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 would enjoy grog every night. Now what was in the grog . I dont know, but i think probably it may be another name for a martini and then also at the little white house where he was said to have had a bootlegger who supplied him with moonshine. So the government was making efforts to control this out of control criminal activity, but they were so outmanned and so outgunned and it was so easy to bribe a prohibition agent because they were poorly paid poorly trained and so many of them had kind of gotten into the enforcement business just to read the rewards of the the bribery of course the most famous of the of the infamous gangsters was al capone and even though my book is about the south lo and behold i found out that al capone was from chicago had spent a lot of time in the south. There are so many places that he was said to ovulate his head. Its kind of Like Washington slept here. I can tell you too that i know for sure one is the federal penitentiary in atlanta where he stayed for two years after being convicted of income tax evasion. The other was both in the late 20s. He bought a home outside on miami beach called where he lived it built the largest Swimming Pool in florida and was seen parading around in a black onepiece bathing suit much like the one fdr war. Why did anyone think wool was good material for a bathing suit, but anyway, but thats where he it after he got out of alcatraz. He went back to miami beach and died there. Or by 1928 repeal had become a major issue of the Campaign Around the mid1920s Public Opinion really started changing the episcopalians and im one had reluctantly gone along with the methodist and the baptist and the president and the presbyterians to support prohibition. They said were out of it. This is were going back to our cocktail parties because of what had happened with the crime. The murder rate was twice what it is today in in new york and chicago. So al smith, the governor of new york was nominated for president fdr put the nomination in. And it became a very ugly race that focused on his catholicism his strong position as a wet and being a people suggested or accused him of being just a puppet of the the big tammany hall Party Machine in new york and he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover. So Herbert Hoover wins in 1928 that february on saint valentines day was when the valentines day massacre happened in chicago, and it was the most brutal and just spectacular murder that the country had seen al capone was largely thought to have been the cause of it, but he said no no, i was in miami when all this happened. I was on vacation. In fact, i was in the District Attorneys Office being questioned at the very moment at hand said they never did find out who did it. But that was another thing that really started pushing Public Opinion against prohibition. Well hoover took office the next month and then october the stock market crashed and that was the beginning of the great depression. The government everybodys funds dried up and employment rose the governments funds were getting very dry. And hoover when he took office promise to study prohibition, but eventually a report came out that said well, its not really working. Its not enforceable, but we think we should keep doing it and he said that sounds fine to me a woman who had helped get him elected named Pauline Morton saban. She was the the first woman on the Republican National committee a powerhouse in fundraising. Decided shed had enough and she turned her book her back on hoover. She resigned from the Republican Party and she started the Womens Organization for National Prohibition reform. One per what a acronym but again, she was in the same mold of the lady who ran the wctu. She could organize anything and they made because she and her wealthy lady friends and their rich husbands are writing the checks to make the thing run any woman in the country could join for free so they had this huge coalition of shop girls and housewives and factory workers who were all working for National Prohibition reform. The interesting thing is they use the same argument. The the Temperance Movement folks had that we are protecting families because since there was no alcohol in the country. There was no reason to regulate the alcohol that wasnt there. So young girls and teenage boys were going to speak easy and there were no rules against it, you know a decent woman would not have gone in a bar before prohibition except maybe miss kitty, so these women jumped on the bad wagon with paul and saban and she endorsed fdr in 1932 switched parties. Um now fdr going along with the plank that the democrats adopted wholeheartedly was to repeal the 18th amendment. He wanted a landslide and then during the Winter Congress repealed the 18th amendment by passing the 21st, and it went to the states to be ratified. Meanwhile one of roosevelts first acts in the hundred days was to ask congress to modify the volstead act. To legalize the sale of light beer and wine and it quickly passed roosevelt said, i think it would be a good time for a beer and the country agreed so it put a lot of people back to work in a Legal Business again and also started the excise tax blowing back into the treasury. It was of course, it was thrown back to the states with the ratification of alcohol of the 21st amendment which happened on december 5th 1933 now in the south interestingly, mississippi did not except that amendment until 1966. So it was a dry state. Legally until 1966. What it did was that through the regulation back to the individual states. So each state could decide what they wanted to do. The Southern States really dragged their fate their feet except for louisiana South Carolina started allowing local option in 35, georgia in 1937. And the fact that they waited so long just kept the moonshine flowing and that was what led to the bird of nascar these guys who were selling moonshine hired these young reckless teenagers to drive their mobile forward model for sorry model a fords all the way down the mountains and on the weekends when they were not so busy they would race each other in camp pastures and that led to start car racing and some of the big stars in the early days of stock car racing and even some of the later days had been moonshiners like junior johnson. So to tell the story of prohibition in my book, it is indeed a series of expeditions through the south i go to different places visit. Bars Museums Hotels distilleries cemeteries all of them that have something to do with the story. And i telled in first person it is a history book. It does have hundreds of footnotes, so i didnt make any of this stuff up, but its fun history and in each chapter i find recipes that were either benedict recipes from that period or else recipes that a friendly bartender was able to share with me and give you a great ideas of places to eat and drink and Charleston Savannah louisville, miami all all that kind of stuff. So it was a very fun book to write. Im happy to say my publisher has just given me a contract to write the sequel methodist in moonshiners and people keep asking me what im going to do about the presbyterians and i said the only thing that comes up in my mind is presbyterians and prostitution and im just not ready to delve into that that form of sanya. So anyway it lot of fun in my wonderful husband leo was my sidekick the whole time. So he was kind of like a character in the book. So what questions can i answer about prohibition . Oh, and i think you have to walk up to the mic, correct, so theyll catch on book tv. Ill come on someones got a question. Okay, go ahead. Actually, ive read the book. So im asking this is one of this what you call a friendly question talk about. Was it dawsonville . Yeah the event you went to that still own going. Yeah, so that culture. Yeah, dawsonville, georgia. There are a lot of places that really havent changed a lot in the south and dawsonville. Georgia is one of them they call themselves the birthplace of stock car racing though the people in North Carolina heatedly dispute that its almost like who makes the best barbecue, but dawsonville is a home of a big racing family awesome bill from dawsonville and his son chase who just won one of the big nascar contests this year chase elliott, and it was a hot bed of moonshining. Its a easy. Well, its not an easy drive, but its a straight shot down mountain roads to atlanta. So people in these communities were making the moonshine originally, they would have bartered and sold it to each other. But when the markup got to be so high they would start selling it to people they didnt know in atlanta through bootleggers and the quality of the stuff got to be really really bad. I mean moonshine would kill you it was being you know, they were using old radiators as worms instead of copper tubing and that kind of thing but these dawsonville has a moonshine festival every year and i went to it to kind of get a feel for you know. That culture i think i knew what i was getting into. It was right before the election the 2020 election and the guy who was running for congress had an outline of an ak47 on his campaign signs. He won he owns a gun store and in a woman about my age from the civitan club, which is kind of like rotary was holding up a cardboard ak47 because she was selling raffle tickets to win a real one great christmas gifts. So anyway, but they have a terrific stock car racing hall of fame museum there which is attached to the city hall which is attached to a distillery and when i went into this distillery, there was this case of these little curved bones and the sign said, six dollars and fifty four cents and i asked the young lady at the counter. Is this what i think they are . She said oh, yeah, theyre raccoon genitalia. And i said well, why would someone buy one and she said oh theyre good luck or you could wear it in a hat band or give it to someone as a sign of affection and im thinking you know. Give me diamonds, i dont want to , but that was just kind of what the culture was like there and then they gave out awards for people to be inducted into the moonshine hall of fame and some of them were dead in their relatives were accepting. I mean one woman, you know talked about her father, you know, hijack sugar tucks and all kinds of things like that and she said, well, you know, i think daddy would be a little bit surprised because we tried to keep that quiet. Anyway, it was just a real experience. We were in line for barbecue and when we got our barbecue, my husband said, did you notice the hat band of the guy in front of you in line . And i said what are to have in it a . And he said no at a knife. So after that we decided to eat our barbecue and just go home, but its a very interesting. Way of life that hasnt changed a lot. So i have a question about the time that roosevelt was governor of new york during prohibition and his assistant missy lahand i would host their happy hours. You want to talk about that . Yeah, missys the misty lahand of course is the subject of my biography the gatekeeper and she was the hostess of his happy hour every day Eleanor Roosevelt very seldom darkened the door. She didnt approve of the drinking. She didnt approve of the joking in the silliness and all that kind of thing, but missy was an Irish Catholic and she was used to being around people who drank and could sock it back herself pretty good. So all through his time it warm springs and the Governors Mansion and and in the white house he always had a childrens hour every day. And he would just call together usually his close staff. I think the only child who actually came might have been dying a Hopkins Harry hopkins daughter who also lived in the white house because her mother had died in she told me that she would sit on his lap during childrens hour and play with the toys. He kept all those little funky toys on his desk and while aldi adults in the room were just talking about the big issues of the day though. I thought they were probably really gossiping. So so that was you know, fdr certainly wasnt a drunk, but he he liked his martinis. Ive got his recipe in the book by the way, if thats an inducement. Its a very good martini. I also have a missy martini in there. All right other questions, do we still have another minute or two . Okay, dont be shy. Some people ask me. What was the thing that surprised me the most when doing my research and it was that i really like bourbon. We went to louisville leo and i on a bourbon tasting weekend and expedition on the way. We found cary nations birthplace, which is on the national register, but its just this falling down farmhouse in the middle of a cow pasture. And we went on to louisville and spent the weekend touring distillerys. We stayed at the seal back hotel, which is just a beautiful old grand hotel. And it was the place where F Scott Fitzgerald got thrown out of the bar several times while he was stationed there. Its got a very lively reputation al capone was also said to have stayed there. And what is always said about anywhere al capone state is that there was a secret tunnel so he could get out of the building should the Law Enforcement converge on him and that there was a girlfriend somewhere around and sometimes an illegitimate son or two or three so i kind of to began to take all the al capone slip here stories with a grain of salt and thats why i can tell you i can only verify two for sure. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your attention
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