Know, the guys whonow, its my o introduce catherine smith. Catherine smith is a journalist in history writer with a longtime interest in fdr and his times. She is the biographer of marguerite alice lahand who was fdrs private secretary counselor confidant from 1921 to 1941 and who served as his de facto white house chief of staff. In addition to her book the gatekeeper katherine coauthors a missile hand mystery series with kelly durham she also impersonates the hand for tell all talks about life with the roosevelts and is given more than 100 presentations at venues including the fdr library. A little white house in warm springs, georgia and the National World war two museum her most recent book is baptists in bootleggers a prohibition expedition through the south with cocktail recipes. She considers the repeal of the 18th amendment to be one of the greatest achievements of the early, new deal. Catherine lives in anderson, South Carolina with her husband leo please join me in welcoming catherine smith. Well, i was telling patrick if i had a moonshine samples. It might have drawn a bigger crowd in today. Well still have a good time without it. Baptist and bootleggers, you may be wondering how i came up with that title and the answer is my father is an economist an academic economist. Hes taught it for many years at clemson university. And he had a theory he developed a theory of government regulation about 35 years ago that he called. Bootleggers and baptists and the way that theory goes is its that regulation will be more durable if there is a coalition of moral interests pushing for it and echo and capitalists who have a profit motive. And the example he gave was the on sundays in the south it was his legal to sell alcohol for many years some places it still is the baptists are in favor of that because its ascend sin to drink on sunday. And most other days too and the the bootleggers are in favor of it because that opens the market for them they can they can the only place to get alcohol so bootleggers and baptists. Well, i have son adam smith. With the c adam c smith and about a few years ago. He and my father coauthored a book about bootleggers and baptist. It was a collection of case studies and it was called bootleggers and baptists and i was so proud of them. Theres 50 years difference and their ages and they wrote this book together, and it was really well done. And as soon as i would tell people and get the title out, theyd say bootleggers and baptists, that sounds like a fun book. And then id have to say well. Its an economics book. Its interesting, but its not really fun. So then i thought what if i wrote a really fun book about bootleggers and baptists the real bootleggers and baptist of the prohibition era. So with their permission i took their original title and flipped it to call it baptist and bootleggers because i thought it would be a shame of someone ordered their book and got mine and even worse if they ordered mine and got theirs and saying where are the cocktail recipes . So thats what i did so to begin with a kind of go through the early part of the america the colonial period and in the early years our country to say that how do we ever get in this position that by 1919 congress and the American Public would thought it would be a good idea to ban alcohol . We were a nation of drunkards really almost from the beginning. Thats thats some ken burns used. That is one of the a titles for his great series on prohibition a few years ago. It was just a tradition of really heavy drinking. It really began with when the pilgrims came on the mayflower. They got blown off course, they were supposed to go to virginia wound up in massachusetts. And the reason they stayed on shore as they were running out of beer and they all we got to start growing something so we can make some beer to drink and half of them died that winter. Anyway, it was a bad decision probably influenced by alcohol. But anyway, then you get things are going along. I mean you think about washington and his men they didnt always have food at valley forge, but they almost always had rum and one of my favorite heroes of the revolutionary war is a man named Francis Marion from the lowcountry of South Carolina, which i mean near charleston. He was a Continental Army officer and the british had already captured savannah and were headed to charleston and he went to a dinner party. That was hosted by someone else for the other some other officers in the army and the tradition at the time was if you had a dinner party for gentleman, you would lock the dining room doors and no one could leave until they were either all under the table or theyd run out of punch and madeira wine. And for instance mary and was a fairly abstemious fellow and he finally had enough he so he decided he would just jump out of the second floor window or fell or was pushed. But anyway, he landed in the street broke his ankle and he had to go home to recover in berkeley county, which is outside charleston. Meanwhile the british captured charleston in all of the Continental Army officers had to take an oath that they would not fight anymore against the crown. And and even if the called up theyd have to fight for the crown or else they were sent on to Saint Augustine prison in florida or put on these awful prison ships out in the Charleston Harbor and if you know how hot it is there right now, you can imagine what it must have been like but Francis Marion because he was out of town. As soon as he could get back on a horse, which was a good look for him because he was this little runny guy who was about five feet tall. His legs were kind of deformed his knees not but put him up on a horse. He looked pretty good. So as soon as he could get up on a horse again, he started leading this marauding bang a band