Leslie Johns 0:02

Welcome everyone to today's talk on Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. Before we get started, I have a few brief announcements. The first thing is that this talk is being recorded, although only Mark and I can be seen or heard on the recording, so your privacy is being respected. After today's talk, the recording can be heard as both a video and audio recording which can be accessed on the Burkle Center website, as well as on YouTube and on Apple podcasts. So please feel free to share these recordings with your friends or colleagues if they can't be here. Also, please feel free to submit any questions you'd like to ask of the speaker during the talk using the Q&A portal which should be located at the bottom of your screen. Now I'd like to go ahead and introduce our guest for today's talk, which is Mark Schrad. Mark works at Villanova University. He's a professor of political science as well as director of Russian area studies at Villanova University. He has authored three books for Oxford University Press. The one before today's book is a book called Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. So as you can tell by that title, as well as the book that he's going to be talking about today, he's pretty much cornered the market on the study of alcohol and political science. Today's book also was recently announced as the winner of the Best Book in Historical International Relations by the International Studies Association. I expect it will also be racking up some Best Book Awards from the American Political Science Association as well in a couple of months because I can tell you, it's a really compelling, interesting, colorful read. It was my beach book for the summer. Although it's quite thick, and it took quite a while to read, I always really strongly encourage it, everyone here to read it. It was a wonderful book. And now I'm going to go ahead and throw the microphone over to our guest author, Mark, who will go ahead and give us all an introduction to his project.

Mark Schrad 2:31

Excellent. Thank you so much, Leslie, and the Burkle Center. I'm very much looking forward to this, this presentation. And good to see some some familiar faces, and what have you. And I should note that just in passing most of our colleagues here at Villanova, just just right across the hallway there, our colleague Ryan Weldzius, he is a UCLA alum, and he was singing your praises, and was telling me in, you know, in great detail that one of the best things about his time at UCLA, in addition to the copious sunshine, were these, these Burkle Center events. And so I'm hoping to live up to that, to that billing, I suppose in some ways, and so yeah. So welcome. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine. It is ridiculously big. My apologies. I remember when the book first came out, you know, the the author's copies came in the mail, my wife and I just opened them, and we were just laughing hysterically. Why would anybody write such a big book over such a avowedly dry topic? But so the story of the book, I want to give you a little bit of an overview, obviously, we're not going to get into intricate details, a lot of that is in the book. So we can, you know, maybe pick up with some of that on the Q&A in a little bit. But I want to give you a little bit of an overview of the project, kind of where the ideas come from, how the approach, you know, comes into being, and give kind of a glimpse of it. And so if we want to delve into greater details into sort of these global elements of the history of prohibition, we can, we can certainly do that. So I'm going to try to do the share screen feature here. And hopefully, this works. Let's see we'll go there, hit share. And okay, we're, we're sharing now, I hope. And so we'll hit play. So yeah, so this is the, you know, the book here. And so just in terms of the, the approach and how we kind of went with it, I've for a long time, I've been fascinated in a couple of different things. One is Russian history. And so the history again, as Leslie was saying, and my previous book was on Vodka Politics, which is kind of a drunk history of Russia, but looks at looks at the role that alcohol plays in, you know, throughout Russian history. And the thesis of that book is that, you know, alcoholism that we oftentimes associate with Russia, isn't some sort of just cultural factor. It's actually the result of centuries of political and economic decision making that's at the heart of autocratic statecraft. And so that was kind of the, you know, one of the the focuses I suppose, of this. I've always had an interest in Russia things Soviet. But in terms of American history, also I've been fascinated with, with temperance. And I think the thing that unites those two is, you know, for much of our sort of Cold War history, you know, the Soviets and the Russians, I guess, even in contemporary history, are the bad guys. Right? Those are the villains. And, and so, if America and American history if we have villains, it always seems to revolve around the temperance movement. Because they get portrayed as these people like, like Carrie Nation, who you see here on the on the slide, these kinds of hatchet wielding bible thumpers, these evangelical zealots, who are there to take away your freedom to drink. And so they get posed as these, like, again, sort of the the villains of American history. And so I think that kind of interest in who we vilify and why has kind of been at the center of a lot of my, my research going, going way back and so. So if you go into and then again, there's not a whole lot of political scientists who do much with regards to temperance and prohibitionism. I think I might be alone out there in the field as, as Leslie was saying. But if you go into sort of the history literature, and you want to explain why we had prohibition, or prohibitionism in the United States, usually ended up with the works of Joseph Gusfield, who said that it was a symbolic crusade, you know. That it was a backlash of rural nativist reactionary, evangelical zealots, again, against sort of this new wave of modernization and immigration. So it was the last gasp, of the old order. And so I remember actually quite vividly, you know, 2016, Election Night 2016, when Donald Trump was elected, and you had CNN contributor, Van Jones got up on TV, and he, he declared that what we were seeing was what he called a white lash. It was this reactionary movement is the last gasp of rural Protestant evangelicals, that it was zealots against, sort of the modernization of the United States. And this multiculturalism, I was like, that's a great line. That's a great term. But that's the exact same way that we've conceptualized what prohibitionism is in the United States. And so so it's been one of those things that people place temperance and prohibitionism as as kind of this red thread of intolerance throughout American history that goes back, they say, to the Puritans. Goes right through, you know, temperance, and straight into sort of modern, you know, sort of movements to overturn Roe v Wade, and, and sort of the anti abortion rights activism. So that's kind of how it's portrayed. Right. And they suggest that this is a particularly unique, uniquely American phenomenon. And I was like, okay, and this is something I can kind of begin with my first book, which was based on my dissertation, came out as the political power of bad ideas. I said, okay, if that's if I'm not even gonna question that, you know, I'm gonna buy that assumption that this is what prohibition was all about in the United States. But if we take a look at the globe, you know, back around the era of World War One, instead, okay, if that cultural politics explanation is really what's going on is say, well, that may explain why we have prohibition in the United States. But it doesn't explain why you had prohibition also, in all these other countries around the globe, including Imperial Russia, including Turkey, you know, secular Turkey. You've got Norway, Finland, Iceland, all these areas, not a whole lot of Midwestern Bible thumping, evangelical Protestants in all these areas. Furthermore, it doesn't explain why in addition to the areas in red, you have, at the exact same time in all these areas in orange, a movement for greater restrictions on the alcohol trade that oftentimes came up just short of prohibition. And it certainly doesn't explain why, you know, in all the countries in red and orange and in yellow, you have this transnational advocacy network of like-minded individuals focused on temperance that actually goes back to the very origins of transnational activism. And so that was kind of the focus of my first book, which looked at, you know, sort of comparative analysis of the United States and Imperial Russia, and also sort of comparing it to Sweden to see see how these different elements were kind of kind of shaking out and so. So it also made me scrutinize that, you know, when you start to look even sort of rudimentary, that's the global history of prohibitionism, you find that it wasn't uniquely American. There are actually 12 other countries or empires that were, that had instituted some degree of prohibitionism. And the temperance movement itself, rather than being some footnote to history, was actually sort of the most robust, longest lived and most successful global transnational advocacy network in history at that point in time. And so, but also, it started to raise all sorts of really uncomfortable questions about how we understand what prohibitionism actually was. And so if you have this idea that it was just culture clash, it was evangelical Protestants, well, how does that get translated into policy? And certainly, how does that get translated, you know, these cultural elements into, you know, into the 18th Amendment, in particular. The causation, the causal mechanisms are never clearly defined in that particular way.

