Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold About this episode Organized crime, speakeasy gin, and jazz impresarios stole headlines in the 1920s, but behind the scenes boiled a bizarre government plot rooted in the first American culture war. In New York City, a pair of scientists sees the devastation written on the wall, and they try to put a halt to the mayhem before it's too late.
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1:03 Speaker 04 Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can preorder it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book. It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker, I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right, I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.
1:45 Speaker 04 So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates, or just click the link in the show notes, that'll work too. Okay, that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snafu, Season 3, Formula 6.
2:16 Speaker 04 November 30th, 1928, Cleveland, Ohio.
2:22 Speaker 04 The city has just opened a new music hall downtown. It's 1920s opulence, from top to bottom. Arched ceilings in an Italian style, columns and balconies glowing with gold leaf, a giant plaster eagle looking down over the stage. Maybe not how I would do the decor, more into tasteful minimalism myself, but the folks in Cleveland are eating it up. A massive sparkling chandelier spills light over a crowd of thousands who are all losing their minds, cheering for the Paul Whitehead Orchestra playing their hits. They're the most popular band in America, and they have a talented young coronetist blowing sweet notes from his horn.
3:05 Speaker 04 That's Bix Biderbeck on the coronet. Not many folks named Bix nowadays. That's how you know you're in the 20s, baby. He's standing in the back row of the band, doing his thing.
3:18 Speaker 04 Bix is a small, dapper fella dressed in a tux, with slicked brown hair parted down the middle like an open Faulkner novel. A few songs into the performance, something strange happens. Bix's eyes roll back. He slumps over on the stage and falls to the ground, completely unconscious.
3:41 Speaker 04 A bandmate jolts him awake, helps him backstage, and eventually takes him back to his hotel room.
3:51 Speaker 04 That night, Bix has a freak-out in his hotel room. He yells hysterically, he destroys furniture. This surprised everyone who knew him. He was a jazz musician, not a member of Led Zeppelin. His bandmates would later describe it as a fit of delirium. They said he cracked up.
4:12 Speaker 05 Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through. Just a little song keeps Georgia on my mind. Georgia on my mind.
4:30 Speaker 04 That little ditty is the American songbook classic, "Georgia on My Mind." Maybe you know the iconic Ray Charles version, but this is an original recording with the composer Hoagy Carmichael, from the last recording session of Bix's career. In his solo, you can still hear Bix's genius. And though you might not be able to tell, Bix reportedly didn't have enough breath to finish some of the gorgeous phrases in his solo towards the end of the song.
5:05 Speaker 04 Bix is struggling. He never really recovers.
5:10 Speaker 04 A year later, Bix is home in his Queens, New York apartment. By now, he's bedridden, down to just 150 pounds, complaining of constant headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and blackouts. This summer night, a neighbor visits and finds Bix in bed, under the sheets, hallucinating. Bix dies that night. He was just 28. What happened to him? That question haunted Bix's family and his fans. Sure, they knew Bix wasn't well, and they knew that like a lot of touring musicians, Bix was a heavy drinker. That had been true since his teens.
5:51 Speaker 04 But it would take years for anyone to see how this all fit into a larger story. In the 1920s, taking a drink put Bix, along with millions of Americans, right in the middle of the decade's bitter divide over alcohol. In the end, the war between the wets and the dries would have a massive human cost.
6:14 Speaker 04 I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. Last season, we told the story of the burglary that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. This season, we go back a little further in time, all the way to the 1920s. We're bringing you a dark tale from the heart of the prohibition era. As we all know, prohibition did not work. It was what you might call a snafu. Within that snafu is another snafu, one you probably haven't heard about how a lot of Americans started dying mysteriously, and the unlikely duo who tried to figure out why and save them.
6:59 Speaker 04 On this season of Snafu, the story of Formula Six, how prohibitions wore on alcohol, went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people.
