Never underestimate the need
for young dopes to defy the conventional laws.
You want something,
you want them to brush their teeth,
make it illegal.
Make toothpaste illegal,
and they'll be standing on the roof brushing away.
It's natural to human beings.
I think it's a healthy thing.
NARRATOR: On June 19, 1926,
61/2 years after Prohibition became the law of the land,
Republican congressman Fiorello La Guardia of New York
called 20 newspapermen and photographers into room 150
of the House Office Building in Washington, D.C.
No one had been a more vociferous critic
of the Volstead Act.
He thought it intrusive, unfair to the poor,
and, above all, hypocritical.
To prove it, he stood before the cameras
and mixed two perfectly legal products
available in any neighborhood grocery,
non-alcoholic near-beer and malt extract,
which, when allowed to ferment, would become illegal 2% beer.
He downed a glass of it,
pronounced it not only delicious,
but "refreshing, pure, and wholesome,"
and dared anyone to stop him.
No one did.
When the director of the New York Prohibition office
warned that anyone who tried to duplicate La Guardia's stunt
in his state would be arrested, the congressman hurried home
to stage the same demonstration at Kaufman's Drugstore
on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
No Prohibition agent turned up to arrest him,
and when he asked a passing patrolman to take him in,
the officer said it wasn't his job.
The 18th Amendment, La Guardia said, was a disaster.
It had created "contempt and disregard for the law"
all over the country."
MAN: I think the thing that stands out for me most
when I think about Prohibition
is the law of unintended consequences,
that you just don't know what you're gonna get when you pass
a law that seems pretty straightforward.
MAN: What a stupid idea it was,
that people actually thought you could get away with this,
that you could actually ban alcohol,
completely eliminate its usage in American society.
It's a preposterous idea.
WOMAN: To me, one of the great lessons of Prohibition
is that the dry movement in the late 1920s
had an opportunity to capitalize on its success
but modify the most egregious issues within the Volstead Act
and the enforcement of Prohibition and refused to.
In their extremism,
they eliminated all moderate support,
and that's a really important political lesson
that applies to a lot of different movements,
that you got to bend a little if you're gonna stay,
if you're gonna keep what you've got,
because if you don't bend,
it's all gonna come crashing down around you.
["Charleston" playing]
MAN: It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art,
it was an age of excess,
and it was an age of satire...
it was a whole race going hedonistic,
deciding on pleasure...
the people over 30, people all the way up to 50,
had joined the dance...
the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power,
served by great filling stations full of money.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
NARRATOR: In the mid 1920s,
the pace of change in America was steadily accelerating.
Big cities grew relentlessly bigger.
Women found themselves going places
they had never gone before.
An unprecedented, unbroken winning streak on Wall Street
seemed to suggest that the good times would go on forever...
and an exciting new music seemed to capture it all.
Prohibition had been enacted to forestall change,
to put an end to alcoholism,
to safeguard the American family,
to re-establish the moral supremacy
of small-town Protestant America.
Instead, it had helped fuel the very transformation
its champions feared.
Somehow, the same country that had banned the sale of alcohol
had become the biggest importer
of cocktail shakers in the world.
By 1926, more and more Americans
were beginning to rethink the Volstead Act.
Their initial optimism at the decline in alcohol consumption
had given way to frustration and cynicism
as the law was so imperfectly applied
and so widely ignored.
Whether you were for it or against it,
Prohibition bred hypocrisy.
Brigadier General Lincoln Andrews,
head of the Treasury Department's Prohibition efforts,
admitted that, while his agents had seized
700,000 stills since 1920,
at least half a million more remained in business.
Scores of people had been killed in armed encounters
with federal, state, and city law enforcement.
Many more were dying from drinking illegal liquor
made from industrial alcohol deliberately poisoned
at government orders to discourage its being diverted
for human consumption,
and when Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-saloon League,
the chief lobbyist for the drys, denounced the victims
as "deliberate suicides" for whom no one should feel sorry,
even some Prohibition supporters
were appalled at his callousness.
Soon, Americans would be battling every bit as fiercely
over whether to repeal the 18th Amendment
as they'd once fought over its passage.
Before that struggle would end,
a Connecticut clergyman's daughter would chronicle
a nighttime world her parents could never have imagined.
A murderous gangster with a fatal fondness for publicity
would turn himself into an international celebrity
and then find himself under siege for crimes
far less serious than the ones he'd gotten away with.
An unyielding upholder of the law
would abandon her principles and help poison a campaign
for the highest office in the land,
and an unlikely revolutionary would lead a new woman's crusade
not in favor of Prohibition, but against it.
No right-thinking man or woman wants the return of the saloon,
but far worse than the return of the saloon it would be
to enthrone hypocrisy permanently
as our dominant force in this country.
HAMILL: There was a speakeasy in the ground floor of our building
run by Willie Sutton, later to become a famous bank robber,
and most of the people... including my father,
who had come from Ireland in 1923...
most of the people remembered it fondly
because it made them feel like Americans.
A lot of them were immigrants, and, as we know with the history
of Prohibition, a lot of it was an anti-immigrant movement,
and these people were really Americans.
They thought the Constitution was a real thing.
They had to read it to get to become citizens,
which some of the other dumbbells didn't.
They felt it was the stupidest law
in the history of the country, couldn't possibly last,
and they had to bring it to an early death by drinking,
and thank God the resistance triumphed in the end.
WOMAN: I wasn't much of a party girl...
my sister went quite a bit...
but I did go once to 21, which is still with us,
and I remember knocking on the door
and somebody looking through a peephole,
and the boys in the group sort of whispered something to them,
and they opened the door, and we went in,
and it was very exciting, the fact, I guess,
that you were able to break a law so easily
and having to have a password
and going out on the town.
NARRATOR: The Stork Club and the 21 Club
and O'Leary's on the Bowery...
the Lido, Ciro's, and the Trocadero...
The Day Breakers and The Cave of the Fallen Angels...
The Casanova and The jungle room and Club Alabam...
The Hyena and The Ha! Ha! And The Hole in the Wall...
Basement Brown's and Barney's and The Beaux-arts...
The Zum Brauhaus and The Irish Veterans Association...
The Culture Club and the Club Pansy.
Prohibition had done away with the old-time saloon,
but speakeasies had grown up everywhere,
from lavish nightclubs where waiters
served champagne on silver trays
to tiny apartments in rundown tenements.
All you needed, one man said, was "two bottles and a room."
No one knows precisely how many speakeasies
operated in New York City.
One police commissioner estimated
there were at least 32,000,
one for every 243 inhabitants.
There were so many hidden behind the doors of brownstones
along a single block of West 52nd Street
that a tenant was forced to put a sign on her door...
"This is a private residence. Do not ring."
As soon as Prohibition agents closed one speakeasy down,
two more seemed to open somewhere else.
Texas Guinan, an ex-star of western movies
and the city's most celebrated speakeasy hostess,
endured so many closings that she had a charm necklace
made for herself of miniature gold padlocks.
WOMAN: My girlish delight in barrooms
received a serious setback a week or so ago
in a place which shall, not to say should, be nameless.
The cause was a good old-fashioned raid.
It wasn't one of those refined, modern things
where gentlemen in evening dress arise suavely
from ringside tables and depart, arm in arm,
towards the waiting patrol wagons.
It was one of those movie affairs
where burly cops kick down the doors
and women fall fainting on tables
and strong men crawl under them and waiters shriek
and start throwing bottles out of windows.
Lois Long, the "New Yorker."
NARRATOR: When the "New Yorker" magazine began weekly publication in 1925,
its advertising prospectus vowed that it would be
witty and sophisticated and definitely not
for what it called "the old lady in Dubuque."
23-year-old Lois Long,
the Vassar-educated daughter of a congregational minister,
was assigned to cover the city's nightlife.
Her pen name was Lipstick.
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: To the accompaniment of a slight shiver of outworn padlocks,
Barney Gallant is doing business at The Old Stand.
The place is dimly lit, comfortable,
and decorated in modernistic-bohemian fashion.
The revue is as bad as ever.
I don't like to put any deserving black bottom dancers
out of a job, but I don't see why Barney
bothers with entertainment at all.
In a place as dark as that,
people ought to be able to entertain themselves.
MAN: Lois Long's columns were laced
with a wicked sort of sexual sense of humor.
She openly flouted sexual and social conventions.