Second, was this this weird question of if we conceptualize prohibitionism as this right wing reactionary movement, how could you have organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union that was simultaneously reactionary, quote, unquote, in promoting promoting prohibitionism, and very progressive, at the same time pushing for women's rights, suffragists movements, and also made common cause with abolitionist labor? And so that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And furthermore, if you say that, you know, if what describes or you know, what explains prohibitionism was all evangelical Protestantism, well, then why was there no sort of great awakening at that point in time? Actually, if you look at the time or, you know, sort of the progressive era, you know, I guess when it comes to attendance in churches were all very much down. And so it wasn't like there was some huge religious fervor had gripped the nation, just the exact opposite as it was, right. And furthermore, if we'd see prohibitionism as a reactionary movement, how is it that we have this crowning achievement of this reactionary prohibitionism, the passing of the 18th Amendment? It got ratified in 1919, smack dab in the middle of the progressive era. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever, right. And then, of course, if you spent some time sort of just understanding, you know, the conventional wisdom that we have with with prohibitionism, often, a lot of it gets put on to women, they get vilified. They get blamed for putting over prohibition, while the men were up fighting in World War One. Which is another bunch of craziness because we all know, chronologically, the 18th Amendment, which institute's prohibition came before the 19th Amendment, which is when women got the right to vote. So if you look at the record, you know, Jeannette Rankin was the only woman who actually voted for prohibition. All of the all the rest of them were dudes, right? All of them were guys. And so so we start to get prohibition gets intertwined with all these different sort of myths of American history, you know, and, and whatnot. But I think the key is, I want to be cognizant of time here, the key to really understanding prohibition and prohibitionism, is to recognize that prohibitionism wasn't an attempt to ban alcohol, it wasn't about the stuff in the bottle. And if you go back and read the original documents, you find that the phrase that always comes up time and time again, isn't alcohol prohibition, they say they're prohibiting the liquor traffic, and that word traffic is incredibly important, right? Because trafficking in something is different from the thing being trafficked. Right? So conflating those two is a big problem. So for example, you can be very much against human trafficking, which is the process of making money and trafficking human beings, right? And not be against the human beings themselves. You're not against the thing that's being trafficked, you're against sort of the predatory economy of making money by selling and trafficking in this this scarce commodity. And so, so that, I think, is really key, that that focus on the liquor traffic rather than liquor itself. Because even the 18th Amendment didn't prohibit the actual consumption of alcohol, it prohibited the liquor traffic. It prohibited the buying and selling of alcohol in those ways. And so. So I think those are some some key elements just to kind of have the thumbnail sketch of this. But I did want to give you a brief overview of, of the book itself. And it starts off with the you know, with the introductory chapter, what not, so the idea was, was this I said, okay, this was my proposal for the book. Like all right, well, we have a pretty good idea about what caused prohibition in the United States. It doesn't entirely totally makes sense. But my interest was not so much in the United States, but to see what prohibitionism was like in the rest of the world. And so I proposed like maybe a nice little a chapter book. Nice little summary, at the end, a little conclusion, to see what what's, you know, insights we might have for American history and American prohibitionism. And so, so the chapters kind of go unit by the unit of analysis, ultimately, in this case, is an empire. Right? So I look at the different empires. And I start in, in if we go back and look at the world as it was on the eve of World War One, you know, the second chapter takes us to the Russian Empire. And so see, here it is right there. This is kind of the focus again, in my previous book on Vodka Politics. And what you find is that in the Russian Empire, in particular, that, you know, you had a stringent prohibitionism, and it wasn't a movement of conservative evangelical Protestants. But some of the most, I guess, formidable names are people that you would recognize from a cursory look into, you know, the czarist elite czars politics. People like Leo Tolstoy was a, probably the country's foremost prohibitionist because he recognized that at that point in time, the liquor traffic, the vodka traffic, was how the Russian empire of Nicolas the second, 1/3 of all the revenues of the mighty Russian Empire came from selling alcohol to their own peasantry, which is a huge amount, right? And so Lenin also recognized this, he was a prohibitionist as well. And the argument was that, you know, that if you want to bring down this autocratic system, and liberate the peasantry, liberate the people, you have to wean them from the thing that's making them addicted to the alcohol. And it's not just the vodka per se, it's this entire system that profits from selling alcohol to its own people and making them drunk, and disoriented, and everything that kind of comes with that. And so, so Chapter Two looks at, you know, prohibitionism, and a sort of anti authoritarian, sort of communism and looks at it, you know, through so, you know, through the, the guise of some of these, these important leaders like, like Leo Tolstoy, like like Lenin, and so and on. So chapter two kind of focuses on that. Chapter Three takes us next door, and instead of looking at sort of anti authoritarian, communism looks at democratic socialism, in you know, in some of these vignettes, and I do try to, rather than being necessarily about big structures, I try to imply this in stories about significant historical figures, right. So people like, you know, that the first social democratic leader of Sweden, Hjalmar Branting, Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was a member of the temperance organization, as were most social democrats at that point in time. For the same reason that you wanted to have the uplift of the labor movement, that meant, you know, fighting against this entrenched system that was profiting off of getting the people drunk and disoriented. And so, so that chapter looks at Sweden, in particular, in social democracy in Sweden, and for the Communist International as well. But also Belgium, with Emile Vandervelde, who was the head of the, the Socialist International and probably the most outspoken prohibitionist in Belgium at that point in time. But he was also validly outspoken about essentially being anti colonial, you know. So he was the one probably the more than anyone who was standing up against King Leopold's, you know, plans for for the Belgian Congo and the exploitation. Because he saw the same sort of exploitation that was going on in Belgium, where you had, you know, these Belgians going in and getting natives addicted to alcohol so that you could exploit them and exploit their labor and exploit their, their lands and everything they have to offer. He saw the exact same thing that was happening in Belgium proper, with the, with the labor movement. And so it was very interesting to see these sorts of commonalities and we'll get to sort of the the the colonial, anti colonial aspects to it a little bit later as well. So that was sort of the third chapter looked at, looked at socialists moved from Communism to socialism. Chapter four looked at, you know, temperance and prohibition, in sort of the continental empires. In the German Empire, the Austro Hungarian empire, and was associated in this particular case with not necessarily with socialism, but with political liberalism. And so this idea that we need to liberate people we need to, you know, make sure that we have people who are educated and not befuddled, not clouded by drink and who, you know can be contributing members of a democratic society. And so we have people like Tomas Masaryk, sort of the the founding father of modern Czechoslovakia, was a sort of the foremost prohibitionist in his way as well. And so you have that, that same sort of dynamic when it comes to liberalism in the German Empire, and also the Austro Hungarian empire as well.

