, he had plenty of sons
that are older that can take his place. But if
(04:16):
he's just got a bunch of girls or a bunch
of young kids and his wife, they're done for. Women
have no way to get their own income that equals
the men that they've just lost. They have no property,
they can't divorce their husbands, and they can't vote to
change how any of it works. So at a certain point,
the only option is a massive cultural movement to change
the way America fuse alcohol. And you know, we all
(04:39):
regard prohibition as kind of a failure today. There are
things that did well. It did eliminate it did change
your drinking culture for the better, I think, But I
think generally, historically it's seen as a failure, and people
tend to look at the Temperance movement and deride them
and scold them and condescend to them for doing it,
for making it happen. And while I agree that maybe
(05:01):
it wasn't the right solution, there was a problem worth solving.
And at that point, I ask you, what solution is there,
What solution other than getting rid of the nefarious influence
is there. They had tried moderation laws, they had tried
laws to kind of limit serving, but the power of
the saloon was just so much so that people were
drinking themselves regardless. So at a certain point I understand them.
(05:24):
You know, you don't have to condone every bit of
the temperance movement, but I think it's unfair to say, ah,
Prohibition ruined certain parts of the country, and it's all
these ladies fall faced with the destruction of their family.
What else? I am a noted Carrie Nation apologist. That
is one of my strongest missions when I'm working the floor,
when I'm telling stories in the museum, is to get
(05:46):
I always say there's three stages of learning about Carrie Nation. First,
you think she's a nutcase because she's a woman with
a hatchet destroying bars. It seems insane. The second, you
understand her, even if you don't condone her. And the
third you admire her. And I'm way past that at
this point. But really it's you know, at because at
first glance, it's a woman running into bars that you
(06:07):
think are perfectly legal. You know, if you're just learning
about her, it seems like they're perfectly legal, and she's
smashing them up and she's insane and she's ruining people's property.
It's vandalism. But then you learn that Kansas, where she
was doing most of her smashing, had been dry for
twenty years before she finally snapped off. From eighteen eighty
one to nineteen forty eight, it was illegal to sell
alcohol in Kansas sixty seven years. And then she helped
(06:31):
get this stuff passed. She was instrumental in the movement.
I'm not sure if she was in Kansas yet when
it would pass, but basically, her like minded friends had
gotten this, had worked very hard to get the Constitution
of Kansas change to include prohibition. Good work is done.
Nineteen years go by, and there's still bars everywhere operating
with impunity. The first one she smash us up is
(06:52):
owned by the brother of her county sheriff. So it's
definitely this situation where yeah, there's laws on the books,
but nobody's enforcing it. Well, if they're not going to
do the job, who is any attempt to paint carry
as this crazy person. You look at her, Everything she
did was completely rational. She wasn't indiscriminate, She wasn't smashing
up bars that were obeying the law. She was destroying
bars that were in dry areas. She was methodical, she
(07:15):
was smart, she was funny. She knew how to control
the crowd. She'd get this huge army by the time
she marched on Topeka. In the early parts of her smashings,
she had it was reported as two thousand people were
marching in the streets of the capital of Kansas, protesting,
not all smashing bars, but they were basically following her around.
Nobody gets hurt. She controls this entire army. They're all
(07:38):
on her side. And then they take her to jail. Finally,
because they're sick of her. Where you can havoc, they
take her to jail. She goes to jail and immediately
fight start breaking out and a guy shot and killed.
Without her influence around, so she was this very smart
Everybody whoever this is kind of what changed me on her,
is like, you know, we can all can look back
(07:58):
and go, ah, this crazy woman, But as soon as
you look at anything anybody who actually knew her said
about her. They never said she was unhinged. They talked
about her being motherly and funny and kind. She was
kind to a fault. She'd give you the shirt off
her back. A lot of the money that she was
making off of her celebrity was put right back into
helping people from a temperance perspective, and she wanted her
(08:22):
last big venture in life. She purchased a home in
Eureka Springs, Arkansas, called She named it Hatchet Hall, and
it was her dream was to make it into a
like a boarding house with a shelter for specifically abused women,
widows of alcoholics, a church on staff, a school where
(08:43):
she could teach kids. So essentially, she wanted this entire
complex to help communities, and she was thrown all her
own money at that.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
And you're listening to Travis Bendenberg tell the story of
Carrie Nation and the story of Prohibition. And when we
come back, more from this passionate man. And by the way,
he also happens to be the creative and production manager
for the American Prohibition Museum in Savannah, Georgia. And we
love taking into these kinds of museums across this great country.