She was a favorite of Harold Ross,
who was the original editor of the "New Yorker"
and who couldn't have been more different
from Long if he had tried.
He was a staid and proper Midwesterner,
and she was absolutely a wild woman.
She would come into the office at 4:00 in the morning...
usually inebriated, still in an evening dress...
and, having forgotten the key to her cubicle,
she would normally prop herself up on a chair
and try to, you know, in stocking feet
jump over the cubicle, usually in a dress
that was too immodest for Harold Ross' liking.
She was... in every sense of the word,
both in public and private...
the embodiment of the 1920s flapper,
and her readers really loved her.
MEN: Yes, sir, that's my baby.
No, sir, don't mean maybe...
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: Texas Guinan, who is now carousing at The Salon Royal,
has added to her show a girl who does a hootch dance
with the aid of a real boa constrictor
a good 8 feet long.
Since Texas' place is legitimately open
until 7 A.M. or later
and is, therefore, the last stop on the nightclub whirl,
you can imagine the effect of this on late arrivals
who are a little the worse for wear.
The highlight of the week was the opening of The Club Mirador.
I have never seen so many good-looking blonde women
in my life as were present.
The men were not handsome,
but they looked like good providers.
Rosita and Ramon are dancing at The Mirador
and look so suspiciously Spanish
that I am convinced they were born in Jersey City.
ZEITZ: Most women who were working
didn't make enough money to go to nightclubs
to spend their evenings drinking and dancing
in the arms of dashing young men.
That simply wasn't available to most people.
This is still a country in which there are deep inequities,
but they could read about what it was like
to be a young, single, liberated woman
who goes to all the right nightclubs,
who drinks all of the right liquors,
who knows all of the right people.
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: Another thing that your most high-hat friends
have recently discovered is The Cotton Club in Harlem.
I cannot believe that most of them realize
that they are listening to probably
the greatest jazz orchestra of all time,
which is Duke Ellington's
I'll fight anyone who says different.
It is barbaric and rhythmic and brassy as jazz ought to be,
and it is all too much for an impressionable girl.
NARRATOR: Harlem had hundreds of speakeasies of its own,
most hidden behind storefronts and tucked away in alleys.
The Spider's Web and The Nest...
The Garden of Joy and the Bucket of Blood...
The Shim Sham and The Hotcha and The Yeah, Man...
Connie's Inn and The Catagonia Club
and Small's Paradise.
Some, like The Cotton Club, allowed only white customers,
but most were "black and tans,"
eager to sell drinks to customers of both races.
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: Above 125th Street,
the latest place visited was The Club Harlem.
Your first impression is of very pleasing decoration.
The second impression is of a grand blues orchestra,
and the third is probably the most inferior collection
of white people you can see anywhere.
Possibly, they are hired by the management
to give the colored people magnificent dignity
by contrast, but I don't know.
WOMAN: We used to go dancing up there,
and the music, of course, was wonderful.
It was a time when quite a lot of white people were up there.
They were sort of interested to have us,
and we were all ashamed to dance
because they all danced so much better than we did.
MAN: What occasions the focusing of attention on the negro?
Granted that white people have long enjoyed
the negro entertainment as a diversion.
Is it not something different, something more,
when they bodily throw themselves
into negro entertainment in cabarets?
They camel and fish-tail and turkey.
They geechee and black-bottom and scrontch.
Maybe these Nordics at last have tuned in our wavelength.
Maybe they are at last learning to speak our language.
Rudolf Fischer.
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: In the dear, dead days of my youth,
some 5 years ago,
the crude younger generation that gamboled about the town
used to dine out in all manner of places
carrying such a load of cocktails
that further libations were not only unnecessary, but risky.
In the new speakeasies deluxe,
there has been a trend among bright young drinkers
toward a glass of sherry before meals,
a bottle of wine during dinner,
port with the cheese, a liqueur with the coffee,
instead of one highball after another.
All of this is doing wonders for our young people.
All of us are less likely to collapse utterly
before we have time to be the fathers and mothers
of the next horrendous generation.
Lois Long.
MAN: Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering.
I call it a business.
They say I violate the Prohibition law.
Who doesn't?
All I ever did was sell beer and whiskey to our best people.
All I ever did was to supply a demand that was pretty popular.
Why, the very guys that made my trade good
are the ones that yell loudest at me.
Some of the leading judges use the stuff.
They talk about me not being on the legitimate?
Nobody is on the legit.
Al Capone.
[Sirens]
EIG: Capone becomes really famous for the first time
in the summer of 1926.
It's after the murder of Billy McSwiggin, a prosecutor,
and this is a crime that really outrages everybody.
I mean, it gets national publicity,
and Capone is the first person blamed for it.
He hides out for a while, and he comes back to town and says,
"I'll answer all the questions you've got.
"I didn't do it. Billy McSwiggin was a friend of mine.
In fact, I was paying him. He was on my payroll,"
as if that explains everything.
NARRATOR: Al Capone, the big-time Chicago bootlegger
and gangster, had not wanted the prosecutor killed.
His triggermen were trying to hit the mobsters
walking next to McSwiggin who had gone to school with him.
Two of them had also died.
Capone was never charged.
The peace among the city's
various ethnic neighborhood gangs.
Capone and his mentor Johnny Torrio
had carefully negotiated back in 1921
had not lasted very long.
The big profits to be made from hijacking
each other's shipments of beer and liquor proved too tempting.
MAN: So all the gangsters who had their own neighborhoods
in Chicago started vying for the work in their territories.
Well, the strong won out,
and they ended up with the district,
and the weak ended up in the cemetery.
NARRATOR: Dion O'Banion, the head of one gang,
became worried that the Italians,
including Capone and Torrio,
were conspiring against the Irish,
and decided to double-cross them.
When O'Banion learned that the police were planning
to raid his biggest illegal brewery,
he kept it to himself and told Torrio and Capone
he wanted out of the business
and was willing to sell it to them for half a million dollars.
When Torrio arrived to take possession,
the police descended and arrested him
and a number of his men.
"O'Banion's head," Capone said, "got away from his hat."
A few months later, as O'Banion was working in his flower shop,
two gunmen shot him dead.
Capone denied any connection to that crime, too,
and sent a huge bouquet to the funeral,
but O'Banion's henchmen, Hymie Weiss
and George "Bugs" Moran, swore vengeance.
The Chicago beer wars had begun.
When someone shot up Capone's car,
he ordered himself a 7-ton, bulletproof Cadillac.
[Machine gun fire]
Weiss and Moran then shot Johnny Torrio
as he returned from shopping with his wife.
Torrio was hit 5 times.
He somehow survived
but soon thereafter decided he'd had enough
and went home to New York.
Al Capone inherited all of Torrio's Chicago operations
and moved to consolidate his hold on the beer business.
EIG: As Capone starts to seek more power,
there's a great shake-up in the hierarchy.
This sets off a huge gang war,
and the public begins to see shoot-outs on Michigan Avenue,
and suddenly it's like Dodge City here...
newspapers every day screaming with headlines,
bullets flying, cars driving by,
and light of the machine gun flashing from the window...
and suddenly, he's in the spotlight.
He seems to like the spotlight.
MAN AS AL CAPONE: I don't want trouble.
I don't want bloodshed, but I'm going to protect myself.
When somebody strikes at me, I'm going to strike back.
I'm the boss.
NARRATOR: In September of 1926,
Hymie Weiss led a deadly convoy
of 11 sedans through the suburb of Cicero,
firing more than a thousand rounds
into Capone's headquarters there
and hitting several innocent passersby.
Capone was unhurt.
No one was arrested.
3 weeks later in broad daylight in front of Holy Name Cathedral
in downtown Chicago, Capone's men
machine-gunned Weiss to death
and wounded 3 of his lieutenants.
Again, no one dared make an arrest.
76 mobsters would be shot or stabbed or bludgeoned to death
in Chicago by the end of 1926.
54 more would die in 1927.
"I don't want to encourage the business,"
the chief of police told a reporter,
"but if somebody has to be killed,
"it's a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves.
It saves trouble for the police."
jurors and judges and prosecutors were paid off.
Gang members refused to talk.
Intimidated witnesses developed
what was called "Chicago amnesia."
None of the killers was ever sent to jail.
The city today, wrote the "Literary Digest,"
symbolizes "murder galore and crime unpunished."
one senator demanded that President Coolidge
withdraw U.S. Marines from Nicaragua
and send them to Chicago.
