Up next, historians talk about the history and politics of prohibition in the u. S. The National Constitution center hosting this event, the moderator is jeffrey rosen. [ applause ] ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution center. [ applause ] 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 n 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 the sydney kimmel foundation. And youre hearing me from these stateoftheart cool ted talk mics on these beautiful new seats. And its a thrill to see so many people here to celebrate the opening of the return of our great exhibit american spirits. [ 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 this 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14 years later by a similarly overwhelming majority of 46 states with only two states dissenting changed its mind and repealed the 18th amendment in the 21st amendment, the only time in our constitutional history that an amendment had been repealed and it took only 14 years . I hear a bravo from the crowd. Those who are here enjoying a full bar imagining that its 19 1933. We have to talk about it two of americas leading experts, phenomenal historians and i am 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 ou 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 and 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. 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. Its now my great pleasure to introduce our phenomenal copanelist Lisa Anderson is a historian at juliard. And joshua zeitz is the author of a bunch of spectacular books including flapper a mad cap story of sex, style, celebrity, and the women who made america modern. Can you beat a book title like that . Please join me in welcoming Lisa Anderson and joshua zeitz. [ applause ] so glad to be here. Let us jump right into it. Lisa. Pretend its 1919 so we must have water. Thats only appropriate. You dont know that theres actually water in here. Thats true. It could be gin. It certainly is 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 . Well, the first part is that drunk people are annoying, especially if youre not drunk. 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. Because you need selfdetermination in order to have that. And 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 whod push back and see it infill traiting both of the Political Parties and its messing with politics and overall the future of democracy in america, which seems like a big deal. Wow, fascinating. So employers, theres a religious element. Theres an anticorporate element. 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 that. If you zoom out theres an incredible backdrop. Some of it will seem familiar to us today because we have parallels to it going on. This is 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 old stock american populous. And they had drinking cultures that came to kind of represent many old stock americans something that was foreign and dangerous and not part of the organic american nation. Its a period of rapid demographic transformation. Its 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 in the air because more women are moving into the workplace, more people moving into the cities where theres anonymity that you didnt have in the countryside. And put together alcohol or the prohibition of alcohol became representative with a number of other cultural touch points. 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 that we think of as reformers as liberals, many of them latched onto 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. People looked at the lens that they used to look at the question would influence, you know, their reasoning for embrag an anti liquor platform. Fascinating. A bipartisan movement uniting these urban progressives with rural evangelicals and, lets take us up to the progressive era and the question of whiskey is really important. 40 of funding for the tax is a National Funding for the time of the founding when the whiskey tax on farmers, the 25 task tax at George Washington administration imposed. But all of a sudden, you do not need the whiskey revenue when the 16th amendment authorize a federal income tax. Tell us about that and about the Politics Around 1913, 14 during the administration of that great president , president William Howard taft. The subject of my next biography. Tapped is against the prohibition, because he thinks it will be really hard to enforce and tell us about the Politics Around 20 1912, at a time when more than half the states are dry but it is not obvious that a federal tax is going to pass. They were huge economic reasons to avoid it. Those reasons seem so significant, that particular the Beer Industry, because americans were starting to transition away from distilled alcohol and more and more towards beer. Partially because of refrigeration. You know, that technologically possible to transport and store. It is as that transition happens, all the people involved in the Beer Industry and they are particularly important because they are better organized in a lot of ways than the distilled liquor industries. They are actually feeling pretty good because the rates of sailor going up. Because they know that there is this long history of cooperation with the federal government and that the federal government really relied upon beer excise taxes as a means of gaining revenue, they actually do not organize particularly well to stop prohibition, simply because they cannot believe it could happen. It seems terribly naive, but the people who are pro prohibition also believe it was not going to happen anytime soon, so it kind of makes a little more sense. It was something, we can look at that amendment as something that seems to have ambushed both sides simultaneously. So there is a law in 1913 that would allow states to restrict the boos that is imported in to them and taft vetoes that law. He wants to be on the Supreme Court, he hates being president , he views everything in constitutional terms anythings congress has no power to regulate this. His veto is overwritten by a two thirds majority partly because of the intervention of a guy called wheeler, who is one of the political operatives of the state, the Anti Saloon League, who goes around individual congresspeople saloon districts and say he will mobilize activists against them. Tell us about his role and how a two thirds majority is building in congress around this time. I will start that and then hand it to you. You know, wheeler is this fascinating character. Arguably one of the first modern lobbyists. He is a product of this era, when we sort of mentioned the progressives earlier. There are a whole bunch of progressive causes that give rise to a kind of modern advocacy model. People going in organizing visits to congressman. There were no offices then, there were in the early 20th century, but organizing business to congressman, letter writing campaigns to congressman, organizing programs and public