Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms S3E8: National Hangover About this episode Prohibition, and all that Mabel has worked to build, comes crashing down, thanks in part to a sly tell-all by none other than George Cassiday. And in New York City, Gettler & Norris finally see their work yield meaningful results.
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1:34 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. So, if you've ever wanted to see me stumble
2:19 Speaker 04 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. Previously on Snafu, Norris and Gettler finally got the nation's attention.
2:50 Speaker 05 You have the chief medical examiner of one of the most important American cities accusing the federal government of a planned program of extermination.
3:00 Speaker 04 The Drys tried to shrug it off.
3:02 Speaker 06 You can't poison, poison.
3:06 Speaker 04 But the backlash sent Mabel Walker Willibrant packing.
3:09 Speaker 06 Hoover had no use for her any longer. She was kind of an irrelevancy.
3:14 Speaker 04 Support for prohibition was on the ropes.
3:17 Speaker 07 Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor.
3:37 Speaker 04 James Duran, prohibition commissioner, is seated at a long table. Spread out around him are accounting documents, charts, lists of warehouses across the country where industrial alcohol is stored. He's flanked by his staff. He's been pulled into a congressional budget hearing for 1930. It ain't the C-SPAN era, but you can practically see the sweat steaming up Duran's round glasses. Stories have been swirling in the press about the Bureau's violence, its corruption, its cruel and casual approach to mass poisoning. Which means that when Duran sits down to talk about funding his agency, he finds himself in a defensive posture. Partway through,
4:21 Speaker 04 the congressman from New York, deliciously named Mr. Robert Bacon, decides to make Duran answer the kinds of questions he usually ducks. You will recall this fall, there were a number of deaths. in New York City due to wood alcohol poisoning. Yes, sir. Bacon presses him on whether or not the people in New York were killed by his formulas, the ones that pumped lethal toxins into the industrial alcohol supply. In other words, did he sacrifice these people on the altar of prohibition?
4:56 Speaker 04 Let me just say personally, I love this moment. It's like, yeah, we're finally gonna get it all from the horse's mouth. I know we're back in the 1920s, but the drama of this moment, it's what I love about history. It's why we do this damn podcast. As Deborah Blum says.
5:15 Speaker 05 The last thing you want is for your people to be called murdering chemists in a congressional hearing.
5:22 Speaker 04 So true, Deborah. With the screws finally being put to Duran, would citizens finally get answers for the deaths of their loved ones? Would Duran, or anyone else for that matter, finally be held accountable for the Treasury Department's deadly poisoning scheme?
5:49 Speaker 04 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.
6:13 Speaker 04 In our final episode, James Duran faces a reckoning, first in Congress and then for his career. Along the way, his prohibition boys finally catch George Cassidy. But that slippery George has one more trick up his sleeve. As the Great Depression pushes prohibition off center stage, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler take stock. And so do we.
6:58 Speaker 04 In the US Senate mailroom, a new clerk is sorting the day's incoming letters. It's the spring of 1930, another election year. There's plenty of mail flying in and out as senators coordinate their campaigns. But this new clerk can't stay focused on his work. He keeps looking up, watching the flow of people coming into the building. He's got his eyes peeled for one thing in particular. He's looking for a green hat. He's looking for George Cassidy. As George's son says... So this guy had it out for Dad, and he wanted him bad. The clerk job, it's a ruse. Just a cover. The guy's name is Roger Butts, and he's a young prohibition agent on his first big assignment.
7:40 Speaker 04 He's just 20 years old, but he's been specially assigned to catch, and I quote, "The Man in the Green Hat." You gotta admit, your brand is strong when even the haters are using your handle. Duran's prohibition bureau is making one final play to bring him down. The mailroom charade goes on for a while, but just scanning government offices for suspicious behavior isn't getting him anywhere. So Butts gets off his duff and takes action. He starts asking around.
8:13 Speaker 07 Say, do you know if this fella called "The Man in the Green Hat"? I'm trying to get something for the holidays to make a little whoopee.
