Posts Tagged ‘Prohibition’
“I’m more American than apple pie. I’m like apple pie, with a hot dog in it.”*…
From Kelsey McKinney and the invaluable Defector.com, investigative reporting at its most trenchant: just how many hot dogs do Americans eat?…
Last summer, my friend Dana brought me a very important question. She and some friends had been debating all weekend whether or not a certain officially reported number could possibly be true. Could I report it out? Could I find out whether there were lies afoot and frauds being perpetrated? As a good friend, I promised that I would try. And here I am, a mere 10 months later, trying.
The issue is this: The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council puts out a figure each year claiming to be the number of hot dogs an American eats annually.
I will give you a second to think about how many hot dogs this might be.
…
have asked this question at every party I have been to in the last 10 months, and most people give an answer somewhere between five and 25. I, a lover of hot dogs, guessed 30 when first faced with this question. It is still nowhere near the number the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council claims.
The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (from here on out referred to as Big Hot Dog) claims that the average American eats … 70 hot dogs a year… To be clear, this number includes only hot dogs. It does not include bratwursts or sausages or those mini dogs that can be rolled up in pigs-in-a-blanket. It does not include veggie dogs. It is only hot dogs that Big Hot Dog claims we are each eating 70 of every single year…
I emailed Eric Mittenthal, president of Big Hot Dog, last May to ask him where this number comes from and he said, “The number is an estimate based on the sales data we have.” OK, yes. I figured that much. I tried to ask follow-up questions, but they were left unanswered. So we are forced to try to confirm this figure using our powers of deduction. It is important that we do because this number is cited left and right. In the past five years, Big Hot Dog’s numbers have been quoted by Newsweek, and USA Today, and Time and a dozen other major publications. But are they … real?
Seventy hot dogs per American x 341,362,543 Americans = nearly 23.9 BILLION hot dogs per year…
How many dogs do Americans down? Read on to find out: “Big Hot Dog Must Tell The Truth,” (gift article) @mckinneykelsey @DefectorMedia.
* Stephen Colbert
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As we pass the mustard, we might note that today is “New Beers Eve,” the day before National Beer Day in the U.S.– a commemoration of the date (in 1933) that the Cullen–Harrison Act came into effect, legalizing the sale of 3.2% alcohol beer in the U.S.– which presaged the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment (on December 5, 1933) via the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, and the end of Prohibition.
“Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for”*…
We looked earlier at the shrinking away of public companies in the U.S., both as a product of consolidation (of operations and of ownership) and of the (potentially dangerous) growth, in their stead, of private equity. University of Michigan professor Jerry Davis has a more optimistic take…
Public corporations have been dominant institutions in the American economy since the dawn of the 20th century. Whether due to their greater efficiency or power, listed corporations spread across nearly all industries. “Capitalism” in America was synonymous with “corporate capitalism,” and the number of exchange-listed companies grew with the size of the economy.
Yet since the late 1990s, the number of listed corporations has dropped by half in the US, underwritten by new technologies that lower the cost of assembling an enterprise. Meanwhile, neglected alternatives to the public corporation both old (e.g., mutuals, cooperatives) and new (e.g., open source, platform coops) have proven surprisingly durable. Given the manifest pathologies of shareholder capitalism, the combination of these two trends may suggest pathways out of our current dilemma…
[David explains how both consolidation among listed companies and the rise of private equity have contributed to this drop, but then raises a third, more general explanation…]
A more encompassing interpretation is that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have drastically changed the basic economic calculus of what an enterprise looks like and how it might be funded. In the US context, this has meant that companies prefer “buy” to “make,” as transaction cost enthusiasts might describe it. I coined the term Nikefication to describe the process of vertical dis-integration that reconfigured American industry during the 1990s and 2000s and the options it opens for alternative forms of enterprise, described in detail in previous books…
The vertical dis-integration of the American economy was driven by Wall Street and enabled by ICTs. Ironically, the result is that the capital requirements to create and scale a business can be much lower, reducing the rationale to go public in the first place. Indeed, IPO prospectuses routinely convey that the point of the IPO is not to raise capital, but to create a market for the company’s shares to enable VCs and employees to cash out – which is not the most persuasive pitch to potential buyers, and perhaps helps account for the disastrous post-IPO performance of most new listings.