The New York mobster Lucky Luciano visited the city
and pronounced it "a real goddamn crazy place.
Nobody is safe in the street."
EIG: For just a couple of years there, '26 and '27,
it almost lives up to the hype.
These incredible violent acts, it's Capone's doing.
It's his quest for power.
NARRATOR: With most of his enemies dead
or driven out of town, Capone decided
it was time to call for a truce in the beer wars.
[Machine gun fire]
MAN AS AL CAPONE: We're making a shooting gallery
out of a great business, and nobody is profiting by it.
It's hard and dangerous work,
and when a fellow works hard at any line of business,
he wants to go home and forget it.
He doesn't want to be afraid to sit near a window
or open a door.
There's plenty of beer business for everybody.
Why kill each other over it?
NARRATOR: Everything seemed to be going Capone's way.
In 1927, his old ally,
the Republican ex-mayor Big Bill Thompson,
decided to run again, promising an end to police raids
that seemed only to affect thirsty working people
and leave the big shots untouched.
"When I'm elected,
we will not only reopen places these people have closed,".
Thompson promised, "but we'll open 10,000 new ones.
"No copper will invade your home
and fan your mattress for a hip flask."
Capone gave Thompson an estimated
$1/4 million dollars to run his campaign.
The Republican won by a landslide.
Capone hung a portrait of Thompson
between images of George Washington
and Abraham Lincoln on his office wall.
He could now afford to be magnanimous about law enforcement.
"I got nothing against the honest cop on the beat,"
he explained.
"You just have them transferred someplace
where they can't do you any harm."
EIG: There's no real reason why he should become
the most famous gangster in American history.
He's not that different from dozens,
maybe hundreds of others,
who were doing the same kind of criminal activity.
I think the key difference is that he liked attention.
He was the first media hound, the first publicity addict
among the great gangsters,
and he invited the newspaper reporters for interviews.
NARRATOR: Most gangsters did their best to stay out of sight.
Al Capone held press conferences at which he presented himself
as what he called a "public benefactor"
who offered Chicago citizens
the "light pleasures" they wanted.
"When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging," he said.
"When my patrons serve it on a silver tray
on Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality."
CLARKE: He got to be very popular because he was
one of the few gangsters that spent money.
The rest of them threw half-dollars around
like they were sewer covers.
Capone gave everybody money,
including the newspaper reporters.
Capone's idea was that everybody reads the newspaper
and most people are stupid enough to believe
what's written in the newspapers.
EIG: There was a great media war underway at the time.
Hearst was expanding to Chicago and other cities,
and he was doing it by making his papers
splashier than the others, and the newspaper writers
who discovered these gangsters were rewarded.
They became stars of their newspapers because
these were great stories that people couldn't get enough of.
He felt like by elevating himself in this way,
by making himself famous in the way that Babe Ruth
was more than a baseball player but he was a celebrity,
in making himself famous in that way,
he would somehow rise above the muck
and make himself into a public figure
and he might be accepted that way,
that he might have a better chance of operating
in the long run as this Prohibition businessman.
NARRATOR: Capone became one of the best-known Americans on Earth.
He signed autographs at Cubs and White Sox games,
played Santa Claus at the nearby parochial school,
and gave away $100,000 worth of baubles every Christmas.
Schoolchildren ran after his limousine
as it slid through the streets.
18 bodyguards surrounded him when he turned up
at the fights or the opera or the racetrack.
Tour buses rolled past the Metropole Hotel,
his new Chicago headquarters, where he had rented two floors
and 50 rooms from which to run a growing empire
of prostitution and gambling, racketeering,
and his biggest source of money... booze.
Newspaper readers couldn't get enough of Al Capone.
EIG: I think in the middle of Capone's reign,
it's very complicated,
the relationship that the public has.
It's not that he's a bad guy, that he's a super villain.
They see him as a human being
who happens to be in this illegal racket,
but it's also a racket that nobody really...
I mean, nobody really supports Prohibition.
So they can't really hate Capone too much,
and for the most part, there's never a clear murder
that you can pin on him.
So people at least have this feeling
that maybe he's above it all somehow,
and, of course, he's got a piece of everything at this point.
Not a lot of businesses in Chicago
are not in some way connected to Capone.
You know, every delivery driver, every dry cleaning business
is connected to Capone.
He's everywhere now.
His tentacles are reaching everywhere.
NARRATOR: As Capone diversified,
he nonetheless cautioned everyone
against investing in the booming stock market.
"It's a racket," he said.
MAN: My dad ran two very large hotels in Chicago.
The principal one was the Stevens Hotel.
They were successful in persuading
the Canners' convention to come to Chicago.
He and the manager of another hotel in Chicago
thought it was very important that there not be
an awful lot of crime in the city
at the time of the convention.
So they had the bright idea of going to see Al Capone,
and they told him how important it would be for Chicago
not to have crime while the Canners were in town,
and Capone said he understood the purpose of it,
and it's a certainly reasonable request,
and he'd do what he could do to help out,
and my dad said there wasn't a single holdup
in the city of Chicago for the week the Canners were there.
Now, I don't know if that's true or not,
but he told me that story on more than one occasion.
MAN: Women come into this new barroom.
They go right up to the bar.
They put a foot on the brass railing.
They order. They are served.
They bend the elbow. They hoist.
They toss down the feminine esophagus the brew
that was really meant for men, stout and wicked men.
The last barrier is down.
The citadel has been stormed and taken.
There is no longer any escape, no hiding place
where the hounded male may seek his fellow and strut his stuff
safe from the atmosphere and presence of femininity.
A man might as well do his drinking at home
with his wife and daughters,
and there was never fun in that.
Don Marquis.
MAN: Men and women almost never drank together
before Prohibition,
maybe at occasional dinner parties of the rich,
because the saloon was a male-only institution,
but the speakeasy,
where there was no law enforced of any kind, became different,
and if you have a little jazz band
and they're gonna play the Charleston,
you're gonna have women and men together.
There's a real liberation for women,
a liberation of behavior that takes place then,
an independence that said,
"You know, he can drink. I can drink, too,"
and that wouldn't have happened before Prohibition.
WILKIE: I went to Radcliffe, and Harvard was right beside,
and the boys at Harvard were always making bathtub gin,
you know, and having people for drinks.
I was somewhat in awe of some of the college men that I knew.
They were so grown-up. They were juniors and seniors.
I sort of went along with it.
I didn't drink much, but I did drink some,
and I thought it was quite good
and made you feel nice and cheerful.
LERNER: There's a liberation here that the young, urban,
modern woman could jump into and really go crazy.
Whether it was wild dancing or wild sex or really the sense
of "No one's going to tell me what I can or can't do,"
women were suddenly behaving in very different ways in the 1920s.
It's not a complete turn overnight.
In some ways, this is a gradual build-up
from the beginning of the 20th century,
but then in the 1920s, it seems to really take off.
MAN: Historians talk about a revolution in morals
in the 1920s, and some of what's said is exaggerated,
but the most careful studies find
that if women were not being more promiscuous,
men and women were enjoying sex more,
and there is a view that what happens in the 1920s
is that men discover the clitoris,
and men and women have a lot better time in bed
than they had in Victorian days.
MAN: You'll do it someday.
So why not now?
Oh, won't you let me try to show you how?
Think what you're missing.
Oh, it's a shame.
You'll miss the kissing.
And the rest of the game.
In open spaces.
Where men are men.
A chicken never waits till she's a hen.
Don't keep me waiting.
For I do vow.
You'll do it someday.
So why not now?
WILKIE: I did realize that there was a fast set
and that you had to be prepared
for how you were going to answer questions.
It was the beginning of the time
when boys and girls slept together.
There was quite a lot of that going on,
which astounded me from my innocent background,
but anyway, it was happening a lot, really.
My girlfriends told me, and, you know, would ask,
did I have a really good boyfriend or not.
But I always denied it.
NARRATOR: The older generation of women who had fought so hard
to win the vote and to bring about Prohibition
were more and more appalled
at the wanton behavior of their daughters.
ZEITZ: There would have been a sexual revolution in the 1920s
without the role of alcohol but because the two
were happening together, folks who were active
in the temperance and suffrage movements came to zero in
on liquor as an engine of this new sexual revolution.
Don't keep me waiting.
