SNAFU with Ed Helms
S3E1: Satan's Last Stronghold
Wed, 12 Mar
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Organized crime, speakeasy gin, and jazz impresarios stole headlines in the 1920s, but behind the scenes boiled a bizarre government plot rooted in the first American culture war. In New York City, a pair of scientists sees the devastation written on the wall, and they try to put a halt to the mayhem before it's too late. Preorder the SNAFU book and join me on book tour at www.snafu-book.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
John F. Kennedy. Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What happens when we come face to face with death? My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine. My parachute did not deploy. I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.
When we step beyond the edge of what we know. I clinically died. The heart stopped beating. Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes. In return. It's a miracle I was brought back. Alive Again, a podcast about the strength of the human spirit. Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.
So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.
November 30th, 1928, Cleveland, Ohio. The city has just opened a new music hall downtown. It's 1920s opulence from top to bottom, arched ceilings in an Italian style, columns and balconies glowing with gold leaf, a giant plaster eagle looking down over the stage. Maybe not how I would do the decor, more into tasteful minimalism myself, but the folks in Cleveland are eating it up.
A massive sparkling chandelier spills light over a crowd of thousands who are all losing their minds, cheering for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing their hits. They're the most popular band in America, and they have a talented young cornetist blowing sweet notes from his horn. That's Bix Beiderbecke on the coronet. Not many folks name Bix nowadays. That's how you know you're in the 20s, baby.
He's standing in the back row of the band, doing his thing. Bix is a small, dapper fella dressed in a tux with slicked brown hair parted down the middle like an open Faulkner novel. A few songs into the performance, something strange happens. Bix's eyes roll back. He slumps over on the stage and falls to the ground, completely unconscious.
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Chapter 2: Who was Bix Beiderbecke and why is he important?
The Anti-Saloon League, they were a lot of lawyers and Methodist ministers from, like, Ohio. New York City, meanwhile, was a lot of working class, immigrant, black and Catholic neighborhoods constantly evolving. These New Yorkers weren't exactly interested in test driving someone else's moral experiment in turning the city dry as a kale chip.
But when a ban hit the whole country, they had no choice. The entire commercial beer supply in New York City, from the warehouses to the grocery stores to the cabinets of every legitimate business, got poured down the drain. But you might be surprised to hear, despite all that beer saying goodbye, New York nightlife wasn't changing. The alcohol fueling it, however, was.
With the beer taps dry, saloons were now serving stiffer and more mysterious concoctions, this time with distilled liquor.
As the amendment is circulating and moving forward to when it actually goes into place, around New York City, people are starting to prepare for it by making sure they have their own little home stills or backyard stills or, you know, what people used to call bathtub gin. Even if they can't get it legally, they want those systems in place.
And they were using wood or other materials that they could easily access in an urban area. And they were making wood alcohol.
Wood alcohol, known to those of us who passed 10th grade chemistry as methyl alcohol. It was used as a solvent to make varnish and as a fuel, and unfortunately sometimes to mix cocktails. From the taste, you couldn't tell exactly what was in those drinks. But you might find out the next day when you woke up in the hospital, your body loaded with methyl alcohol, a very toxic substance.
And that's if you were lucky enough to wake up. More and more people from all parts of the city were ending up on a gurney outside Gettler's lab.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood... She had been shot twice in the head and in the back behind the heart.
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