Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms S3E2: Ready, Willing, and Mabel About this episode How did alcohol come to be illegal and why, of all the agencies, was the IRS tapped to enforce it? One rising legal superstar from California becomes the highest ranking woman in government, but she finds her efforts impeded by the IRS's newly established—and rather corrupt—Prohibition Unit.
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0:35 Speaker 01 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.
1:18 Speaker 01 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.
1:46 Speaker 01 Previously on Snafu. In the 1920s, New York City was facing a record number of unsolved murders.
1:54 Speaker 02 There are death certificates that literally say could be diabetes or possibly an auto accident. You're just going seriously?
2:02 Speaker 01 Until unlikely duo Charles Norris and Alexander Gedler teamed up to investigate.
2:08 Speaker 03 They're like a buddy cop movie of like these two scientists in the trenches together.
2:13 Speaker 01 And while America braced itself for the new normal of prohibition.
2:17 Speaker 04 Georgia becomes the 13th state to ratify the 18th amendment.
2:22 Speaker 01 Norris and Gettler issued a warning to the public as the bodies kept stacking up at Bellevue Hospital.
2:35 Speaker 01 The winter of 1901 in Topeka, Kansas was a cold one. Temperatures hovered in the single digits. I imagine the wind howling down the streets. Too much snow for a car, although someone might bust out a horse-drawn sleigh or two. But inside one saloon, the Senate Bar, the regulars got cozy. This was a favorite haunt for elected officials situated not far from the state capitol, equipped with enough booze for the local elite to forget all about the cold weather. And also the fact that many of them had recently voted to ban the sale of alcohol statewide. At least, that's how it was on most nights.
3:16 Speaker 01 But one freezing cold dawn, before the place opened up, a silhouette fills the doorway. It's a woman, six feet tall and easily able to stand eye to eye with any corn-fed man in Topeka. She wears a black dress and black ribbons in her hair, like she's attending a funeral. And she peers into the darkened saloon through little oval-shaped glasses. It's highly unusual for any woman to enter a saloon in this day and age, let alone at 5:30 in the morning. But this is a highly unusual woman. Her name is Carrie Nation. There's one employee inside the closed bar, as Carrie forces the door open. Even if he doesn't know her, by the look of righteous fury in her eyes, he can probably
4:00 Speaker 01 guess her intentions from the hatchet she's wielding in her hand. Carrie Nation didn't come here to crack open a cold one with the boys. Or at least, not the way you'd think. This hatchet is her signature accessory. And before the barman can stop her, she starts putting it to use.
4:20 Speaker 01 Carrie jumps behind the bar and smashes the liquor bottles.
4:24 Speaker 04 Carrie, no!
4:25 Speaker 01 She smashes the glasses, she smashes the faucets, the cash register, the slot machine...
4:31 Speaker 04 Oh, my panties! Well, at least I'm still looking dapper.
4:35 Speaker 01 Even the mirror on the wall.
4:37 Speaker 04 Ah, my reflection!
4:39 Speaker 01 But all of this is prelude, because finally Carrie Nation lays into her number one target: The kegs.
4:47 Speaker 04 But it was beer, look!
4:50 Speaker 01 She drives her hatchet into the beer kegs flooding the bar floor with the devil's elixir.
5:00 Speaker 01 By the time the sheriff arrives, Carrie is soaked to the bone. Her behavior was extreme, but Carrie Nation was nothing if not a zealot.
5:11 Speaker 01 By 1901, she had become the axe-wielding face of the temperance movement. The Senate bar is just the latest stop in her crusade to destroy every last keg in America. And in that crusade, Carrie is far from alone.
5:27 Speaker 01 Before she started smashing stuff up, Carrie was a devout Christian and felt compelled by God to do things like making clothes for the poor or opening a shelter for the families of violent alcoholics. Her first husband had been a severe alcoholic himself, dying of drink in 1869 and leaving Carrie with their infant daughter. Influenced by her own experience and that of others around her, Carrie would later say that she felt personally called by God to rid the country of alcohol. Her devoted service to the poor earned her the nickname "Mother Nation." At the same time, her manic attacks on saloons earned her the nickname "Hatchet Granny." Carrie referred to herself as...