(09:14):
More on the story of Prohibition and Carrie Nation. Here
on our American story, and we're back with our American
(09:40):
stories and the story of Prohibition as told by Travis Spendenberg,
creative and production manager for the American Prohibition Museum. And
that's in Savannah. If you're ever in that part of Georgia,
pay Travis a visit. Travis was just telling us about
the notorious prohibitionist Carrie Nation, a woman famous for smashing
(10:01):
illegal saloons up with an axe. We're back to Travis
on the streets of Savannah, Georgia to tell us more
of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The biggest way I can get people on her side,
so to speak, is you look into her past. She
fell in love young. She's twenty twenty one years old.
She fell in love with a na a man named
doctor Gloyd. She fell in love with him, and it
was this storybook romance. Against the wishes of her parents.
They had somebody else in mind for her to marry.
(10:30):
She does it anyway, and quickly finds out that he's
got a problem with alcohol. Over the course of their
year or so of being married, she gets pregnant, but
before the kid's even born, it's clear to her that
this isn't sustainable. She leaves him, goes back to live
with her parents, and when she finally decides to separate
from him entirely, she goes back to get her things
and he says he looks her in the eye and says, pet,
(10:53):
if you leave me, I'll be a dead man. In
six months she left. She was right. Almost six months
to her leaving him, he died, drank himself to death. Charlene,
her daughter, was born. Throughout Charlene's life, she had a
whole host of physical and mental illnesses. Carrie blamed herself
for procreating with a drunkard. She said that it was hereditary,
(11:14):
that she essentially was. The quote is Charlene was the
product of a drunken father and a distracted mother that
she wasn't able to properly parent her because she was grieving,
and she blamed herself. She spent the next years of
her life going through their own love letters and reading
(11:35):
and thinking about what could have been. She even named
her daughter Charlene after her husband Charlie. And it's deeply sad.
And she eventually marries David Nation. Not out of love.
She had that once she had her chance at that
she lost it. She marries David Nation because a woman
can't get by in Frontier Kansas on teaching jobs and
on hotel jobs. She didn't like him, she says in
(11:57):
her autobiography, I shall speak very little of my time
with mister Nation. He and I agreed on few things.
She's very short about it. She calls him at times
like bad at his faith, like not really good at things.
She boasts herself as a better preacher than him. She
(12:17):
talks about how bad they were at ranching. They try
to start a farm in Texas. They move back to Kansas,
and she's in this unhappy marriage. He belittles her when
she starts hiring religious visions. He basically mocks her, says,
and she's you know, by the time she starts smashing
up bar, she's embraced this. But in eighteen eighty or so,
(12:37):
when it starts twenty years prior, she hears this voice
in her head and it scares her, and she goes
to her husband for comfort, and he goes, oh, what's
God saying now? Carry ah making fun of her, and
eventually he divorces her. He divorces her in nineteen oh one,
about a year into her bar smashings, and at that
(12:58):
point she's making all this money on the road doing
these sermons in the Temperance movement, and her reaction is basically,
see you later. Fine, she got what she needed out
of them. So she had this chance at a love life,
at a real fulfilling marriage that was ruined by drinking,
and then she spent. So he dies in the late
(13:19):
eighteen seventies, died. She spends twenty years musing on what
could have been and who took it from them? The
saloon and the what do you call him? She blamed
the Mason Lodge. He would go off to the Mason
Lodge and just get blitz drunk. Saloons didn't have a
there was no incentive to stop serving somebody. There were
(13:40):
no laws in the books where you would get in
trouble for anything they did or anything that happened to
them because of what they drank. So you just served
him until they were out of money or they couldn't
literally ingest it anymore. So saloons were making a boatload
up money, all at the expense of the local citizens.
And they knew what they were doing, and they made
they made themselves the center of communities. You could get
(14:02):
your mail at the saloon, you could vote at the saloon,
you could sleep in the saloons. So essentially they made
men come there. Not they weren't just targeting men who
were coming in expressly for a drink. That would almost
be fine if it was the case where it's like, Okay,
these guys are coming for drink, and they gave them drink.
They may be coming to pick up their mail and
they get tempted into the bar or into the brothel
section of some saloons and they were seen as a
(14:24):
real societal ill by this temperate It wasn't just the
alcohol problem that was the worst thing, but it was
the control that they had and what they did with
that control. In the eyes of the temperance movement, It's complicated.
It's you know, I'm a drink I drink cocktails like now,
I'm gonna go home make one today. But and I
get it. But I live in twenty twenty one. I
(14:45):
get to be a guy who if I did develop
a problem, I have people who would support me. I
have methods to get better. I have disposable income people.