The asset-lite model means fewer public companies, but it also suggests new possibilities for non-corporate forms that may be more human-scale and democratic. Nike’s profit-driven, asset- and employee-lite model is not the only option enabled by new technologies.
By “noncorporate” I mean forms of economic organization that are not owned by outside shareholders, although they may be legally organized as a corporation. These include mutuals (where consumers or members are also the owners); cooperatives (where workers, producers, or consumers are the owners); municipal enterprises (where citizens or governments own the enterprise); nonprofits; and open source projects. These forms are far more prevalent than one might expect, and in some cases they dominate their industry (e.g., property insurance, server software).
Noncorporate forms of enterprise have proven surprisingly resilient in the US. The Fortune 500 list for 2022 includes at least a dozen mutual insurance companies, including State Farm (#44), New York Life (#71), and Nationwide (#83). The single largest shareholder of over 350 of the 1000 largest American corporations is Vanguard—also a mutual. Land o’ Lakes (#213) is an agricultural cooperative owned by its producer-members, as are Ocean Spray and Blue Diamond. Ace Hardware is a retail cooperative in which local stores can be attuned to local needs and tastes yet gain the economies of scale of a large-scale brand. Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s brilliant book Collective Courage documents that cooperative forms thrived in African-American communities for generations – often overlooked by those who find data about the economy solely through online databases. And the US is home to nearly 5000 credit unions, which by law are not-for-profits, owned by their members.
Stanford Law professor Ron Gilson once quipped that if shareholders didn’t exist, they would have to be invented. That’s not quite true: plenty of American enterprises do quite well without shareholders. Indeed, civilization itself might be better without them. As I have written elsewhere, “nearly every major societal pathology in the West today – certainly in the USA – is caused or exacerbated by profit-oriented corporations,” including the opioid epidemic, the obesity crisis, the return of nicotine addiction among the young, democracy-undermining social media, and a climate catastrophe underwritten by the fossil fuel industry. Shareholder capitalism may be a suicide pact. Conversely, cooperatives are inherently democratic and accountable…
Institutional alternatives to public corporations are well-established in the US, and in some cases they lead their industry, such as mutuals in finance and insurance. But cooperatives have historically been thin on the ground here compared to Europe. According to the Democracy At Work Initiative, there were 612 worker cooperatives in 2021 –a 30% increase over 2019, but still a tiny number.
Perhaps the digital revolution has finally created the conditions for cooperatives to thrive. Research from the pre-digital era suggests that one of the factors limiting cooperatives is, for want of a better term, the transaction costs of democracy. A lot of workers’ time spent in meetings to engage in dialogue, debate, and polling is a price that corporate dictatorships don’t have to bear. But newer tools have dramatically reduced the transaction costs of democracy: the same smartphones that enable pervasive corporate surveillance also allow worker voice at scale on a continuous basis.
It is not just transaction costs that have declined: the required assets to start a business are also much cheaper now to own or rent. Capital equipment such as Computer Numerical Control tools, powered by software, gets better and cheaper much the same way other software-powered tools do. (Compare the price of a color laser printer in 1990 to one today.) This is also true of the software required to run an enterprise. It is possible to buy a knockoff version of the enterprise software underlying the Uber app for under $10,000 – and the Drivers Coop in New York is creating a version to “franchise” the locavore driver-owned coop alternative to Uber. The ICTs that dis-integrated the corporate economy have opened space for noncorporate alternatives that might be more democratic and human-scaled.
There are reasons for optimism here. Platform cooperatives merge the benefits of coops with accessible technology, and have been especially effective in industries in which the required new capital investment is low (home cleaning, home health aides, transit). Trebor Scholz’s new book Own This! provides details on the opportunities here. Municipally- or cooperative-owned fabrication facilities can enable enterprises with limited capital to launch and thrive. If the required investment to start a business is low, then the range of alternative institutions, including coops, is correspondingly larger.
The technologies exist to create low-cost alternatives to public corporations. Maybe we are not stuck with the legacy of 20th century corporate capitalism after all…
An optimistic (and aspirational) take on what might follow the economic reign of the public company: “Is This the End of Corporate Capitalism?” from @vanishingcorp via @iftf.
