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democracy. >> now it's my pleasure to interviews kathryn smith. kathryn smith is a journalist and history writer with a long-time interest in fdr and his time. she is the biographer of marguerite alice, who is fdr's private secretary, counselor, confidante until 1941 and defacto white house chief of staff. in addition to her book "the gate keeper", kathryn authors a mystery series with kelly durham and impersonates lahan for tell-all talks for life with the roosevelts, and given more than 100 presentations at the library, little white house, and the national world war ii museum. her most recent book is baptists and bootleggers, a prohibition expedition

throughout the south with cocktail recipes and the repeal. 18th amendment one of the greatest achievements of the early new deal and she lives in south carolina with her husband leo. please welcome -- join me in welcoming kathryn smith. [applause] >> well, i was telling patrick, if i had samples i might have drawn in bigger crowds today. baptists and bootleggers, you might wonder how i came up with that title. the answer is my father is it an economist, an academic economist and bought many years at clemson university and he had a theory he developed a theory of government regulation about 35 years ago that he called bootleggers and baptists and the way the theory goes, is that regulation will be more durable if there is a coalition

of moral interest pushing for it and capitalists who have a profit motive. and the example he gave was on sundays in the south, it was illegal to sell alcohol and some places it sill is. and a baptist, it's a sin to drink on sundays and most other days, too. the bootleggers in favor of it, it opens the market for them, the only place to get alcohol. so bootleggers and baptist. well, i have a son, adam smith, with a c, adam c. smith and a few years ago he and my father co-authored a book about bootleggers and baptists and it was a case study called bootleggers and baptists. >> and i was proud of them.

50 years difference and tell people and get the title out, bootleggers and baptists, that sounds like a fun book and have to say, well, it's an economics book, it's interesting, but it's not really fun. and so then i thought what if i wrote a fun book about boop leggers and baths, the real bootleggers and baptists during the prohibition errors and so with their permission, i flipped it, baptists and bootleggers, if one ordered mine and got theirs, or ordered mine and got theirs, and where are the cocktail recipes. what so that's what i did. i went through early america, the colonial period and how did we ever get the position by 1919 congress and the american

public thought it would be a good idea to ban alcohol. we were a nation of drunkards, really from the beginning. and ken byrnes used that as one of the titles for his great series on prohibition and it was a tradition of really heavy drinking, it began when the pilgrims came on the mayflower they got blown off course and supposed to be in virginia and wound up in massachusetts and the reason they stayed on shore, they were running out of beer and they thought we've got to start growing something so we can make some beer to drink, and half of them died anyway, it was a bad decision, probably by alcohol. and you think about washington and his men, they didn't always have food at valley forge, but almost always had rum. and one of my favorite heroes of the revolutionary war is a

man named francis marion, from the low country of south carolina, near charleston. and he was a continental army officer and the british had already captured savannah and were headed to charleston and he went to a dinner party that was hosted by someone else for the other-- some other officers in the army and the tradition at the time was if you had a dinner party for gentlemen, you would lock the dining room doors and no one could leave until they were either all under the table or they'd run out of punch and madeira wine. and francis marion was a fairly obstemious fellow and he jumped out the word or fell or pushed and broke his ankle. and meanwhile, the british captured charleston and all of the continental army officers had to take an oath that they

would not fight anymore against the crown and even if it called up, they'd have to fight for the crown or else they were sent on to st. augustine prison in florida or put on these awful prison ships out in the charleston harbor and you know how hot it is there right now, you can imagine what it must have been like. but francis marion because he was out of town, as soon as he could get back on a horse, which was a good look for him because he was this little runty guy about five feet tall and his legs were kind of deformed and knees knocked, put him on a horse and looked pretty. ... a band of gorilla fighters in the swamps of south carolina. so he was called the swamp fox by the british commander because he was just impossible to catch. and and the place that he worked out of became known as hell h