8:20 Speaker 04 Yep, according to his own testimony, Butts is, and I quote, "in search of some whoopee." One of those W words spelled with an H. I love those. Whiskey, while, whatever. Someone eventually obliges and introduces Butts to Cassidy two days later in the Senate stationary room. Butts squares George up and determines he matches the physical description he was given by the prohibition bureau. But on this day, Cassidy isn't sporting his typical green hat. He's dressed to the nines in a blue suit, but his hat is tan.
8:58 Speaker 04 What a trickster! So Butts orders a fifth of gin. They shake hands, but Cassidy doesn't fall for the trap. Rather than deliver it to Butts personally, he passes the bottle off through a third party. No evidence, no gotcha. Butts tries again, and again, but round after round, Cassidy is just a little too slick for him.
9:21 Speaker 07 Since Cassidy knew the House Office building better than the agents did, and understood the Senate's side, it was mighty hard to mislead him.
9:32 Speaker 04 Finally, Butts decides he needs to take a different approach. He corners a staffer for a senator he knows is a customer of Cassidy's, and he reveals he's an undercover agent.
9:42 Speaker 07 The man was not surprised. He said he had been suspicious of me for some time.
9:48 Speaker 04 Suspicious or no, the man agreed to help Butts make the arrest. The staffer calls Cassidy to place an order.
9:57 Speaker 04 And George drives out to the parking lot of the Senate Building to make the drop.
10:03 Speaker 04 Now, I don't know if George let his guard down, or what. Maybe this particular staffer was a regular, someone he trusted. Regardless, to George, it was just a normal day. As his son Fred says... He would've parked someplace close by. When suddenly, prohibition officers surround his car.
10:23 Speaker 04 They grab him, pull him out. They pop the trunk and rummage through his vehicle. Yeah, he was going in, and they nabbed him. I think we can all see Butts' smug smile, right? All that hard work is finally paying off. He got his man. But that smile fades, because George is smart. No bottles on him, no liquor in the car. A trailing vehicle tries to pull away, and the prohibition agents realize Cassidy is leading a two-car caravan, the liquors in the car behind him. Agents spring away from Cassidy to stop the second car. I imagine it from George's perspective, pushed onto the hood of his car, officers grabbing his wrists.
11:07 Speaker 04 He's gotta be hoping his accomplice can shift into reverse and peel out of there. But Butts and the other agents are too quick. The second driver can't maneuver. He stopped and dragged out. The search that follows turns up a motherload.
11:24 Speaker 04 A dozen or more suitcases in the car. Butts says they nabbed at least six fifths of gin. George's mind must have been racing as Butts pops open the suitcases and counts the bottles. Was this finally it for him? His wife at home, what would she do if he was in the slammer? Maybe he hoped he could skate by because of his two-car plan. He's got deniability, right? They can't pin the liquor on him. But with the liquor in hand, Butts and the other agents turn their attention to George. When they go through his pockets, they pull out something even more incriminating than a hip flask. They get their hands on the key to his whole operation. A little black book. It's George's client list.
12:09 Speaker 04 It seems like many extralegal entrepreneurs before him, George took notes on his criminal enterprise. And it's clear from his ledger, he's been bootlegging in Congress for a decade. The case was a slam dunk for Butts and the Bureau. When George went to trial, he found he was facing a year and a half in jail. That was bad enough, but then something else really got his dander up. As the court's decision came down, they ruled it was not a punishable crime for his, ahem, customers to purchase alcohol. In other words, while George was taking the fall, every gin-guzzling senator preaching the good word of prohibition was effectively immune from charges. The law wasn't going to lay a finger on them.
12:55 Speaker 04 It was just a matter of trying to catch them in such a way that it doesn't implicate high-ups. So George decided, if the courts weren't going to give his sanctimonious customers their due, he would do it himself.
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13:43 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
13:58 Speaker 04 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
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14:44 Speaker 07 Dr. Duran, are you familiar with the amendment providing that no industrial alcohol should be denatured by any material injurious to the human system? Yes, sir.
14:56 Speaker 04 Back in his budget hearing turned culture war interrogation, James Duran is fending off charges that he's been diabolically poisoning American drinkers and cackling behind his spindly fingers. Robert Bacon, the New York congressman asking the questions, wants to force Duran to admit mass poisoning through the denaturing program. But it's not just about that. He's trying to attack prohibition itself. So Bacon brings up a case where drinkers in upstate New York had tapped into a vat of methanol and dropped dead. He points the finger at Duran. This is you. This is your fault. These people died because of prohibition. Duran deflects.
15:39 Speaker 07 You will recall this fall, there were a number of deaths in New York City due to wood alcohol poisoning. Yes, sir.
15:47 Speaker 04 Bacon's convinced these deaths came from industrial denaturants. Duran counters that the wood alcohol could have come from anywhere. These deaths by methanol aren't on him. In fact, since he's facing a congressman from New York, he pulls in the testimony of one famous New Yorker as evidence for his side. He brings in analysis from Alexander Getler. The toxicologist of the city of New York testified that the autopsies showed that pure wood alcohol only was found in the brain cells of the people who had died. It had no relation to the National Prohibition Act. Now, this moment is, for lack of a better word, bananas.
16:29 Speaker 04 Because as we know, if it weren't for prohibition, no one would be breaking into industrial warehouses to drink aftershave ingredients. They could just walk down to the liquor store on the corner and pick up some gin. For Duran to say deaths like this had, quote, "no relation to the National Prohibition Act," it's just, well, it's an insult to anyone's basic intelligence.
16:51 Speaker 05 You know, is he a trustworthy source? No, he's not a trustworthy source.
16:56 Speaker 04 To be clear, it's true in the case of these particular methanol deaths that Getler's analysis showed they were killed by pure wood alcohol, not wood alcohol that was mixed into liquor. But Duran is using Getler's judgment of this one case to deflect from Norris and Getler's bigger analysis, that prohibition was causing people to turn to denatured alcohol, and that it was poisoning them. And by the way, James Duran knows what he's doing. See, behind the scenes, after the Christmas poisonings in 1926, Duran must have gotten a little nervous. Could those deaths actually be his fault? He wrote directly to the New York Health Commissioner and asked for the city's data on the deaths. The commish wrote back.
17:41 Speaker 05 It is my belief that some of these deaths were due to methanol or other substances employed to denature alcohol.
17:49 Speaker 04 So Duran had it right there in black and white. The New York Health Commissioner made the damning connection, denaturing alcohol was killing people. But back in the present, now, sitting in front of Congress, Duran has the audacity to tell the committee that Getler's work exonerated him. It was a bold strategy, but then Duran was never gonna just roll over.
18:14 Speaker 05 He's clearly defending their policies and saying, "No, this wasn't us." My reaction is that's exactly what I would say if I was James Duran, which is deny all responsibility and wash his hands.
18:27 Speaker 04 I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but this is a show about screw-ups.
18:33 Speaker 04 Duran's gambit worked. Deny, evade, deflect, it's an old playbook, and Duran was a natural. It was practically a reflex for him.
18:43 Speaker 05 I mean, this is not gonna be a confessional moment.
18:46 Speaker 04 And here's the real downer, Representative Bacon. He backed down. He asked a raft of questions, but at the key moment, when he could have asked some, you know, follow-ups, he just kinda wilted. The hearing moved on. Just imagine Duran wiping his forehead with a silk hanky and allowing himself a sly, satisfied smile. No handcuffs, no trial, just a little chit-chat behind closed doors and a slick set of lies, and he was home free. I mean, that's so fracking insane. Do all the stuff we've talked about, hurt and poison and kill so many people, and just walk away. The prohibition bureau was well aware that people were getting injured,
19:31 Speaker 04 even dying from drinking industrial chemicals. They knew the system in place to manage those chemicals was porous and corrupt. They knew it was getting out into bootleg liquor. They knew that denaturing industrial alcohol was not deterring people, and in fact, it was just killing them. The indifference to all of those deaths by Duran and the Drys in Congress was negligent at best. Personally, I'd go for cruel, reckless, and rooted in a callous disregard for human life.
20:07 Speaker 04 But even if Duran was able to smoothly lie his way out of this one moment of congressional accountability, not everyone was so easily fooled. Duran might deny the link, but after the public outcry from Norris and Geller's report, the American public was finally connecting the dots between national prohibition and people dying in their own towns and neighborhoods.
