Of prohibition in the u. S. The National ConstitutionCenter Hosted this event. The moderator is jeffrey rosen. [ applause ] ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution center i am jeffrey rosen, the president of this wonderful institution, the only institution in america chartered by congress to disseminate information about the u. S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis beautiful. So great to hear those wonderful words of our Inspiring Mission statement here in the beautifully renovated kimmel theater. Ladies and gentlemen, just a few months ago we opened up this gorgeous, new space, renovated with a great grant by the Kimmel Foundation and youre hearing me from these cool stateoftheart ted talk mics and these beautiful seats and im thrilled to see so many people here to celebrate the opening of the return of our great exhibit, american spirit [ applause ] i want you to go see it after the show, if you havent seen it yet, and cspan viewers, i want you to come to philadelphia to see this beautiful exhibit, which tells an amazing constitutional story that we are going to talk about tonight, and that is the constitutional story that poses an incredible question how did it happen . How did it happen that america voluntarily, by a vote of 46 states, with only two states dissenting in 1919, decided essentially to ban intoxicating liquors with the 18th amendment, and then only 14 years later, by a similarly overwhelming majority of 46 states with only two states dissenting, changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment and the 21st amendment, the only time in our constitutional history that an amendment had been repealed, and it took over 14 years . I hear a bravo from one of the celebrants in the crowd. Those who are here enjoying a full bar, imagining that its 1933 and not 1919. So, everyone is enjoying their drinks. Its an incredible story. I had to cram to learn about it, but we have, to talk about it, two of americas leading experts, phenomenal historians, and im going to introduce them in a second. But before i do, i just want to say, again, how thrilled everyone at the Constitution Center is to welcome our new chair, Vice President joe biden. [ applause ] and it is so meaningful that Vice President biden joins this incredible group. He was preceded by governor jeb bush, before him, president bill clinton, and before him, president george h. W. Bush. No other institution in america has brought together leaders from both sides of the aisle to unite around our shared love of the u. S. Constitution and the importance of teaching it to all americans. And thats what tonights show is about, and thats what the exhibit is about, educating ourselves about this history which is forgotten largely today but so important and can teach us so much about who we are as a nation, how the constitution has changed, and how we should think about constitutional change today. Okay, its now my great pleasure to introduce our phenomenal copanelists, Lisa Andersen is a historian at juilliard. Her great book is the politics of prohibition american governance and the prohibition party. And joshua zeitz is a historian, the author of a bunch of spectacular books, including flapper a mad cap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made american modern. Can you beat a book title like that . Please join me in welcoming Lisa Andersen and joshua zeitz [ applause ] pleased to be here. So glad to be here. Please, let us jump right into it. Lisa water . Ha ha okay, well, pretend its 1919. There we go. So we must have water. Its only appropriate. You dont know that theres actually water in here. Thats true. Thats true. It may be gin. Theres a possibility. It is. So, to a certain degree, were going to spend the whole show talking about this question, but i want to just begin by asking the obvious one how did it happen . How did it happen . Well, the first part is that drunk people are annoying. Especially if youre not drunk. And that really becomes the starting point. But theres a few kind of pathways that people come to prohibition. One is simply employers. Its really dangerous to have employees who are drinking on the job, which was pretty customary. And especially as america starts to industrialize, that danger becomes even greater. Then you have people who are coming from a fundamentally religious point of view. Part of it is a desire to restrict something they see as sinful, but part of it is also a sense that its something that prohibits the process of salvation, right . Because people dont have you need selfdetermination in order to have that. And then part of its political, because as theres a growing movement of opposition towards corporations and trusts, the liquor industry certainly seems to fit that profile. And so, theres a lot of people who push back and see it as having infiltrated both of the Political Parties to the extent that its really messing with party politics. And hence, overall, the future of democracy in america, which seems like a big deal. Wow. Fascinating. Okay. So, employers. Theres a religious element. Theres an anticorporate element. Joshua, tell us about more. Theres also immigrants in the urban areas versus dry people in the rural areas, and progressives who we think of today as liberal, turned out to be quite antiimmigrant. So, tell us about some of that. Theres quite a if you zoom out, theres an incredible backdrop, and some of it will seem familiar to us today because we have rough parallels to it going on. I mean, theres a period 20 or 30 years leading up to prohibition of massive influx of immigrants from countries that today would be considered not particularly unusual. But at the time, immigrants from italy and ireland and Eastern Europe and greece, they were considered quite foreign and not