>> and the place to work out how became known as hellhole swamp because the british commander said it was one s hell of a hole of a swamp. men usually h it became a hotbed of moonshine making. francis and a few other leaders from south carolina turn the tide of the revolution, drove the british out and that was the end of the war but it was not the end of the drinking. by the 1820s, 1830s the amount of alcohol consumed by thet average adult in the united states was about seven gallons of pure alcohol a a year. i don't mean seven gallons of beer, seven gallons of wine or even seven gallons of whiskey. i mean the pure alcohol. today it's about two and a half gallons. so that tells you something about how much people drank. i shared that fact in a talk is getting added distally one time and a man by the bar said some of you people are not doing your part.

however, by about the 1820s and 1830s is when people realized there was a problem. part it was realized by women in this movement began called temperance that was led by people like elizabeth cady stanton and susan b. anthony. because women were suffering. they could not vote. they were a real patchwork of laws but propertypa they could own. so theta property rights were vy uncertain. there was no divorce. if a woman left her husband he could keep the children. these drunken husbands were just becoming a real problem. not that there were some drunken women, too, so that was the beginning of what was the temperance union. susan b. anthony asked to speak to an organization called the sons of temperance and they wouldn't let her speak. like, i don't need to hear from

you girls. she would often decidedo to work for women's suffrage and other rights, and the two movements were very tightly intertwined, suffrage and prohibition,, temperance. then the civil war comes along and abraham lincoln decides to raise money of the union army i putting an excise tax on alcohol which would not had since the jefferson administration. it starts out with two cents a gallon and works it up to two dollars a gallon by the end of the war. and when the south was welcomed act into the bosom of the country, these people up in the mountains who haden been making moonshine for generations are being approached by revenue agents say hey, buddy, we want that excise tax. we have to pay the bills of the union army. this was not real popular in the south at the time. it began a time of what these themselves block aiders and they were having whiskey words, moonshine wars in the

mountains. originally the moonshine makers against the revenue agents but then it got to be more a moonshine makers were at war with each other fighting for that market share. about 1874 and organization was started called the women christian p temperance union, wctu.. there maybe people here like me who had a grandmother who was a member of the wctu, you always think of the lips that touch liquor will never touch my motto. they had others but they were known for their big white ribbons. the lady who was the leader for many years wass frances willard who was just a genius at organizing and speaking and writing and persuasion. i'm really convinced she could've led the d-day invasion with much less loss of life. they were also a very much allid with the suffragists, and anything they could do to

empower women. one of their causes was to raise the age of sexual consent from ten to 16, which finally happened in my state of south carolina in 1895. my favorite person in the book was a member of the wctu, a radical member, named carry a nation. she was born in kentucky during the civil war and her first husband was a very alcoholic doctor. she must've been pretty naïve because she didn't realize he was a drunk until after they married. he was dead and in the yearg her with a small baby, and she woke up one year at age 52 living with her second husband in medicine lodge cans and decide that the lord had told her she neededon to start on a mission to destroy saloons. so she wrapped up her weapon of

choice that day was rocks and she and the methodist minister went to a saloon, i'm sorry, the methodist ministers wife come with a hand organ yelling hands of the top of their voices breaking mirrors, breaking windows, wrecking the place. it eventually they wiped out all the saloons in medicine lodge. kansas was supposed to be a tri-state but in practice it wasn't. then she moved on to bigger and better things, bigger and better towns and more effective weaponry. her favorite was theit little hatchet that she would get at hardware stores. and carry a nation was never photographed without her bible in one hand and her hatchet in the other. loving home defender. she cut a wide pass through the country when all the way to new york all the way down to miami. she went to england. she went to washington demanded

have an audience with theodore roosevelt. she was turned away. she went to congress demanded to speak to a joint house of congress. she was turned away. but instead she stayed up in the lady's gallery where she sold miniature hatchet pins to raise money for her cause quite a character but by the time she died in 1912 there had been a lot of advances in states going dry, especially in the south and in baptism bootleggers, i decided to look at the south during prohibition because we went dry before much of the rest of the country and had gotten really really good it producing transporting and selling alcohol by the time the rest of the country got dry. georgia went dry in 1907 by 1919 every state in the south was dry. except for one should not surprise you it was, louisiana. and it really never did go dry.