7:26 Speaker 04 I thought I had a pretty good handle on prohibition. The 1920s, the era before the Great Depression, when we felt like, hey, World War I is over, what better to do than party? The Harlem Renaissance, jazz, votes for women. America was feeling a burst of new energy. We were trying out cars, trying out radio, heck, we were trying out movies. And as a Georgia boy, I can't help loving how much love Georgia was getting in that decade. In addition to Georgia on my mind, another classic emerged, sweet Georgia Brown.
8:05 Speaker 04 And the background to all of that was, of course, prohibition. It's just kind of part of our mental furniture, right? For me, the word prohibition takes me back to all the great portrayals in classic American cinema, like The Untouchables. Two straight hours of mafia set pieces. Who could forget when Elliot Ness faces down Al Capone in a hotel lobby?
8:28 Speaker 06 Come on, you can't, son of a bitch. You talk to me like that in front of my son?
8:32 Speaker 04 If you didn't sneak out to hear De Niro drop F-bombs in an Italian accent, were you even 13 the summer The Untouchables came out? I mean, just listen to that macho chest thumping. Cops and mobsters, good guys and bad guys going toe-to-toe. It's classic Hollywood stuff that just reels you in. But then, well, I heard the story of a prohibition snafu that genuinely surprised me, because it wasn't part of the prohibition story that I knew. It was the story of Formula 6 and a devastating prohibition-era program by the federal government. Hey, honey, have you ever heard of Formula 6? Nope. Yeah, almost no one had.
9:13 Speaker 04 So I called up someone who really brought prohibition into focus for me, along with millions of TV fans like me.
9:20 Speaker 07 Hey, it's so good to meet you, man.
9:22 Speaker 04 It's so, so great to meet you. That's Terrence Winter, creator of the epic TV series Boardwalk Empire. I put the question to him. I'm curious if you're, if you hit on in your research, are you familiar with Formula 6?
9:38 Speaker 07 I am not.
9:40 Speaker 04 And that was wild to me, because his show is stacked with the kinds of details that made 1920's Atlantic City come to life.
9:50 Speaker 07 Even though it's 100 years ago, it still felt modern. People dressed in suits, they went out to restaurants, they talked on the telephone, they drove in cars. You know, it still felt cool, it still felt like accessible. This was modern. You know, you could wear some of those clothes today.
10:05 Speaker 04 I mean, I gotta say, I do look pretty good in a pair of spats. But the sense we have that we already know prohibition, it can actually lead us astray a little, because cliches about life in the 1920's are so thick. We assume we know what it's all about. You know, liquor was made illegal. It was a big mistake. There was a bunch of mobsters and tommy guns. And then it got repealed.
10:32 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, every time you ever see anything in the 20s, everybody's doing the fucking Charleston. It's like, did they do any, is there any other songs written between 1920 and 1930?
10:41 Speaker 04 Obviously, yes. I mean, we're talking about the birth of jazz. We're talking about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Eddie Lang, Earl Hines. I could go on. The point is, we tend to paint history with broad brushes. Like Terry says, when we think about the prohibition era, our minds probably go immediately to the cliches we know best. And the real, complex human lives that ordinary people lived in the past don't always come through when we talk about history. But this story, the story of Formula Six, reveals something bizarre that was happening all along, underneath all the organized crime and speakeasy gin and temperance moralizing.
11:22 Speaker 04 A shocking government plot rooted in the first modern American culture war. It starts with a pair of scientists, investigators who happened to see it coming. In fact, they tried to stop it.
11:45 Speaker 04 It's 1918 in New York, and the city is facing a problem. Okay, the city is facing a lot of problems, but here's a tricky one. A record number of murders are going unsolved. A city report lays blame squarely on one government office in particular, the office of the coroner. The coroner was essentially the city's chief death investigator. He issued death certificates and performed autopsies for all murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. A pretty grim but important job. And yet, the city's coroners were either horribly unqualified or terribly corrupt, or, quite often, both.