necessarily part of the fabric of the kind of oldstock american populous. And they had drinking cultures that came to kind of represent to many oldstock americans something that was foreign and dangerous and not part of the organic american nation. Its a period of rapid demographic transformation. You know, theres a period of rapid urbanization. So, you had, you know, quite a lot of political and cultural contests that grew up around that. Its also a period of cultural innovation. Its a period when gender roles are getting thrown up into the air, in part because more women are moving into the workplace, more people moving into cities where theres aminity that you didnt have in the countryside. You put all of this together, and Something Like alcohol or the prohibition of alcohol became representative, a number of other cultural touchpoints. So it became the type of issue that people could latch onto in a representative way, even if they didnt always do it consistently. So as you said, many progressives we think of as reformers, as liberals, many of them not all of them many of them latched on to prohibition for their own reasons. But by the same token, many antiprogressives, kind of protectors of the old guard also embraced prohibition for their own reasons. So, people looked at the lens that they used to look at the question, would influence, you know, their reason for embracing a kind of antiliquor platform. Fascinating. So, a bipartisan movement uniting these urban progressives with rural evangelicals. And lets take us up to the progressive era and the question of whiskey taxes is really important. And theyve been 40 of funding the National Government since the time of the founding when the whiskey tax on farmers, the 25 tax that George Washingtons administration imposed created the whiskey rebellion. Farmers tried for treason. Washington magnanimously pardons them. But all of a sudden, you dont need the whiskey revenue when the 16th amendment authorizing a federal income tax passes. So, tell us about that and about the Politics Around 191314 during the administration of that great president , president William Howard taft, the subject of my next biography. Taft is against the prohibition because he thinks its going to be really hard to enforce and will lead to a trampling of states rights. But tell us about the Politics Around take around 1912, at a time when more than half the states are dry, but its not obvious that the federal amendment is actually going it pass. Yeah, so there were huge economic reasons to avoid it. And those reasons seemed so significant that particularly the Beer Industry, because americans were starting to transition away from stilled alcohol and more and more towards beer, partially because of refrigeration, makes that technologically possible to transport and store. And as that transition happens, all of the people involved in the Beer Industry and theyre particular important because theyre better organized in a lot of ways than the distilled liquor industries. Theyre actually feeling pretty good because their rates of sale are going up and because they know theres this long history of cooperation with the federal government and of the federal government really relying upon beer excise taxes as a means of gaining revenue. They actually dont organize particularly well to stop prohibition simply because they cant believe it could happen, which seems terribly naive, but the people who were pro prohibition also believed it wasnt going to happen any time soon, so then it kind of makes more sense. We can look at that amendment as something that seems to have ambushed both sides simultaneously. Wow. So, theres a law in 1913 that would allow states to restrict the booze thats imported into them, and taft vetoes that law. He wants to be on the Supreme Court. He hates being president. He views everything from constitutional terms, and he thinks congress has no power to regulate this under its power to regulate interstate commerce. But his veto is overwritten by a twothirds majority, partly because of the intervention of a guy called wheeler, who is one of the political operatives of his day, the head of the Antisaloon League, who goes around to individual congresspeople in swing districts and said hes going to mobilize his activists against them. Tell us about his role and how a twothirds majority is building in congress around this time that will eventually propose the amendment. Im going to start that and thenha hand it to you. Wheeler is fascinating. Hes arguably one of the first modern lobbyists, and hes a product of this era, when theyre, you know, you sort of mentioned the progressives earlier, but theres a whole bunch of progressive causes that give rise to a kind of modern advocacy model, people going and organizing, you know, visits to congressmen, not their offices. There were no offices then, where there were in the early 20th century. But organizing visits to congressmen, letterwriting campaigns to congressmen, organizing letter to the editortype programs and public meetings, the kinds of things we think of today as being, you know, a central part of modern organized political action, was really in many ways the Antisaloon League embodied that, but you also saw other advocates, oftentimes intersecting with them, people trying to secure passage of antichild labor laws, people trying to secure passage of immigration restriction laws or laws loosening immigration restrictions. So its actually a period of heightened political activism, but the Antisaloon League was particularly innovative in the way it mobilized both Public Opinion and elite Public Opinion. Tell us more about the Antisaloon League and wheeler. Dan ogrant in his great book that we relied on for the american spirits exhibit looked at wheeler as basically an older version of ned flanders from the simpsons. Actually, i like that. No, wheeler is if ned flanders was terrifying, i think that would be the best way to describe it. He is kind of terrifying. Wheeler has an insane organizational sense and a willingness to well, lets just say pressure. If he had been part of the mob, he would have been very successful. It was one of those things where he was able to find just the right person in just the right position and figure out exactly how to persuade that person that there was an enormous Popular Support for prohibition. Popula support for prohibition. This involved trying to remove people from office by circulating things that were kind of unsavory, by making it appear that people who were merely neutral on the issue actually had a close relationship to the liquor traffic. He wasnt above such techniques. He did use them quite a bit thats when we talk about the Antisaloon League, its this for most historians, we call it the first Major Pressure group. Thats different and special in comparison to politics regulated by Political Parties. There was this whole movement happening at the same time where people were trying to clean up Political Parties. They were trying to make primary elections run legitimately. They were trying to create initiative and referendum to establish better procedures for bringing forward candidates. All sorts of regulations to try and make Political Parties better and more democratic. Then all of a sudden the anti f Antisaloon League is like, we can represent people directly. That became an overwhelming jolt to the way people organized politics. No longer was it dependent on Political Parties. There were now special interest groups. Fascinating. Imagine populist forces rising up and challenging the they looked like populist forces. He said they were. But were not quite sure if he was actually representing all that many people, because they kept very secret records. Thats interesting. There were no gallop polls. So we dont know not yet. We do know by 1913, wheeler was able to persuade twothirds of congress to override tafts ve veto. Wilson, i gather, wis not clear how he stands on the issue. Its 1917. All of a sudden, world war i and wilson gives this dramatic address to congress on april 2nd, 1917, declaring war on germ any. Two days later on april 4, congress by a twothirds vote proposes the prohibition amendment. Tell us the story of how part that was reflected xenophobic anger at german brewers and what was the role of world war i of pushing this over the edge . This is true of a lot of wars. It cat liput the war on steroid. It moves a lot a lot more women, more rural people into urban settings into the work force. Like other wars, it necessarily kind of upends a lot of older cultural patterns. It places into a sharp spotlight this question about who is an american. This has been brewing for some years. Brewing. Sorry. Youre killing me. Beer on my mind. Germanamericans are suspect during the war. In the aftermath of the war, particularly in the context of the larger brevolution there ar people who become suspect. Theres a larger discussion about whether they are fit for citizenship or fit to be part of the american nation, whether they are italians who are suspected of being anarchists or Eastern European jews suspected of being communist or socialist. These people seem suspect particularly in the immediate aftermath of a war that required an immense amount of mobilization and a focus on unity of the american spirit. It gives it provides an opportunity for people who had for some time been worried about these trends to fully zero in on particular issues like Alcohol Consumption but also on sexual and religious practices. It allows them to grab certain issues and use them in a representative way to kind of to talk about a larger constellation of concerns. It kind of all cop comes to a h around 1919, 1920. The amendment is proposed on april 4, 1917. Its ratified in 1919, about a year and a half later. The ratification is by threequarters of the state legislatures. Ladies and gentlemen, time for a quick reminder about how you can amend the constitution. There are two ways to propose and two ways to ratify. An amendment can be proposed by twothirds vote of both houses of congress, which is what happened with the 18th amendment, or by a convention called at the request of twothirds of the state legislatures. People are calling for a balanced budget, a convention of the states today, have now gotten seven states short of the twothirds that are necessary to call a new constitutional convention. That will be the first time that proposal mechanism will have been used in American History. To ratify, you ratification by threequarters of special conventions called in the states. The 18th amendment was ratified by the legislative method. It was repealed by the convention method, the only time in American History that ratification by state conventions has ever been used. Thanks for indulging me on that brief article 5 primer. Its good to refresh. We had Great Middle School kids here today for the opening of the exhibit. I quizzed them. They got each they actually got it. It was wonderful. Give those teachers super gold stars. That is amazing. I cant resist. Cspan viewers if you have doubt about how you should learn about how to amend the constitution, check out the thrilling interactive constitution, the National Constitution center created with the Federalist Society and the american constitution society. You will see the liberal and conservative scholars in america writing about every clause of the constitution. We have a great explainer on article 5 with scholars describing what they agree and disagree about. Back to the ratification. It takes threequarters of the state legislatures. How did ratificati