20:33 Speaker 04 And in 1930, they got a little more affirmation from a bootlegger in a green hat, George Cassidy. As his case wound through the legal system, George made a connection, a reporter at The Washington Post. I imagine him chatting with folks as he walked in and out of the courtroom. George was a colorful character, and this was a high-profile bust. Some news hound was bound to catch him on a potty break. So that meant when the verdict came down, and he was going to take the fall, and no one else was going to pay any price at all, George knew exactly what to do.
21:17 Speaker 04 He was ready to tell his story. So, as Garrett Peck says, he gave The Post their first scoop of the century. At this point, a really great newspaper at the time is The Evening Star, and The Post is just this, you know, smaller rival of the city, kind of a gossip newspaper. But they get this great scoop, and they ask Cassidy to spill the beans on Congress, and he writes six front-page articles. That's right, six front-page articles. Each morning, people around the country waited with bated breath for the next installment of old George's exposé to land on newsstands. Will somebody please arrest me for bootlegging so I can get that kind of press?
21:57 Speaker 04 Anyway, three weeks before people were set to cast their ballots in the 1930 midterms, a bombshell landed that made voters reconsider which box to check. Extra, extra, read all about it. The government's hypocrisy on prohibition exposed. On October 23rd, 1930, George wrote:
22:16 Speaker 05 I saw a side of prohibition no one else has seen. I would say that four out of five senators and congressmen consume liquor either at their offices or their homes. This is a conservative estimate.
22:28 Speaker 04 October 24th.
22:29 Speaker 05 We would have a few rounds of drinks, sing a few songs, and have a general good time.
22:33 Speaker 04 And on the 25th.
22:34 Speaker 05 Busiest day I ever put in the House Office Building, I made 47 calls on customers. It kept me hustling from the time the offices opened at 3 o'clock in the morning until well along the evening. On occasions, I have heard members of the House and Senate making strong arguments on the floor the prohibition was being well-informed.
22:52 Speaker 03 When I knew good stuff was being regularly delivered at their own offices. The Washington Post was a wet newspaper and they knew exactly what they were doing, which was to embarrass the dry cause.
23:03 Speaker 04 What's black and white and wet all over? Yeah, a wet newspaper doesn't sound particularly threatening, but with this story, they were torching the dries.
23:15 Speaker 03 It goes national. Other newspapers around the country are all reporting on this. This is a scandal.
23:21 Speaker 04 A good old DC scandal that couldn't have been more perfectly timed if you were a wet and gunning to kick prohibition to the curb.
23:29 Speaker 03 The last one of them was published one week before the midterm election in 1930. You can't blame these men for taking the same means of refreshment and relaxation other people enjoy. If there's any difference between members of Congress and other people and their personal habits and tastes, I didn't see it in 10 years in and about Congress.
23:47 Speaker 04 As Fred Cassidy says. They didn't take any prisoners. And neither did the Washington Post. They followed the George Cassidy stories with another series from Butts himself with headlines like. Prohibition in the Senate. Cassidy's arrest and seizure of black book, bared by Butts. Okay, they definitely went for the bare Butts thing and God bless them for it. But of course, exposing the hypocrisy of the dries wasn't the only factor in the election. Because in 1929. It was panic. 16 and a half million shares of stock sold in a single day at any price. That frenzy set a wrecking ball through the economy.
24:31 Speaker 03 You have the collapse of the stock market signaling the Great Depression. People are really getting cynical at this point. It was just the worst economic catastrophe in our nation's history. It was absolutely unreal. And the Democrats seized on this. They're like, look, let's create jobs again. Alcohol. Let's do it. You know, Cassidy had done a huge amount of damage here to the dries and people were all just like, we're done with this. Let's, let's elect some wets and let's end this thing because it's not working.
24:58 Speaker 04 That November, the wets flooded the House, going from 76 seats to 146. Republican states like Ohio and Illinois and Kansas flung aside dry Republicans for wet Democrats. As for the man who helped push the tidal wave, George Cassidy was behind bars, locked away, serving his time. Well, sort of.
25:20 Speaker 06 He never spent one full night in jail.
25:23 Speaker 03 He'd sit around and play with the ward and play poker and whatnot.
25:26 Speaker 04 He was handed an 18-month sentence at a jail about two blocks away from his house on Capitol Hill.