12:27 Speaker 05 They made coroners out of anyone who needed a job, who the party machine owed them a favor.
12:35 Speaker 04 That's Deborah Blum, author of "The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York." She describes how, at the time, the police essentially used coroners to "rubber stamp" false reports, and sometimes even cover up murders. And when she says "anyone could become a coroner," she means it.
12:56 Speaker 05 There were sign painters, there were milkmen, there were funeral home operators, there were lawyers, and there were notably doctors who were such terrible doctors that they had lost their practices.
13:11 Speaker 04 And if you think that's bad, let me introduce you to the head coroner of New York in 1918, a guy who showed up to crime scenes completely hammered.
13:22 Speaker 05 There are death certificates that literally say, "could be diabetes or possibly an auto accident," right? I mean, you're just going, "Seriously?"
13:33 Speaker 04 After stories like that started coming to light, the mayor had no choice but to make some changes. It was time to find someone who could get to the bottom of all these crimes. Someone who was less Homer Simpson and more Sherlock Holmes. Or, I don't know, maybe anyone who could stand upright? City officials decided the coroner's office was a joke, an embarrassment, and a waste of taxpayers' money. So they shut it down. But they couldn't just ignore the reasons people died in New York. They had to replace it with something. Their idea? A new system for the city and a new position that would be filled by a qualified doctor
14:15 Speaker 04 who would appoint a trained staff to examine cases and rule on causes of death. This new lead position was Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. So they announced the job opening, and in walked a fella named Charles Norris.
14:34 Speaker 04 Uh, no, love Walker, Texas Ranger Chuck Norris. Uh, and God knows I'm scared of him, but just to be clear, this is Dr. Charles Norris of New York, New York.
14:44 Speaker 05 He was a really big guy and he had one of those kind of classic spade-like beards. He had a big booming voice and a Yale football player's presence and he used it when he needed to.
14:58 Speaker 04 That's right, this particular Norris was a Yalie with the appropriate aristocratic roots.
15:05 Speaker 05 He was a descendant of the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania. So they were a long time, well-established, important American family.
15:13 Speaker 04 Which means that, yep, Norris was rich, rich. He didn't hide it. Norris was a public servant who rode around like Bruce Wayne.
15:23 Speaker 05 He never went anywhere without his, being driven by his chauffeur. And even when he went to crime scenes, you know, his chauffeur would take him to the crime scene and he would get out in his cashmere coat and his expensive hat.
15:39 Speaker 04 Not exactly a man of the people, you'd think, but moneybags aside, it turns out public service actually ran deep in Norris's blood. Norris's ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. Ever heard of it? They stripped lead gutters and rain spouts from their house to make bullets for the Continental Army.
15:58 Speaker 07 The house is flooding again. My smoking chair will be ruined. My beloved, it is the sacrifice we make to bring forth a new nation.
16:12 Speaker 04 And then, in the Civil War, Norris's grandfather negotiated the first $100 million loan financing the Union government's war against the Confederates. Norris took the do-gooder spirit of his ancestors and studied medicine, became a doctor, and now, as the Great War raged in Europe, he was looking to do his part, to keep the people of New York safe. So he made a real run at the position of chief medical examiner when the job opened up. An actually qualified doctor who wanted to use his position for the public good? Well, it turns out that even for someone who wanted to do good, even after he started
16:55 Speaker 04 his job as chief medical examiner, the odds were stacked against him.
17:01 Speaker 04 Because, it turns out, there were plenty of officials who simply liked the old way of doing things. Norris's budget for his staff and his workspace was laughably small. That drunk coroner had left him an office literally in shambles.
17:17 Speaker 05 At one point, he was actually forced to buy the clocks on the walls of the medical examiner's office because the mayor cut the budget to such an degree that they couldn't even afford clocks.