of gorilla fighters in the swamps of South Carolina. So he was called the swamp fox by the british commander because he was just impossible to catch. And and the place that he worked out of became known as hell hole swamp because the british commander said it was one hell of a whole of a swamp and many years later it became a hotbed of moonshine making but anyway, Francis Marion in a few other leaders in South Carolina turned the tide of the revolution drove the british out and that was you know, the end of the war, but it was not the end of the drinking. By the 1820s 1830s the amount of alcohol consumed by the average adult in the United States. Was about seven gallons of pure alcohol a year and i dont mean seven gallons of beer or seven gallons of wine or even seven gallons of whiskey. I mean the pure alcohol today its about two and a half gallons. So that tells you something about how much people drank i shared that fact at a talk. I was giving it a distillery one time and a man by the bar said well, some of you people arent doing your part. So however that the 1820s and 1830s were when people realize that there was a problem and for the most part it was realized by women in this Movement Began called temperance. That was led by people like Elizabeth Cady stanton and susan bien anthony because women were were suffering could not vote. And many there are very real patchwork of laws about property. They could own. Said the Property Rights for very uncertain if a woman there was no divorce in most cases if a woman left her husband, he could keep the children. They just so and these drunken husbands were just becoming a real problem. No, not that there were not some women, too, but so that was the beginning of what was the trent the Temperance Union . And susan b. Anthony asked to speak to an Organization Called the sons of temperance and they wouldnt let her speak like we dont need to hear from you girls. So she went off and decided to work for for womens suffrage and other rights and the two movements were very tightly intertwined suffrage and prohibition temperance. Well, then the civil war comes along. And Abraham Lincoln decides to raise money for the union army by putting an excise tax on alcohol, which we had not had since the jefferson administration. He starts out with two cents a gallon he works it up to two dollars a gallon by the end of the war. And when the south was welcomed back into the bosom of the country these people up in the mountains whod been making moonshine for generations are being approached by revenue agents saying hey, buddy, we want that exercise tax. We got to pay the bills of the union army, which was not real popular in the south at the time. So it began a period of what these men called themselves blockaders and they were having whiskey wars moonshine wars in the mountains, you know, originally the moonshine makers against the revenue agents, but then it got to be more and why the moonshine makers were at war with each other fighting for that market share. But in 1874 an organization was started called the womens christian Temperance Union the wctu and there may be people here like me who had a grandmother who was a member of the wctu you always think of the lips that touch liquor will never touch mine motto they had others, but they were known for their white big white ribbons. And the lady who was their leader for many years was Francis Willard who was just a genius at organizing and speaking and writing and persuasion. Im really convinced. She could have led the dday invasion with much less loss of life. So anyway, they were also very much allied with the suffragist and and anything they could do to empower women one of their causes was to raise the age of Sexual Consent from 10 to 16, which finally happened in my state of South Carolina in 1895. Um my favorite in the book. Was a member of the wctu a radical member named carrie a nation . Kerry a million nation she was born in kentucky about the during the civil war and she her first husband was a very alcoholic doctor. She must have been pretty naive because she didnt realize he was a drunk until after they married he was dead in a year leaving her with a small baby and she woke up one year about at age 52 living with her second husband in medicine lodge, kansas and decided that the lord had told her she needed to start on a mission to destroy saloons. So she wrapped up her weapon of choice that day was rocks and she in the methodist minister went to a saloon. Im sorry the methodist ministers wife with a hand organ, you know yelling hymns at the top of their voices throwing the rocks breaking mirrors breaking windows. Just wrecking the place. And eventually they wiped out all the saloons of medicine lodge. I mean cancer supposed to be a dry state but in practice it wasnt and then she moved on to bigger and Better Things bigger and better towns and more effective weaponry. Her favorite was the little hatchet that she would get hardware stores. And Carrie Nation was never photographed without her bible in one hand and her hatchet in the other and her her she called her herself carey nation your loving home defender. She cut a wide pass through the country when all the way to new york all the way down to miami. She went to england. She went to washington demanded have an audience with theodore roosevelt. She was turned away. She went to Congress Demanded to speak to a joint house of congress. She was turned away. But instead she stayed up in the ladys gallery where she sold miniature hatchet pins to raise money for her cause quite a character but by the time she died in 1912 there had been a lot of advances in states going dry, especially in the south and in baptism bootleggers, i decided to look at the south during prohibition because we went dry before