So again, trying to make sure that we have a good geographic representation of all these different empires, especially through Europe. But obviously, the big one is the British Empire. And so we've got a number of chapters that are just on the British Empire. Chapter five looks at, for lack of a better term, the white British Empire, and so looks at relations, not only within Britain itself, but with regards to Ireland. And so, you know, we have a lot of stereotypes about Irish drinking. But one thing that might surprise you is that 150 years ago, Ireland probably had more temperance members than any other country on Earth. So you had father Theobald Matthew and his his temperance campaign there. Which gets co opted by fellows, like Daniel O'Connell, into this movement against British colonization. The idea was that we need to have Ireland you know, as they said, Ireland, sober Ireland free, you know, so that we can fight against the colonial oppression of the British, because ultimately, it was the British, it was the English in particular, who were profiting from the drunken misery of the Irish there. And so, so chapter three looks at at that those dynamics, not only in Ireland, but also in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the same types of dynamics, time and time, again, that have very, very deep roots. Chapter six then takes us to, I guess, British South Africa, and has a very, very interesting corollary to it. That you have, you know, sort of the British South Africa company, and headed up by Cecil Rhodes or the the imperialists imperialist, as it were fighting against local indigenous African leaders in what is today, Botswana, what was then known as Bechuanaland. But fellas, like like King Khama the third, were adamant that, you know, if there was anything that was worth fighting for, against British colonialism, it was two things. One was, you know, sort of ownership of the land. But second was to keep the white man's liquor out of out of their territories. Because again, you have sort of the introduction of distilled alcohol, for the most part is what we're looking at not fermented beers, not wines, but whiskies, gins, rums, those types of very highly potent and highly profitable concoctions are the things that you had Native leaders that were pushing against. Because they had seen the ruin that, you know, came with introducing these new industrial distillates into a population that are highly, you know, these are highly addictive, highly potent. And they had no previous history with, you know, with this alcohol in these these particular types of cases. And so, that was a very interesting, it really kind of drives home the anti colonial nature of this, when the people who were selling the liquor, the liquor traffickers tended to be white, British men, and the people who were on the temperance and prohibition side were the black African populations and their leaders like like King Khama. So we see that in, in in Botswana. Chapter seven, essentially moves from from South Africa, and actually follows Mahatma Gandhi in particular, as a prohibitionist. You know, sort of cuts his teeth in British South Africa, and then goes to, you know, goes back home to India. But his entire movement, sort of the the non cooperation movement against the British was premised on temperance and prohibitionism, the idea being that not that alcohol itself is bad, but it's alcohol and the up carry revenue that was drawn from it, is going to profits and is going to benefit the British and their military domination over over India, in particular. And so, so that was fascinating to see. Sort of the same sort of dynamics that you have in India, are pretty much the same as you had with the Opium Wars in China as well. That you had opium in China and alcohol in India became the instrument of colonization, just as much as you have with with bayonets and bullets and in many cases. And then finally, I guess, for our purposes, this chapter eight looks at the Ottoman Empire, in particular. Very interesting tapestry of of temperance forces and an alcohol in the former Ottoman areas. But more importantly, you have, you know, with sort of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and World War One, and sort of the the rise of secular Turkey, you have Mustafa Kemal Ataturk there who is, in reality, probably the drunkest leader in world history. He drank, he died very early from liver cirrhosis, because he was drinking, you know, bottles of rocky every single night. So he wasn't exactly, you know, card carrying temperance member. But he was actually instrumental in the institution of prohibition in, in Anatolia in Turkey at that point in time, again, not based upon any personal resentment against alcohol. But the idea was that this is something that is you know, that the benefits from the sales of alcohol are going to benefit the Greeks and the British in particular. And so he says, as a measure this, you know, we need to, if we're going to have a system like this, you know, we should have it so that it benefits our people, rather than those those imperial colonial oppressors. Now, I know that we're, I'm almost out of time here. But we're, and that's, that's where the book was supposed to end. The book, as it turns out, is quite a bit longer than this. But we did, we had a brown bag discussion here at Villanova, and with one of my colleagues, and I kind of presented the story as it was so far, and one of my colleagues across the hallway here, you know, Jennifer Dixon, if you know her, just a wonderful scholar, she says, okay, great. But if we were to buy this hypothesis that you were putting out here, that temperance was not about Bible thumping evangelicals, but was this anti colonial system to push back against sort of predatory capitalism, she says, where are the Native Americans? Where are the Native Americans on your account? And and I was like, you got me, they're not there. But that's the exact moment that this book went from being eight or nine chapters to being eighteen chapters. Because one of the things that happens, and I'll guess, come off of the screen sharing here, one of the things that happens when you take this this kind of perspective, and recognize that it's not about the alcohol that's in the bottle, but against this predatory economy, you find that in the American history, America's first prohibitionists were it's first peoples, were Native Americans. From the very arrival of European colonists, you had, you know, Native American leaders, pushing back against against, you know, sort of this this deprivation. And in fact, the first federal prohibition wasn't the 18th amendment. It actually came in 1802, by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers. You had Native American leaders, including the leader of the Ohio excuse me, the the Miami confederacy of Ohio, Chief Little Turtle pleads with, essentially he goes all the way to Washington, DC, makes common cause with a bunch of Quakers along the way, and pleas the United States government to institute a prohibition against trafficking in what they call the white man's wicked water with Native American populations. And Jefferson thought that was a good idea. You know, all of our elected representatives thought it was a good idea. You know, in order to sort of protect the native peoples against the domination and subordination that comes with, you know, essentially enslaving an entire population to drink. And so you see that, again, from, from from Native American populations, to African American populations, you find that there's a essentially, you know, when you go back to the 1840s and 1850s, temperance was essentially synonymous with abolitionism. So, you know, the top abolitionists of the day: William Lloyd Garrison's, your Abraham Lincoln's, your, you know, you're Frederick Douglass, we're all temperance minded prohibitionist, right. But the idea was that you wanted to make sure that we when it came to the liberation of the African American population, that the chains of slavery don't just slip from the hands of the white slave keeper to the white tavern owner. Right. And so it was the same sort of thing that you know, is a push back against this the system of subjugation, domination and subordination. And so you have, you know, and just to wrap things up here, you know, you have guys like Frederick Douglass, whose famous line was that all great reforms go together. And he met three reforms. He met abolitionism, abolition of the slave trade, suffrageism, women's rights, and temperance. Those were his big three. And the thing that unites all of this and the thing that unites the entire book is that we have to reposition this not as a conservative backlash against modernization and immigration. But this was a fundamentally progressive movement that was part of this global shift in sort of norms of human rights in particular that said, hey, it's not okay for one group of people to take advantage and essentially subordinate another group of people through addiction for profit. And so that you know, that lines up perfectly with abolitionism. That lines up perfectly with suffrageism and is part of the has this kind of global movement of sort of labor rights and progressivism that has its echoes throughout this book, and throughout the throughout the temperance movement as well. So looking at the clock, I think I've run over a little bit, but hopefully we can pick up with some of these these questions as we continue on.

