>> i can help. ed? >> there is no free lunch. a fascinating story. we associate that with you know, bureaucracy, today you got to pay for what you get, et cetera, et cetera. this really does come from the late 19th century. and workers when they started leaving those factories they would go to saloons, drink during lunch time, go back to work, and the temperance forces that ed was talking about, prohibition forces, pre-prohibition, said it's a shame that those workers are getting so inebriated. they are drinking on an empty stomach. the saloons at a minimum should provide them a lunch. the breweries said hey, no problem. and the breweries started shipping in food, usually sausages, cheese. >> mmm, sausages. >> are you getting hungry, ed? i notice they didn't provide food. and so, the tradition of providing a free lunch in the back room really became

synonymous with saloons and it was so powerful not only would guys go have a schooner of beer and go back to the back room and have lunch but lots of respectable women would actually go, just to the back room only have lunch and they literally did have a free lunch. but here is the twist. >> sounds like there was a free lunch. >> yeah, there was a free lunch, until prohibition. >> not according to the temperance forces. having encouraged saloons to serve lunch they came up with the slogan, there is no free lunch. and they used that to underscore the price that workers were paying for that so called free lunch. the price in drunkenness, et cetera. >> thank you. >> thank you for asking a question i could answer. >> since he's your brother. he's not really. okay, on the other side. >> hi, i'm from the university of california.

>> i see trouble already. >> no, no. >> you're not from uc davis, are you? >> this is a question for 18th century guy and 19th century guy. >> i love it. bring it on. >> the question is about the regulation of alcohol and slavery and the regulation of alcohol and interaction between whites and native americans. i know that those two were the focuses of early focuses of the regulation of alcohol. >> that's a great question and it's absolutely true. if you want to see the state begin to operate effectively, whether it's through the regulation of indian trade and trade and alcohol, you see it with groups perceived to be dangerous and ungovernable and this is where the state and i think i'm actually going to bring brian in on this, too, it's where the state is largely invisible in the 19th century but in precisely these areas.

as i think ed has mentioned before, there is a tight regular regulation of alcohol among slaves. it's seen as incentive for holiday festivities. but it's again tightly regulated. >> yeah. the real problem comes for white south after the end of slavery. and people often don't know that the south had an even more active movement toward prohibition and local control. they adopted the main law. this is a southern thing. and the abc stores developed in south carolina in the 1890s as ways to do two things, one, get state revenue from alcohol, a major reform movement is getting rid of the blind tigers and other illicit forms of distribution. but a major concern was they were selling directly to african-americans. and they were concerned about interestingly, the marketing of these forms of alcohol by using white women on the labels and it became an explicit concern and

in the atlanta race riot one of the reasons that the white people put forward for the reason for the riot is this irresponsible use of advertising that inflamed. so it becomes a major reason. one reason i think that the south has been at the forefront of control of alcohol just for the reasons that you say. you know, the twitter sphere is going crazy. somebody twittered and said you didn't answer my question. i don't know whether to reward. i think it's going to be short. >> i attributed the question to the wrong person. >> okay. >> right. >> in fairness, and i'm sorry for you humans actually standing here live in person. but doug and tap did not ask the question you attributed to him. he did ask, was part of the reason for the income tax loss revenues from prohibition?

part of the reason for the income tax lost revenues from prohibition. well, no. chronologically we have things a little backwards there. we had the income tax first. but there is no question that lost revenues from prohibition were really hurting the federal government and there is no question that one of the reasons that roosevelt, franklin roosevelt, wanted to end prohibition was to restore that $5 tax, federal tax, on crates, on barrels of beer. so yes. >> we haven't talked about sin taxes. that's really an interesting topic because it suggests the close connection between the federal, state, and alcohol. >> exactly. it's a symbiotic relationship,

and we know this from tobacco as well. so good question. sorry i screwed up. >> another human. >> yes. we don't screw up with humans, though. >> thanks. good talk. my name is brett. i'm from indiana. my question is a literary question. you know when you think about the 20th century's greatest writers, they are like a pack of pickled scoundrels. they're drunks. >> falkner never drank. >> i guess my question is who was the first american writer who would write about drinking as a literary asset? and my second question would be as in the last 30 years where people are working more and going into more debt, where did the trends with drinking, people with less leisure time drinking less or more? >> who booked this gig? i'll answer the second question. if you look at alcohol consumption, it actually corresponds with income.

so the people with the greatest disposable income, the wealthiest people drink the most. people who make less than $25,000 a year drink the least. >> i think on the first question it has something to do with that era of sensational literature in the antebellum period in which temperance reformers produced what you might call a pornography of intemperance, and since one of the rituals in the temperance movement was to enact a kind of conversion experience and tell your story, is sort of anticipating alcoholics anonymous. i'd answer not with one of the authors or some obscure author, but rather with a general trend in literature toward a kind of sensational pornography and the confessional literature of the 1830s and '40s. could you think that is it? >> i think it is. it skips until the earliest 20th century. the idea that an author is

supposed to reveal as terms heavily gendered male, all about himself, the literature is real and true. and if you can enact it as well as convey it, it becomes sort of an expectation we see acted out in the rock 'n roll era as well that if what you're telling me is so powerful and true, should it be killing you, right? so i think alcohol and drugs become a part of that same motif. >> the notion of demon rum is deeply attractive to some tormented and tortured soul and i think it's a romantic response to the whole culture of regulation, prohibition and temptation. >> one of the things you can see how an impulse that was there in the antebellum period and then skipped several generations, i think you had that bohemian. but i think you have to answer your question, i do believe it's in the culture celebrity in the 1920s. we received a question i feel i need to answer from twitter. want to know if i could say more about why women were in the forefront of these movements against alcohol. and peter referred to the fact that it's easy, kind of an

american shtick to kid around with alcohol. but i think the women reformers in the 1920s were right. if you had seen what was the most corrosive force on violence against women, to have seen abuse against children, it would have been alcohol. so, you know, i think prohibition retrospectively discredited efforts against drinking earlier and we inherited that from the same era of the '20s and hey, drinking is cool and stuff. but you go back and actually read in the 18th and 19th centuries, an era with no safety net, just what alcohol did to families, you can understand why this was the most persistent and most powerful impulse of female reformers of the late 19th or 20th century. >> and coincides with the gendering of alcohol production. and -- >> and consumption. look at beer advertising today. >> right. >> we think always of the restrictive nature of temperance, the fight against this male preserve which led to

so many true evils. but there's the constructive efforts, too. they went on here in milwaukee. the beer gardens, they were the attempt to make -- to -- >> domesticate. >> and embed drink in a family friendly setting. i went to the brewers game last night. unfortunately they lost. >> it was a good game, though. >> it was a good game. >> they lost because you left early. >> shhhh! i had to prepare for "backstory." i was really struck by the efforts at least to create a family setting. beer was being sold. beer was being consumed. but there was a play area for kids, there were lots of young people there. and these beer gardens late 19th, early 20th century were an effort in a constructive way to domesticate drink within a larger set of family values.

if you will. >> though i never want you to think that i'm not an american exceptionalist, americans have thought that the french have a real advantage and other sophisticated europeans, not the scots or the english because they're off the edge. it's family-centered. it is domesticated. and it's precisely because drink takes place in dangerous places outside the home, and the great normalization and regularization of alcohol intake in america has been television, couch potatoes and all of those commercials are devoted to you guys particularly but even you -- >> this commercial is for you. >> and it's to rivet you in your place and give you a chance -- that's why they have commercials -- it's to enable you to go get another one. >> and then the rest room later. yes? >> hi, guys. >> makes me nervous when you

looking at your iphone. it suggests that you might be looking for hard questions. >> not allowed to twitter a question and ask one. >> are there any live twitters here? tweeters? >> don't want to forget what i want to say so. first of all i spent the entire weekend coming up with tough historical questions in panel after panel, so it's a real relief to be at the really important. >> yay, all right! >> quick question. then perhaps one that you might not have the answer to. where does in his cup or in my cups come from. and the second question is, the word beer, i seem to have heard at some point when i did a lot of beer drinking -- >> sound likes he's reformed. >> temperate. >> that beer was just one of the terms like pilsner and lager that presented a particular type of brew. so i wonder if that's true and if it is, when did beer become the overall umbrella term? >> thank goodness we have lucy here. yay lucy! >> that's right. [ applause ]

>> should we give her -- we need give her a microphone? >> i think my microphone is on now. i wanted to say you would think of beer as being the overall arcing term for that fermented beverage, and then under very close to it, though, is ale because for the longest time beer that was consumed was the top fermenting ale. and so beer and ale were sort of synonymous. as other forms of fermentation through cultured yeast became part of the practice in brewing, and brewing became more commercialized and offered more beer styles, now you see beers that are wild fermented with variations that include -- >> free range fermentation. >> exactly.

and those are the -- some of the belgian styles. and wild yeast beers, sour ales that are now being brewed and barrel aged a lot in the united states. then you also have you know, the various substyles that then become attempts to brand a beer and attempts by a commercial brewer to make their style uniquely theirs through trademarking. there has been some effort at that too. >> so that's what i was going to say. but i'm glad that lucy was able to, especially the latin names for yeast. >> as for the cups, what do you think? >> the cups question. >> well, i mean, suggests it comes from a period when they had cups. [ laughter ] >> we have two humans, we'll take these two questions. and then we will wrap up. we invite people to stay if you're interested to talk about sort of the public history component of this.

>> yes. we'll step out of character, or into character? >> we'll find out. >> we'll stop being characters. >> we can talk about the show and perhaps what we learned and what horrible mistakes we made. so let's hear your question, please. >> yes. i'm jonathan pollack. i'm from madison, wisconsin. so my question is, when andrew jackson was inaugurated, there is a huge crowd that follows him back to the white house, and they proceed to trash the place. and the way the white house staff tries to get everyone out from standing on chairs and swinging on chandeliers and stuff is they take a big barrel of orange punch and put it on the white house lawn. my question is how do i make orange punch? [ laughter ] >> i would say two things. one, they actually spilled the orange punch on the carpets of the white house. and it was one of the enduring stains. i'm sorry, it was.

step one, become elected president of the united states. the way to make that kind of orange punch. >> the guess was it was not russia's weak punch. it was russia's strong punch. >> kidding aside, that did -- that was seen as a symbol of just how out of control and the way it was polluting american politics even in the white house was a sign, predates right before the great effort of temperance. >> we haven't talked about this but of course heavy drinking was associated with jackson and the democrats and wig middle class types such as myself most times, not tonight, certainly our near owe latter day whigs. and that is a big cultural cleavage then that has a lot of significance in our politics ever since then. >> i think you'll see it played out in the upcoming presidential election perhaps. our final question. >> thank you.

>> okay. i'm jasmine. i live in milwaukee, wisconsin. my question is about the role of religion and when religion was or was not invoked to justify temperance when this became a moral issue. and then maybe more specifically during prohibition were there exceptions? so if wine plays a really important role this things like communion or passover, seder, what happened during prohibition? >> there were exemptions for that, right? >> yeah. i'm pretty sure there were exemptions for, in prohibition. there were huge fights as ed can tell you about it, all throughout it the -- especially the late 19th century about the use of liquor in religious ceremonies. it really drove politics in many ways. what peter was saying is many of the divisions between the republicans and the democrats turned on catering to catholics who were more inclined to -- who did use drink in their

ceremonies and the protestants who were -- the protestants who were not as happy with the use of alcohol. >> and so today, in many protestant churches, you will still find the use of grape juice, precisely because it's seen as a pollution of the ritual. >> we were talking about some of the distinctions between drinkers and those who abstain today. and ed mentioned one of them which is income. and people with low incomes are absolutely the most likely to abstain from drink absolutely. but the other difference is religion and of course some of these map on to each other. but people who attend church regularly are absolutely the most likely to abstain from alcohol completely. >> the connection is very strong of course between the conversion experience of a new birth as a kind of an effective technique to control behavior.

and to make the absolute commitment. we talked about the end of a moderate temperance a la benjamin rush and this embrace of the absolutism of yes or no, and that's very much in the psychodynamics of the conversion experience. it's been a resource for those heavy drinking. there's a lot of heavy drinking in the lower income strata, and that's precisely why a commitment not to drink is so powerful and so appealing, it's the privileged types at the top who have always from the beginning imported wine and drunk moderately, well not always. >> what we call social drinking. >> right. exactly right. social drinking is really class coded. >> so it is all tangled in with politics and american religion. i think as we think about an issue that we might be privileged to have a chance to talk with fellow historians and fellow at least temporary

milwaukeeans here, actually to have been a good choice. >> alcohol explains everything if i'm not mistaken. the expansion of the federal government. >> and that it's bankrupting. right. >> right. >> it does. but, as always, we'd love to keep the conversation going. we want you to pay us a visit at backstory.radio.org and what you think of the history of drinking reveals in american society in general. you'll be able to find those of you in the tv audience, find this on our website soon and to understand exactly what peter was laying out here. but you'll get a chance to look ahead about what shows they were doing, give us ideas and send us questions. so one of the things we say is don't be a stranger. >> today's episode of "backstory" is produced by tony field and anna pinkert with help from neil bourbonstein, jamal minger, julie carlowitz and our executive producer andrew windham.

[ applause ] >> not quite done. >> we want to hear that several times. >> special thanks today to nancy mclean, kathleen france, amy stark, lucy saunders and elliott nichersik. thanks also to ben franklin stand-ins and thanks for your questions, chris nichols and mary bergman. and last but not least, to our live audience here in milwaukee at the 2012 meeting of the organization of american historians and the national council on public history. you have been terrific. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> one more. one more. work you up so you can't stop clapping eventually. major production support provided by the national

endowment for the humanities, the cornell foundation, the university of virginia weinstein properties, the history channel and an anonymous donor. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> all right. now we go out of character. you can go now. >> yeah. you can ask as many questions as you want. you just have to do it while the music's playing. sunday on q&a -- >> i don't regard this as just the biography of lyndon johnson. i want each book to examine a current of political power in america. this is a kind of political power. seeing what a president can do in a moment of -- in a time of great crisis, great crisis, how

he gathers all around. what does he do to get legislation moving, to take command in washington. that's a way of examining power in a time of crisis. i said i want to do this in full. i suppose it takes 300 pages in there. so i couldn't -- that's who i -- i just said let's examine this. >> robert caro on the passage of power, volume 4 in the years of lyndon johnson. his multivolume biography of the 36th president, this sunday at 8:00 on c-span's q&a. and look for our second hour of conversation with robert caro sunday, may 20th. each week american history tv's american artifacts takes viewers into archives, museums, and historic sites from around the country. next, located about three miles from george washington's mt. vernon estate in virginia is a reconstructed 18th century style whiskey distillery. american history visited to

learn about washington's distilling business on a day when the staff was making apple brandy. my name is dennis poag. i'm the vice president for preservation here at mt. vernon. we're standing in front of the reconstruction of george washington's whiskey distillery. most people have no idea that washington not only was first in war -- first in peace but he was also one of the first in distilling. as it turns out, he operated a major distillery here, and it was a very important part of the plantation economy. and historians had known this for a long time. but about ten years ago, we decided that we wanted to explore that. and we came out here with archaeologists. we excavated the site, found where the distillery had been located, did about five years of excavation and other research, and decided we had a wonderful opportunity to bring this back and to show what an 18th century whiskey distillery was like.

and you can't see it anywhere else in thun >> and there is a gristmill here as well? how do the two relate to each other? >> the reason the distillery's here is because washington already had a gristmill here located. it was a major part of the plantation, made lots of money off of it over the years. and in 1797 at the end of his second term as president, he was getting ready to come back to mt. vernon and hired a scotsman by the name of james anderson to be his plantation manager. and apparently all scotsmen know how to distill, or at least anderson did. and as soon as he was on the job, he lobbied washington and said if you'll pay for this, i can make you a lot of money by distilling whiskey. and washington, you know, initially said, you know, look, i don't know much about that, but we have letters that he wrote to friends of his asking their advice and they said as long as he can make a good product, there's no doubt, you know, it'll be successful. >> so he agreed and in 1797,

they started here sort of in a small way using an existing building and they bought a couple of stills. by the end of that year, they were convinced that it was going to be successful. so washington agreed to build the building behind us. so they bought three more stills and set it up. and by the early spring of 1798, it was up and running. >> this is a large building, looks like it was expensive to build. how did you get the funding for this? and how did you decide the architecture of it? >> again, we've got great records. the archaeology gave us the footprint of the building. when we go inside, you'll see where the stills are located. and when we dug here, we found the footprint of the building, we found the locations of all the stills. so we have five stills in here that you've seen behind me. and each one of them is located where the archaeologists found evidence for it. either in the form of remnants of the brick base of the furnace or, you know, heavily burned, reddened soils where the fires had been.

and so we have two stills here and then a third one in the middle and then two more, you know, at the other end. then the floors here we found evidence of the brick floor. we found evidence of the boiler to heat the water for the mashing operation. and then where all the mash tubs are located beyond the boiler, that stone floor again comes from the archaeological evidence. so that really gave us the footprint of the building and allowed us to place -- you know to position the different parts of the process. and then the documentary evidence gave us all sorts of other information. we knew the size of the stills because we have the records of when he bought them. we know that the stone mason spent a certain amount of time raising the walls, we knew there were 10-foot high walls. we had all sorts of records from the carpenters and other workmen. so we were able to pull that together really to get a good picture of what we think washington's distillery would've looked like. when you go inside, i think it's very, very accurate to what washington's building would've looked like.

we know that there were two dorm room windows because there's records of that. so lots of information about it. although this building was gone by 1814. it seems to have burned at that time. only about 15 years after it was built. and the support we got for this was very important. mt. vernon really couldn't have done it on our own. but the distilled spirits council of the united states, you know, the folks that represent the liquor industry in this country. they came -- we got together with them very early on in the project and told them we have this wonderful educational opportunity to tell a great story about george washington, and it's also a great story about the heritage of spirits in american history. they supported that and so they actually had came up with over $2 million to support the research and then the reconstruction of the distillery. so what washington was making

a rye whiskey. and we know his recipe was 60% rye grain, 35% corn and then 5% malted barley. that was a very typical, very popular recipe from the time period. and rye is a little different. most whiskey folks drink is mostly out of corn, which yields a sort of sweeter end product. rye's kind of spicier, little bit sharper. but it was the popular grain at the time. and how they would do this is take all of those different grains and mix them in these large barrels called mash tubs. and they would put them in and they would add boiling water. and behind us here, this is the boiler where the water gets heated up. and you would actually have to dip that out and bring it over to one of these large tubs and deposit the grain in here, put the boiling water in, and then you'd take this mash rake and then you would stir it.