Episode 5: Prohibition and the War on Drugs
A full transcript of this episode is available here.
In this episode of the Bully Pulpit, we explore presidential power as it relates to Prohibition and the War on Drugs. If you go looking through American history, it's not difficult to find conflict over alcohol and drugs, and the president's role in addressing them. The president of the United States has plenty to say, not just about what goes into our bodies, but about the industries, ecosystems, and societal consequences of those substances.
For some keen historical insight, we talked to two guests. First, we spoke to Dr. Mark Schrad, author of Smashing the Liquor Machine. Dr. Schrad set the scene for us at the turn of the 20th century, and provided some fascinating insight into the global history of prohibition. Then, we talked with Dr. Aileen Teague, an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. Dr. Teague explained how the War on Drugs became an animating part of presidential politics, especially during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Together, these two authors reveal how drug and alcohol policies are about more than just the substances. Rather, alcohol and drug policies reflect American's greatest fears in each historical moment.
Guests:
Dr. Mark Schrad is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University
Dt. Mark Lawrence Schrad is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University and an expert in the fields of Comparative Politics & International Relations. Dr Schrad earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His most recent book, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (Oxford University Press, 2021) argues that American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory “liquor machine” that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States.
Dr. Schrad is also the author of The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave and Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.
Follow Dr. Schrad on Twitter @VodkaPolitics.
Dr. Aileen Teague is an assistant professor at The Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University
Dr. Aileen Teague joined the Bush School’s Department of International Affairs as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2020. She previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She is also a Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics, and Public Policy. Dr. Teague earned her PhD in history from Vanderbilt University in 2018. Born in Colon, Panama, she travelled the world as part of a military family and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2006 to 2014. She teaches classes on American history and U.S. relations with Mexico and Latin America as well as thematic courses addressing issues such as interventionism, drug enforcement, national security, and addiction in U.S. society. Dr. Teague serves as faculty coordinator for the Latin America concentration. With support from the Mosbacher Institute, she coordinates The Other Side of the Border: Ties that Bind and Issues that Divide, a speaker series highlighting practitioner perspectives on the border, Mexico, and Latin America. Dr. Teague enjoys providing a voice on how history has shaped current social and political issues. Her opinion pieces have appeared in venues including Time and The Washington Post.
Dr. Teague’s research focuses broadly on issues of interventionism, militarization, and incorporating top-down and bottom-up perspectives to understand the effects of U.S. policies on foreign societies. She is currently drafting a book manuscript, based on her dissertation, Americanizing Mexican Drug Enforcement: The War on Drugs in Mexican Politics and Society, 1964–1982, which examines the effects of United States drug policies and policing efforts on 1970s and 1980s Mexican politics and society. The study incorporates a transnational approach, using archival sources from Mexico and the United States to explore the origins of bilateral drug enforcement measures and their relationship to Mexican state formation and U.S. domestic drug issues. The project also sheds new light on how local histories of political instability shaped the Mexican government’s response to the U.S. war on drugs. Dr. Teague’s work has been published in academic journals, including Diplomatic History and the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Her research has received support from organizations that include Fulbright (García Robles); the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR); the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College; and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she served as a Visiting Fellow.
Follow Dr. Teague on Twitter @AileenTTeague.