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 twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre order it right now at snaffoodashbook dot 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 through a live Q and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head to snaffoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book and check out all the tour details in day, or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffoo Season three formula six previously on Snaffoo, Norris and Gettler finally got the nation's attention.
You have the chief medical examiner of one of the most important American cities accusing the federal government of a planned program of extermination.
The DRIs tried to shrug it off. You can't poison poison, but the backlash sent Mabel Walker Willebrandt packing. Hoover had no use for her any longer.
She was kind of an irrelevancy.
Support for prohibition was on the ropes only when possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor. 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 nineteen thirty. 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. Part Way through, the congressman from New York, deliciously named mister Robert Bacon, decides to make Duran answer the kinds of questions he usually ducks.
You will recall 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. Let me just say personally, I love this moment. It's like, yeah, we're finally going to get it all from the horse's mouth. I know we're back in the nineteen twenties, 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, the last.
Thing you want is for your people to be called murdering chemas in a congressional hearing.
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. I'm at Helms and this is Snaffo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is season three, the story of Formula six. How prohibitions war on alcohol went so off the rails the government wound up poisoning its own people.
In our final episode, James Durand 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 its sleeve. As the Great Depression pushes Prohibition off center stage, Charles Norris and Alexander get takes stock, and so do we. In the US Senate mailroom, a new clerk is sorting the day's incoming letters. It's the spring of nineteen thirty, 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 on 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. He's just twenty 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, say, do you know if.
There's fella called the man in the green hat. I'm trying to get something for the holidays, to make a little whoopie yep.
According to his own testimony, Butts is and I quote in search of some whiopie, one of those W words spelled with an H. I love those whiskey while what ever. 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
supporting his typical green hat. He's dressed to the nines in a blue suit, but his hat is damn What a tricksteh. 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.
Since Cassidy knew the House office building better than the agents did and understood the Senate's side, it was mighty hot to mislead him.
Finally, Butts decides he needs to take a different approach. He corners a staffer for a senator he knows as a customer of Cassidys, and he reveals he's an undercover agent.
The man was not surprised. He said he had been suspicious of me for some time.
Suspicious or no. The man agreed to help Butts make the arrest. The staffer calls Cassidy to place in order, and George drives out to the parking lot of the Senate Building to make the drop.
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 have parked someplace close by.
When suddenly prohibition officers surround his car. They grab him, pull him out. They popped the trunk and rummaged through his vehicle.
Yeah, he was going in and he nabbed him.
I think we can all see Butts smugs 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.
He's got to 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 mother load.
He probably had, you know, half 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 popped 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. It seems
like many extra legal 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 in 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 m customers to purchase alcohol.
In other words, while George was taking the fall, every gen guzzling senator preaching the good word of prohibition was effectively immune from charges. The law wasn't going to lay a finger on them.
It was just a matter 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.
Doctor 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.
Back In his budget hearing turned culture war interrogation, James Durant 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, you will.
Recall this fall, there were a number of deaths in New York City due to wood alcohol poisoning.
Yes, Sir, 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 Congress from New York. He pulls in the testimony of one famous New Yorker as evidence for his side. He brings in analysis from Alexander Gettler.
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 because, as we know, if it weren't for prohibition, no one would be breaking into industrial warehouses to drink after shape 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.
You know, Is he a trustworthy source, No, he's not a trustworthy source.
To be clear, it's true in the case of these particular methanol deaths that Get'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 Gettler'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 nineteen twenty six, 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 commission wrote back, it is my belief that some of these deaths were due to methanol or other substances employed to denature alcohol. 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 Gettler's work exonerated him. It was a bold strategy. But then Duran was never going to just roll over.
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.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but this is a show about screw ups. Duran's gambit worked. Deny, evade, deflect. It's an old playbook, and Duran was a natural. It was practically a reflex for him.
I mean, this is not going to be a confessional moment.
