- I'm John Levenstein,
and today we're going to be
talking about Wayne Wheeler,
the man responsible
for Prohibition.
Cheers.
- Cheers, John.
- Wayne Wheeler
would have hated that.
 Wayne Wheeler's family
 had a farmhand who was drunk,
 who was swinging a pitchfork--
 a hayfork--wildly.
 He said, Mom,
 that farmhand's acting sloppy.
 The farmhand
 stabs Wayne Wheeler in the leg.
 Wayne Wheeler said
 Ouch.
Hey.
 - Yeah.
- What are you doing?
You just stabbed me in the leg.
What, are you drunk,
you farmhand?
 Wayne Wheeler decided,
 Alcohol's bad.
I'm going to spend
the rest of my life
fighting against alcohol.
And that's the fornd--
the formative event
of Wayne Wheeler's life,
with--of, okay.
The--
[laughs]
Okay.
The--
[laughs]
The formative event
of Wayne Wheeler's life.
 Wayne Wheeler, in 1893,
 graduated from college.
 He goes to see
 Howard Hyde Russell,
 from the Anti-Saloon League,
 speak.
I'm against alcohol.
I'm against the way alcohol
affects the American family.
Men should not
drink at the saloon,
waste away
their family's money,
come home, hit their wives,
hit their children.
That shouldn't happen.
 After the speech he said,
I'm going to
join your movement,
and I'll devote my life
to making people not drink.
Now, Wayne Wheeler,
with the Anti-Saloon League,
was a dynamo.
He was just biking everywhere.
He was biking
from town to town,
going door-to-door,
getting people
to vote against candidates
who opposed Prohibition.
 And Wayne Wheeler would say,
 People shouldn't drink.
I was stabbed by a fith--
a pitchfork when I was a child.
 And then they would say,
Oh, people can be stabbed
by pitchforks as children?
 And Wayne Wheeler would say,
 Yes.
[laughs]
- Why did you laugh?
- Because I was seeing
two of you.
- That's okay.
[laughs]
I--
[laughs]
 Wayne Wheeler was going
 to churches to raise money.
 He was going
 to arrange demonstrations,
 and he was always on his bike.
 He was always
 pedaling furiously.
 Wayne Wheeler
 invented pressure politics.
 Wayne Wheeler would say,
This person is not strongly
enough in favor of temperance.
 Then that person would go down.
 Every time--70 for 70.
So Wayne Wheeler
comes to Washington, DC
and starts fighting for
a constitutional amendment
against alcohol.
 Everyone is afraid
 of Wayne Wheeler.
 Wayne Wheeler is the most
 successful lobbyist
 in the United States.
There was another
thing that happened
that I'm forgetting right now
that I'll get back to.
That I'll get back to, Derek.
But, in the meantime,
Prohibition was passed,
and Wayne Wheeler won the day.
 Wayne Wheeler was
 such a zealot,
because once
Prohibition happened--
that wasn't enough
for Wayne Wheeler.
 He goes to see
 the head of the KKK.
I'm a national figure.
I can't do my own bidding,
but you, Ku Klux Klan, can.
 So the Ku Klux Klan did it.
They were Wayne Wheeler's
private security force.
 And they would go into bars
 and just tear
 the [bleep]ing place apart.
 The Ku Klux Klan
 was a violent organization.
 They were
 tarring and feathering
 people who were bootleggers.
[laughs]
Wha--
[laughs]
[laughter]
Wha--
[laughs]
Wayne Wheeler--
[laughs]
- Great name.
- Wayne Wheeler.
Wayne Wheeler is so crazy
because there was
still industrial alcohol
that was used
to clean engine parts,
to make nail polish.
 Wayne Wheeler said,
 We need to find a way
to make
that legal alcohol poisonous.
We're going to add
methanol to ethanol,
call it formula number 30,
and then anyone
who drinks ethanol--
not to clean engines,
but to get drunk--
will die.
And that's when
the [bleep] hit the fan.
 People who were drinking
 ethanol mixed with methanol
 didn't know that
 that's what they were doing.
 It made thousands
 of people sick
 and hundreds of people die.
 And Wayne Wheeler was saying,
 Well, it's your own fault.
You know about Prohibition.
You know alcohol's illegal.
You're dead now.
 And people started thinking,
Why would my own government
do this to me?
Wayne Wheeler,
who had been pretty much
running the government
as a lobbyist, was discredited.
 And that's when
 he went to Michigan.
 And then died a few weeks
 later.
 Just because Wayne Wheeler
 was stabbed in the leg
 by a pitchfork by
 a drunken farmhand as a child,
 he had to spend
 the rest of his life
 making sure no one else
 had fun, no matter what.
[laughs]
I mean--
[laughs]
Oh, God. I just spilled.
- Oh, you got it.
I love that
you're collecting the ice.
- All right.
This is as drunk as I get.
[laughter]