now one of the supporters of the temperance cause was eleanor roosevelt, which is not surprising for several reasons one is she was very involved involved in the suffragist movement. the other was her family history of severe alcoholism her father had been severely alcoholic and died when she was a small child. she had alcoholic uncles eventually an alcoholic brother one of her children had some pretty bad problems with it. so she was not a fan of drinking. fdr on the other hand mina was a social drinker so he kind of called himself a damp. until it became politic to become a wet. so is the the century is moving on after you are becomes assistant secretary of the navy to josephus daniels who was a newspaper publisher from raleigh, north carolina a great

advocate of temperance and really josephus daniels is assistant secretary of the navy under woodrow wilson his big cause was wiping out sin, which if you've ever met a sailor, you know, what a tall ordered that is and he banned any beverage stronger than coffee on ships bases and even in the officers' mess which is why we still call a cup of coffee a cup of joe after joseph is daniel. so fdr was his lieutenant in that cause the first decades of this century were very anti-immigrant very ant. click and increasingly anti-german is we got into the war in europe the annie immigrant cause came because we had had such a huge amount of immigrants coming into the country many of whom were catholic. so you had the the italians who were catholic and drank wine you had the germans who were lutheran, but they drank beer and then you had the irish who

were catholic and drank everything and these nice protestant members of the wctu were just afraid of these people and and didn't trust them and they thought you know, the catholic religion was voodoo or something. there was also an organization that got started in the late 1900s called the anti-saloon league and it was especially aimed at saloons where beer was sold most of the breweries in the country were owned by germans who had immigrated here and most of the saloons were affiliated with these breweries so that anti-german played in there and then congress passed the 16th amendment which created an income tax. so the government was not as dependent on that excise tax all of these things started coming together. in an october 1919 congress passed the 18th amendment which made it illegal to produce transport and sell alcohol in

the united states and much of the surprise of everyone. it was ratified just 13 months. the 19th amendment followed and at first everything went pretty much as the temperance supporters thought i mean they had these these rosy beliefs that that everyone would just switch to milk and the prisons would empty. there'd be no more crime there would be no more insanity. it would just be a beautiful beautiful world. and but it happened instead is the gangs in in criminal interests realized we could make a lot of money here the government step back. they're not only you know, not letting anyone sell this stuff. they're not collecting exercise tax on it either. so people still wanted to drink and they found ways to do it. there were some major loopholes in the volstead act which enforced prohibition one of them

will allowed medicinal alcohol to be made so any man woman and child in the country could buy a pint of so any man, woman and child in the country by a pint of whiskey every ten days as long as you got a prescription from a doctor who said you had a medicinal reason to need it. oddly enough the american medical association had comeio o the conclusion some y years befe that alcohol had no medicinal value but when they found that doctorse could charge a three dollars dispensing fee each time they wrote the script a change their mind and decided we didn't want to be hasty. that kept a lot of the distilleries in kentucky in businessss as there were ten license distilleries in the country that could make this medicinal alcohol and sell it in little bottles and six of them were in louisville. another exception was religiousu purposes. if you were a catholic you could get your wine for communion.

