2:30:47 And Australian scientists have found that a type of immune response in the brain is linked to how we respond to alcohol. They were coming up with the Stay Sober pill. Which will fit right into our final clip. So you can drink as much as you want and you'll still stay sober. So set that clip up for me one more time, John. Yeah, this is Ken Burns, the documentarian who's always on PBS and made all his money there. And this thing I think kind of changed his attitude about his worldview a little bit from extremely liberal to a little more conservative. And it's about prohibition. It's just kind of the wrap up of the story and kind of the key to how it got started and some of the bad actors.
2:31:34 Some of the crap it's just a very kind of a summary of prohibition Happened in the 20s in the United States where they banned the sale of alcohol correct for 14 years, right? That was the 20th amendment or the 18th 18th amendment later repealed by the 21st and yet when it also brings up the question if marijuana is illegal why isn't there a constitutional amendment the same way there was with prohibition a A, well it's because we all want it, it's the drug companies who don't want to plant weaselin' in on their business. Why isn't there a constitutional amendment? How can it be legal to make marijuana illegal the same way alcohol was made? It had to be a constitutional amendment. It's because the government's decided they don't need constitutional amendments, they can just do what they want.
2:32:18 These questions and more will be answered for you on Thursday. Coming to you from the Hilltop Watchtower Crackpot Command Center in the morning, I'm Adam Curry. And from Northern Silicon Valley where we're producing the 10th poll of all podcasts, I'm John C. Dvorak. No Agenda producer update coming up after the show live on the stream and we'll be back here Thursday on No Agenda. The right to vote and had absolutely no rights at the beginning of the 19th century but who through their support of abolition and temperance began to find that voice, began to achieve that agency, began to act outside the house in powerful and interesting ways. That movement ebbed and flowed. It was of course hijacked by those who thought not just temperance
2:33:01 but total abstinence, capital T total abstinence would be the best thing. And of course a new modern single issue movement was born that blotted out the efforts of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other periodic crusades that were sponsored by women across the country and taken over by the single most effective and powerful lobbying organization in the history of the United States. Something a group that I had never heard of going into this project called the Anti-Saloon League. Its leader, Wayne B. Wheeler, was as powerful as any human being has ever been outside of holding public office in the United States, and I had never heard of him either. It was said of Wayne B. Wheeler that he could make the Senate of the United States sit up and beg, and he did, and they did.
2:33:53 It is an interesting and fascinating story as the Women's Christian Temperance Union was sort of shoved aside and the Anti-Saloon League with its single issue campaign. They wanted only one goal, the elimination of alcohol and worked tirelessly to do it. And they were willing to compromise on nothing and yet willing to make alliances with anybody if it would advance their goal. when Myron T. Herrick, who was the very popular but moderate Republican governor of Ohio, said he thought that local towns should have a voice in what they were doing. The anti-Saloon League got him unelected and the Democratic challenger, who was thought to have no chance in the race, elected in his place. It is a fascinating story which seems
2:34:43 ultimately modern in every respect. They were turning out tons and tons and tons of anti-liquor propaganda every month from their plant in Westerville, Ohio, which was their headquarters, a town just north of Columbus. It is a fascinating story. But what is more fascinating is how a majority of Americans came to embrace the notion that we needed an amendment to the Constitution that actually limited human freedom when every other amendment to the Constitution has actually expanded human freedom. That has been the American model. We have moved forward into our uncertain future by extending to our citizens more rights than they had before. This is the only amendment
2:35:32 that actually curtailed those rights. And by the turn of the 20th century and in the first two decades of that tumultuous century, we found a huge, strange collection of people who were for prohibition in some way, shape or form. Progressives were for it as well as the very conservative anti-saloon league. Democrats as well as Republicans Prohibition came to be seen as a way to solve all of society's ills, that we could just swallow this pill, this magic bullet, this panacea which would change everything. That every family would be improved, that the slums would empty, men would walk upright, the evangelist Billy Sunday said. Women would smile, children would laugh, and hell would forever be for rent.
2:36:22 if this amendment went through. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were for it because they thought that alcohol weakened the output of their working man. The Wobblies, the radical labor union of the IWW, the International Workers of the World, were for it too. They saw prohibition, they saw alcohol as a capitalist plot to destroy the working man and joined this odd bandwagon towards prohibition. We had the NAACP was for it, Booker T. Washington arguing always and passionately for a black advancement and the development of a black middle class saw the obstacle of alcoholism as central or as a huge enough problem that they needed to join that bandwagon. But then the Ku Klux Klan was for it too.
2:37:18 They were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-black, and the last thing they feared was a black man with a bottle in one hand and a ballot in the other. Everything coalesced around it. And then finally, as we moved into the second decade of the 20th century, two things sort of made it a reality. The first was was the 16th Amendment. Now, the Anti-Saloon League shrewdly allied themselves, many would say cynically allied themselves, with progressive groups interested in the redistribution of wealth in the United States because there was in that time, as we argue and debate today, a huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots. The Gilded Age and the Robber Barons had squeezed the middle class,
2:38:04 The poor were rising in their ranks, the rich were getting richer, and progressive movement wanted among a number of agendas to redistribute the wealth in the United States. They thought the best way to do this was to pass an amendment to the Constitution that would initiate an income tax. Strangely, the Anti-Saloon League joined with them because they knew that by supporting this amendment, they would ensure that the liquor industry, the brewers and distillers, would no longer have the symbiotic relationship they had with Uncle Sam. Because up to that point, fully 70% of all internal revenues for the federal government came
2:38:46 from taxing beer and spirits. And despite local prohibition movements, the beer and the liquor industries were confident that they would never be disconnected from their, the person most addicted to them, which was the federal government. The income tax proved them wrong and they found themselves in deep trouble. Devorak.org slash N-A Adios, mofo.