6:10 Speaker 05 A bulldog, running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like.
6:16 Speaker 01 Call her a bulldog, call her Hatchet Granny, call her whatever you like. Carrie Nation was an impassioned anti-alcohol activist. She, and people like her, were determined to remake America by any means necessary.
6:39 Speaker 01 I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is season three, the story of Formula Six. How prohibitions wore on alcohol, went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. Today, we're taking a look at the people responsible for prohibition. See, before the government set about botching the enforcement of dry laws, lone wolves like Carrie Nation had already been taking matters into their own hands for decades.
7:36 Speaker 06 Even in the years leading up to prohibition, I think half the states were already going dry. It was already starting. There's this ground swell.
7:43 Speaker 01 That's Terrence Winter, legendary TV writer and creator of Boardwalk Empire. His show, like ours, takes place in the 20s. But the full story of prohibition begins a lot earlier.
7:55 Speaker 06 I got where it came from. Alcoholism was devastating. You know, if you had the cliche of the dad who got paid on Friday and then you didn't see him and spent all his money at the bar and your family went destitute, this is in days before social programs or even before AA was a thing. It was a real problem.
8:13 Speaker 01 Terry made himself an expert on this stuff for Boardwalk Empire, digging into the research.
8:18 Speaker 07 You know, at the time we created national prohibition, 65% of America already lived in a dry town. 65% of Americans already couldn't buy liquor in town.
8:27 Speaker 01 That's historian Paul Thompson. Anti-alcohol sentiment, also called temperance, was a social movement. It eventually led to prohibition, the outright banning of alcohol, but it didn't start out that way.
8:40 Speaker 07 What is called the temperance movement lasted over a century. It started by meaning simply individuals should avoid drunkenness. And so it was temperate use of alcoholic beverages, with a particular focus on distilled beverages. So your whiskey and your gins and your brandies.
9:00 Speaker 01 Early temperance supporters urged people to abstain from drink, starting with liquor, but eventually also beer and wine. For them, it was a personal choice you could make to improve both yourself and society. Here's Tom Pegram, author of Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America.
9:17 Speaker 08 Temperance is a self-control movement, not tied to legal restrictions?
9:22 Speaker 01 Self-control was all the rage in the early 1800s, and not just when it came to booze. Case in point, New England Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham.
9:32 Speaker 08 Sylvester Graham was a diet and health reformer in the early 19th century. He was also a temperance guy. Sylvester Graham believed that meat was sexually stimulating, and in fact, he led an attack, I think in somewhere in Massachusetts, on butchers.
9:50 Speaker 01 Graham loved temperance in all its forms. You name it, he didn't want you to enjoy it. He encouraged a diet of vegetables and whole wheat in order to best suppress those bodily urges. Today, he's most famous for his cracker recipe. Yep, that's right, Graham crackers were designed to stop people from masturbating.
10:10 Speaker 01 But it wasn't all about self-denial. Temperance advocates tended to believe in other types of social change, things which, even if they sound like basic human rights today, were actually quite radical in 1800s America.
10:22 Speaker 07 Guess what else they wanted? The people that wanted a prohibition party wanted to give women the right to vote. This is 1869, and that should tell you how radical these people were, because women didn't get the right to vote until 1919. So, these people are decades ahead of the nation on women. There was a lot of temperance people that were not abolitionists, but every abolitionist was a teetotaler.
10:50 Speaker 01 Temperance could easily go hand in hand with blatant racism. In fact, put a pin in that for later. But in the 1800s, the likes of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were prominent figures in the temperance movement. The people fighting hardest for causes like racial equality and women's rights were often supporters of temperance as well.
11:10 Speaker 07 It's very hard for people in the late 20th and 21st century to understand that temperance and prohibition advocates were progressives.
11:19 Speaker 01 Here's author Dan Ockrent on what it meant to be a progressive back in the 1800s.