For I do vow.
You'll do it someday.
So why not now?
We tend to think ahistorically,
so we imagine that our generation invented sex
or that it invented drinking or even that it invented drug use.
If you look at the movies of the 1920s...
for instance, "Flaming Youth," the Colleen Moore movie,
which was, arguably, the first flapper movie...
it portrays a tremendous amount of sex
and a tremendous amount of drinking.
There's even a very scandalous scene
that's seen behind a silhouette in which all of the teenagers
are jumping into a pool unclothed.
OKRENT: If you're in Omaha or you're in Cleveland
or wherever it might be and you see the young,
glamorous Joan Crawford drunk and dancing on a table top
in "Our Dancing Daughters," well, gee,
that's the life of the exciting people in the big city.
So it spreads, and you find that as the country
becomes more homogenized through mass media,
one of the things that's getting homogenized is its drinking habits.
[Men scatting "Let's Misbehave"]
MAN: Let's misbehave.
NARRATOR: In Hollywood and on the Broadway stage,
in magazines and newspapers
and countless songs turned out by Tin-pan Alley...
MAN: Let's misbehave.
NARRATOR: Illegal alcohol, with its hint of illicit sex,
had come to be seen as a sign of glamour and sophistication,
something to be sought after, not shunned.
LERNER: It's part of the conspicuous consumption
of the 1920s, where the amount you spent
and what you got and the brand and the label and everything,
it became that much more important to people.
It's a status symbol.
It's kind of strange to think of something so illegal
being such a status symbol.
You were what you drank.
MAN: Let's misbehave.
MAN: July 1, 1928.
The "New York Times."
More than 160 federal Prohibition agents
conducted early this morning the largest series of raids
on nightclubs that has taken place in this city.
Between midnight and 3:00,
11 of the leading nightclubs had been closed,
the waiters, entertainers, orchestras, and guests
driven to the street, and in many instances,
principals and employees were arrested
and taken to the West 30th Street Station.
NARRATOR: One day before unprecedented raids
closed down 11 of the biggest speakeasies in Manhattan,
Al Smith, the governor of New York State,
accepted the Democratic nomination for president.
It was not a coincidence that one event
preceded the other by just a few hours.
The raid had been ordered in a deliberate effort
to embarrass the Democratic nominee
by Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the Assistant Attorney General
in charge of enforcing Prohibition.
She had devoted 7 years to the effort
to uphold the 18th Amendment and was determined
that all that work would not be undone by a presidential nominee
who had consistently criticized it.
AL SMITH: Government should be constructive, not destructive.
While this is a government of laws, and not of men,
laws do not execute themselves.
OKRENT: In 1928, Al Smith gets the nomination,
and it is the first national campaign run by somebody
who believes the Prohibition law is wrong,
and he runs as an unapologetic wet.
AL SMITH: I will not be influenced in appointments
by the question of a person's wet or dry attitude
or by what church he attends in the worship of God.
In this spirit, I enter upon the campaign.
NARRATOR: The contrast between Smith and his opponent
in the 1928 presidential election
could not have been clearer.
Herbert Hoover, the Republican nominee,
favored Prohibition, at least in public.
It was "a great social and economic experiment",
"noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose," he said,
but in a nod to swing voters
disillusioned with the Volstead Act,
Hoover also conceded that problems with the law
"must be worked out constructively."
MAN: The imperatives of democracy are such
that even if people want to be hypocritical about it,
they still want to vote for somebody who stands up
for the right sort of values,
and Prohibition counted in that time
as the right sort of values.
NARRATOR: Within a few days, Willebrandt would try again
to tarnish the Democratic nominee's reputation
by ordering another series of raids in Manhattan
that swept up not just waiters and bartenders,
but scores of speakeasy customers
who had never before been targeted.
Willebrandt's raids may have pleased.
Hoover's conservative supporters,
but many Democrats saw them as the publicity stunt they were,
and they especially infuriated Al Smith's big-city supporters,
who shared his conviction that Prohibition
was then, and had always been, a terrible idea.
MAN: If you were Catholic, you were for him.
He said he would repeal Prohibition,
and, boy, everybody gravitated to that message
because they wanted to get that regular beer back.
HAMILL: He knew what it was to be poor.
He came off the streets of New York City.
It was before television, obviously,
but it was not before radio, so he had some disadvantages.
AL SMITH: My friends of the radio audience,
the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
HAMILL: His accent... he was great.
He makes me want to weep when I hear the voice.
He was a terminal New Yorker... if you listened to him talking,
because there's not many people who speak like that anymore...
but he had one big strike going against him.
He was a Catholic.
It was the Catholic plus the big city,
the Catholic plus the wet insistence.
This religious fundamentalist root
of the Prohibition argument got inflamed again.
We must press on with invincible determination,
praiseworthy perseverance.
No time to shilly-shally, no time to turn back.
Liquor is an evil.
It has never done anyone any good, nor never will.
NARRATOR: The country may have been changing.
The drys were not.
They had rejected every proposal to revise the Volstead Act,
insisting that stronger enforcement was the answer.
As for repealing the 18th Amendment,
that was unthinkable.
Prohibitionists said, "No way. It's a Constitutional amendment."
"No Constitutional amendment has ever been repealed.
We've got it. Tough nooks," basically.
By 1928, when the drys... who are, may I say,
the most inflexible people I have ever come across...
it is completely their fault that Prohibition failed.
They refused to give in an inch, a millimeter.
There were multiple opportunities
to make the law correspond more accurately
to the reality of American life.
OKRENT: Being no fools, the Anti-saloon League,
realizing they had to get Prohibition passed by 1920,
got it passed and then realized they had to protect it.
So for the first time in American history,
there was no reapportionment in congress.
The Anti-saloon League controlled state legislatures.
There was no reapportionment in '22, '24, '26, '28,
and the issue, the only issue there,
was keeping representation in the cities down.
Now, who were the groups who wanted to keep representation down?
Those who were anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-Italian,
anti-Jewish, and anti-booze.
NARRATOR: Once again, big cities found themselves
pitted against small towns.
As the presidential campaign began,
Hoover preferred to remain above its bitterness,
but his surrogates fanned out across the country,
intent on doing all they could to preserve the 18th Amendment
and destroy Al Smith.
Wayne Wheeler, the master tactician
of the Anti-saloon League for more than 30 years,
had recently died.
His successor as league spokesman
was James Cannon Jr.,
the Virginia political boss and Methodist bishop
whose self-righteous zeal equaled that of his predecessor
and whose xenophobia far exceeded it.
Cannon concentrated his fire on the south,
flooding the region with tracts
and pamphlets falsely charging
that Smith was a drunk, the "cocktail president,"
denouncing his Catholic faith as "the mother of ignorance",
superstition, intolerance, and sin;"
dismissing his most ardent supporters
as the "kind of dirty people that you find today"
on the sidewalks of New York."
The Ku Klux Klan joined the fight.
Crazed rumors spread...
a Smith victory meant all Protestant children
would be made illegitimate;
Smith planned to give the Pope an office
in the east wing of the White House and was building
an underwater tunnel to the Vatican.
OKRENT: The hatred directed toward him
that was both anti-Catholic and anti-wet
was really beyond the pale,
the worst we can imagine in American politics.
The reverend Bob Jones,
the founder of Bob Jones university,
he said, and this is a direct quotation of ugly words,
"I would rather see a nigger in the White House
than have Al Smith president."
NARRATOR: In September, Mabel Walker Willebrandt herself
took to the campaign trail, traveling to Springfield, Ohio,
to address a gathering of Methodist ministers.
Herbert Hoover would enforce Prohibition
with "consecrated leadership," she promised them,
while Smith was the captive of Tammany Hall
and the liquor interests and could not be trusted
to be faithful to the Constitution,
and then she urged the clergymen to campaign against Smith
from the pulpit.
WOMAN: It is not abandoning your non-partisan policy
to take a stand against the Democratic nominee.
In fact, there is no choice.
There are 2,000 pastors here.
You have in your churches more than 600,000 members
in Ohio alone.
That is enough to swing the election.
The 600,000 have friends in other states.
Write to them.
Every day and every ounce of your energy are needed to rouse
the friends of Prohibition to register and vote.
NARRATOR: To many, Willebrandt seemed to be calling
for something like a religious war.
"So much for the separation of church and state," Smith said,
but the damage had been done.