17:34 Speaker 04 Before, police officers used coroners to play their political games. But now, with Norris in charge, they were in for a surprise. Like when a few officers brought Norris a body to examine, which happened to be riddled with bullet holes. They asked for a simple John Hancock on a, let's say, pre-filled-out death certificate that said the cause of death was suicide. Norris looked at the corpse and said, "I don't think so."
18:01 Speaker 07 It is entirely out of the question, in my opinion, to even consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the number and situation of the bullet wounds. There were four bullet wounds sprayed across the corpse.
18:14 Speaker 04 In other words, seems impossible that this poor guy shot himself in the heart, shoulder, leg, and arm. Norris was serious about his work. He was serious about building the office of the chief medical examiner into an effective research team that could get to the bottom of all the deaths in New York City. But to do that, he needed help. Norris was a doctor, not a chemist who could detect toxins or poisons in a dead body. And during this time, there were more and more poisons surrounding Americans. Morphine and teething medicines for infants, opium and sedatives, arsenic and everything from cosmetics to pesticides, and don't even ask about how much formaldehyde they were
18:58 Speaker 04 mixing with cow brains and putting in milk. And I thought the microplastics in my water bottle were bad. And it's not like it was harmless. People were dying from this stuff. So often, in fact, that it was hard to keep up. But here's the thing about poisons. They're just not quite as obvious as bullet holes. And so Norris had a crazy idea. To create a dedicated lab where chemists could work on determining causes of death. Call it a toxicology lab. At the time, no other city in America had one. And you know Norris and his Kashmir. He always had to have the best. This lab would be installed at Bellevue.
19:41 Speaker 04 A New York hospital perched along the East River since 1811. As he thinks about organizing his department, the first thing he thinks is, we need a chemist. Norris just needed to pick the right brainiac for the job. Fortunately for him, there was someone who fit the bill right down the hall. An assistant professor at the Bellevue Medical College. And the award for forensic toxicologist for the newly established New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner where the clocks don't even work goes to Dr. Alexander Getler. Come on down, Alex. You're the lucky winner. Uh, Dr. Getler? Dr.
20:24 Speaker 04 Getler? Well, when Norris approached him, this Alexander Getler fellow wasn't convinced that playing Robin to Norris's Batman was his dream job. You see, Alexander Getler was already in a position that was nothing to sneeze at in those days. And, well, if you looked at where the invitation was coming from, let's just say it was pretty clear the medical examiner's office was in the "build the plane as you fly" stage of its existence. Not to mention Getler was from a completely different world. He was quite different from Flash the Cash Norris.
21:00 Speaker 05 He was trim. He had dark hair. He had a long, angular face, chomping on a cigar all the time, from what I understand.
21:09 Speaker 04 That's Dorothy Atzel, Alexander Getler's granddaughter. Every picture we have of him, he's in a suit. And that's Vicky Atzel, Alexander's great-granddaughter. He's got like a pretty serious expression, which I think was kind of his MO.
21:23 Speaker 00 He was a pretty serious guy. He just kind of like went to work as anyone would go to work with his suit jacket on.
21:29 Speaker 05 He wasn't from wealth or Ivy League education or anything like that. He just kind of pulled himself up and followed what he wanted to do. Got the education he needed, worked nights so he could go to school during the day.
21:44 Speaker 04 Tickets, please. All right, have a nice day. Getler worked as a ticket taker for the 39th Street Brooklyn Battery Ferry and took the overnight shift. During the day, he earned himself a PhD in biochemistry at Columbia. Those brains and, you know, fairly intense work ethic got Getler his teaching job. He had put in the hard yards and he had earned it. But outside of work, he lived like a lot of other people in his Brooklyn neighborhood, tucked snugly in a brownstone with his wife, son, and more than a half dozen Irish in-laws.
22:16 Speaker 05 He raised his kids in the middle of this kind of chaos of the Irish-American life in Brooklyn. I think that hugely influenced also his sense of the world because he was so connected to her family.