11:24 Speaker 09 You believed in the betterment of society through government action and in expertise and turning things over to the people who really knew what they were doing. It was kind of an anti-democratic impulse. It's not related, really, to the progressivism that we know today.
11:39 Speaker 01 But the Drys, as the temperance advocates came to be known, didn't arise in a vacuum. In fact, temperance started to gain steam at precisely the same time as immigrants from Europe streamed into American cities in record numbers. Packed into unsafe tenement buildings compelled to work exhausting and often dangerous jobs, these newcomers were in desperate need of a place to unwind and throw back a few beers.
12:05 Speaker 08 There were public houses, there were taverns in colonial and revolutionary America in the early part of the 19th century, in rural areas, often serving as hotels as well. But the saloon was tied to urbanization and also tied to beer culture and the Germans. You know, as the Germans came in, they brought in lager beer. Americans had English-type ales, but the lager beer revolution really switched American drinking practices.
12:34 Speaker 10 Reformers who wanted to improve society, that they had their ideas of how to improve it, tended to associate the evils of urbanization, the evils of industrialization, with immigration because all of those things come together.
12:50 Speaker 01 That's Annie Polland, the president of the Tenement Museum in the heart of New York City's Lower East Side.
12:56 Speaker 10 There were 526 lager beer saloons in the neighborhood then known as Kleindeutschland. Now we think of the Lower East Side and the East Village. And so saloons were everywhere. And saloons were the, like, living rooms of the community.
13:13 Speaker 01 Take us inside, Annie.
13:15 Speaker 10 You would take a few steps down from the street into a lower level, opening an all wooden door. It would probably be lit very well with beautiful lanterns and lamps, wooden tables filled with different foods, pretzels, hard-boiled eggs, cheeses, sauerkraut, different kinds of meats. You'd have musicians there because it was a place for musicians to gather.
13:40 Speaker 01 Welcome to Yummy Town. That almost makes all the turn-of-the-century typhoid and dysentery worth it.
13:46 Speaker 10 It would be noisy, lots of the sounds of people singing or talking. Maybe there'd be newspapers out, maybe there'd be different games out. You'd probably see children coming downstairs with a growler to fill to bring back upstairs to the family.
14:02 Speaker 01 Our man Alexander Getler, chief toxicologist at Bellevue Hospital and himself an immigrant, would have been quite familiar with places like this. His family actually brewed their own beer in their bathroom, and their social lives would have been intimately tied to the saloons around them.
14:18 Speaker 10 Of course, the smell of beer, but also the smell of cooking and smell of tobacco. You might also have people conducting business in a saloon. One of the things that the Germans and the German-speaking immigrants did a lot was form associations, mutual aid associations, political associations, associations for singing, for dancing, for gymnastics, like, you name it.
14:41 Speaker 01 Getler was more workaholic than alcoholic, and there's no record of him joining any associations for singing, dancing, or gymnastics, but this was his world. People like Getler worked their asses off to make a life for themselves and their families in the US. But as they did, they faced discrimination from the blue-blooded Protestants of this country. Ironically, people quite similar to Getler's partner, Charles Norris, who were fed up with immigrants, their foreign cultures, and their pernicious booze.
15:12 Speaker 07 The native-born white, middle-class, by late 1800s, that's already bought into abstinence, sees these, what they called, hordes, made of Jews and Catholics, coming in, who are also, a lot of times, halfway illiterate in English, and living conditions aren't great, and somebody called it the "working man's palace." And these places are quite elaborate by the turn of the century.
15:37 Speaker 01 Saloons became the primary targets for the carry nations of the world, as did the immigrants who frequented them. Even though prohibition was not technically an anti-immigrant policy,
15:48 Speaker 08 Prohibition developed as a movement to change laws to prevent access to alcohol.
15:55 Speaker 01 As its proponents began trying to force it on the country, the battle lines became clear. On the dry side was the temperance movement, zealous and all too willing to throw in their lot with outright racists. On the other side, a whole lot of German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. Here's historian David Goldberg.
16:15 Speaker 11 Well, prohibition played a huge role in what you might call the culture war of the 1920s.
16:21 Speaker 01 We can only get in touch with David over the phone, which is why it kind of sounds like he's calling from the 1920s.
16:27 Speaker 11 Prohibition had been favored by those who were Protestant. And the major organization that had pushed for the prohibition amendment, the Anti-Saloon League, was tied to the Protestant churches. And prohibition had been motivated by a great deal of anti-immigrant sentiment, because many of those were members of this organization, the Anti-Saloon League, were especially hostile to immigrants, especially immigrants from Catholic backgrounds.
16:56 Speaker 01 David's not exaggerating in the slightest. Before long Catholics across America were being smeared as not only drunkards, but traitors as well. Alexander Getler was born Jewish, but married an Irish Catholic girl and then converted. That means he left one faith targeted by the dry movement, only to join another. The Anti-Saloon League's efforts were one of the first instances of single-issue lobbying to dramatically influence American politics.
17:24 Speaker 07 They drafted model legislation and said, "You support what we do? Here's a sample law. Maybe you could write a law like this." That still goes on with interest groups. They created mailing lists of people they knew who would vote for dry candidates. People do that today. Every interest group does that today.
17:41 Speaker 09 Your position, if you were a politician, on other issues was meaningless to them if you were okay on the prohibition issue.
17:48 Speaker 01 The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League were the two main organizations carrying the torch, and/or occasionally hatchet, for prohibition. They were the definition of single-issue voters, and when they found a candidate willing to vote for prohibition, they would go all in to get their guy elected.
18:06 Speaker 09 I think one of the key things that one has to know about prohibition, there was never any indication that a majority of Americans believed in it.
18:12 Speaker 01 In other words, when dry candidates won, it didn't necessarily mean they'd won a majority of voters' hearts and minds. It just meant that the WCTU had an influential group of voters who could swing elections. And it worked, time and time again. State after state went dry.
18:31 Speaker 12 The Anti-Saloon League, the main lobbyist organization for temperance, used this moment really to the umpteenth degree.
18:39 Speaker 01 That's historian Garrett Peck.
18:41 Speaker 12 They stigmatized alcohol, they turned beer-drinking into treason, and they basically questioned the patriotism of every German-American.
18:49 Speaker 01 Here are a few actual lines from the Anti-Saloon League's propaganda.
18:53 Speaker 04 The breweries and the saloons of the country continue to waste foodstuffs, fuel, and manpower to impair the efficiency of labors in the mines, factories, and even ammunition plants near which saloons are located. German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the republic in its war on the Prussian militarism. How can any loyal citizen vote for a trade that is aiding a pro-German alliance? Everything that is pro-German is anti-American. Everything that is pro-German must go.
19:32 Speaker 01 To me, this is starting to sound like just good, old-fashioned prejudice. And alcohol, just the latest convenient issue to inflame people's fears.
19:41 Speaker 01 The war unleashed a tidal wave of immigrant and ethnic hatred, all dolled up in red, white and blue. As one Wisconsin politician put it,
19:49 Speaker 13 "We have German enemies across the water. We have German enemies in this country too. And worst of all, our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatt and Miller."
20:03 Speaker 01 Turns out fear mongering beer boycotts are as American as hot dogs, which, incidentally, got their name around this time too, because frankfurter sounded a little too German. I'm assuming sauerkraut also became liberty cabbage, and German breweries became targets.
20:19 Speaker 14 Pabst, Schlitz, Blatt and Miller. Watch your glass, the hunt's a killer. Don't eat that brat. Don't drink those suds, or they'll check you out in future duds.
20:37 Speaker 01 In 1917, the US entered the war. That year, Congress passed the 18th Amendment, which gave the government the power to ban alcohol sales. All that was left was for Congress to actually use its new power. Finally, after almost a century of organising, sloganeering and hectoring, the Drys got their way. Prohibition became law with the Volstead Act. But that raises a very critical question: who the hell's gonna enforce it? We'll meet them after the break.