A conclave of Atlanta ministers warned the Democratic candidate
that "you cannot nail us to a Roman cross"
and submerge us in a sea of rum."
as Smith's campaign train rattled toward Oklahoma City,
it passed a fiery cross lit by Klansmen
burning in a field beside the track.
That night, the Democratic candidate
blamed "Republicans high in the councils of the party"
for countenancing the rumor-mongering
and pointed out that no campaign official had disavowed.
Willebrandt's exhortation to the Ohio clergymen.
Then, he spoke directly to the question of his faith.
"In this campaign," he said, "an effort has been made
"to distract the attention of the electorate
"and to fasten it on malicious and un-American propaganda.
"Let me make myself perfectly clear.
"I do not want any Catholic to vote for me
"because I am a Catholic,
"but on the other hand, I have the right to say
"that any citizen of this country that believes.
"I am capable of steering the ship of state
"safely through the next 4 years
"and votes against me because of my religion,
he is not a real, pure, genuine American."
Smith's cause had probably always been hopeless.
The economy was still booming,
and no one saw a way that the Republicans could lose.
Smith's candidacy did bring thousands
of big-city working-class voters to the polls for the first time,
but his religion and his opposition to Prohibition
cut deeply into the supposedly solid Democratic South.
Hoover won by 6 million votes.
Smith was stunned at the size of his defeat
and the viciousness of the campaign against him.
"I do not expect to run for office again,"
he told reporters.
"I have had all I can stand of it."
HAMILL: He had gone to a lot of American cities
which were all against it, against Prohibition,
and mistook that for the entire country, I think.
OKRENT: But the important thing in terms of Prohibition
is that he brought the discussion of Prohibition,
whether it should be kept in the law and in the Constitution,
he brought that discussion into the open.
NARRATOR: Empowered by their mandate,
Bishop Cannon and the drys won another victory for their cause,
successfully lobbying congress to enact
the so-called "5 and 10" law that doubled the penalties
for a first violation of the Volstead Act,
5 years in prison and $10,000
for a first offense, and for the first time,
also made it a felony not to report violators.
A citizen who suspected his neighbor of selling home brew
was now legally required to turn him in.
LEUCHTENBURG: I have a searing memory of a day in my childhood.
I'm living in a New Jersey suburb.
My father works in the big post office
across from Penn Station in Manhattan,
and he supplements family income by a still
down in the cellar of this New Jersey house,
and on this particular day... I'm 8 years old...
I'm sitting on the front steps of the house.
All of a sudden come two huge men, broad shouldered,
heavy suits and ties, like nothing I've ever seen before,
like the scene in a movie of Hemingway's "The Killers,"
and they come in and tell my father
that a neighbor has complained.
They know he has a still in the cellar,
and he has to smash it,
and it takes away the extra family income.
We are forced to move into the Borough of Queens in New York,
give up the house, the countryside,
and the city and life close in around me.
NARRATOR: Not long after the election,
Bishop Cannon himself was disgraced,
charged with gambling in fraudulent stocks,
hoarding flour during the Great War,
and having had not one, but two mistresses
while his first wife still lived.
Meanwhile, Mabel Walker Willebrandt,
who had so successfully stirred up anti-Catholic prejudice
against Al Smith, expected to be rewarded
for her loyalty by becoming Attorney General.
When Hoover named someone else, she resigned her post
and resumed the private practice of law.
One of the first clients she took on
was Fruit Industries, Limited,
an organization of California grape growers
lobbying for the right to sell a flavored grape concentrate
called Vine-Glo which, when water and sugar were added,
could be turned into wine.
Later, she would represent the movie industry
and convert to the Roman Catholic faith.
LA GUARDIA: I believe that God Almighty, when he made grapes,
intended that grapes should be enjoyed by all of the people,
and I don't think that he intended the use of grapes
to be made into jelly.
Prohibition will be a success when Congress,
by an act or by a law, will be able
to stop fermentation or to repeal the law of gravitation.
NARRATOR: Despite the efforts of Fiorello La Guardia and others
to point out the folly of the law,
Al Smith's defeat seemed to make the chances
of repealing Prohibition more remote than ever.
There had always been organized opposition by wet politicians,
brewers, distillers, restaurant owners,
and the unions that represented workers
made jobless by the 18th Amendment,
but they had made almost no progress.
Over the years, a number of wealthy and influential men
had lent their names and given their money to an organization
called the association against the Prohibition amendment.
Some felt Prohibition was simply foolish.
Others objected to the contempt for the law it fostered.
All hoped that if alcohol could be legalized and taxed again,
their own income taxes would fall.
Their organization was well-financed but too elitist,
ill-suited to working with Americans
less fortunate than its leaders.
In 1928, they had tried to influence
56 House and Senate races,
but only 19 of their wet candidates won,
and 11 of them were incumbents.
That year, one wet politician said, "We were licked."
Something else, someone else, was needed.
SABIN: It has been 11 years since the passage
of the 18th Amendment as interpreted by the Volstead Act.
The time has come when we should organize and become articulate
and to work for some sane solution of this problem.
Prohibition, it has led to more violation of
and contempt for law, to more hypocrisy
among both private citizens and public officials
than anything else in our national history.
NARRATOR: Of all the splendid homes wealthy New Yorkers
had built for themselves near Long Island's tip,
none was more splendid than "Bayberry Land."
It had been constructed on a 289-acre estate
to the exacting specifications of its mistress...
Mrs. Pauline Sabin.
WOMAN: It was a beautiful house, just extraordinary,
on the water and a very large house
and built for entertaining.
I think it was having this household
that freed her to do what she wanted.
She didn't really have to run the house.
That was done for her.
NARRATOR: She was the wife of Charles Sabin,
chairman of the board of the guaranty trust company,
and an heiress in her own right.
Her father was president
of The Equitable Life Assurance Company.
An uncle founded Morton Salt.
She was also the first woman ever to serve
on the Republican National Committee,
the founder and first president
of the Women's National Republican Club,
and had been a major fundraiser for the presidential campaigns
of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge,
and Herbert Hoover.
Sabin was also celebrated for her elegant parties.
WILLIS: Everybody had such a good time,
and the conversation would be sparkling.
That was terribly important.
My grandmother did not suffer dullards lightly.
The wine in Bayberry Land, I believe,
was stored in a secret room off the library.
The whole room was filled with leather books,
and that wall had a door of fake leather books,
and there was a little push button,
and the door would spring open at the touch.
NARRATOR: Pauline Sabin had initially supported Prohibition
because she thought it would be good for her two sons,
protect them from alcohol and its temptations,
but as time went on, she began to think again.
The Prohibition law, she said, was "written for weaklings"
"and derelicts, and has divided the nation,
like Gaul, into 3 parts... wets, drys, and hypocrites."
She was repelled by politicians who voted dry
and then turned up at her dinner table expecting a drink,
and she had a special aversion
to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
and the way its president, Ella Boole,
claimed to speak for all American women.
BOOLE: Women are relieved of the fear of a drunken husband.
Children no longer hide with terror
as they see their father reeling home.
The whole United States is happier
because the liquor traffic is an outlaw.
We are going to keep it up.
MURDOCK: She reacted to this now-fairly-worn image
that the WCTU was American womanhood.
It was getting a little frayed around the edges, that one,
and she just put her fist right through it and said,
"No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't."
LERNER: Pauline Sabin is sort of the most surprising hero
in the whole repeal story.
Here's this very wealthy, blue blood New York socialite,
but here's someone who genuinely believed
that Prohibition had failed and that it was her responsibility
and the responsibility of other American women
to do something about it.
NARRATOR: She had remained loyal to the Republican party
until after the 1928 election,
hoping that the new president
would make good on a campaign promise
to "look into Prohibition laws" once he was in office.
Hoover, like Harding and Coolidge before him,
had little personal interest in Prohibition,
but he did owe a heavy debt to the drys.
So the president did what politicians often do.
He dodged the issue.
He appointed ex-Attorney General George W. Wickersham
to head a blue-ribbon commission to study the entire problem
of American criminal justice.
Sabin resigned in disgust
from the Republican National Committee
and helped found a new group that soon became
the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform.
Its sole goal was repeal.
LERNER: She knew how politics worked
because she had worked so much in the Republican Party.
She was well-connected, but she also had a real presence.
She knew how to deal with the press.