Leslie Johns 30:17

Okay. Thanks so much Mark, I do have to apologize to the audience. It's a huge project. And I did tell Mark, focus on the international. Focus on the international. Because we're an international relations center. I should say, I mean, the second half of the book is really about challenging. It presents, it presents a completely alternative view of American history. I and I think that that is a huge innovation and what the book is doing. So if you are an American history buff that second half the book is really powerful. And and I think, Mark, you've done a tremendous service to American historians in doing that. But, you know, one thing I wanted to talk about, just in our Q&A. And I should say, if you are interested in, in submitting a question to the Q&A, please go ahead and click that Q&aAbutton at the bottom of your screen. And go ahead and type in your question. And I'll be bringing those in. But I wanted to get us started with a few questions of my own. As this book came to my attention initially, through an op ed that Mark had written in The Washington Post, it got published in January. And it did a really amazing job about talking about how our conceptions of human rights or freedoms and rights have changed so much over time and issue that you just alluded to, right? And that I thought it did a really nice job of talking about how, how, in the time period that you're talking about a prohibitionism, there was much more emphasis on sort of social rights, this notion of, of groups as opposed to individuals. And I was wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about how the time period you're talking about. There was a lot more emphasis on the social impact of liquor, as opposed to our more modern conceptions, which tend to think about sort of individual liberties and consumer choices. And and how our notions of rights can change over time.

Mark Schrad 32:27

Yeah, and I think that was, that was what drove me initially into this question. You know, was because, because looking back, you know, I grew up like any kid in the United States. You know, you go through civics class or social studies, and you look at, I kind of looked at the, you know, the Constitution as kind of, like the received wisdom of the United States. Right. And so, you know, that we have, you know, this Bill of Rights, and it looks pretty good, but it needed some updating. So, you know, no slavery, that makes sense, you know. You know, equal rights. Excellent. That's a good thing, right, you know, women should have the right to vote. Great. And but then you get this 18th amendment, you're like, you know, but but no alcohol traffic. Right. Okay, what, what was that about? Right? Yeah. And so, I think for a long time, it was. That was the thing that drove this whole investigation was trying to figure out what it was that about. I can't figure out, you know, wrap our minds around that. It certainly couldn't have been that everybody went crazy. And you know, that you had enough people in the United States to, you know, because we, our self image is of freedom loving, liberty loving individuals, right. That's, that's who we are. Right. And so this idea that these temperance people, including some formative Americans, you know, I guess very important ones, were somehow against freedom and against liberty, you know, the individual right to drink, you know, seemed really crazy. And ultimately, I found that, you know, it's wasn't so much based upon, you know, that the temperance and prohibition movements, you know, were wrong, necessarily. But it's our, we're wrong. We're having a hard time of understanding what was motivating them back in the day, right. And so we come up with all these concoctions. We come up with these conspiracy theories. We come up with, these are arguments that was, you know, it was all women's fault, even though women couldn't vote. Right, you know, while the boys were off fighting in World War One. Well, no, it's not like they missed a vote. There was no vote. Right. And so and actually the, you know, the Congress that got us to the 18th Amendment, you know, was was voted in in 1916, well before any sort of military intervention in World War One by the United States, right. So, so it's like, all these different things. None of it makes sense, in particular. And so the thing that's, that's kind of spurred the the op ed piece was focusing in on how our conceptions change over time. Because we we naturally, I mean, we're all sort of driven by ego, right? We think that we're right. We look at our windows and we assume that you know, that these basic concepts that we've always had forever look the same now, as they ever always had. The basic notions of liberty and freedom. You know, we don't need like a primer on that. We have an understanding of what freedom means, even if you don't have like a textbook definition. And so the question was, and I guess, you know, you're right, in kind of pointing this out, that if you go back to, you know, what was motivating the temperance movement. They were interested more so in these kind of, sort of collective freedoms, right. The the freedom of a subordinated population, whether that's, you know, freedom of self determination of Native American peoples, of African American peoples, during Jim Crow era, in particular, of women, disenfranchised women, right. And so this idea that, that, you know, we have that particular elements to it, I think, is is particularly key. And I think the other thing that kind of happens is, you know, you've got the you've got temperance, you got the prohibition era, you know, after World War One. It kind of slowly dies out through the 1920s. And of course, you get repeal by 1933. And by that time, you know, nobody really wants to talk about it, right? I mean, everybody's just kind of licking their wounds. And it's not like anybody's gearing up for another fight about prohibitionism. And a lot of the people who were fighting for it, you know, those old timey prohibitionists, a lot of them are have died, or are in retirements were very, very old. Right. And so there's nobody there to kind of defend what they were thinking, you know. And so it became very easy for sort of this new round of, of, you know, scholars to come in, and kind of just completely lambaste, you know, and kind of give their own interpretation of what they thought was motivating these these temperance folks. And so that's where you start to get this this, I guess, more of a notion that these are, you know, people who, who hate our freedoms and want to take away our freedom to drink. But the other thing that comes out of that era, is the rise of of that sort of economic neoliberalism. And so the the suggestion that any infringement upon my individual economic freedoms, freedoms to buy and sell, is necessarily also an infringement upon my political liberties. And that's a fundamentally new understanding. Right? That's, that's something that you know, before World War One. Those you know, the, there was a firewall between political liberties and economic liberties. And you can go back and read the Supreme Court findings on questions of temperance and prohibitionism. And they're all universal in this way that you know, nobody has a, you know, you can talk about your freedom to drink. But also, there's a suggestion that you don't have the freedom to sell alcohol. You don't have the freedom to sell a highly toxic poison any more than you have the right to sell, you know, spoiled meats, for instance, or adulterated foods. These are not things that are that are necessarily part of your freedom. So in many cases, that blurring the division between economic liberties and political liberties leaves us in a in something of a distorted view of history. Right. So our own conceptions of what is freedom, and what is not freedom is fundamentally different from people, you know, in the 1920s, 19-teens isn't even before that.

Leslie Johns 38:22

Well. So we do, we do have some questions in the Q&A about, about the repeal of prohibition. So maybe we'll set that aside for the moment knowing that we're probably going to come back to that, because I think that's a really key issue. So, so so we'll, we'll set that aside for a moment because we are going to come back to that, I think. So another thing that I was really struck by and you did allude to this in your presentation, is this distinction between fermentation and distilled liquor, which, you know, I'm not a huge drinker. So I didn't really know the difference until I read the book. But turns out, it's really important. Just for the audience, you know. The sort of metaphor that I had in my mind is I kept having this image in my brain of, you know, journalist accounts that I had read of like the Germans attacking Herero soldiers, right? Where where they have these accounts of like, the Herero soldiers are standing with the spear with these spears in their hands. And the Germans are attacking them with airplanes and machine guns, right? And you're kinda like, okay, like, they both have weapons, right, but one's a spear and one's a machine gun. And, and that's kind of like the metaphor that I kind of got from your description of like, the difference between fermented alcohol and like distilled alcohol, right. And, and so and so the the impression I sort of get is this that like, colonialism was bringing in like, yes, the society has already had alcohol. But like it's a fundamentally different sort of technology that's bringing that's being brought into these societies. And that it's just clobbering the natives once they're being exposed to it. Is that like a fair way of thinking about the role of alcohol? You know, in terms of how people are engaging with the drink in these societies?

Mark Schrad 40:19

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, there's a, the one that was similar to what you're saying sort of, that impressed me was David Christian who's gone on to, I think he does, like big history stuff now. But he used he started out as a Russian alcohol historian. And he had this great line once upon a time in the history of Russian alcohol. He talked about the transition from fermented beverages, you know, your beers, wines, meades, ales, those sort of thing, you know, to sort of these high potency industrial distillates. He kind of made an analogy to sort of the, the invention of gunpowder, right? And, like you say, so, you have something of a potency that's well far and above anything that native populations were ever used to, right. And so, so when you have, you know, European colonization and going to other parts, you know, going to North America or South Asia or Africa, in some cases, there's no history of alcohol consumption. In other cases, there's some history of fermentation. You know, very light wines, beers, palm oils that are palm wines, that kind of stuff. But there isn't this high potent distilled liquors, you know that your whiskies, your rums, your your vodkas, I suppose. And those are, those are, you know, industrial revolution developments. Those are industrial distillates, right. Those are part of that particular process. And it really does change, like the entire dynamic of colonialism. It's fascinating how much of colonization of the world gets done as much through a bottle as it does through bayonets and bullets, right. So imagine if you're a, you know, if you're a white colonial trader, and you're going out of new either to North America, and you want to trade furs, or if you're going to Africa, and you want to trade, you know, palm, rubber or something along those lines. You know, you could go into a native community as kind of an outsider. And maybe you have some wares that you can trade, you know, those pots and pans, maybe you've got some blankets, or whatnot. And you can trade spices, or you can trade furs, or whatever it is that you need, and you can make a profit on that's great. But those populations had been there for hundreds and hundreds of years without you, right. You're not necessary to how they've been continuing their lives forever. But so if you know, and if you trade with them a pot, you know, they can use that iron pot or iron kettle for the next 20 years, they're not going to need another one. So you're not exactly important to that trade relationship. But if you can introduce this high potent alcohol, and you can get people addicted to it. And these are people who don't have any history of industrial distillation, and don't know how to do it. Suddenly, you know, you've got something with constant perpetual renewing demand. There's always going to be demand for the thing that you're selling. And you've suddenly got a monopoly on it, because nobody else around you can produce it, except for the other white colonial traders, right. And so this becomes part of, you know, this process of domination and subordination, getting people addicted to this. This highly potent thing so that they can get more furs. So they can extract more resources, so they can extract more labor and send more people down into the gold mines and the diamond mines in South Africa or, you know, harvesting rubber plants or you know. Even here in the United States, if you look at, you know, the American Fur Company, which is what, you know, got John Jacob Astor all of his millions and millions of dollars, it was the exact same dynamic, getting Native American populations hooked on alcohol. And then, you know, using that and the promise of more alcohol, to trade with the one thing that they could have that the white traders wanted, which were, you know, minks and furs and all these other other elements. And so a very interesting sort of colonial dynamic that we just kind of miss out on. Because for the most part, our understandings of temperance and prohibitionism, has traditionally been couched as kind of white people's politics, right? It only comes into the history books, when you start to have you know, sort of white women in the the 1840s 50s 60s. You know, start taking up the mantle with regards to suffrageism. And so we miss out on that legacy of colonialism. That's just the same in the United States. It is as it is in Africa and South Asia and many other places.

Leslie Johns 44:42

And then one, one natural thing that follows up on that notion of creating a demand for your products that only you can satisfy. You know, can we draw any implications from your work for thinking about the the opioid epidemic? You know, obviously, we see a lot of, you know, intense activism within the US, certainly in terms of people trying to deal with the opioid epidemic. There definitely seem to be class based distinctions or socio-economic elements to, you know, who tends to be disproportionately affected by it. Although it seems like the the strategy seems to be legally based, right, trying to sort of sue the companies that make these products, rather than an outright sort of banning of the products. I don't know, have you, have you thought about sort of drawing that connection out more explicitly?

Mark Schrad 45:43

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's, uh,

Leslie Johns 45:45

You mention about that a few times in the book. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Schrad 45:48