25:32 Speaker 06 So he'd go get dressed up in the morning, go into the jail, sign in, go do his work in the jail. After his shift was over, he'd come back, sign out.
25:40 Speaker 03 So they let him go home every night.
25:43 Speaker 04 Ah, yes, the old George Remus treatment. A jail term fit for a king. King of the bootleggers, at least.
25:50 Speaker 03 As part of Cassidy's plea agreement, he tells the judge he will stop bootlegging. And, by the way, I got his FBI folder. He did not stop bootlegging.
25:59 Speaker 04 And remember Cassidy's little black book, replete with the contact information of each and every one of his customers? Every politician who secretly solicited bootlegged liquor? Well, the Treasury Department got their hands on that little book. James Duran and his bosses. So what did they do with this comprehensive list of every fat cat and hypocrite in Washington? Did Duran sneak into their offices and drip methanol into their whiskeys? Well, of course not, but at least they cracked down on them, right? Not a chance. In fact, they did the exact opposite. Every photocopied record of Cassidy's client list was tossed into a fire and burned. If George Cassidy got the treatment of a
26:41 Speaker 04 king, then the members of Congress were, I don't know, emperors? The point is, even when it's clear an emperor has no clothes, in the American old-boy crony system, he can always count on a James Duran to cover his ass.
27:00 Speaker 04 After the 1930s midterms, prohibition was really on the ropes. Alexander Getler and Charles Norris have spelled out the failures of the Prohibition Bureau's denaturing program. Cassidy exposed the dry politicians for what they were: hypocrites getting sloshed. James Duran's crew, having failed miserably in their poisoning campaign, were totally flailing.
27:26 Speaker 05 The strategy at the federal government was that, "We're running out of chemical options. Let's try everything."
27:33 Speaker 04 In 1931, Duran's chemists rolled out another new formula for denaturing alcohol.
27:40 Speaker 05 Formula 59B. Okay, now we've tried 58, maybe there was a 58A, but there were dozens of these formulas, each with a different number, each with a different mix of things. This whole panorama of industrial chemistry gets thrown at the wall in this period. And then they kind of give up.
28:06 Speaker 04 It was like the government's heart just wasn't in the whole mass poisoning thing anymore. There were no more incendiary newspaper stories about new deadly formulas. Prohibition Bureau officials, the Treasury Department, they all simply quit talking about it. They started quietly backing away from the crime scene with a "nothing to see here" shrug, as if the killing of thousands of Americans never happened. Deborah spent years combing through reports from newspapers, medical examiners, insurance companies, and coroner offices, and came to her best estimate on the final body count.
28:44 Speaker 05 I added up all the numbers to about 10,000 deaths. That number is the best estimate that I could come up with for every report I could find from that period in the 1920s. What the actual number is, I don't know. I think it's higher, but don't have that evidence, and I'm not sure anyone does.
29:04 Speaker 04 In the early 1930s, support for the dry cause crumbled. The violence of liquor raids played a part. If you're keeping track, that's Richard Hart and the other agents like him. Corruption at every level of enforcement played a part, too. Big thanks to George Cassidy for dragging that one out into the open. And the outrage over the poisoning scheme, that was a body blow to the support for prohibition. Gettler's research and Norris's essay exposed just how callous, how morally indefensible, prohibition enforcement had become. By the time 1932 rolled around, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, declared that if elected on day one of his presidency, taps were going to
29:49 Speaker 04 be wide open once again.
29:51 Speaker 06 Your candidate wants repeal. And I am confident that-
29:59 Speaker 05 The United States of America wants repeal.
30:05 Speaker 04 You hear that one guy hollering? I love that guy. If my beer mug had been sitting empty in the cabinet for 10 years, yeah, I'd be voting for that, too.
30:15 Speaker 05 From this date on, the 18th Amendment is doomed. I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.
30:27 Speaker 04 On election night, 1932, Roosevelt won in a landslide. Happy days are here again. The skies above are clear again. As he addressed the nation, the banner behind him was adorned with his campaign slogan, "Happy days are here again." The American people had spoken. It was closing time on prohibition. The drinkers in Congress rushed to pass the 21st Amendment.