She knew how to make a repeal movement look very respectable
and very serious, and people really paid attention.
NARRATOR: Sabin may have been a wealthy New Yorker,
but she was wise enough to know
that if her movement were to succeed,
she would have to make welcome women
of every class from all over the country.
LERNER: She was going to recruit women from all walks of life...
factory workers, housewives, professionals...
and bring them all together
basically to say that women do not support this
and the temperance movement has to stop saying that they do.
They have to acknowledge that women could be
of different minds about Prohibition,
and what she does is, she makes it OK for women to say,
"Yeah, I don't like Prohibition either."
NARRATOR: For more than a century,
women had been essential to the struggle to impose Prohibition.
Now they were becoming central to the struggle to end it,
and they were using the same old arguments in a new way.
The gravest threat to the protection
of the American family, they now said,
was not alcohol, but Prohibition.
Sabin and her followers outargued, outcampaigned,
outpromised the dry opposition.
They held rallies, produced radio spots,
organized automobile caravans and flights by female aviators.
WILLIS: She got them excited and fired up.
They went everywhere.
They were taken out of their living rooms,
away from their canasta packs,
and just had a very exciting time for something
that they really believed in very strongly.
NARRATOR: The ranks of Sabin's organization grew steadily.
Soon, a million and a half women had signed on.
We are here a thousand strong.
We have come to the Capitol to inform our members
in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate
that we will not support candidates who will not help us
rid this country of a law that has made of us
a nation of hypocrites and undermined our moral fiber.
NARRATOR: "By heavens,"
said Republican senator James Wadsworth,
who had lost his seat in 1926 under attack from dry forces,
"there's a chance of getting repeal
if the women are going to join with us."
EIG: He really seemed to believe that he could be a family man
and supply this booze and kill people when he had to
and still somehow come out of it all.
Maybe it was naïve, but the guy
really seemed to think that he could pull it off.
NARRATOR: On the morning of February 14, 1929,
Valentine's Day, Al Capone was vacationing at the new villa
he had bought on Palm Island off Miami Beach, Florida.
Back in Chicago, the truce Capone had tried to impose
on the city's bootlegging gangs had collapsed again.
His chief rival was George "Bugs" Moran,
the triggerman who had once almost killed.
Capone's mentor Johnny Torrio
and had made a failed attempt on Capone's life, as well.
Moran loathed Capone and loved saying so to newspapermen.
Capone was a "beast" and a "behemoth," he said,
"lower than a snake's belly" because he dealt
"in flesh," prostitution, as well as beer.
In Chicago that morning,
according to one of many contradictory stories,
Moran received a phone call.
It was from a nameless hijacker
who said he had a big stolen shipment of whiskey for sale.
Moran told his caller to drive it to a garage
at 2122 north Clark street.
He'd meet him there at 10:30.
At the appointed time, 7 of Moran's men
were waiting inside the garage for the hijacker to arrive.
Moran himself was late. He had stopped for a haircut.
Meanwhile, 4 men drove up in a Cadillac
and hurried into the garage.
Two wore police uniforms.
They all carried shotguns or submachine guns.
They lined Moran's men up against the wall.
Then they opened fire.
CLARKE: They're nice and bloody, a lot of photography,
no investigation required,
and who do you lay it on?
Why, our favorite guy... Capone.
Capone did this, in spite of the fact that he was in Florida.
EIG: It was extremely cold-blooded.
Nobody knows to this day who did it.
Nobody was ever arrested. Nobody was ever charged with the crime.
It was widely believed to have been the work of Al Capone,
who was said to be in pursuit of Bugs Moran.
Bugs Moran was not one of the 7 men killed.
NARRATOR: No one could ever prove Capone was involved.
The killers got away clean.
Bugs Moran managed to hold on to his territory
and what was left of his gang
but continued to feud bitterly with Capone.
The "Chicago American" reported that "Chicago gangsters
graduated yesterday from murder to massacre."
Something had to be done.
EIG: The Valentine's Day Massacre becomes
a rallying point at which people say enough is enough.
Something has got to be done about this.
There have been other shootings where, you know,
half a dozen people had been killed before,
but this one is different.
It seemed ridiculous to people that after all these years,
nobody had done anything about it,
that these gangsters could continue to operate with impunity,
that Al Capone, sitting in his mansion in Florida,
on the beach with a cigar in his mouth
and a fishing rod poked into the water,
can order a hit and have 7 men taken out in Chicago
and nobody would do anything about it,
that he wasn't even arrested.
NARRATOR: Gang violence was on the rise
in nearly every American city.
MAN: Spraying this crowded street with lead
at Dyckman Street and Broadway,
two thugs who killed two policemen
in cold blood met death in this bullet-riddled cab.
The cab itself was hit 42 times in the running gun fight.
Look at those bullet holes.
The crowd, which a few minutes before
fled in panic from the bandits fire...
pressed the police hard
in attempt to see the dead bandit taken away.
He goes to join his two companions,
who died on the way to the hospital.
NARRATOR: Slaughter was bad for business.
Even the mobsters began to worry
that things were getting out of hand.
Two of the shrewdest now lived in New York City...
Capone's old employer Johnny Torrio
and Meyer Lansky, who had already joined forces
to organize the bootlegging and rum-running businesses
from Boston to the Great Lakes.
For 3 days in may of 1929,
an unprecedented conclave of mob bosses
from the eastern half of the country strolled together
along the beach at Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Johnny Torrio and Meyer Lansky were there.
So were Charles "King" Solomon from Boston,
"Boo Boo" Hoff from Philadelphia,
Kansas City's Johnny Lazia,
Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Dutch Schultz,
and Albert Anastasia from New York.
Together, they agreed to build a national crime syndicate.
They had finally a sit-down
and said, "We can't kill each other,"
and they divided up territories nationally,
using the Federal Reserve Bank's grid
to figure out where the zones were.
NARRATOR: Prohibition had been intended
in part to reduce crime.
Instead, it had provided small-time criminals
with a world of opportunities to increase exponentially
their profits and their power.
OKRENT: They learned during Prohibition how to do the things
that they would need to do in the years ahead
in every form of organized crime that we've seen since...
how to control money, how to control troops,
how to divide territory with each other,
how to cooperate, how to end feuds.
Prohibition was the finishing school,
the college, and the graduate school
for the criminal syndicates of America.
NARRATOR: Al Capone had attended the Atlantic City summit, too.
It had been called in part
because of the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
which had brought so much unwanted attention.
Afterwards, he told a reporter, "at Atlantic City,
"we all agreed to bury the past and forget warfare in the future
for the general good of all concerned."
In Chicago, the general good usually meant
what was good for Capone.
His business was booming.
Illegal beer was as plentiful as ever.
No one, it seemed, could touch him.
Each morning that spring, President Hoover
and some of his officials exercised together
on the White House lawn.
The press called the group "The Medicine Ball Cabinet."
One day, as Hoover hurled the ball,
he asked the Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon,
"Have you got this fellow Capone yet?
Remember now, I want that man Capone in jail."
WOMAN AS LOIS LONG: After a couple of dreary weeks
in which the nightclubs of the town were half-full
of ruined stock market victims trying to get cheered up
and inevitably ending the evening with a crying jag
on the head waiter's shoulder, things seem almost normal again,
though I suppose every time the market slips a point,
the wailing will start up once more.
MAN AS F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: Somebody had blundered,
and the most expensive orgy in history was over.
It was borrowed time, anyway,
the whole upper tenth of the nation
living with the insouciance of grand ducs
and the casualness of chorus girls.
Even when you were broke, you didn't worry about money
because it was in such profusion around you.
Now once more the belt is tight,
and we summon the proper expression of horror
as we look back on our wasted youth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
NARRATOR: In the autumn of 1929...
after nearly a decade of unprecedented economic growth,
of rampant speculation and inflated real estate values,
of easy credit and little regulation...
the stock market crashed.
The Great Depression that followed was the worst crisis.
America had faced since the Civil War.
Before it was over, one out of every 4 wage earners,
more than 15 million men and women,
would be without work.
Prices of wheat and corn and cotton fell so low,
the crops were left to rot in the fields.
In Boston, children with cardboard soles on their shoes
walked to school past silent shoe factories
with padlocks on the doors.
In New York, 17 homeless men built themselves
a shantytown in the middle of Central Park.
Like hundreds of thousands of desperate people
all across the country, they named their temporary village.