You can't view it as you are today and as
you drink today, and the problems that you have, you
have to view it through history. History happens when it happened.
I may very well have voted for probition. You know
(15:08):
I wouldn't today. But you know, nineteen fifteen, if I
knew a bunch of men in my community who had
been ruined by it, if I watch women struggle, and
I don't want to keep too bad on the men
for becoming drunks, like it was all their choice. They
were they had been off to any messes of wars
we'd all just been through the Civil War, economic panics,
(15:30):
economic problems, backbreaking factory jobs. You know, when I talk
about prohibition as a complex issue, there's no heroes here.
There's no villains for every good thing that the temperance
people went after. They got the crazy things done. Labor laws,
they got the age of consent rates to sixteen from ten.
(15:51):
They were they were legitimately honest about protecting the people
that they wanted to protect. However, it also meant throwing
other people down the bus. And in the late nineteen century,
it's Italians and it's Germans, and it's the Irish coming
to town, and it's really easy for the temperance people
to go, oh, look, they're bringing all their whiskey and
their wines and their beers, and they're going to fundamentally change.
(16:11):
You think that in temperance problem is bad, now imagine
what it's going to be like when all these guys
show up. So we need to get to Ellis Island.
We need to Americanize them as soon as they come in,
get them to give up these drinking habits. And then, yeah,
World War Prohibition was already the work was already being
done in that by the time we had in World
War One that I think it probably would have happened anyway,
(16:33):
But that is the last home run in the game.
That's a silver platter. All these Germans that they'd spent
decades demonizing, and that's what it is. They demonize them.
They suddenly we're in a war with them. And it's
really easy to say, oh, well, if you give your
money to the Brewers, they're going to send it home
to their family and they're going to use it to
kill your sons, your uncles, your brothers, your dad's And
(16:55):
it didn't matter that these American German American brewers like
Adolphus Bush were fiercely American, especially in their capitalism. They
were real innovators, and they were donating to American causes.
They were building infrastructure in American society, they were innovating
new technology. They had definitely been paying their way in
(17:16):
this country. It didn't matter. Their names were Bush and
Papst and all these German names, and it was really
easy to say, hey, look they will ultimately, they will
side with Germany every time, despite their being not really
any evidence, you know, so much gets made of the gangsters.
It killed each other the poisoned alcohol, the racism of
(17:36):
it all all definitely, you know, you can't tell this,
to tell the story without all that would be nonsense.
But it is very easy to lose sight of what
changed about culture. You know, women get the right to
vote right at the beginning of prohibition, less than seven months.
In seven months into prohibition, women get the right to vote.
And suddenly it's like a switch being flipped. Life changes
for women overnight. So women becoup journalists and lawyers, and
(18:00):
they're working in speakeasies. You know, this whole thing started,
like we talked about, because women couldn't contribute to their
household income. Now they're lawyers, Now they're journalists. They work
in speakeasies, as bartenders, as sugar girls, as waitresses, as performers.
Not to mention, Black performers in America finally have a
time where they can say, oh, we work for ourselves.
(18:21):
You know, back in the Jim Crow era, they were
basically carted around and made to perform for people the
things that white people told them to during Prohibition, these
jazz performers one get to create their own genre that's
born out of African American influences and traditions, and they
get to perform it themselves, They get to write their
own music, and they get to tell club promoters, I'm
(18:43):
not playing for your segregated clubs anymore. This is people
like Bessie Smith and Joseph E. Baker, Louis Armstrong, King,
Oliver Duke Ellington does play for the segregated club but
he's making a bunch of money as his own band leader.
He is the most famous band leader in America at
the time. Bessie Smith has their own private train car
when she travels, and essentially they can muscle promoters around
(19:07):
rather than the other way around, and say, okay, you
want me and your club integrate it. And if they
don't do it, they don't get to perform, and they
don't get all those ticket sales, and a lot of
club promoters they immediately bow and the music is so good.
So yeah, it's this wild time where I like to
say that it is freer for more Americans than any
decade in American history prior, and actually for several decades after.
(19:30):
A lot of it tightens up after the thirties, you know,
through the Great Depression, through World War Two, but it
is a time where you start to see those glimmers
of people getting to have their own influence in society
and their own say about who they are and what
they do and what they don't do.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
And a special thanks to Robbie for his work on
the story, and a special thanks to Travis Benngenberg. Travis
is the creative and production manager for the American Prohibition
Museum in Savannah, Georgia. And by the way, go to
all American Stories on the website and listen to our
Duke Ellington story. That story is available on our American
stories dot com. The story of Prohibition and the people
(20:05):
behind the movement, including Carrie Nation here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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