30:55 Speaker 05 It goes right from Congress, right to the states for ratification. The first state that ratifies it is the proud state of Michigan, an excellent beer state, I might add. The prohibition amendment, the 18th Amendment, took 13 months to ratify. The 21st Amendment, the repeal amendment, took eight months. One state after the next, it's just like dominoes, they all just fell.
31:17 Speaker 04 Bop the champagne. Brewers could brew again, bars could serve again, and that means everything's going back to normal, right? Well, no. Prohibition had been an extremely violent mess. It had changed the American way of life. It hadn't stopped the drinking, but it had driven it underground, created black markets, destroyed legitimate businesses. The pre-prohibition saloons, those immigrant living rooms at the heart of working-class neighborhoods, they never really came back. And of course, the real cost was in human lives. People, so many people, had been hurt and killed along the way.
32:01 Speaker 04 So you're probably wondering the same thing I'd been wondering the whole time. Was anyone actually going to answer for all of that? The boys in Washington already knew exactly who to pin the blame on: Mabel Walker Willibrant. As time went on, they made her the figurehead of everything that went wrong with prohibition enforcement. During her time as Assistant Attorney General, she had been the face of the law. Even swapping burns with Al Smith on the campaign trail, right? Not that we gotta feel sorry for her after everything she did. I mean, she gave a thumbs up to the KKK. You can't just brush right past that.
32:41 Speaker 04 But by pinning it all on her, they made Mabel a scapegoat for the worst abuses of the prohibition bureau. All of the blood spilled, the whole pile of corpses. They got dumped at Mabel's feet. Prohibition Portia. Her fault. By making Mabel Walker Willibrant the fall gal, everybody else got off scot-free. Take Duran himself. He weaseled out of accountability for the way he ran the prohibition bureau and covered up for Congress. Then he stepped down as Commissioner in 1930 and went back behind the scenes.
33:19 Speaker 04 His behind-the-scenes position was, drumroll please, Commissioner of Industrial Alcohol. Remember how the prohibition bureau got shifted over to the Department of Justice once Mabel was gone? Well, it was part of a big show by Congress to make it look like they were really changing things now. They passed the Prohibition Reorganization Act. Not only did it send prohibition policing over to the DOJ, but in its place, the Treasury established a new bureau: the Bureau of Industrial Alcohol. Duran was the new bureau's first employee. Once a commissioner, always a commissioner, I guess. In other words, with Duran having burned Cassidy's black book, essentially covering
34:03 Speaker 04 Congress's ass, none of those guys were gonna come after Duran. But one year into the new job that's definitely not the same as the old job, Duran published his first annual report. It's big news. He's finally reversing course on the whole denaturing thing.
34:20 Speaker 06 The Bureau adopted a new policy on January 1, 1931. It eliminated the use of wood alcohol. It revoked completely denatured alcohol formula number one and replaced wood alcohol with a new non-toxic denaturant developed after several months of intense research.
34:41 Speaker 04 And sadly, that's as close as we get to an admission. It's like, yeah, the wood alcohol we were using was bad. It killed people, but we're stopping all that. And oh, look, check it out. It turns out we can actually come up with a non-toxic way of denaturing industrial alcohol. Who knew? Not sure I really trust the guy after, you know, everything. And now he's got a pass. He's just passing the word along. Don't worry, y'all. That little poisoning snafu, that won't happen again. To add one more olive to this already extremely dirty martini of a career, I bet you can guess what Duran did when liquor became legal again.
35:21 Speaker 04 He became a lobbyist for the country's biggest distillers. And he set out to fight against government regulation of alcohol. God damn. I mean, you remember his wife was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union? She was the one who wrote that book, saying it was bad to even cook with alcohol. I'm dying to know what she thought when old Honey Bun turned around and started chilling for big liquor. And he wasn't the only one, which brings us for one last time back to Mabel Walker Willibrant. We left her falling off the tightrope in Washington, but let's just say she was also able to make a nice soft landing because as Terry Winter says.
36:06 Speaker 04 When prohibition ended, she went to work for a wine company. It's like. Yeah, these people. In fact, what makes it even crazier is that Mabel started working for this wine company before prohibition ended. I mean, does anyone, anyone have a single atom of genuine conviction? It's just all so cynical. Not that Mabel made that her life's work either. She kept climbing from position to position. Eventually, she became a lawyer for two other interesting industries, the airlines and, oh, wait, what's this? The movies. Hey, that's what I do.
36:43 Speaker 04 Also, I gotta say, it's a little ironic that of all the people to comment on what went wrong with prohibition, it may have been Mabel herself who put it best. The violence which has accompanied enforcement of the prohibition law has done more than anything else to instill in the public mind the question and the doubt: Can prohibition ever be enforced? Is it worth the price in human life?
37:07 Speaker 04 Adios, Mabel. It wasn't all your fault. It wasn't not your fault.
37:19 Speaker 05 Prohibition was a huge mistake in all kinds of ways. What I hope is that we actually learn from the mistake. I hope that understanding our history will add something to the idea that we're not going to repeat the mistakes of the past.
37:37 Speaker 04 It started as a moral crusade, as a minority of hardliners fought to remake American life in their own squeaky-clean image. A powerful political lobby turned it into a wedge issue. Congress made it a crime. It was a culture war that made it all the way to the Constitution.
37:59 Speaker 04 Does all of this feel a bit familiar to you? It should, because it's basically the world we still live in today. Our political system is set up so that certain people benefit from nasty, unending political fights. For starters, take, well, lobbyists.
38:17 Speaker 02 The term lobbyist actually comes from the fact that they would come and they would wait in the lobby outside the chamber. And so they were the lobbyists who would stay there in the lobby and speak to the needs of the constituents, which was a real service.
38:30 Speaker 04 That's my friend Josh Graham Lin. He directs a bipartisan anti-corruption organization called Represent Us. And full disclosure, I do some work with them, too.
38:40 Speaker 02 But what's ended up happening is there's nothing really preventing lobbyists from taking congresspeople out to dinner, or, hey, you want to borrow my jet? Or even worse, hey, you've done a great job in Congress.
38:52 Speaker 04 And when you leave, you should come work for my lobbying firm. We can offer you $10 million a year. It's called the revolving door, and it's a huge problem. Look no further than Mabel Walker Willibrandt and James Duran to see that this was a huge problem during prohibition. To hear more about how it's still a problem today, keep an ear out for our bonus episode with Josh, coming very soon. And this revolving door for lobbyists, it's just one of a number of systemic problems in the way our government functions. Most of the American people want common sense solutions that are best for the most of us. And instead, what we get are ideological, hot-button, divisive rhetoric, and then divisive policy getting passed.
39:37 Speaker 04 And part of the reason for that is that it's actually better for those in power. Most people in the 1920s didn't want prohibition. Sure, maybe they knew alcohol could hurt people, but they also had a sense that banning it outright was probably not the most sensible solution. The laws that get passed and the way the government operates is actually wildly out of step with what most of us would consider reasonable or common sense, because it doesn't get people fired up. It's not hot button. It doesn't fuel the culture war. But as the historian Paul Thompson says... People have to be internally persuaded of a reform. Law is not how you change people's minds. You know, if there's no willpower, you don't write a law to ban something. That's just stupid. It's just a mess.
40:22 Speaker 04 Well said, Paul. Let me reiterate that. Law is not how you change people's minds. I mean, think about the prohibitions we still live with today. Bans on abortion, bans on weed. We've only just overturned the ban on gay marriage. Since the 1920s, when the temperance movement played on racist fears and gave guns to domestic terrorists, it feels like we've been caught in one culture war after another. When lobbyists get those issues written into law, we end up enforcing moral codes with some kind of kindergarten justice. But setting off a culture war is like taking a jackhammer to the foundations of your own house. It just might bring your entire home crashing down around you.
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41:44 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
42:14 Speaker 00 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
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42:45 Speaker 04 November 1933, New York City. The Waldorf Astoria is putting the finishing touches on three new bars. One of them, with blue and gold columns and a mirrored ceiling, is the jewel of the city. The hotel New Yorker has purchased $100,000 worth of top-shelf whiskey and is building out a new basement wine cellar to house the world's finest wines. All anyone knew anymore was bathtub gin. The waiters at Louis Sherry's on Park Avenue relearned the appropriate wines for each course. A hearty Barolo with your steak. Maybe a Chardonnay with your chicken cordon bleu. Requests for liquor licenses filed at New York City Hall are coming in at a rate of a thousand a day.
43:28 Speaker 04 At Bloomingdale's on the Upper East Side, the line snakes out the door and around the corner. Customers waiting for doors to open so they can snatch up bottles of imported Scotch and wine. As for Charles Norris, well, the end of prohibition is in sight, but he's still got plenty of work to do. He travels through New York, the waterfront, the Bowery, collecting data and writing down his observations for his annual report. The city is still far from perfect. The Great Depression now brings its own litany of suffering to the people around him. But the destructive wake of prohibition is finally dissipating. As he passes the Gothic edifice of Bellevue, it's hard not to remember the worst days of the poisonings,
44:11 Speaker 04 when the hospital was surrounded by bodies.
44:14 Speaker 05 Bellevue was close to the river. They would stack the bodies up on piers behind the hospitals sometimes. When there was a catastrophe, some kind of multiple fatality thing, the bodies went to Bellevue. And there are actually newspaper reports of the time where bodies were really stacked up.
44:32 Speaker 04 That was the thick of prohibition. But now, the piers are clear.
44:40 Speaker 05 He's thinking, "In this city, this imperfect, amazing city is coming back to what it should be." People see him walking away in the dusk with this feeling of a job done.
45:03 Speaker 04 1933, Utah becomes the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment. That seals it. Prohibition is overturned. In New York, Bellevue Hospital makes an announcement to little fanfare. The formation of a new department: forensic medicine. It's the first of its kind in the country. The head of the department will be Charles Norris, and the head of toxicology, Alexander Getler. In the next chapter of his career, Norris loved the stage and the microphone, relishing his position as the face of public service. Meanwhile, Getler continued to live out his days, a private man in a public job. He was offered a chance to do a TV show on forensics—CSI before CSI—but that wasn't
45:48 Speaker 04 his style. He kept his head down, and he worked hard. But he still couldn't avoid controversy altogether. In fact, according to his grandson Al, the family still remembers that one time Getler's wife, Alice, dropped by the courtroom to see Getler in action.
46:05 Speaker 07 My grandmother never went to the courtroom, and he was always in there testifying. And she went there once, and the jury found the defendant guilty for murder. He said, "If I ever get out, and there are two people I'm gonna go get, you know, the DA and that son of a bitch Getler." So, after that, she never went to another court case.
46:26 Speaker 04 That threat brought home the gravity of Getler's work to his family. But to Alexander, that was the cost of doing work that really mattered. After prohibition, even more new poisons were entering daily life. Leaded gasoline, the newly discovered and highly toxic element, thallium, sold as a rat poison but so dangerous, it was eventually banned. Not to mention an old poison in the air, whose danger was just starting to emerge: cigarette smoke. Alexander worked against all of these poisons. And in fact, Getler is still celebrated today by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
47:06 Speaker 04 They give an award in his name to toxicologists who develop new techniques for chemical analysis. And he wasn't alone, because he launched a generation of forensic geniuses who followed in his footsteps. They went on to lead forensics labs from Long Island to Puerto Rico.
47:24 Speaker 05 Like this Getler family tree of people that he trained and then who they trained and who they trained, who then went on to train other people, to the point of like people who are still alive and still working and training other people.
47:38 Speaker 04 They were a special club. They were chemists and toxicologists dedicated to public health, public servants who made sure that we wouldn't accidentally poison ourselves in the pursuit of better living through chemistry.
47:53 Speaker 04 They carried on his legacy. They even called themselves The Getler Boys.
48:39 Speaker 04 Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Carl Nellis and Albert Chin, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. 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,
49:23 Speaker 04 music, and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato.
49:34 Speaker 04 The role of Mabel Walker Willibrant was played by Carrie Bichette. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.
50:59 Speaker 02 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
51:11 Speaker 03 Zolair 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 Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair 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. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair 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 zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.
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Previous Behind the SNAFU Book – plus, your chance to meet Ed on tour (or virtually)! Next BONUS: Recreating the 1920s with Terence Winter Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated