findings no matter where they lead. the circular floor of the memorial features a map showing much of the universe as it appear the on the dates of its dedication in april 1979 which also coincided with einstein's 100th birthday. 30 years later, visitors of all ages are drawn to the iconic figure on grounds of the national science. children especially enjoy climbing into the lap of the scientific genius with the smile of a grandfather. >> this is american history tv on c-span3. next, a program on the history of beer and spirits in america. the program recorded saturday at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians and national council on public history. presenting the show historian ed airs, peter onuf and brian bal low, hosts of the public radio

show and podcast back story with the american history guys. >> you ready, guys? >> ready. >> plug it in. >> all right. >> hey. on the air. >> major production support for back story was provided by the national endowment for the humanities. ♪ >> from the virginia foundation for the humanities in charlottesville, virginia, this is back story. it's october 8th, 1871. we're in chicago. and a fire is spreading. it's a horrible fire.

nobody's exactly sure how it started. it started on the westside of chicago, but it spread incredibly quickly and before long, the central district is aflame and by the end of two days, 300 people are dead and 1800,000 people are left homeless. >> and in if the weeks following the great chicago fire, people from all over the country ral little to help the great city. businessmen in places like boston and new york and cincinnati send food and clothing and money. and chicago's nearby neighbor to the north, the city of milwaukee also pitches in. but it sends something else, something that comes with that special milwaukee flavor. ♪ great light beer schick >> the beer that made milwaukee

famous simply because it tastes so good. >> well, that ad in case it's not clear to you is not from 1871. it's from 90 years later. >> that's my period. >> so why are we playing this? well, it's because that tag you heard at the end of the jingle, the beer that made milwaukee famous, hard as it may be to believe, it wasn't because slits tasted so good. or at all. that's not what made first made it its hometown famous beyond its borders. it was because in the wake of the great fire, joseph slits donated thousands of barrels of beerer to chicago all of chicago's breweries were wiped out in the fire. this was brilliant marketing, a true loss leader. >> today on back story, we're coming to you from the city that

was made famous bill slits. we're in milwaukee at the 2012 annual meeting of the organization of american historians and the national council on public history. which in case you haven't noticed guys, means we're surrounded by a lot of people who know more history than us. >> fortunately, we're used to that. >> that's true. >> but not all gathered in one place which is a little intimidating so we want to say hello, milwaukee. >> hey, milwaukee. >> hey. >> all right. big surprise. our theme for today's show the is guess what, americans relationship with beer. and drinking in general. and as we dole in each week on our radio show, we'll be bouncing around through the centuries trying to see what a transhistorical approach to this subject like alcohol might

reveal about other aspects of american life. i peter onuf will be representing the 18th century. >> and i will be representing the mid-19th century. >> and i brian bellow will be toasting the 20th century. but to kick things off, i want to go back to your period, peter, and just a few basic questions. i want to know who was drinking, i want to know what they were drinking, and hold on. >> yeah. >> i want to know mainly how much were they drinking. >> well, you should have asked who wasn't drinking and it would have been a short show. we could shut down right now. they're drinking everything. you might even say this is the golden age, guys, of the 18th century for alcohol in america. actually, it's not a very nice entry to be honest. but they will -- if you're -- if you're into alcohol, you got all

kinds. >> you got pear trees, you got peary from pear trees, apple, kreider, you got home brew. beer, only 1%, you have to drink a lot to get wasted. you got rum. you got various distilled fruit drinks and basically you've also got dirty water. so the i ask you as a sensible healthy american, which way are you going to going? you're going to drink. think of the chesapeake area, think of the tidewater area, an brackish water you die, and they did. they deserved to. >> the fact is not endorsed by that story or by the virginian at the time. >> well, it's ubiquitous. that's the first point to make. it's incorporated into the daily lives of all-americans. now, it's not good to be totally wildly drunk and preachers will rail against that, but they don't blame it on demon rum.

that's ed's century. if you choose to get drunk, it used to be a free country but then it really was. it's your choice. it's a question of will. this is not an addiction, it's not a disease. it's just your choice. of course, there's enough social regulation and long-standing long settled colonial areas that it can be reasonably orderly and yeah, there is some disapproval, but by and large, i want to give you an example from what my second favorite founding father said brl alcohol. in his -- that would be benjamin franklin in his drinker's dictionary printed in 1737. and what franklin does, and this demonstrates how accepted drinking was in this period because franklin lists more than 200 synonyms for being drunk. and we're going to give you a

sample of that. we have a few very brave audience members who were doing a little drinking before the show and so they're ready to go. >> that's how we got them, peter. >> and they volunteered to do some sampling of the beer and to give us a sample from franklin's dictionary. are you ready out there volunteers? >> we're ready. >> all right, go for it. >> he is addled. he's afflicted. he's in his airs. he's been at barbados. his head is full of bees. >> he's been too free with the creature. he's fishy foxed, fuddled, crump footsed, been to france. >> he's glad, glob u lar, loose in the hilts, he clips the king's english. he sees two moons. >> pigeon eyed, punky, pridy, as good conditioned as a puppy. >> in the suds, staggerish, he

carries too much sale. stewed, soaked, soft, been too free with sir john strawberry. >> double tongued, has swallowed a tavern token. he makes virginia fence. >> whoa, does that sound like fun? hey, all right. >> thank you, volunteers. >> thank you very much. >> it was so hard to get them here from the 18th century. spared no expense tonight. >> so everybody's drinking all the time. well, maybe about five gallons per capita of alcohol per every person, man, woman and child. it's hard to know because so much of it is brewed at home, distilled at home. it's not yet a big business. all that will eventual garl stuff happens in ed's century. i'm sorry, i didn't mean that. there is growing concern as the

revolution approaches, nobody knows this of let's be like historians. they don't know the it but there is a growing concern about drinking in certain areas. one of the things is that the taverns are crowded with lots of people, including future patriots and they have been squeezed out of their legislature so what else are they going to do, have a drink about it, but there is some concern about maybe there's too much drinking, too much roudiness in the cities. those mobs which the patriots used in order to overthrow the old yooem, they could be a potentially dangerous force. so there's concern about drinking on the frontier, drinking in newly settled areas. sailors are notorious because they have to drink, it's part of their job. so that we have a revolution, right? and. >> since the revolution basically fixed everything that was wrong in america that, must have ended after that will chofl

consumption decline stockholder absolutely a new world began in 1776, right? wrong. >> that's all the time we have for this evening. >> well, and i got news for you and i want to share it with our friends out here. and that is well, my people in the 18th century, they were concerned about regulation about, moderation, about maybe there's some excessive drinking. well, it's a free country, it was a free country and american democrats, they're going to drink and they're going to drink and you're not going to be able to impose any order on them. so guess what, by 1830, this is -- want to talk about a golden age. drunkest moment in u.s. history. >> yeah. be quiet. >> 7.8 gallons per capita. >> in the 19th century in 1930. so in the early decades of the new nation it, kind of gross crazy. you wouldn't think you col drink more than five gallons of pure alcohol a year.

>> maintaining order. they're also in a drunken stup po are. >> what's happening peter. >> it sure helped political participation. >> this is the time when markets rapidly expanding and the population is so rapidly growing. you find a very complex yeography if i of drinking across the country. so you have the tavern culture of the eastern cities but you're also finding new cultures of drinking out on the frontier, down in the south the perpetual frontier of slavery and the plantations and you're finding too that right after this, a huge infusion of immigrants of people such as. >> i'm a little confused. this is we're merging on an age of jackson when things get even worse, right? >> right. >> how did we ever turn the corner on alcohol to become such a sober and moderate people as we are today. >> look at them coming out on a saturday night to listen to be radio live. if they will very temperate

people people. >> to watch radio. >> let's be clear what these people are doing here right now. >> this is about -- this is a very serious problem you've got, folks. watching radio. >> here's the situation. they didn't know the about radio back then but what they did notice is that after it piques in 1830, alcohol con is this remains remarkably stable across the 19th century. the civil war is a huge catastrophe. you find if you're worried about trying to maintain order in the troops, when either confederate or union troops come near a household that they can an appropriate the alcohol they do. but afterwards it turns out that the consumption of alcohol per capita, it's far better than in your century. >> it's like half, right. >> yeah, it is and it stays stable which is a surprising thing. what would that be? it would have to be inrt drink that maybe they read these words and decided to interpret.

>> what were they drinking, ed? wasn't it harder stuff? >> yeah they were drinking harder stuff. >> it will seems like this is an early triumph of capitalism. that's a big theme here. and it was the market that brought lots of whiskey to lots of drinkers. that's very american. it's progress, right? so why didn't that just go on forever? >> well, because people said you , market this much alcohol. we'd better find ways to control it a little bit. that's a little bit later in the show just to keep people wonder c ing. something happened along the way. you also found the other sort of counter veiling pressures came in that people decided maybe we'd better show up on work on monday and a lot more than they did back in the 18th century and sort of internalize this. >> we drank on the job in my century. >> we started segmenting all

this. >> that's in the job description. >> by the time we handed the baton over to the 20th century, we don't do that anymore. >> so you have to have sober workers to produce good drink. >> to produce all that alcohol, you got to the have the somebody show up at work. >> that's one of the contradicts of high capitalism. >> you think the story's over because we're drinking less and we're drinking everywhere. >> yeah. >> but we're drinking less and a lot of the story in the 20th century is how this drinking becomes distilled, if you will. and becomes concentrated. and ironically becomes embodied in beer, not in whiskey. >> it's good for you relatively speaking. >> it starts out at the beginning of the 20th century it's being promoted as healthful. >> especially a lagger. it's like water and it still is. >> but what is not what is not

so helpful in the view of many menses is the concentration in places called sal loons. sal loons were places associated with prostitution, with political corruption. let me put in a good word for sal loons. sal loons were key sites for labor organizing. they were basically offices for lots of union leaders who wanted to organize workers and saloons were a safe haven away from the view of the boss. you know, when you got your act together in the 19th century and made sure people didn't show up drunk at work and probably a good thing, they're working with heavy machinery, well, they just started drinking in these sal loons. they took their alcohol. >> that's where they went. >> i told you you should read about the 20th century. so whax wort worried people alms

much as the problems related to alcoholism, the kind of domestic abuse that it will led to, what it did to families was the fear that this working class was forming, it was forming an uncontrolled places. >> they did it before in taverns. you had a revolution. >> that's right. but that was against the bad guys. >> you see. >> good revolution. >> this revolution would have been against those capitalists and they were not happy about that, but really they didn't need to worry so much because a couple of things happened. first, prohibition came along and absolutely shut down the sal loons. we don't believe in doing things halfway in the 20th century. >> no, no. >> and then after that, you had the great depression. so by the time that will breweries got going again, a lot of the local breweries, regional breweries are already within wiped out and a lot of those breweries had been supporting those sal loons, in fact, 70% of

the sal loons at the turn of the century had tie-ins as they called it with these big brewers. those connections with severed and what you get is the emergence of these national beer companies that are distributing widely. they're using things like steel cans in order to distribute their beer. they're no longer doing it -- they're by passing the saloons and they are pitching their beer to more of a national audience and to be honest, it's kind of generic. they will talk about the flavors of the beer. all the ads have pictures of women or when we get tv, we will have maybe who brings us black label. you remember she always winks at the end of a commercial. >> they're too young. >> i know. i know. >> they could probably find it on youtube though. >> i'll bet you can. it's a very generic thing and then in 1971, something truly remarkable happens.

advertisers actually fill lim morris who has bought you this beer company to be specific discover that will beer drinkers feel left out. and they start to focus their attention on that beer drinker. on you, the beer drinker. so i want you guys to listen to this jingle. ♪ if you've got the time is, we've got the beer ♪ ♪. >> miller beer ♪ ♪ tastes too good to hurry through ♪ ♪ but when it's time to relax ♪ miller stands clear beer after beer ♪ ♪ if you've got the time you've got the time, we've got the beer miller beer ♪ >> so if you have the time and

they're appealing to all kinds of americans who are really at the peak post world war ii earning years. they're getting more fringe benefits. they have more leisure time and miller would like them toll have endless leisure time. >> because they have the beer. >> they have the beer and they can drink beer after beer. it's not just miller. the bud slogan right after this. >> bud's for you, i don't want. >> it's whatever you do, this bud's for you. >> right. >> exactly. >> yeah, so what happens to the working guy and his beer? >> we know the only real working guy here is ed ayers, only because he's a university president. >> that's right. >> just an average old university president. >> and so it turns out not everybody buys this idea of everybody's got all the time and they've got all the beer. and in 1973, one of the biggest hits in the country addressed this issue head-on in sort of a

fearless way in johnny russell's timeless classic "red necks, white socks and blue ribbon beer," which we need to hear a little bit of right now. >> seems to be two cities in white socks and blue ribbon beer. >> you'll just have to sing it it, ed. >> you know, that is a really a horrifying prospect to think about. you know, but what i'm suggesting is that this whole message that will we're just one big class and all -- it's for you, whatever you do, was kind of a sham and in fact, that there was a places to get -- bars you can maybe hear the record on the needle there. i don't know if we're going to hear the song ♪ a drunk at the bar was getting noisy and mean ♪ ♪ some guy on the phone says

i'll be home soon dear ♪ ♪ red necks, white socks and blue ribbon beer ♪ ♪ no, we don't fit in with that white collar crowd ♪ ♪ we're a little too rowdy and a little tool loud ♪ ♪ there's no place that will i'd rather be than right here ♪ ♪ with my red neck white socks and blue ribbon beer ♪ >> red, white and blue. >> i got the white collar. that's what i got. >> i happen to be wearing one. which is unfortunate. >> so what this suggests is somebody should come full circle the way that alcohol is tied into the social world. so highly differentiated before. the 19th century we'll talk about a little bit later, tries to get this under control. marketers try to act as if there's one big market. country music comes back out and

suggests don't fool us, alcohol is still deeply coded in every american way. but you know, all this talking about beer kind of has me thirsty. and you know, pbr would be good. >> yeah. >> but i think that we're so for the nat tonight to have a special guest and brian you can tell us about it. >> an yeah, and unlike us, she actually is an expert on beer. we have with us tonight, lucy saunders. welcome, lucy. >> hey, lucy. >> and just short introduction. i know in milwaukee, lucy needs no introduction. but lucy is an award-winning food writer here in milwaukee. whose books include cooking with beer, grilling with beer, are you picking up on a theme? best of american beer and food. and i'm dieing to ask if lucy's

currently working on a book called microwaving with beer. please help me welcome lucy, a round of applause. historian. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. well, actually, peter, this beer is for you. this is a beer that predays -- >> we didn't know that you had any that we could drink. >> all right, peter. >> all right. crack ta baby open. >> all right. it's time to salute the flag. red, white and sfwlu and for our radio an audience out there, peter, what have you just done? >> this is believe it or not, 24 fluid ounces it means for any group of three history guys, you get eight ounces each and it is an enormous pabst blue ribbon. >> it's a tall boy. >> a tall boy. >> so this is -- >> now, this is we're drinking my century to you? is that right. >> actually, it predates your

century. the 18th century. this would be a an example of a 16th century beer style. it's a dopple bach. and dopple balks were the liquid bread that were brewed for nutrition during the fasting season of lent by mon nastories in bavaria. right, right. there's lots of speculation about the origins of lag erl yeast, lagger yeast differing from ale yeast by being bottom fermenting and really what you see here is a beautiful dark. >> you can't even see through it. >> it's mahogany. >> describe this to our audience, fred. >> it's a deep ma who hogny. it looks so tasty. baby we should taste it. >> please do. cheers. >> radio audience, we are now drinking the beer in small tasteful. >> some of us have finished our beer. >> oh, right. what is this, some kind of

competition. >> and some of us are helping out the show by describing what we're doing and not thinking about themself. this is remarkably good. >> it is. it's actually an award. >> this didn't come from the 17th century. >> no, this is actually a beer style that was resuscitated by spreker brew ril based here in milwaukee county. it's actually in glen ca dale. >> it's delicious. >> dopple bach is a very popular german beer style. it would be considered a seasonal beer. >> so they brought this with them when they came 0 wisconsin. >> they would have brought this with them. >> we made this into an american beer. we took the best of the new world and gave it new life. >> it's giving us new life. >> the german brewers in milwaukee in the 19th century, there were many, many breweries here, and i would say that the balks and brown ales, everything was pretty much dark but then

starting in the middle of the 19th century, two things happened. refrigeration was widely adopted, and clear glass could be mass manufactured. and so suddenly, the color of beer became much more important. and a bavarian brewer. >> i can see they didn't have the twist off. >> they did not have the twist off. >> i've got an example from another milwaukee brewer, the lakefront brewery, it's their clish pillsner. it's a lovely soft straw gold. >> and this would have -- >> what are we going to share? >> no, we're not. >> we don't usually drink on the show. and so we're. >> there's a question of protocol here. >> matter of fact, i'm knowing less history by the second. >> so take that into account. >> we'll cover it in the q and a. >> but the pilsen stishlgs the

lagger really was an invention that came about in the 19th century with the advent of the bottom fermenting lagger yeast and they use hops that are grown in that borderline area between germany and the czech republic. the lovely s app az hops. they're very floral. >> i'm still confused. so did americans sewerly we played some pioneering role in developing lighter and thinner beer, did we not? >> yes, that actually happened in the '70s. >> 1970s? >> i'll drink to that. >> yea, brian's century. all right. >> but seriously, before prohibition, you could find many different beer styles. special dark styles, many, many different styles of beer. and after prohibition, there were so few breweries that

reopened, we went frext having more than 2,000 breweries to just a bit over 700 breweries after prohibition. so the changing tastes evolved with the marketing of beer as something lighter, more enjoyable, and increasingly marketed to women. >> we were talking about that. it's actually true. she actually knows this stuff. >> well, for example, here in milwaukee, alice chalmers during the war years, world war ii the workforce went from being 3% women to more than 25% women. there was a big shift. and the women coming off their shifts wanted to go to the tavern and have a beer too. >> can you imagine calling a beer the champagne of bottled beers? that seems so transgressive little perverse. >> well, i still think that there are some beers that rival champagne in terms of their complexity of flavor. >> we'll drink to that. >> the