I kind of come from it from the opposite direction, right. So my interest is, is not so much trying to, you know, enlighten, present-day politics. It's more to get a better understanding of what was happening 100 years ago, right. And so I think 100 years ago, it was, I guess, two years ago was the centennial of the 18th amendment. And I wrote this piece, it was ended up in the New York Times, and focus particularly on that question of how do we understand, you know, temperance history. And that was sort of my way of saying, you know, it because people liked it a lot, make a lot of parallels with, you know, the drug war, you know, with regards to prohibition as the same sort of, you know, when it comes to to cannabis, for instance, or comes to pot? As like, I don't know, that's probably not quite the right analogy to, you know, sort of the temperance and prohibition movement. But really, the opioid epidemic is, right. So if you're, the argument that I was making there is that if you are okay, with, you know, Purdue pharmaceuticals, going out and getting people addicted to to opioids, and then literally sucking them dry, you know, and then leaving them, you know, to to be not only addicted, but in many cases end up, end up dead, just for your own profits. You know, well, I guess that's on you if you're okay with that. But, but if you're not, if you think that there's something kind of morally reprehensible with that, well, congratulations. 100 years ago, you were probably a temperance member, because that was the exact same argument. It wasn't about, you know, again, the morality of, of the stuff that's in the bottle, necessarily, but it was more about is it okay, for one group to profit from the, you know, subordination and, and drunken misery of another population? And so I think that that, for me was the interesting, the interesting analog. And if there is, I guess, a, you know, sort of a lesson from contemporary politics that might be you know, what we see after Prohibition, right, is that you end up having a movement, sort of devolve in control of the liquor trade to the states, right. And so you get state level level alcohol dispensaries. And guess what, you know, we're starting to see these pop up all across the United States. You've got, you know, marijuana dispensaries, right. And the idea is that it's regulated, it's safe. And it generates tax revenue at the same time. So trying to minimize the policy externalities of the trade, but also trying to increase revenues and whatnot. So, so yeah, it's an interesting dynamic.

Leslie Johns 48:15

Okay, now turning to the Q&A from the audience members, one of our guests asks, are there any otherwise unassuming global industries or trades in the present, which you feel play a similar part in modern systems of repression, which may not be fully appreciated by people today?

Mark Schrad 48:38

Ooh, that's a good one. I really haven't thought too much about that. You know, other than, again, opioids, I think this idea of hooking somebody for for profit.

Leslie Johns 48:49

You have a lot of typewriters behind you. I'm wondering if you might have a hidden hatred of computers.

Mark Schrad 48:57

No, no. Got a new one on here.

Leslie Johns 49:01

Okay, you're working on a computer. I didn't know if you wanted us all to go back to typewriter.

Mark Schrad 49:06

No, no. Although it is it is situated on another typewriter. So it's, it they are they've kind of taken over at some, you know, to some degree. But in terms of, you know, things that are, you know, sort of an addictive nature. So I think questions of gambling, right, you know, so if you've got lotteries, gambling, these are other things that people can get addicted on, but it profits the state to some, you know, actually a ridiculously large decree. And so, you know, having a push back against those sorts of addictive type things, gambling, cigarettes, you know, anything that I think has that addictive quality that you can make money on, I think there might be a possible analog there.

Leslie Johns 49:47

Okay, um, we have a couple of questions asking about the rollback of prohibition. And the people who've written in about this have written that it's that the prohibition in the United States partly ended to stem the huge rise in crime and power of the mafia that operated and controlled the black alcohol market. Prohibition was considered a social failure from that perspective. I don't know if you'd agree with that. But that's certainly sort of the conventional wisdom, or at least, you know, what I was taught in public school. Do you see that kind of story in the other societies that did adopt prohibition? Why did temperance movements end in other areas of the world? I know that when you mentioned the rollback of prohibition, you mentioned a few minutes ago, you mentioned that a lot of the people who spearheaded the drive sort of died or retired, and that there was a rise of neoliberalism as an ideology. You didn't mention sort of the mafia and crime, you know. So that was kind of interesting that your perspective didn't align with what the conventional wisdom is.