22:31 Speaker 04 But going back and forth between a busy home and a busy hospital, he saw the difference medicine could make in the lives of everyday people. So even though he had turned down Norris's offer, he couldn't put it out of his mind. Maybe if he joined the medical examiner's office, he could do some good. So when Norris came around again, Getler was ready to consider the job. But Norris was also completely honest with Getler. This was nothing like a cushy job in academia. Getler would have to design the lab from scratch. He would have to figure out for himself how to do the work of detecting poisons. There were no training programs in forensic toxicology. He would have to blaze his own trail.
23:15 Speaker 04 That was all right, though, because Getler loved nothing more than a challenge and cramming more chemistry work into his days. He agreed to take the position, but only if he could keep teaching at the medical college. That's how much he believed in his grind. Norris looked around at the backlog of bodies stacking up in Bellevue and said, "Sure, man. Whatever you want."
23:38 Speaker 05 My grandfather was tapped to be the chief toxicologist. It just felt almost like... Like they were like superhero crusaders as well, you know, like starting something and actually not just starting it, but turning, turning the page on, on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair and was corrupt.
24:01 Speaker 00 It's funny what you say. I was gonna say what you said, Mom, about them being like superheroes that have just like, it feels like it was, they're like, like a buddy cop movie of like these two scientists in the trenches together.
24:12 Speaker 04 And while the scientific trenches of New York may have been metaphorical, there's no question that our dynamic duo had a very real fight on their hands. Because it turned out that even though the city was moving on from the flu epidemic and the war in France was winding down, a different kind of war was just getting started. And Norris and Getler had gotten together just in time for the shit to hit the fan.
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26:11 Speaker 07 It's been in the big baggie, in the box, in a closet. And if you look at each of the pages, they're all like sort of frayed and chipping.
26:31 Speaker 04 Dorothy Atsell is at home at her kitchen table.
26:34 Speaker 07 I'm hesitating separating the pages.
26:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:37 Speaker 07 Because every time I open it, there's pieces of paper that just kind of flake off.
26:42 Speaker 04 She's meeting with one of our writers, Albert Chen. She's very, very carefully handling a dusty blue hardbound book that's older than my mom's wedding china. The book is a collection of typed reports written by Alexander Getler over the course of three decades.
26:58 Speaker 07 His dissertation was the balance of acid-forming and base-forming elements in food and its relation to ammonia metabolism. I don't know what that means.
27:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's been a while since 10th grade chemistry for me, too.
27:13 Speaker 07 And then like this one, which was from 1921, "A Method for the Determination of Death by Drowning." So now I understand what this is about. It's easy to understand. Back in the day when he was doing all of his work, they were pulling bodies out of the Hudson. And you, how do you know if they drowned or they died by another means?
27:38 Speaker 04 A great question that before Getler and Norris came along, no one had any clue how to answer. But Dorothy's daughter, Vicky, says Getler figured it out.
27:48 Speaker 00 People would come to him with problems that they like didn't even really know the cause of. Just like all of these people who work in the same place are having the same issue. They're all getting weird tumors and cancer. Transit workers or subway workers who were all feeling really like sluggish.
28:04 Speaker 07 And like cognitively fuzzy and he would first figure out like the cause of the problem and then solve it.
28:09 Speaker 04 That blue book contained all the detective work that Getler and Norris pursued in their day and that work kept them busy, very busy.
28:18 Speaker 07 They were so like focused on their work and they were trying to do things. They didn't want to like leave the lab to use the bathroom. So they just urinated in the big sink they had in the lab. Which I'm like, okay, I guess if you're really focused on your work and you really don't want to take the time, I get it. But um.