"Hooverville" after the president whom they had come
to blame for everything that had happened to them,
and on the South Side of Chicago,
a soup kitchen fed thousands of hungry, desperate people,
courtesy of Al Capone.
ROCHE: My dad worked for the City of Chicago
in a civil service job,
and the city's budget was in trouble,
and my dad, even though he worked every day,
he didn't get a paycheck for 8 months.
I can remember one night, all we had for dinner
was a quart of milk with butter
and lima beans made into a soup.
That's all we could afford.
OKRENT: It just seemed very hard for people to focus
on the enforcement of Prohibition
when people are being thrown out of work
and their homes are being repossessed.
The economy has collapsed.
To the wets, it was always an anachronism,
but to the man and woman in the middle,
it really didn't make any sense any longer.
In fact, there was a very strong impulse
to get rid of Prohibition because of the Depression.
First, the government needed tax revenue desperately,
and secondly, it was a jobs program.
If you reopen the breweries and for every brewery,
how many people are making barrels
and how many people are making bottles and cans
and driving trucks and harvesting the grain for it,
it's hundreds of thousands of jobs.
NARRATOR: The two central issues in the 1930 mid-term elections,
the "New York Telegraph" argued, were "hunger and thirst...
"hunger for food and jobs and security,
"thirst, if not for decent liquor,
then the right to it."
Pauline Sabin and the Women's Organization
for National Prohibition Reform went to work
on behalf of candidates committed to repeal.
Like the leaders of the Anti-saloon League
a generation earlier, they were now practicing the most focused
and effective kind of single-issue politics.
Democrats triumphed at the polls that fall,
winning a majority in the House
and coming within a single vote of controlling the Senate.
Wet forces nearly doubled.
"I do think our little organization,."
Pauline Sabin said,
"did something to perfect this wet landslide."
In early 1931, President Hoover
finally released the report of his commission on Prohibition.
He took comfort from its summary statement...
the 18th Amendment should remain in effect
for the foreseeable future, but the report also cataloged
all the flaws in the Volstead Act,
and only a minority of its members
actually favored the law as it stood.
LERNER: I don't know why he needed a panel to tell him
how badly it was failing, but he did,
but Hoover looked at the report and basically found
what he wanted to find, sort of an argument to stay the course.
It seemed like, is the president the only one
in the country who doesn't get it?
Is he the only one who doesn't see
all the problems this is causing?
It added to the sense that Hoover was someone
who was very out of touch with the American public.
When you're a president and you're out of touch,
that's a big political problem.
NARRATOR: Hoover's critics were merciless.
MAN: Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime
it didn't prohibit worth a dime.
It's filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we're for it.
The "New York World".
NARRATOR: By 1931, Al Capone was at the top of his game.
He had no real rivals anymore among Chicago's mobsters,
and he continued to expand his empire
in case Prohibition was repealed.
He took over labor unions...
chauffeurs, plumbers,
city workers, motion picture projectionists,
soda pop peddlers, kosher poultry dealers...
and he toyed with the idea of going into the dairy business
because more people bought milk than booze.
Besides, the markup was higher.
"Honest to God," he said,
"we've been in the wrong racket right along."
Meanwhile, President Hoover remained determined to put.
America's most famous bootlegger behind bars, one way or another.
EIG: The income tax was a fairly new phenomena,
and a lot of people didn't understand it,
and if you're a criminal and all your business,
all of your income is illegally gained,
it makes sense that you are not going to file a return
and admit that you're taking in all this illegal income
and tell the government, basically,
"In case you hadn't noticed, I've been bootlegging
for the past year, and here's how much I made."
when the Supreme Court announced that,
yes, illegal income is taxable,
it was a great moment of confusion
for all these criminals,
and many of them went down and filed tax returns.
Capone did not get around to filing,
and neither did his brother Ralph.
NARRATOR: For two years, the government tried
without success to build a case, any case, against Capone.
CLARKE: President Hoover is sitting there
with a group of investigators
that couldn't find an elephant in a phone booth,
paying these people a lot of money.
The results... zilch, none.
EIG: They couldn't get Capone on gun charges.
They couldn't get him on murder.
They couldn't get him on bootlegging.
They thought they could get him on taxes,
but even that was a very hard case to make
because Capone was smart in this way.
He kept no books. He had no bank accounts.
He owned no property except for a house in Florida
that he bought in his wife's name.
He did everything in cash, and he seemed to pay out
almost as much as he was taking in.
It made it almost impossible for anybody to prove that he had income.
The first time he sat down with the IRS and tried to settle,
you know, he admitted that he hadn't paid his taxes all these years.
He said, "I really didn't make a lot."
"I don't have a lot of money to claim.
"I've been just delivering beer, supplying beer.
I'm a public servant."
He said, "I'm just doing it for the good of the people."
NARRATOR: On June 5, 1931,
the United States finally accumulated enough evidence
to indict Al Capone on 22 counts of income tax evasion.
EIG: Capone's trial was the story of the year.
Reporters from all over the world were coming in for it.
Actors from Hollywood were coming in
because they wanted to play parts based on Capone.
They wanted to see how he presented himself.
Jimmy Cagney was there,
and Damon Runyon came in from New York to cover it.
The celebrity journalists were all coming in for this
and partying with Capone at night before the trial.
Capone had managed to beat every rap before,
so I think he thought
there was no reason this would be any different.
NARRATOR: Capone's optimism was understandable.
His men had bribed or threatened
most of the people in the jury pool,
but at the last moment, the judge got wind of it
and brought in a whole new group of potential jurors.
On October 24, 1931,
after a 10-day trial,
Al Capone was sentenced to the stiffest penalty
ever given to a tax evader...
11 years in federal prison.
MAN: The king of the gangsters
is about to be taken for a ride
by your Uncle Sammy.
It's moving day for Scarface Al Capone.
The camera boys are all ready, so look sharp.
Here he comes.
That's Al wearing the big, white hat.
Seems to be in a hurry, but where he's going,
he'll have time and nothing but,
and none of the good citizens of Chicago is exactly weeping about it.
NARRATOR: "It was my own fault," Capone said,
"publicity. That's what got me."
STEVENS: I think the general feeling was that he deserved it.
There's that sense he was guilty of a lot of other things
and that society would be better off if he were behind bars.
A lot of people in the profession have felt
that he was punished for something
that was not his primary crime, but rather, they found an excuse
to put him away rather than trying to punish him
for things he probably had done.
NARRATOR: Despite Capone's imprisonment,
despite all the government's efforts,
the flow of liquor into Chicago never even slowed.
By the summer of 1932,
it seemed to many Americans as if the world
had turned upside down in the 4 years
since Herbert Hoover's election.
Bad times had only gotten worse.
In some cities, nearly half the wage earners were without work.
Nationwide, a thousand families
were losing their homes every day.
5,000 banks had failed,
taking with them the life savings
of 9 million Americans.
"We can no longer depend on passing the hat,"
wrote the Kansas editor William Allen White.
"We have gone to the bottom of the barrel."
But president Hoover still insisted
that there was a "minimum of actual suffering."
Private charities and local governments, he said,
would take care of the hungry and the destitute.
It seemed increasingly misguided to spend millions
of federal dollars to enforce a law
that seemed perpetually unenforceable,
especially when the Republican administration was unwilling
to spend those dollars to provide relief.
MAN: We believe that to make beer legal at the present time
would bring labor and employment
for hundreds of thousands of people,
that it would bring business millions of dollars,
and that it would bring the Treasury of the United States
between $400 million and $500 million dollars in taxes
that we need to help our people.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,
it is with a sense of grave responsibility
that I address you tonight.
I speak on the eve of what I venture to regard
as the most momentous election ever held in this country.
I call on you whose standards I see before me
to here and now testify to your determination
that the candidate of this convention shall be,
and must be, that incarnation of Thomas Jefferson,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York.
[Cheering and applause]
NARRATOR: In Chicago stadium on the evening of July 2, 1932,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepted
the presidential nomination of his party.
ROOSEVELT: This is more than a political campaign.
It is a call to arms.
Give me your help not to win votes alone,
but to win in this crusade
to restore America
to its own people.
[Applause]
NARRATOR: Like most politicians of his day,
he had hoped to avoid taking a stand
on the divisive issue of Prohibition,
but wet forces, led by Al Smith,
backed him into a corner.
They had already pushed through a platform plank
demanding repeal,
and Roosevelt quickly changed his mind.
ROOSEVELT: And now a word...
wait till I get through the paragraph.
Now a word as to beer.
[Cheering]
[Whistle blows]
You good people...
you good people are in a terrible hurry.
[Laughter and cheering]
Now let me complete the statement.
It's all right.
I favor the modification of the Volstead Act
just as fast as the law will let us.
[Cheering]
NARRATOR: Hoover and the Republicans
continued to straddle the issue.
Their platform simultaneously called for state conventions
to reconsider the 18th Amendment
and promised the federal government
would "continue to safeguard our citizens everywhere"
from the return of the saloon and attendant abuses."
"The Hoover plank," wrote the journalist H.L. Mencken,
"at least has the great virtue of being quite unintelligible."
Pauline Sabin, the lifelong Republican,
enthusiastically endorsed Franklin Roosevelt
and put the full force of her organization behind him.
ROOSEVELT: It looks, my friends, like a real landslide this time,
but...
but we have not yet had the returns from the West Coast,
and for that reason, I am making no official
or public statement as yet.
NARRATOR: It was a landslide.
Roosevelt carried 42 of the 48 states.
Less than a month later,
well before Roosevelt was inaugurated,
Republican senator John J. Blaine of Wisconsin
offered a joint resolution calling for submission
to the states of a new 21st Amendment
which would void the 18th.
Senator Morris Sheppard, the Texan who had introduced
the 18th Amendment in the senate 20 years earlier,
staged a one-man, daylong filibuster
to keep it from coming to a vote,
but after 81/2 hours, when not a single dry senator
thought it worth the trouble to support him,
he surrendered to the inevitable.
The resolution would pass, 63-23.
Seated in the gallery, Ella Boole,
president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
wept.
The House passed it in 40 minutes,
289-121,
and sent it on to the states for ratification.
Within 9 days of taking office,
while waiting for the new amendment to be ratified,
the new president called upon Congress to do 3 things...
reorganize the banks, cut federal spending,
and pass a new bill legalizing 3.2 beer.
When the beer bill reached the floor
and members of the dry minority
began making their familiar case against alcohol,
the impatient wet majority chanted,
"Vote, vote! We want beer!"
The bill easily passed
both houses.
MAN: Like a magic wand, the stroke of the president's pen
has started cafés, beer gardens, and hotels
preparing for the amber flood.
So get ready to wet your whistle and join the festive chorus.
Let 'er go!
MAN: Gangway for good times.
NARRATOR: On April 7, 1933,
barely a month after FDR became president,
Americans could legally buy a bottle of beer
for the first time since 1920.
At the stroke of midnight, sirens and steam whistles blew
in the beer-brewing city of St. Louis,
and traffic was halted on Milwaukee's Wisconsin Avenue
by exultant crowds singing "Sweet Adeline."
MAN: It was Marching Through Paris Day,
Mardi Gras Day, Independence Day,
all the triumphal days put together.
The first time I had a drink, an actual beer,
was the night of celebration.
NARRATOR: In Manhattan, Anheuser-Busch
paid special tribute to the man
whose willingness to champion the wet cause
had helped destroy his political career
by presenting former governor Al Smith with a case of beer.
AL SMITH: I got a real thrill when I saw the 6 big horses
coming along with the wagonload of beer.
The only regret I have is that it isn't all for me.
The case just presented is kind of small,
but you can tell Mr. Busch that I'm around all the time
and that I have plenty of friends.
OK.
NARRATOR: The national celebration over the beer bill
was so intense and long-lasting
that repeal of the 18th Amendment itself
would seem almost anticlimactic.
Many believed that that process would take several years.
It took less than one.
At 5:32 in the evening, Eastern Time,
on December 5, 1933,
13 years, 10 months, and 18 days
after Prohibition went into effect,
it finally came to an end.
H.L. Mencken marked the occasion
by swallowing a tumbler of cold water.
It was, he said, the first water he'd drunk in 13 years.
WILKIE: I just remember it ended and that everybody
was terribly relieved to be able to go
into the shut-up restaurants without having to give a number.
There was a great feeling that it was better to trust people
not to drink so much on their own
than have a law saying they couldn't have liquor.
RUTH PROSKAUER SMITH: I think all my friends and my family
and everybody were relieved that they didn't,
quote, "need to break the law anymore."
At last, you could really choose what you wanted.
MAN: After Prohibition,
after everyone had seen how devastating it was to morals,
to policing, to government, really a failure,
people are picking up the pieces and trying to make sense of it.
The key thing, though, about this picking up the pieces
after Prohibition was,
the same God that laughs at our folly...
and there was folly in Prohibition...
still holds us responsible,
still wants us to build a better society,
to build a better world,
and doesn't disdain human endeavor,
and I think that post Prohibition,
you were picking up the pieces and trying to find
a new moral framework for improving America
without quite so much pride and arrogance
and self-assurance as the Prohibitionists had.
NARRATOR: Prohibition's effects outlasted the 18th Amendment.
Several states and many counties, townships, and towns
chose to let stand local laws
that would keep them dry for decades.
Oklahomans would do so for more than a quarter of a century,
in part because clergymen and bootleggers alike
opposed repeal.
His home state, Will Rogers said,
"will be dry so long as its citizens
can stagger to the polls."
they would do so 5 times before finally voting for repeal
in 1959.
The interstate crime syndicate spawned by warfare
over bootlegging profits would expand steadily
in the years that followed repeal,
finding new worlds to conquer in every corner of the country.
Congress had barred breweries from owning
or leasing saloons anymore,
and the old-time all-male drinking establishments
that had been the hated target of the Prohibitionists
never returned.
Women drank freely in the bars and taverns that replaced them.
OKRENT: The most surprising legacy of Prohibition
is that it's much harder to get a drink today than it was
when it was against the law to get a drink.
Once you allow something, there is an entire code of law...
closing hours, age limits,
percentage of alcohol in a drink,
no Sunday sales in many states.
During Prohibition, because you couldn't drink at all,
you could drink anytime, and anyone could drink,
and it was only when it comes back
that there's a restriction on our drinking.
NARRATOR: Prohibition did cut alcohol consumption for a time,
but alcoholism, the disease that had inspired it,
has never gone away.
It destroyed lives in 1820 and 1920,
and it destroys them still.
No government anywhere has found a way to prevent it.
LEUCHTENBURG: Often one hears about the response
to the repeal of the 18th Amendment,
that there's jubilation in the land.
There was not jubilation in my home.
My mother and father were both alcoholics.
My father was an alcoholic to the day of his death.
I wouldn't say that Prohibition caused the alcoholism,
but it surely didn't stop it.
I viewed the return of liquor
as not a blessing,
but a continuation of a sad, sorry time
for a boy growing up in this country.
NARRATOR: In 1935, two alcoholics,
a New York stockbroker and an Ohio surgeon,
discovered that simply through prayer
and by talking to one another, confessing their lapses,
and offering counsel based on their own experience,
they could sometimes strengthen
one another's resolve not to drink.
Alcoholics Anonymous, the organization they started,
would eventually have millions of members.
Its founders had never heard of the Washingtonians,
the temperance organization built
upon precisely the same principles
that had flourished in America nearly a century before.
MAN: Well, I'm a recovering alcoholic, 30 years almost.
I'm not a Prohibitionist. It doesn't work.
When you look at the United States
with 300-plus million people,
about 10% of the population, the adult population,
has a serious problem with alcohol.
You don't pass the law based on 10%
because a lot of people... in fact, most people... who drink
handle it very well.
So treat the people who have a problem with alcohol.
Don't try and treat the whole country.
NARRATOR: Over the years, there have been many calls
upon congress by one group of Americans or another
for Constitutional amendments that would impose their version
of morality on the rest of their fellow citizens.
All have been defeated,
at least in part because the memory of Prohibition
and the unintended consequences that accompanied it
remain fresh more than 3/4 of a century after it ended.
HAMILL: I haven't had a drink in 35 years,
and I don't even care if I ever have another drink.
I don't long for it or ache for it,
but if somebody said, "You can't have another drink,"
I'd probably go to some demo in front of the federal courthouse
and have one.
It's one of those things where the average American says,
"Who the hell are you to tell me how to live?"
and if we cease being that country,
if we become a country in which we all say,
"Please tell me how to live," we're doomed.