Mark Schrad 51:11

Yeah, that's, that's an that's another thing. I spend way too much time, like on Twitter and whatnot, seeing and just do like keyword searches to see just kind of what the popular understanding is. And the place where always pops up is one in libertarian circles, where prohibition is, is seen as sort of the Antichrist in many cases. But also when it comes to sort of pot regulation, and, and, and everything else that they say, well, you know, we obviously should have learned our lesson, because, you know, prohibition only begets organized crime and whatnot. And, you know, I would agree that in many cases, that that is certainly the case. And I do see, you know, the first book I wrote was The Political Power of Bad Ideas, right, you know. The idea that prohibition is a bad idea, it's not a very good policy, and in fact, it got repealed. So, you know, obviously, I'm not out here saying that it was, it was a great idea, by any stretch of the imagination. But what's also really weird about when you start to get into the the substance of it, is that if you go back to the reasons for prohibition, again, the idea was that it was fighting against, you know, that's why I called it this, you know, Smashing the Liquor Machine. Because the liquor machine, it wasn't about, you know, I think the original title was going to be like the war on alcohol, which is Lisa McGirr, you know, title essentially. But it wasn't a war on the stuff that's in the bottle. It's about the machine. It's about machine politics. It's about big city, you know, politics, where you see in, you know, in places like Chicago, New York City, where you actually had the prohibition movement was fighting against organized crime. Because that was, you know, you had, you know, you had the liquor trade was intimately intertwined with, you know, buying politicians in big city boroughs. Right. And so there's entire chapters in here on, you know, sort of, you know, the first mob boss, you know, Isaiah Rynders, Captain Renders, in New York City. And so yeah, the organized crime didn't start with prohibition, it actually started with the liquor trade, you know, 100 years before 50 years before prohibition. And the prohibitionist movement was a fight against that. Of course, essentially, what they did is took the ostensibly legal alcohol trade and pushed it underground, which isn't a good idea, right? That's, that's just gonna make it make it even worse, which is essentially what happened. But it wasn't as though you know, everything was just fine. We had this perfectly functioning, you know, capitalist trade in alcoholic beverages, you know, before the 18th Amendment. It was a highly corrupt system. And that was part of the argument of, you know, the the prohibitionists. Was that this was part of this kind of progressive movement to cleanse the body politic of all these, you know, these, these, these problematic forces that were there to corrupted, you know, with with, ill gotten money and so on. And so they did see sort of this, the liquor trust of, you know, sort of these these big breweries, big distilleries that were influencing politics. You know, they saw them as as kind of the enemy. And so the idea that, you know, we can abolish this would, you know. If you keep the focus on on the liquor trade, rather than the liquor itself, it's interesting to see how those dynamics played out. Because the one thing and I know, we're kind of running a little short on time, is, is that there's always been this like, historical debate as to whether or not prohibition was successful. Obviously, it gets repealed, that seems like an outright failure. But also, you know, we also look back in the same sort of distortion that we have between trying to take our modern understandings and project them back into history when it comes to understandings of freedom and liberty. We also have the same thing when it comes to alcohol, right. So you had like the, the anti saloon league and all these these organizations. You know, nowadays saloon sounds like a wonderful kind of an old timey Western, you know, wild West saloon, that kind of thing. And I talked about this in the conclusion of the book, we have this thing I call I just called the Ted Danson effect, right. That we assume that you know that the saloon keeper is this guy like Ted Danson on Cheers, who's gonna bend your ear, and he's gonna listen to your problems. And if you've had too much to drink, he's going to pack you in a cab. And so, no! The saloon keeper was like, the, you know, the the pawn broker. He was, you know, oftentimes a local pimp, you know, he was running the gambling dens. He was, and that's why he was very much influencing local politics was to, you know, corrupt the system so that they would look the other way. And so the entire system that was in existence before Prohibition was completely different from what we're now used to, nowadays. And the one the one sort of anecdote that got me and kind of blew my mind and made me realize just how far we've come in terms of regulation of the liquor traffic was Carrie Nation. And so you know, I had the picture up there earlier, you know, the hatchet wielding Carrie Nation who, the saloon smasher of Kansas, right? She was out there. She'd go in and smash up these saloons and send the, you know, the barflies to flights and so on. You know, what time of day was was Carrie Nation going in and smashing up saloons and sending all these people, you know, these drunkards to flight? Usually, she was doing it between seven and eight o'clock in the morning. And the people who had been drinking there had been drinking there all night, because there was no closing hours. There were no opening hours, and people would just drink there constantly, there was no regulation of the system. And so now the idea that you know, that you would have bars that were open at seven o'clock in the morning, eight o'clock in the morning, you know, seems ridiculous to us. It's and that's, I think, more evidence of sort of this normative change over time, that we just kind of miss out on if we just take our contemporary understandings of politics and alcohol, and just try to project it back in time. Because that's not what history says, was actually going on back then.

Leslie Johns 56:59

Okay. And one last final question, since we just have a few minutes left, from one of our guests. Do you feel that there are any lessons from this historical social movement for contemporary global social movements about how to be effective, how to organize things like that tactics?

Mark Schrad 57:23

Oh, that's a good one, um. The parallels that I've seen in many cases, especially being part of doing the International Relations discipline, and having that focus on like, transnational advocacy networks, like the CAC and CIG Inc. You know, kind of notion, one of the things I think they miss on miss out on is that, you know, a lot of it is contemporary focused, right. And you say, if you read Activists Beyond Borders, they kind of assume that it all begins with like, the global anti war movements and women's networks, and at the beginning of like, the 1960s, and so on, and see it as very much a modern phenomenon. But if you go back, you know, and recognize, like, like, temperance, you see, actually kind of a lifecycle, right, it kind of grows and evolves over time. And like, any lifecycle, eventually declines, and, and dies, right? So we don't have really a global temperance movement anymore. We do have some organizations like the International Order of Good Templars kind of morphs into different ways. And now it's interested in things like, you know, curbing cigarette addiction, and helping developing countries and all sorts of stuff, but for the most part, we don't have it anymore. So it's kind of a dead movement in that way. And I guess there are different ways of thinking about how these movements evolve and die. I mean, they can die in one way, which is that they ultimately achieved their goals. Right, you know, so if your focus is on, you know, saving the environment, having, you know, and dealing with climate changem if, you know, knock on wood, that were able to somehow, you know, meet the Paris Climate Accords and development goals, maybe, you know, 100 years, 150 years, you know, we'll look back on, you know, the international environmental movement as, as kind of a passing fad, as it were, you know, that was there to confront a particular challenge at that point in time. But it's no longer necessary, right? But the other thing, and I guess maybe this would be the lesson for, for contemporary, transnational advocacy networks or organizations is, is not to be not to be content, you know. And so I think what happened to the temperance movement in particular, especially in the United States, after the 18th Amendment was passed, and no amendment had ever been repealed to that point, you know, from from the US Constitution. Everybody just kind of like, okay, our job here is done, you know. So we did what we're here to do, and, you know, all these organizations start to fall apart. The you know, the Anti-Saloon League, you know, falls apart, effectively in the early 1920s. The Women's Christian Temperance Union does as well. They lose subscribers, they lose adherence, and the whole thing kind of falls apart, right without recognizing that, you know, that that was only part I guess of, of what would be a sustainable long term goal. And so I would say, you know, just making sure that you, you know, don't pack things up when you think that victory is assured because as we've seen, these things can be rolled back over time as well.

Leslie Johns 1:00:15

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And thanks to all of our guests for joining us for this great discussion. As a reminder recordings both video and audio recordings will be available on the Burkle Center website, as well as YouTube and Apple podcasts. Please feel free to share these recordings with your friends and colleagues. And please be sure to join us for our future book talks at the Burkle Center. Bye everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai