On the 32-year-old lawyer put in charge of enforcing Prohibition in the 1920s. DiLiberto goes on to say that men in power assumed women would vote as a bloc and wanted a woman in a big job to win them over. The episode traces how Prohibition's failure led to Alcoholics Anonymous.
All of a sudden, there's a woman, Mabel Walker Willibrandt, who is this young lawyer who was the head of enforcing prohibition during the jazz age.
Miss Mabel Willebrandt was 32 when she was appointed U.S. assistant attorney after an early career shaped by fighting for women convicted and punished for doing sex work. Overnight, she became an extremely powerful force in the U.S. government and was given the massive, unpleasant task of enforcing the ban on alcohol.
It was an impossible job, impossible to do. Prohibition was impossible to enforce. So of course they gave it to a woman. So women never did vote as a block from the get-go, but the men thought that they were going to vote with a block and they figured they had to have some women in power so that all the women would be excited because the Republicans had given a big job to this woman. And so they were looking for a woman and she fit the bill. So that's how she got the job.
Mabel and the Dries were up against a nation hell-bent on drinking. The people who did continue to drink during prohibition tended to really commit and now had this rebellious, politicized reason to continue to drink. And quickly, gangs of working class men became central figures in illegal alcohol sale and consumption in larger cities. And it's here where a lot of similarities with the failed war on drugs crops up. Because alcohol is illegal to sell and people will seek it out either way, the alcohol that is sold illegally goes through no quality check and can be cut with any number of dangerous ingredients. So today, that's cutting cocaine with fentanyl. During prohibition, this meant cutting booze with ingredients found in paint thinner, which resulted in thousands becoming blind or even dying. So people who drank were not just being criminalized by the government, they were more at risk than ever, which makes it interesting that we don't really teach prohibition in schools and even more interesting that these parasites. Parallels with the war on drugs never seemed to come up. I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat. Okay, by the mid-1920s, cracks had already begun to show as the supporters of the dry side added some rather scary people to their ranks. While prohibition was initially championed by feminists, abolitionists, and unions, the KKK leader came out in strong favor of prohibition policies, using the issue as a recruitment tool for cleaning up the neighborhood by implicating that anyone who didn't align with white Protestant nationalism was more likely to be a violent alcoholic. That is, Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Meanwhile, the Speakeasy held potential to be a more progressive space than the saloon. Some speakeasies, not all, were racially integrated decades before Jim Crow laws ended. And it was there that jazz music and vaudeville acts could really flourish, where women could explore newfound sexual freedom. Quick sidebar here, because it is so funny to me. There's this historian in the Ken Burns documentary who states confidently that it is during this sexual revolution of the 1920s that men discovered the clitoris, which is certainly a claim he gives no sources. Mabel Willibrandt worked hard to frighten the speakeasy operators of New York and Chicago with little success. But the Anti-Saloon League had considerable political influence throughout the 20s and even helped get a dry candidate elected president in 1928 in the form of Herbert Hoover. Although it's worth saying, Herbert Hoover did drink. Imagine a politician being a hypocrite. In classic American fashion, the Dries ignored the working class, immigrants, and any non-Protestant as they tend to to this day. But in another interesting twist, one of the first people that Drys seemed to take seriously as a threat to prohibition was kind of one of them, a wealthy white Republican woman.
That the jazz age opened up the whole world of drinking to women who didn't drink before, and sexual freedom, and smoking, and all of this behavior that was considered naughty before suddenly becomes very cool. And also, those suffrage leaders and the leaders of the temperance movement were getting old, and now they were these old fogeys, you know, and they were like the opposite of the glamorous, youthful, fun-loving flapper. And so nobody wanted to follow them anymore. And that coincides with the rise of Pauline Sabin.
Pauline Sabin was the heiress to the Morton Salt Fortune, and she started one of the most effective anti-prohibition organizations in the country, an organization exclusively made up of women.