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22:48 Speaker 01 In a nondescript office building somewhere in the nation's capital, a man stands over a beaker of liquid. He's white, middle-aged, hair starting to thin, heavy circular glasses, peering over his experiment like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. And not to get all middle school English teacher on you here, but just like those famous eyes from The Great Gatsby, James Duran was looking down on 1920s America with more than a little bit of judgment.
23:16 Speaker 01 Duran is a chemist and an avid supporter of the dry movement. Mild-mannered, methodical, a hard worker with a keen scientific mind, he busies himself with government work while his wife dedicates her time to the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In fact, she'll go on to author a book of non-alcoholic cocktail recipes. They're even substitutes for baking recipes that happen to involve alcohol.
23:41 Speaker 17 Minced pie is delicious without brandy, if made properly.
23:47 Speaker 01 Not to nitpick here, Mrs. Duran, but the alcohol bakes away. People aren't out here getting drunk off pie. But in the Duran's defense, people in 1920 can find a way to get drunk off just about anything. In fact, that's precisely James Duran's problem. See, James is a chemist for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the predecessor to the IRS. If you're wondering why the IRS needs chemists... You're not alone. But as Thomas Pegram says, it's something that still happens today. You see evidence of it anytime you walk into a liquor store.
24:19 Speaker 08 You go get your rum or whiskey and it's got that tape on it at the top. That's a sign that the federal excise tax has been passed. So there is a tradition of Internal Revenue regulating alcohol.
24:31 Speaker 01 The thing is, alcohol has a lot of different uses. In addition to being a wonderful social lubricant, it's commonly used as a solvent in industrial chemistry, a medical disinfectant, and as fuel. But I bet you've never been offered a medical alcohol swab as an aperitif. At least, I hope not. And there's a really good reason for that. It's not the same stuff. Alcohol you're not supposed to drink gets denatured. In other words, it's made unnatural by adding a lot of really bad chemicals. These chemicals don't diminish the alcohol's industrial value, but they make it really hard to drink. Which is the whole point. You're not supposed to drink it.
25:15 Speaker 01 All of this allows the IRS to draw a chemical distinction between industrial alcohol and all that other yummy stuff you're supposed to drink. And the reason all this matters to the IRS is because different types of alcohol get taxed differently. And Uncle Sam needs a way to ensure nobody skirts the tax code by making drinking alcohol out of the stuff you're supposed to be using to sterilize needles. Since 1907, James Duran has been proudly polluting, sorry, denaturing industrial alcohol in service of our nation's tax code. But with the passage of the Volstead Act, James' job suddenly becomes crucial not only to tax enforcement, but to enforcement of the new nationwide dry law.
26:00 Speaker 08 And so you had this prohibition unit, it was originally called, that's tied to the Internal Revenue Service in the Treasury Department, you know, not Justice, you know, which usually enforces the laws.
26:12 Speaker 01 Yep, in its infinite wisdom, Congress has decided to make alcohol illegal and to make the IRS enforce it. James Duran's job is about to get a whole lot more interesting. And he's not the only one.
26:34 Speaker 01 You ever see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? It's an old Hollywood classic. A scout troop leader from the American West, played by, yet again, Jimmy Stewart. What's with this guy? Hi, I'm Jimmy Stewart, and basically, I just play every American archetype under the sun, you see? Anyway, he gets handpicked for a senate seat by a bunch of fat cats. He comes into Congress, still brushing the Oregon trail dust off his necktie. The political bosses think he's such a rube, they can pull his strings and he'll be none the wiser. Of course, they get him all wrong. Why? Well, they think loving the founding fathers and reciting their speeches by heart makes him a naive bumpkin.
27:17 Speaker 01 But that turns out to be exactly what lets him see right through their greedy schemes. He's got principles, goddammit! Oh wait, I mean, dag nabbit! And that means something in America.
27:29 Speaker 18 All you people don't know about law's causes, the only causes worth fighting for.
27:36 Speaker 01 But two decades before Mr. Smith, another plucky Westerner arrives in DC for real. Her name is Mabel Walker Willibrant. She's a rising legal star, the first woman in Los Angeles to serve as a public defender and the parliamentarian of the city's Women Lawyers Club. She made a name for herself, providing free counsel to sex workers, and she's already proven that she can captivate a courtroom. Mabel is a trailblazer, a crusading attorney who never hesitates to stand up for women. Definitely not easy in 1920. She has a well-earned reputation for defying men's expectations. So when President Warren G. Harding begins searching for someone to lead the charge for
28:20 Speaker 01 federal prohibition, a host of California lawyers and judges tell him, "We want Walker Willibrant."
28:31 Speaker 01 Harding offers an interview. Mabel says farewell to her parents in Cali and rides the rails across the country. Full of confidence, she'll be hired as Assistant Attorney General of the United States. And when I think of her stepping off the train with her big canvas bag and her hair and tight braids over her ears, I see a lot of that Mr. Smith story. I mean, Jimmy may not have had the braids, but as Mabel catches a trolley through the busy streets of DC, she's also riding into a world she doesn't know. At just 32, Mabel has a resume that would make most lawyers in Washington green with envy, but enforcing prohibition remains an unenviable and largely untested task.
29:13 Speaker 01 Because by 1920, the national experiment in prohibition is going pretty much exactly like Gettler and Doris had predicted. Enterprising Americans find all sorts of ways to skirt the law, from making moonshine out in the boonies, to smuggling in the good stuff from across the Canadian border, to going full mad scientist and making Franken cocktails out of industrial alcohols. If this thing's gonna actually last, the feds are gonna need a steady hand at the helm of the brand-new prohibition unit.
29:44 Speaker 09 She didn't particularly believe in prohibition, but she believed in the law and she believed in her assignment, and if this is what you want me to do, damn it all, I'm gonna do it.
29:52 Speaker 01 So, despite her reservations, Mabel aces her interview with the Attorney General.
30:01 Speaker 01 Then, with his stamp of approval, she catches a cab to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with President Warren Harding. Harding and his Attorney General had a long history together. They were something of an old boys' club, backroom deals, et cetera. Mabel was a by-the-books West Coast lady trying to break in. All that is to say that whatever her principles, she needed to know how to play ball if she wanted this job.
30:27 Speaker 19 Give me the authority and let me have my pick of 300 men and I'll make this country as dry as is humanly possible.
30:35 Speaker 01 As the story goes, President Harding told Mabel, "There's only one thing against you: you're too young." Mabel takes what Harding gives her and sends it right back at him.
30:45 Speaker 19 I'll outgrow it.
30:48 Speaker 01 She knocks the interview out of the park. She gets the job. It's a huge moment for Mabel and for the country. Mabel Walker Willibrant is now the highest ranking woman in government. She's young and ambitious, and in all likelihood, she's thinking that if she plays her cards right, she could get herself a federal judgeship, or even become America's first female Attorney General. But the reaction in the press is sadly predictable. These are actual headlines from the time.
31:19 Speaker 04 L.A. Woman to Fight Wetts. Man's Job Is Given to Mrs. Willibrant by Harding. California Woman Gets Federal Plum. May Want to Primp Up. Extra, Extra. Woman Suede by Logic. New Assistant Attorney General Is Not Emotional.
31:35 Speaker 01 The media was already on Harding's case for handing out jobs to his friends and political allies, and now, they were going to turn that anger on Mabel. With an extra layer of misogyny just for kicks. When she announces to the papers that she's not giving interviews until she's gotten her feet under her, one paper proclaims...
31:54 Speaker 04 A woman who was not ready and willing to talk or be photographed has been found.
32:00 Speaker 01 Mabel probably saw this coming. There's no question she's hit with snide remarks every time she steps into the spotlight. But what she can't have prepared for is the resistance she'll meet from her colleagues, and the corruption she'll find around every corner.
