Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

Today, part two at our look at the first week of prohibition, the chaos, the corruption, the very

American mix of culture and religion and politics. It's kind of basically

a cultural hangover. The last episode, we talked about all of the social forces that led up to

the 18th Amendment and got us right up until the amendment passed and then the Volstead Act went

into effect. Now let's look at the new normal of how it actually played out. It was very not normal. But boy, does it reveal a lot about how this country of ours is wired. Here, as always, to discuss Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. So obviously listeners can know there are a lot of forces at play here. But since we are talking about a kind of new law here, let's focus on the two sides of that coin, which is law enforcement and then the people breaking the law. And I want to paint the picture first of how they try to enforce this thing. And then we can talk about all the folks who were very creatively trying to avoid the law.

But, you know, as we said last time, it was kind of like a law without a roadmap, right?

Like the 18th Amendment said, we're going to ban all these things.

We're going to ban the consumption and sale and transportation of alcohol, but doesn't really

give any details about how you actually enforce that.

So Congress rushes through this 17-page single-space-type Volstead Act, which lays out some of the thresholds for what counts as alcohol, has all sorts of loopholes about medicinal alcohol and so forth, and also hands enforcement to the IRS, which is an agency that was built

to tax alcohol, but not necessarily built to eliminate it. And I guess my question there is,

you know, was it handed to the IRS because, you know, we mentioned earlier how not much earlier

than this, they had passed the 16th Amendment,

which kind of shifted the tax base in this country from alcohol to the income tax. But do you think

that it was just kind of muscle memory to say, like, okay, if we're enforcing alcohol, that should be

sort of go to the tax agency? I think so, because I think that it's the IRS that knows where all of the saloons are.

Right? They have the infrastructure for taxing alcohol, so they have the information that you need in order to

police it. They don't want the guns. So they're going to have to build some of those things out.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the IRS, though, nevertheless still has to scramble because they're not just looking at paperwork

and pulling in taxes here.

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