meetings. The kind of things that we think of today, and is an essential part of modern organized political action. It was really, in many ways the Anti Saloon League and it embodied that. It also sold other advocates other times intersecting them, a secret passage of anti child labor laws. A secret passage of immigration restriction laws, loosening immigration restrictions. Theres a period of heightened political activism. The Anti Saloon League was mobilizing Public Opinion and elite Public Opinion. Tell us more about the Anti Saloon League describes wheeler as basically an older version of ned flinders, from the symptom sins. I like that. Wheeler is if ned flanders was terrifying, that would be the best way to describe it. Wheeler has an insane organizational sense and a willingness to, 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, just the right position and figure out exactly how to persuade that person that there was an enormous Popular Support for prohibition. Even if 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 was not above such techniques. He did use them quite a bit. That is when we talk about the Anti Saloon League. It is this idea that, for most historians, we call it the first major pressure. Its Something Different and special, related to Political Parties. There was a 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 are 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 Saloon League comes in and theyre like, we do not need Political Parties, we can represent the people directly. That kind of became an overwhelming jolt to the entire way that people organized politics. No longer was it so dependent on Political Parties, there were also now special interest groups. Fascinating. Imagine a populist force is rising up and challenging the political establishment. They looked like populist forces and he said they were populist forces, but we are not quite sure if he was actually representing all that many people because they kept very secret records. Thats interesting. There were no gala polls. Not yet. We do know that by 1913, wheeler was able to persuade two thirds of congress to hold override tafts veto, even though he was against probation. Wilson i gather, which was taft 1912, is kind of not clear how he stands on the issue, but its 1917 and all of a sudden, world war one is starting and wilson gives this dramatic address to Congress Declaring War on germany. Two days later, on april 4th, congress by two thirds vote approaches opposes the prohibition amendment. Tell us the story about how part of that reflected xenophobic anger and socalled german brewers and what was the role of world war one and really pushing this amendment over the edge . I think world war one in this is true of a lot of wars. It capitalizes social economic demographic forces that have been in play for many years. Many wars, including world war one, put the economy on steroids, which in effect will, in this particular case, accelerate patterns of urbanization and industrialization. It moves a lot more women and a lot more rural people into urban settings and the workforce. Like other wars, it necessarily kind of offends a lot of cultural, older cultural patterns. And it places into the spotlight this question about who is an american. It this has been brewing for some years. laughs brewing. You are killing me. In, german americans are going to be suspect during the war, but in the aftermath of the war, particularly in the context of a larger revolution, there are a whole people in the United States a become suspect. A larger discussion about whether they are fit for citizenship or fit to be part of the american nation. Whether they are italians, or suspected of being an artist, or jews who are suspected of being communists or socialists. These people all seem very suspect, particularly in the context in the immediate aftermath of a war that required immense amount of mobilization and a real focus on unity of the american spirit. It gives, it provides an opportunity for people who have for some time, been worried about these trends, to actually zero in on particular issues, like Alcohol Consumption, but also on sexual morals and religious practices. It allows them to grab these issues and use them in a representative way to kind of talk about a larger consolation of concerns. And it kind of all comes to a head really around 1919, 1920. Fascinating. So the amendment is proposed on april 4th, 1917 and is ratified in 1919, about a year and a half later. The ramifications is by three quarters of the state legislators. Ladies and gentlemen, a quick reminder about how you can amend the constitution. Two ways to propose and two ways to ratify. An amendment can be proposed, either by two thirds vote of both houses of congress, which is what happened with the 18th amendment, or by a convention called at the request of two thirds of the state legislators. People who are calling for a balanced budget, a convention of the states today, have now gotten seven states short of the two thirds that are necessary to call a new constitutional convention. That will be the first time that proposal mechanism would be used in American History. To ratify, you need three quarters of the state legislators or ratification by three quarters of special conventions called in the states. The 18th amendment, for prohibition was ratified by the legislative method, well see that it was repealed in the 21st amendment by the convention method. The only time in American History that ratification by state convention has ever been used. So, thanks for indulging me on that brief article five. Its good to refresh. We have some great Old School Kids here today for the opening exhibit and i quiz of about that and they got each of them. They actually got, it was wonderful. Give those teacher super gold stars. Thats amazing. Okay, sorry, and cspan viewers, if you have further doubts about how you can learn the amendment constitution, check out the thrilling interactive constitution that the National Constitution center has created with the Federalist Society and the american constitutional society. You will see the leading liberal and conservative scholars in america right about every clause of the constitution. We have a great explainer on article five where scholars explain. Back to the ratification, it takes three quarters of the state legislators, how did ratification go . Obviously well since, in the end, 46 out of the 48 states ratified, but world war one is going on, so what was the ratification process . It was fast, and thats probably the most important thing. This is where a lot of the later critiques come into play about how democratic essentially was this amendment. The speed is important because of two factors. One, it means that soldiers who are in world war i are having difficulty communicating with their representatives in a state legislator. So they are having trouble communicating in ways that voters want to articulate to their representatives. T