for the jewish sacraments they could get winee but it started out there were some unusual peoplele getting into the rabbi business, like rabbi o'shaughnessy and rabbi mcdonald and a rabbi who lives in a two-room tenement claims he is a synagogue of 2000 members. basically anyone who had bought a bottle of wine for him became a member of his synagogue. another exception was if you had had alcohol when prohibition began you could keep it and if you even moved from one house to the other you could take it with you. franklin roosevelt's and his wealthy friends could do that. they're private clubs could keep alcohol they had on hand. another person who follow this practice was the president of the united states, warren g harding. he had been a a senator so we moved his hash of liquor from his house to the white house and it was widely suspected that

when he ran out of it the justice department started supplying him with staff that had been confiscated. he didn't serve alcohol at formal white house events but his wife was a barmaid at his several times a week poker parties where they would drink themselvesth silly. fdr lost the race for vice president during that electionth that elected harding and coolidge. he got polio the next year, so a couple of winters he spit on his houseboat tooling around the caribbean where they would enjoy grog every night. what was in the grog i don't know but i think it may be another name for a martini. also with the little white house where he waspl said to have bootlegger who supplied him with moonshine. the government was making efforts to control this out-of-control criminal activity

but they were so outmanned and so outgunned and it was so easy to bribe a prohibition agent because they were poorly paid, poorly trained and so many of them had gotten into the enforcement business just to reap the rewards of the bribery. the most famous of the infamous gangsters was al capone. even though my book is about the south, lo and behold i found out al capone was s from chicago, hs spent a lot of time in the south. there are soce many places he ws said to have laid his head. it's kind of like washington slept here. i can tell you that i know for sure one is the federal penitentiary in atlanta where he stayed for two years after being convicted of income tax evasion. the other was in the late 20s he bought a a home outside on miami beach called, where he

lived, built the largest swimming pooloo in florida and s seen parading around and a black one piece bathing suit much like the one fdr war. why did anyone think wall was a good material for bathing suit? but that's where he went after he got out of alcatraz. he went back to miami beach and died there. by 1928 repeal had become a a major issue of the campaign. around the mid 1920s public opinion started changing. the episcopalians and i am one had reluctantly gone along withb the methodists and the baptists and the presbyterians to support prohibition. basin where out of it, we're going back to our cocktail parties. because of what it happen with the crime. murder rate was twice what it is today in new york and chicago.

so i'll smith the governor of new york was nominated for president. fdr put the nomination in. it became a very ugly race that focus on his catholicism, his strong position as a wet and peopleim suggested her accused m of being just a puppet of the big tammany hall party machine in new york. he lost in a landslide to herbert hoover. herbert hoover wins in 1928. that february on st. valentine's day was when the valentine's day massacre happened in chicago. it was the most brutal and spectacular murder that the country had seen. al capone was largely thought to have been the cause of it but he said no, no, i was in miami when all this happen. i was on vacation.

inic fact, i was in the district attorney's office being questioned at the very moment at hand so they never did find out who did it. but that was another thing that started pushing public opinion against prohibition. hoover took office the next month and then october the stock market crashed and that was the beginning of the great depression. the government everybody's funds dried-up, unemployment rose, the government funds were getting very dry. hoover, when he took office, promised to study prohibition but eventually a report came out the said it's not really working, it's not enforceable but we think we should keep doing it. he said that sounds fine to me. a woman who had helped getting elected named pauline morton sabin, the first woman on the republican national committee, a powerhouse in fundraising,

decided she had enough. she turned her back on hoover. she resigned from theli republin party and she started the women's organization for national prohibition reform. but again she was in the same mold of the lady who ran the debbie ctu. she organize anything and they may come because she and her wealthy lady friends and a rich husband writing checks to make the thing run, anyone in the country could join for free. they had this huge coalition of shop girls and housewives and factory workers who are all working for national prohibition reform. the interesting thing is they use the same argument that the temperance movement folks had that we're protecting families. since it wasn't alcohol in the country there was no reason to regulate the alcohol that wasn't there.

young girls in teenage boys were going to speakeasies and there wereav no rules against it. a decent woman would not of god and a bar before prohibition except maybe miss kitty. these women jump on the bandwagon with pauline sabin, and she endorsed fdr in 1930 year, switched parties. fdr going along with the planned the democrats adopted wholeheartedly was to appeal the 18th amendment. he won in a landslide and during the winter congress repealed the 18th 18th amendment by passingg the 21st and it went to the states to be ratified. meanwhile, one of roosevelt's first asked in the 100 days was to ask congress to modify the act to legalize the sale of light beer and wine. quickly passed. roosevelt said i think would be a good time for a beer and the country agreed.

it put a lot of people back to work in a legal business again and also started the excise tax blowing back into the treasury. it was thrown back to the states with the ratification of alcohol of the 21st amendment which happened on december 5, 1933. in the south interestingly mississippi did not accept that amendment until 1966. so it was a dry state legally until 1966. what it did was through the regulation was sent back to the individual states to each state could decide what they wantedteo do. the southern states really drag their feet except for louisiana. south carolina started allowing local option in 35. george in 1937. the fact they waited so long kept thehe moonshine flowing and that was what led to the bird of

nascar. these guys are selling moonshine hired the younges reckless teenagers to drive their model a ford all w the way down the mountains, and on the weekends when they were not so busy they would race each other in cow pastures, and that led to stock car racing at some of the big stars in the early days of stock car racing and even some of the later days had been moonshiners like junior johnson. to tell the story of prohibition in my book it is indeed a series of expeditions to the south. i go to different places, visit bars, museums, hotels, distilleries, cemeteries, all of them have something to do with the story. i tell b it in first person. it is a history book. it has hundreds of footnotes i

didn't make any of this stuff up but it's fun history. in each chapter i find recipes that were either recipes from thatat period are recipes a friendly bartender was able to shareea with me. give you a great idea some places to eat and drink in charleston, savannah, louisville, miami, all that kind of stuff. so it was a very fun book to write. i have to saysh my publisher has given metr a contract to write e sequel, methodists and moonshiners. people keep asking what i'm going too do about the presbyterians and i said the only thing that comes up in my mind is presbyterians and prostitution, andnd i'm just not ready to delve into that, that form of sin yet. but anyway, it was a lot of fun and my wonderful husband leo was my sidekick the whole time so he

is kind of like like a chan the book. so what questions can answer about prohibition? and i think you can walk up to the mic, correct? so they will catch you on booktv. come on, someone has a question. go ahead. >> actually, i've read the book so this is one which color from the question. talk about, was itt dawsonville, the event you went to still ongoing? so that culture, dawsonville georgia. >> there are a lot of places that would haven't changed a lot in the south. dawsonville georgia is one of them. they call themselves the birthplace of stock-car racing the people in north carolina heatedly disputed that. it's almost like who makes the best barbecue. but dawsonville is the home of a

big racing family who just one of the big nascar contest this year, chase elliott. it was a hotbed of moon shining. not an easy drive but a straight shot down mountain roads to 11. people in these communities were making the moonshine. originally they would've bartered and sold to each other but when the markup got to be so high they would start selling it to people they didn't know in atlanta through bootleggers, and the quality of the staff got to be really, really bad. moonshine would kill you. they were using old radiators instead of copper tubing andat that kind of thing. dawsonville has a moonshine festival e every year and i went to it to kind of get the feel forow that culture.

i think i knew what i was getting into. it was right before the election, the 2020 election, and the guy who was running for congress had an outline of an ak-47 on his campaign signs. he won. he owns a gun store. antiwoman about my age from the civic and club, which is kind of like rotary, was holding up a cardboard ak-47 because she was selling raffle tickets to weigh in a real one. great christmas gifts. anyway, they have a terrific stock-car racing hall of fame museum there which isit attached to the city hall which is attached to a distillery. when i went into this distillery there was this case of these little curved bones and the sign said kuhn dx, $6.54. and asked the young lady at the counter, is this what i think there are?

she said yeah, they are raccoon dick's, genitalia. i said why would someone buy one quick she said oh, they are good luck, or you can wear them and a half men you were given to e as a sign of of affection. and i'm thinking, yougi know, ge me diamonds. i don't want a kuhn dick. that t is, like with the culture was like there and then they give out awards for people to be inducted into the moonshine hall of fame. some of them were dead and the relatives were accepting. one woman, talked about her father,, hijack sugar talks in all kindk of things like that. she said i think daddy would be a little surprised because we tried to keepui that quiet. anyway, it was a real experience. we were in line for barbecue and when we got our barbecue my husband said did you notice the hat band of the guy in front of your life? i said what did have in it, a

coon dick? he said no, it had a knife. so after that we decide to eat our barbecue and just go home. it's a very interesting way of life that hasn'tt changed a lo. >> so i havee a question about the time that roosevelt was governor of new york during prohibition and his assistant missy would host the happy hours. you want to talk about that? >> missy of course is a subject of my biography the gatekeeper and she was the hostess of his happy hour every day. eleanor roosevelt very seldom darkened the door. she didn't approve of the drinking. she didn't approve of the joking and the silliness and all that kind of thing. missy was an irish catholic and she was used to being around people who drank and could socket back yourself pretty

good. all through his time at warm springs and the governor's mansion and in the white house he always had a children's hour every day. he would call together usually his close staff. i think the only child who came might've been diana hopkins, harry hopkins daughter who also lived in the white house because her mother had died. she told me she would sit on his lap during children's hour andhe play with the toys turkey kept all those little funky toys on his desk while all the adults in the room were talking about the big issues of the day, though i thought they were probably gossiping. so that was fdr certainly wasn't a drunk ladylike his martinis. i cut his recipe in the book by the way if that's an inducement. it's a very good martini. i also have a missy martini in there. other questions?

do we still have another minute or two? don't be shy. some people ask me what was the thing that surprised me the most when doing my research, and it was not a really like bourbon. we went to louisville, leo and i own a bourbon tasting weekend expedition. we found kerrie nations birthplace which is on the national register but is just this falling down farmhouse in the middle of c a cow pasture. we went onvi to louisville and spent the weekend touring distilleries. west stayed at the seal back hol which is a beautiful old grand hotel and it was a place where f scott fitzgerald got thrown out of the bar several times while he was stationed there. got a very lightly reputation. al capone was also said to have stayed there. what is always set said abot anywhere al capone state is that

there was a secret tunnel so he could get out of the building should the law enforcement converge on him and that the was a a girlfriend somewhere around and sometimes an illegitimate son or two or three. and doesn't begin to take all of the al capone slept your stories with a grain of salt and that's why can tell you i only verified to for sure. okay. thank you so much for your attention. [applause] >> be up-to-date in the latest in publishing with booktv's podcast "about books" with current nonfiction book releases. plus bestseller lists as those industry news and trends through insider interviews. you can find "about books" on c-span now, our free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts.

>> c-span there is a free mobile app featuring unfiltered view of what's happening in washington live and on-demand. keep up with today's biggest events with live streams are for proceedings from u.s. u.s., white house events, the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. you can stay current with the latest episode of "washington journal" and five schedule information for c-span's q&a networks and c-span radio plus a variety of compelling podcast. c-span now is available at the apple store and google play. download it for free today. c-span now you're front row seat to washington anytime anywhere. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government we are funded by these television companies and more including comcast. >> are you thinking this is just

a kennedy center? it's way more than that. >> comcast is partnering with 1000 committee said it's a great wi-fi enabled lift zones substance from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. comcast supports c-span is a public service along with these other television providers giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> welcome catherine olmsted here to the library. she is no stranger to the fdr library and were so glad to have her. just a little by way of background she's a professor of history at the university of california-davis, she specialized in lyrical cultural history of the 20 and 21st century with a particular interest interest in influence of o anti-communism and conspiry theories on national politics. by theit way, i was just sayingo her themes like an absurd field to me. [laughing] but what do i know? i am