Prohibition: How it Happened, Why it Failed, and How it Still Affects America Today

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

America has a strange relationship with alcohol. Certain drinks represented the darkest parts of the national psyche. Rum was once associated with slavery because sugar cane plantations that made rum were only profitable with chattel slavery. Whisky and hard cider were omnipresent in the 19th century, turning able-bodied men into drunkards who couldn't support their families and left them to starve.

But it was Prohibition that is strangest of all. America successfully outlawed alcohol, the first and only modern nation to do so. The unintended consequences were enormous: from physicians falsifying alcohol's positive effects so they could write prescriptions for “medicine” and make a handsome profit, to record numbers of men converting to Judaism so they could administer alcohol in rabbinical ceremonies.

Here to untangle the Gordion knot of alcohol in America's past is Cody Wheat from the Shots of History Podcast.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The History of North America podcast is a sweeping historical saga of the United States,
0:09.3	Canada, and Mexico from their deep origins to our present epoch.
0:14.1	Join me, Mark Vinet, on this exciting, fascinating epic journey through time, focusing on the compelling,
0:20.7	wonderful, and tragic stories of North America's inhabitants, heroes, villains, leaders,
0:27.1	environment, and geography.
0:29.5	I invite you to come along for the ride!
0:59.5	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, the unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes,
1:14.7	Mythbust's historical lies, and rediscover the forgotten stories that changed our world.
1:21.3	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
1:29.8	One of the strangest experiments in American history was prohibition.
1:33.8	This was arguably the first time that a society was able to successfully outlaw alcohol completely
1:40.8	and almost in its entirety.
1:42.8	Now, it was outlawed, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't present.
1:45.9	Of course, you had speak-easies, you had gangsters, you had bootleggers all over the place
1:50.0	who provided it.
1:51.0	But no other society tried to outlaw, even though cultural conservatives and religious
1:56.4	folks had spoke against it for centuries.
1:59.2	In Islamic societies, Christians and Jews could freely drink, and many Muslims didn't
2:03.3	mind sneaking a drink when no one was watching.
2:06.3	Alcohol's effect on American history isn't just with prohibition, or to develop orange
2:10.2	cultivation because there was a particular cocktail called the Bronx that used oranges.
2:15.2	The modern cocktail developed in America because it had the world's highest output of ice
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Unplugged, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Unplugged and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.