Paul Thompson

But as the historian Paul Thompson says, People have to be internally persuaded of a reform. Law is not how you change people's minds. You know, if there's no willpower, you don't write a law to ban something. That's just stupid. It's just a mess.

They drafted model legislation and said, you support what we do? Here's a sample law. Maybe you could write a law like this. That still goes on with interest groups. They created mailing lists of people they knew who would vote for dry candidates. People do that today. Every interest group does that today.

You know, at the time we created national prohibition, 65% of America already lived in a dry town. 65% of Americans already couldn't buy liquor in town.

What is called the temperance movement lasted over a century. It started by meaning simply individuals should avoid drunkenness. And so it was temperate use of alcoholic beverages with a particular focus on distilled beverages. So your whiskey and your gins and your brandies.

Guess what else they wanted? The people that wanted a prohibition party wanted to give women the right to vote. This is 1869. And that should tell you how radical these people were because women didn't get the right to vote in 1919. So these people are decades ahead of the nation on women. There was a lot of temperance people that were not abolitionists, but every abolitionist was a teetotaler.

It's very hard for people in the late 20th and 21st century to understand that temperance and prohibition advocates were progressives.

The native-born white middle class by late 1800s that's already bought into abstinence sees these what they called hordes made of Jews and Catholics coming in who are also a lot of times halfway illiterate in English. And living conditions aren't great. And somebody called it the working man's palace. And these places are quite elaborate by the turn of the century.