28:40 Speaker 04 Despite what you may be thinking, the apparent lack of nearby urinals was not the biggest public health crisis Norris and Getler were facing. By early 1919, the deadly wave of influenza was finally passing. But Norris and Getler were seeing a concerning uptick in victims reporting similar symptoms, a sudden sense of weakness, severe abdominal pain and vomiting, blindness, a slip into unconsciousness, heart failure, and even death. But why? They had a hunch it had something to do with a ubiquitous substance floating through the streets of New York City in 1919. And no, I'm not talking about all the urine flowing from Getler and Norris's big laboratory sink. We're talking about liquor.
29:24 Speaker 05 Alcohol is everywhere. The term that New York never sleeps is true of the 1920s. Like there are nightclubs on every single corner.
29:34 Speaker 04 That's LaShawn Harris, historian of New York City's underground economy.
29:39 Speaker 05 Even in black and tan clubs, interracial clubs in New York City during the early 20th century, African Americans are going to these clubs, both middle class and working class people and are drinking. Alcohol is something that black churches use for various different ceremonies. We also know that alcohol is something that different-
30:04 Speaker 02 Social groups are engaging in, whether they be light beer, or cocktails, or a little bit of rum. It's something that one can engage in while at church. It's a part of your social life.
30:22 Speaker 04 Light beer, cocktails, a little bit of rum? Not if you were part of the Anti-Saloon League. Let me tell you about these folks. Their mission statement wasn't exactly hard to get at. It's kind of right there in the name: Anti-Saloon. They wanted to hammer the bung back into America's whiskey barrel. To them, drinking was a moral outrage, a sin, and the root of all society's ills. From small beginnings, they grew into the most powerful lobbying group in America. In Ohio, where they started, they ran a pressure campaign that beat a popular governor. Ohio was dry. But why stop there? They got ambitious. They wanted to wring every last drop of liquor out of the whole wet nation.
31:07 Speaker 04 So as their next target, they set their sights on Gettler and Norris's stomping grounds: New York City. You see, by their count, New Yorkers drank a dozen pints of alcoholic beverages a week for every man, woman, and child. A per capita consumption that was more than three times the national average. "One saloon for every six people in New York," the League said. As Dr. Harris says, New York City at the end of World War I was bursting with working-class saloons, chandelier'd hotel bars, and wine-soaked bohemian cafes. The Anti-Saloon League called it "the liquor center of America."
31:48 Speaker 04 To them, the Big Apple had fermented into a cidery slush of drunkards and degenerates. They had the nation, and especially the nation's politicians, running scared.
32:00 Speaker 04 And then came World War I. It was exactly what they'd been waiting for. The Anti-Saloon League saw the chance to justify a national ban on liquor as a wartime measure. That was easy. No politician wanted to be unpatriotic. But the wartime measure was just the first step. What they really wanted? A permanent ban on liquor enshrined in the US Constitution. The US House of Representatives has voted in favor of the proposed 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating
32:35 Speaker 06 liquors." The amendment will now make its way through the 50 states. January 7, 1918. Mississippi becomes the first state to ratify the 18th Amendment. Georgia becomes the 13th state to ratify the 18th Amendment.
32:48 Speaker 04 One by one, lawmakers and state houses across the country fell in line. California is the 22nd state to ratify the 18th Amendment. But New York City was, as one paper called it, Satan's Last Stronghold.
33:05 Speaker 07 An apple did the trick in the Garden of Eden. Imagine what I can do with the big apple in America.
33:14 Speaker 04 The Anti-Saloon League? They were a lot of lawyers and Methodist ministers from, like, Ohio. New York City, meanwhile, was a lot of working-class, immigrant, black, and Catholic neighborhoods, constantly evolving. These New Yorkers weren't exactly interested in test-driving someone else's moral experiment in turning the city dry as a kale chip. But when a ban hit the whole country, they had no choice. The entire commercial beer supply in New York City, from the warehouses to the grocery stores to the cabinets of every legitimate business, got poured down the drain.
33:53 Speaker 04 But, uh, you might be surprised to hear, despite all that beer saying goodbye, New York nightlife wasn't changing. The alcohol fueling it, however, was. With the beer taps dry, saloons were now serving stiffer and more mysterious concoctions, this time with distilled liquor. As the amendment is circulating and moving forward to when it actually goes into place, around New York City...
34:23 Speaker 00 People are starting to prepare for it by making sure they have their own little home stills or backyard stills, or you know what people used to call bathtub gin. Even if they can't get it legally, they want those systems in place. And they were using wood or other materials that they could easily access in an urban area, and they were making wood alcohol.
34:46 Speaker 04 Wood alcohol, known to those of us who passed 10th grade chemistry as methyl alcohol. It was used as a solvent to make varnish and as a fuel, and unfortunately, sometimes to mix cocktails. From the taste, you couldn't tell exactly what was in those drinks, but you might find out the next day when you woke up in the hospital, your body loaded with methyl alcohol, a very toxic substance. And that's if you were lucky enough to wake up. More and more people from all parts of the city were ending up on a gurney outside Getler's lab.
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37:04 Speaker 07 Bellevue was this sort of Gothic brick building on the sort of mid to lower east side of Manhattan. There was something about that brick, ivy, Gothic look of the place. There was something about, you know, the fact that so many deaths occurred there. It had a kind of mythology about it for a number of reasons. Right. They saved a lot of lives, but a lot of people died there. That it just had this kind of reputation of being a slightly haunted place.
37:36 Speaker 04 In 1919, Bellevue just opened a new pathology building. Six stories high, made of solid granite, with long, arched windows. Inside is the city morgue and the medical examiner's offices. There are autopsy rooms and a forensic chemistry laboratory for Charles Norris and Alexander Getler to study the dead.
38:00 Speaker 04 Getler's laboratory is a layer of blue flames leaking out of Bunsen burners, hissing heating systems, boiling dishes. The wood floorboards are discolored by chemicals and burns. When Norris and Getler see a rise in cases of people who've been crippled by blindness just before death, they have a hunch that the reason is poisoning due to toxic liquor: wood alcohol. But no test exists to detect wood alcohol in cadavers, so Getler does what he always does in cases like this: he creates one. Getler's test is grinding up a chunk of tissue into a flask and then boiling it into a dark sludge. He measures the formaldehyde bubbling out.
38:45 Speaker 04 Most alcohol would release just a trace of it. Wood alcohol releases an overpowering amount. They're really trying to get...
38:54 Speaker 05 To the bones of this, right?
38:56 Speaker 04 Literally.
38:57 Speaker 05 How much poison alcohol is out there?
38:59 Speaker 04 A fair amount, actually. For generations, people had been making their own liquor and getting sick doing it. Moonshine, white lightning, liquid courage, call it what you want. But this cheap homemade stuff mostly stayed at the margins of American society. Now, however, it was becoming the mainstream. So in 1918, Getler wrote an article for the country's leading medical journal to get word out to doctors and public health officials. He saw prohibition coming, and he knew exactly what it would mean.
39:30 Speaker 05 He titles this article, "Wood Alcohol Poisoning." He's not messing around. He puts the word poison right in the actual article title. So he says, "The prohibition by our government of the manufacture of distilled liquors will unquestionably lead to much moonshining adulteration and dilution of the liquors offered to the public." It is quite evident, given the recent poisonings in this city of over 30 persons, six of whom died with a whiskey sold in the poorest sections of the city, that on analysis was believed to contain a considerable amount of wood methyl alcohol. Wood alcohol tastes like ethyl alcohol, and moreover, it is considerably cheaper.
40:13 Speaker 05 Hence, the adulterate buys the latter, ignorant that severe poisoning, blindness, and often death lurks within. He's saying to doctors around the country, you know, let people know this is dangerous, this is coming, and arm yourself. He said, "I want to send up a signal flare. Please take this as a warning." We're at the very start of this. Essentially, what that piece says in a beautifully scientific way is, "I'm not talking about alcohol, I'm talking about poison."
40:49 Speaker 04 Getler connects the dots. What he sees in 1918 makes him think that people aren't going to be drinking less because prohibition is the law of the land. Instead, they're going to be drinking a much more suspect, much more dangerous supply. This message, it didn't land. But he was right. By the winter of 1919, more than 60 New Yorkers died from drinking wood alcohol. Another 100 were blinded. Then, almost that same number of alcohol-related deaths, only this time just in the month of December alone. So Getler sat down at his desk, picked up his pen, and tried again.
41:30 Speaker 07 A critical study of methods for the detection of methyl alcohol by Alexander O. Getler.
41:38 Speaker 04 Don't get confused here. Wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, and methanol? Those are just three different names for the same nasty beast. And you should never, ever drink it. As Getler's granddaughter Dorothy says...
41:52 Speaker 07 Says here, "During the years 1918 and 1919, I've had occasion to examine over 700 human organs for alcohol. In addition to this, about 250 liquors of various descriptions were analyzed."
42:08 Speaker 04 In this report, Getler begins to identify the presence of wood alcohol in an alarming number of cases.
42:16 Speaker 04 On the day after Christmas in 1919, Getler and Norris switch tactics.
42:23 Speaker 04 Just writing for America's doctors wasn't going to save the country's direction. "Sorry, doctors. I mean, you've been telling us it's all diet and exercise for like, ever, and we just don't listen." So with two major reports reaching too small of an audience, Norris and Getler take this story straight to the general public. They called a press conference.
42:48 Speaker 04 They invite a throng of reporters from the New York papers into their offices in Bellevue. The news hounds file in past broken chairs and over the blood-sputtered carpet left behind by the drunk coroner as a parting gift. Then, Getler and Norris deliver their message.
43:05 Speaker 06 Anything that passes for whiskey in the saloons is dangerous. The first symptom is a mere pain in the stomach, but one teaspoon of wood alcohol is enough to cause blindness. Drinking a tumbler of it will kill you within hours.
43:18 Speaker 05 Sir, what does it smell like? Complete blindness? What's in this booze? Have you tried it yourself, Dr.?
43:26 Speaker 05 Prohibition is not going to make alcohol disappear. It's instead going to create numerous substitutes for whiskey that are dead.
43:36 Speaker 00 Before prohibition really takes off, he's looking the federal government right in the eye and saying, "I want to let you know that we're looking at this now. We're seeing people starting to die. This is a terrible idea. Whatever, you know, politics and morality you think is behind what you're doing, the bottom line of what you're going to do is kill people."
44:00 Speaker 04 They issued that warning in December 1919. Charles Norris and Alexander Getler were now on the case, a case that would consume them across the next decade and expose the killer of Bix Biderbeck. Remember him? The jazz musician who collapsed in Cleveland at age 28.
44:20 Speaker 04 It would take our dynamic duo to the heart of a cruel and misguided scheme, a snafu that led to the mass poisoning of thousands. And the people behind it? The US government.
44:40 Speaker 04 This season on Snafu.
44:42 Speaker 01 The fact that there were only 2,600 prohibition agents covering the entire Canadian border, the Mexican border, and both coasts? It's ridiculous.
44:50 Speaker 00 When we're five years into prohibition, the government is starting to go, "Okay, this isn't working. What is wrong with the American people?"
44:59 Speaker 05 The bartender took some brass medals and the other two patrons held him down and they beat the crap out of him. He said, "If I ever get out and there are two people I'm going to go get, the DA and that son of a bitch Getler." If I made that up, you'd go, "Come on." And this absolutely all happened.
45:14 Speaker 00 Did people die? They died.
45:23 Speaker 04 Snafu is a production of iHeart Radio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Albert Chen, Carl Nellis, and Nevin Kalapali, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapali and Akimini Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound design by Ben Chug.
46:07 Speaker 04 Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Rizak.
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