much of the rest of the country and had gotten really really good it producing transporting and selling alcohol by the time the rest of the country got dry. Georgia went dry in 1907 by 1919 every state in the south was dry. Except for one should not surprise you it was, louisiana. And it really never did go dry. Now one of the supporters of the temperance cause was Eleanor Roosevelt, which is not surprising for several reasons one is she was very involved involved in the suffragist movement. The other was her Family History of severe alcoholism her father had been severely alcoholic and died when she was a small child. She had alcoholic uncles eventually an alcoholic brother one of her children had some pretty bad problems with it. So she was not a fan of drinking. Fdr on the other hand mina was a social drinker so he kind of called himself a damp. Until it became politic to become a wet. So is the the century is moving on after you are becomes assistant secretary of the navy to Josephus Daniels who was a newspaper publisher from raleigh, North Carolina a great advocate of temperance and really Josephus Daniels is assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson his big cause was wiping out sin, which if youve ever met a sailor, you know, what a tall ordered that is and he banned any beverage stronger than coffee on ships bases and even in the Officers Mess which is why we still call a cup of coffee a cup of joe after joseph is daniel. So fdr was his lieutenant in that cause the first decades of this century were very antiimmigrant very ant. Click and increasingly antigerman is we got into the war in europe the annie immigrant cause came because we had had such a huge amount of immigrants coming into the country many of whom were catholic. So you had the the italians who were catholic and drank wine you had the germans who were lutheran, but they drank beer and then you had the irish who were catholic and drank everything and these nice protestant members of the wctu were just afraid of these people and and didnt trust them and they thought you know, the catholic religion was voodoo or something. There was also an organization that got started in the late 1900s called the Antisaloon League and it was especially aimed at saloons where beer was sold most of the breweries in the country were owned by germans who had immigrated here and most of the saloons were affiliated with these breweries so that antigerman played in there and then Congress Passed the 16th amendment which created an income tax. So the government was not as dependent on that excise tax all of these things started coming together. In an october 1919 Congress Passed the 18th amendment which made it illegal to produce transport and sell alcohol in the United States and much of the surprise of everyone. It was ratified just 13 months. The 19th amendment followed and at first everything went pretty much as the temperance supporters thought i mean they had these these rosy beliefs that that everyone would just switch to milk and the prisons would empty. Thered be no more crime there would be no more insanity. It would just be a beautiful beautiful world. And but it happened instead is the gangs in in criminal interests realized we could make a lot of money here the government step back. Theyre not only you know, not letting anyone sell this stuff. Theyre not collecting exercise tax on it either. So people still wanted to drink and they found ways to do it. There were some major loopholes in the volstead act which enforced prohibition one of them will allowed medicinal alcohol to be made so any man woman and child in the country could buy a pint of whiskey every 10 days as long as you got a prescription from a doctor who said you had a medicinal reason to need it. Oddly enough the American Medical Association had come to the conclusion some years before the alcohol had no medicinal value, but when they found out doctors could charge a three dollar dispensing fee each time. They wrote a script they changed their minds and decided well, we didnt want to be hasty here. So that kept a lot of the distilleries in kentucky in business as there were 10 licensed distilleries in the country that could make this medicinal alcohol and a little bottles and six of them were in louisville another exception. Was religious purposes if you were a catholic you could get your wine for communion for the jewish sacraments . They could get wine, but it started out that things were there were some some unusual people getting into the rabbi business like rabbi oshaughnessy and rabbi mcdonald and and you know a rabbi whos who lives in a tworoom tenement claims. He has a synagogue of 2,000 members and basically just anyone who had bought a bottle of wine for him became a member of his synagogue. Another exception was if you had had alcohol when prohibition began you could keep it and if you even move from one house to the other you could take it with you. So Franklin Roosevelt and his wealthy friends could do that. Theyre private clubs could keep the alcohol they had on hand. Another person who followed this practice was the president of the United States warren g harding. He had been a senator so he just moved his catch of liquor from his house to the white house, and it was widely suspected that when he ran out of it the Justice Department started supplying him with stuff that had been confiscated. He didnt serve alcohol at formal white house events, but his wife was the bar maid at his several times a week poker parties where they would drink themselves silly. Of course, the fdr was lost the race for Vice President during that election that elected harding and coolidge. He got polio the next year. So one a couple of winners he spent on his houseboat tooling around the caribbean where they wou