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33:55 Speaker 01 All right. Prohibition's the law of the land, and President Harding has hired Mabel Walker Willibrand to come to DC and get to work enforcing it. Just one problem. The apparatus that's supposed to enforce this law is less a finely tuned machine and more like, well, what's the 1920s equivalent of a shitshow? I guess it's also a shitshow.
34:20 Speaker 01 For starters, there's her boss, the Attorney General.
34:24 Speaker 09 He was A, a drunk, and B, corrupt. That doesn't make it easy.
34:27 Speaker 01 Thanks, Dan Ockrent. Then there's her staff. You'd think the newly-created prohibition unit would be designed to resist the corrupting influences of the booze business. After all, most civil servants at the time had to pass a series of tests confirming their aptitude and integrity. But this new unit was made exempt from those tests.
34:48 Speaker 09 Which is another way of saying we're gonna use it for political payoffs.
34:52 Speaker 01 Which means Mabel is essentially the meat in a corruption sandwich. She's more or less the only person anywhere in the chain of command who isn't interested in taking bribes to look the other way. The guys enforcing this law and the guys overseeing the whole enterprise, they're all in somebody's pocket.
35:11 Speaker 09 The Secretary of Treasury, who was directly in charge of enforcement, Andrew Mellon, he owned Old Overholt.
35:16 Speaker 01 That's Old Overholt, the bourbon. Yeah, it's bad enough for any member of the cabinet to own a liquor company, but as Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon has a major role to play in prohibition enforcement. He's supposed to work closely with Mabel's office, and he's James Duran's boss.
35:35 Speaker 01 Drunks, bribe takers, liquor magnates. These are the people Mabel's supposed to work hand and glove with in the fight to enforce prohibition. Whenever the IRS gets wind of some alcohol-related skullduggery, they're supposed to investigate, gather evidence, and package it all up so the Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Wilibrant can swoop in and make the arrests. Mabel then wins the case, the bootleggers get tossed in the clink, rinse and repeat until the country goes drier than an anti-masturbatory cracker. Again, that's how it's supposed to work. But in practice, most of the people around her are either uninterested in enforcing dry laws or actively breaking them.
36:17 Speaker 19 There's one way it can be done: get at the source of supply. I know them, and I know how they could be cut off. I have no patience with this policy of going after the hip pocket and speakeasy cases. That's like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.
36:31 Speaker 01 So it must come as a huge relief to Mabel when she finally finds someone in the IRS bureaucracy who takes the law as seriously as she does: James Duran. She's an ambitious lawyer in the Department of Justice. He's a behind-the-scenes chemist in the Department of Treasury. Fate has brought them together. Mabel Walker Wilibrant and James Duran will enforce prohibition despite the corruption all around them. As such, they'll both quickly realize enforcement is going to require some new approaches, a new formula, if you will.
37:11 Speaker 01 But they're determined, they're idealistic, and together, these two dedicated bureaucrats are about to unleash hell on American drinkers. Next time on Snafu, we meet the defiant bootleggers who were already making life a nightmare for the prohibition bureau.
37:33 Speaker 20 He didn't give a shit who you were, where you were from, what you did, or any of that stuff. Come on up, have a drink with me.
37:41 Speaker 01 And meanwhile, our pal Alexandra Getler was back on the case in New York and making some shocking discoveries.
37:48 Speaker 02 Unless you're rich, you're drinking whatever you can get your hands on. So one of the cocktails of the Bowery, which is a really poor neighborhood in New York, was called Smoke. And that was fuel alcohol and water.
38:03 Speaker 01 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 Nevin Kalapali, Stephen Wood, Carl Nellis, and Akimani Ekpo, 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 Akimani Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound design by Ben Chug.
38:48 Speaker 01 Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker Willibrant was played by Carrie Bichette. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.
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40:14 Speaker 22 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed ZOLAR, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
40:27 Speaker 23 ZOLAR 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking ZOLAR, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to ZOLAR. ZOLAR may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. ZOLAR should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. ZOLAR is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolar.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about ZOLAR. This is an advertisement for ZOLAR
41:11 Speaker 23 paid for by Genentech and Novartis.
41:13 Speaker 02 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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