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 kind of 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, 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 Dries in Congress was negligent at best. Personally, I'd go for cruel, reckless, and rooted in a callous disregard for human life. 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 Getler's report, the American public was finally connecting the dots between national prohibition and people dying in their own towns and neighborhoods. And in nineteen thirty 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 newshound 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. 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 as the Evening Star, and the Post is just this small arrival of the city, kind of a gossip newspaper. But they get this great scoop, and they asked 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 baited breath for the next installment of Old George's expose to land on newsstands. Will somebody please arrest me for bootlegging so I can get that kind of press anyway, Three weeks before people were set to cast their ballots in the nineteen thirty midterms, a bombshell landed that made voters reconsider witchbox to check extra extra Read all about it.
The government's hypocrisy on prohibition.
Exposed On October twenty third, nineteen thirty, George wrote, 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.
October twenty fourth, we would have a.
Few rounds of drinks, sing a few songs, and have a general good time. And on the twenty fifth busiest day, I have a put into the House office build and I made forty seven calls on customers kept me hustling from the time the offices opened at three o'clock in
the morning until well along in the evening. On occasions, I've heard members of the House and Senate making strong arguments on the floor the prohibition was being well enforced 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.
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 dryes. It goes national.
Other newspapers around the country are all reporting on this.
This is a scandal, 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.
The last one of them was published one week before the midterm election in nineteen thirty.
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 in their personal habits and tastes, I didn't see it in ten years In and about Congress.
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 caesarre of black book Bear five bucks.
Okay, they definitely went for the Bear 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 nineteen twenty nine it was.
Panic sixteen and a half million shares of stock sold in a single day at any price.
That frenzy set a wrecking ball through the economy.
You have the collapse of the stock market, signaling the Great Depression. People are really getting cynical at this point. Who's just the worst economic catastrophe in our nation's history is absoutely unreal. And the Democrats seized on this. They're like, look, let's create jobs again, alcohol, let's do it. You know, you know, Cassidy had done a huge amount of damage here to the drys 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.
That November, the wets flooded the House, going from seventy six seats to one hundred and forty six. Republican states like Ohio and Illinois and Kansas flung aside dry Republicans for wet Democrats. As for the man who helped push the title wave, George Cassidy was behind bars, locked away, serving his time, well sort of.
According to my mother and Hill, he never spent one full night in jail.
He's sitting around, play with a ward and to play poker and whatnot.
He was handed an eighteen month sentence at a jail about two blocks away from his house on Capitol Hill.
So you go get dressed up in the morning, go into the jail, sign and go do his work in the jail. After his shift was over, he'd come back sign out.
So they let him go home every night.
Ah.
Yes, the old George remas treatment a jail term fit for a king, King of the bootleggers, at least.
As part of Cassie's Lee agreement. He tells the judge he will stop bootlegging. And by the way, I got his FBI folder, he did not stop bootlegging.
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. While 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 whiskies. 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 king, then the members of Congress were I don't know emperors. The point is, even when it's clear and emperor has no clothes, in the American old boy crony system, he can always count on a James Duran
to cover his ass. After the nineteen thirties 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 Durand's crew, having failed miserably in their poisoning campaign, were totally flailing.
The strategy at the federal government was that we're running out of chemical options, Let's try everything.
In nineteen thirty one, Duran's chemists rolled out another new formula for denaturing alcohol.
Formula fifty nine B. Okay, now we've tried fifty eight. Maybe there was a fifty eight A. 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.
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.
I added up all the numbers to about ten thousand deaths. That number is the best estimate that I could come up with for every report I could find from that period in the nineteen twenties. 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.
In the early nineteen thirties, support for the dry cause crumbled. The violence of liquor raids played apart. If you're keeping track, that's Richard Hart and the other agents like him. Corruption at every level of enforcement played a part. Two 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 in Norris's Essay exposed just how callous, how morally indefensible prohibition enforcement had become by the time nineteen thirty two rolled around. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, declared that if elected, on day one of his presidency taps, we're going to be wide open once again.
Yeah, candidate once for apeal.
And I am confident that the United States America want.
For a pail.
You hear that one guy hollering, I love that guy. If my beer mug had been sitting empty in the cabinet for ten years, yeah, I'd be voting for that too.
From this date on the eight ain't Amendment's doom. I pledge myself go a new deal for the American paper.
On election night nineteen thirty two, Roosevelt won in a landslide. All you again, bum ugly 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 twenty first Amendment.
It goes right from Congress right to the states for ratification. The first aid that ratifies it is the crowd state of Michigan, an excellent beer state. I might add the Prohibition Amendment. The eighteenth Amendment took thirteen months to ratify. The twenty first Amendment. The repeal Amendment took eight months, one state after the next. It's just like dominoes. The ell just fell 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. 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 wille Brandt. 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. But by pinning it all on her, they made Mabel escapegoat 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 Porsche her fault by making Mabel Walker win Lebrant 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 nineteen thirty and went back behind the scenes. Behind the scenes position was drum roll 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 Congress's ass, none of those guys we're 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.
The Bureau adapted a new policy on January first, nineteen thirty one. It eliminated the use of wood alcohol. He revoked completely denatured alcohol Formula number one and replaced wood alcohol with a new non toxic dnature and developed after several months of intense research.
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 all that little
poisoning snafoo, 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. 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 honeymun 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 will le Brandt. 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, when prohibition ended, she went to work for
a wine company. It is 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 also 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. Also, I got to 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?
Adios Mabel. It wasn't all your fault. That wasn't not your fault.
Prohibition was a huge mistake in all kinds of ways. What I hope is that we actually learned 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.
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. 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.
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. That's my friend Josh Graham Lynn. He directs a bipartisan anti corruption organization called represent Us and Full Disclosure. I do some work with them too.
But what's ended up happening is there's nothing really preventing lobbyists from taking congress people out to dinner, or hey, you want to borrow my jet, or even worse, Hey you've done a great job in Congress, and when you leave, you should come work for my lobbying firm. We can offer you ten million dollars a year. It's called the revolving door. And it's a huge problem.
Look no further than Mabel Walker, Willebrandt 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. And part of the reason for that is that it's actually better for those in power.
Most people in the nineteen twenties 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 lot of band something that's just stupid.
It's just a mess.
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, bands on weed. We've only just overturned the ban on gay marriage. Since the nineteen twenties, 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. November nineteen thirty three, 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 one hundred thousand dollars 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 bath dub Jen The waiters at Lewis Sherry's on Park Avenue relearn the appropriate wines for each course. A hardy barolo with your steak, maybe a Chardonnay with your chicken cordon bleue. Requests for liquor licenses filed at New York City Hall are coming in at a rate of
one thousand a day. 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, when the hospital was surrounded by bodies.
Bellvue is close to the river. They would stack the bodies up on piers behind the hospital. Sometimes when there was a catastrophe, some kind of multiple fatality thing, the bodies went to Bellevue. And there are actually the newspaper reports of the time where bodies were really stacked up.
That was the thick of prohibition. But now the peers are clear.
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.
Nineteen thirty three, Utah becomes the thirty sixth state to ratify the twenty first 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 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 Gettler's wife, Alice, dropped by the courtroom to see Getler in action.
My grandmother never went to the courtroom, and because he was always in there testifying, and she went there once and the jury found the defend and guilty for murder. He said, if I ever get out and the two people, I'm going to go get you know, the DA and that son of a bitch Gettler.
So after that she went.
She never went to another court case.
That threat brought home the gravity of Gettler'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 in 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. 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.
There was like this Gettler 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 were still alive and still working and training other people.
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. They carried on his legacy. They even called themselves the Gettler Boys. 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 Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callapoly and a kimminy Ekpo.
Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound design by Ben Chuck. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew chug Is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel walkerwell Brandt was played by Kerrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Ryazac
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