Prohibition: Speakeasy In Chief

On New Year's Day 1927, New York City's medical examiner stood in front of reporters and accused the United States government of poisoning its own citizens. He could prove it, because the bodies were stacking up in his morgue. In this episode, we tear down the postcard version of Prohibition, the flappers and the jazz and the secret knock at the speakeasy door, and walk through what the thirteen-year war on alcohol actually cost. A federal denaturing program deliberately laced industrial alcohol with methanol and contributed to an estimated 10,000 American deaths, defended by the most powerful lobbyist in the country on the grounds that the dead had it coming.

A spiked patent medicine called Jamaica ginger left tens of thousands of poor men paralyzed for life, and the men responsible were handed suspended sentences. Federal agents shot a mother named Lillian DeKing in her own home over half a gallon of wine. Drawing on sixteen years in law enforcement, I trace the whole arc: the genuinely drunken America of the early 1800s, the hatchet-swinging crusade of Carry Nation, Wayne Wheeler's invention of modern pressure politics, and the anti-German hysteria that pushed the 18th Amendment over the line.

Then the collapse: George Remus draining government whiskey warehouses before gunning down his wife in a Cincinnati park and walking free, Al Capone turning Chicago into a war zone that produced the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the Coast Guard sinking a Canadian schooner on the high seas, and the Ku Klux Klan deputizing itself as a liquor patrol.

By the time repeal arrived in 1933, the noble experiment had built organized crime, corrupted the courts, and taught a generation that the law was a joke with a cover charge.

This is the history they left out of the party photos, and every word of it is documented.

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Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

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