Charles Norris

You know, is he a trustworthy source? No, he's not a trustworthy source.

He's clearly defending their policies and saying, no, this wasn't us. My reaction is that's exactly what I would say if I was James Duran, which is deny all responsibility and wash his hands.

I mean, this is not going to be a confessional moment.

You have the chief medical examiner of one of the most important American cities accusing the federal government of a planned program of extermination.

The strategy at the federal government was that we're running out of chemical options, let's try everything.

Formula 59B. Okay, now we've tried 58, maybe there was a 58A, but there were dozens of these formulas, each with a different number, each with a different mix of things. This whole panorama of industrial chemistry gets thrown at the wall in this period. And then they kind of give up.

I added up all the numbers to about 10,000 deaths. That number is the best estimate that I could come up with for every report I could find from that period in the 1920s. What the actual number is, I don't know. I think it's higher, but don't have that evidence, and I'm not sure anyone does.

Prohibition was a huge mistake in all kinds of ways. What I hope is that we actually learn from the mistake. I hope that understanding our history will add something to the idea that we're not going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Bellevue is close to the river. They would stack the bodies up on piers behind the hospital sometimes. When there was a catastrophe, some kind of multiple fatality thing, the bodies went to Bellevue. And there are actually newspaper reports of the time where bodies were really stacked up.

He's thinking, and this city, this imperfect, amazing city, is coming back to what it should be. People see him walking away in the dusk with this feeling of a job done.

The last thing you want is for your people to be called murdering chemists in a congressional hearing.

There's one doubter of the nobility of the experiment. Dr. Charles Norris, chief medical examiner of New York, makes protests in the North American Review, calling it a noble experiment in suicide by poison.

New York's chief medical examiner declares that the mortality rate from drink, instead of declining with the advance of prohibition, is actually gaining.

Charles Norris writes, at the end of eight years without good liquor, an increasing proportion of our nation is drinking itself to death on bad liquor.

Dr. Norris attributes a large number of deaths in motor accidents, homicides, and accidental deaths from falls to poison liquor. Norris says most of these are directly traceable to poison alcohol.

Your position, if you were a politician on other issues, was meaningless to them if you were OK on the prohibition issue.

I think one of the key things that one has to know about prohibition, there was never any indication that a majority of Americans believed in it.

The breweries and the saloons of the country continue to waste foodstuffs, fuel, and manpower to impair the efficiency of labors in the mines, factories, and even in munitions plants near which saloons are located. German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the republic in its war on the Prussian militarism.

How can any loyal citizen vote for a trade that is aiding a pro-German alliance? Everything that is pro-German is anti-American. Everything that is pro-German must go.

And while America braced itself for the new normal of prohibition... Georgia becomes the 13th state to ratify the 18th Amendment.

She didn't particularly believe in prohibition, but she believed in the law and she believed in her assignment. And if this is what you want me to do, damn it all, I'm going to do it.

LA woman to fight wets. Man's job is given to Mrs. Willebrandt by Harding. California woman gets federal plum. May want to primp up. Extra, extra. Woman swayed by logic. New assistant attorney general is not emotional.

The Secretary of Treasury, who was directly in charge of enforcement, Andrew Mellon, he owned Old Overholt.

Oh, my pennies! Well, at least I'm still looking dapper.

Ah, my reflection!

You believed in the betterment of society through government action and in expertise and turning things over to the people who really knew what they were doing. It was kind of an anti-democratic impulse. It's not related really to the progressivism that we know today.