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As we ponder proprietorship, we might recall that, on this date in 1933 the hospitality industry got a boost as Congress ratified the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution– repealing the 18th Amendment, which had prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. Prohibition had gone into effect in 1920 in an effort to reduce crime and improve public health, but it had backfired: despite massive public investment in enforcement, there was a sharp rise in organized crime (c.f.: bootleggers like Al Capone stepping in to supply black market booze) and the emergence of a “scofflaw” attitude on the part of a public that wanted its alcohol.
“When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”*…
As we’ve seen before, Prohibition spawned a number of creative work-arounds, some more legal than others. Most of them faded away with the 21st Amendment; but as Olivia White explains, one is still going strong…
Just off the coast of Winsconsin, in the frigid depths of Lake Michigan, sits Washington Island, a tiny island home to just over 700 people. Despite the small, three-digit population, Washington Island outsells every other town in the world when it comes to the amount of Angostura bitters consumed per capita. What could possibly be driving such impressive sales in such a small, remote place? Turns out the answer points back to one bar — Nelsen’s Hall — and it’s not because they’re dishing out thousands of Old Fashioneds.
Rather than garnering the title of largest Angostura purveyor by using the ingredient in an abundance of cocktails, Nelsen’s is famous for kick-starting the bizarre tradition of taking shots of Angostura. Not shots containing various spirits and a dash or two of Angostura, but 1.5-ounce servings of straight-up bitters.
First opened as a dance hall in 1899, Nelsen’s Hall was founded by Tom Nelsen, who expanded the space into a bar three years later. Less than two decades later, when Prohibition threatened the security of his bar, Nelsen was forced to get crafty in coming up with ways to remain open. Instead of operating with an alcohol license — which had for obvious reasons been stripped away — Nelsen acquired a pharmaceutical license as a sneaky way to legally sell the shots.
As Angostura bitters are only intended to be used a few drops at a time, at the time of Prohibition, they were classified as a “stomach tonic for medicinal purposes,” despite the fact that they contain 44.7 percent alcohol by volume. As such, Nelsen acquired a pharmaceutical license that allowed him to legally distribute Angostura as a medical tincture…
Today, the Angostura shot remains one of the most popular menu items at Nelsen’s Hall, which is known to go through three cases of bitters on busier weekends. Annually, the bar sells upwards of 10,000 Angostura shots; every person who chooses to partake earns a spot in the “Bitters Club” and receives a card certifying that they have “taken ‘the Cure’ by consuming the prescribed measure of bitters and as such [are] a fully initiated member of the Bitters Club.” Upon signing their own name in a decades-old book, shot-takers are “considered a full-fledged Islander and entitled to mingle, dance, etc. with all the other islanders.”
The vestigial remains of long-dead regulation: “Wisconsinites Drink an Ungodly Amount of Angostura — Blame It on a Prohibition Loophole,” from @VinePair.
* Henny Youngman
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As we contemplate unintended consequences, we might send dry birthday greetings to Alphonso Alvah Hopkins; he was born on this date in 1843. A teacher, author, journalist, editor, publisher, and politician, he is best remembered as one of the leading Temperance activists of his time. Hopkins ran as the Temperance Party’s candidate for New York State’s Secretary of State, member of Congress, and Governor; he published several books, including two temperance novels entitled His Prison Bars, and Sinner and Saint, and Wealth and Waste, a treatise which applies the principle of political economy to the problems of labor, law, and the liquor traffic; and throughout, he taught at the American Temperance University.
“Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water”*…
From the annals of self-help, get rich quick writing, The Saturday Evening Post…
If you were a bright, ambitious, young man in 1922 who wasn’t inconvenienced by your conscience, you might have considered starting your own liquor distribution business.
There were, of course, challenges: specifically, the 18th Amendment, Treasury Department officers, and, to a wildly unpredictable level, state and local law enforcement.
But in our May 13, 1922, issue, an Anonymous Bootlegger offered insider information to help ambitious entrepreneurs on their way to becoming the next Al Capone.
He discussed three promising business models: brokering legal “medicinal” liquor, driving liquor over the border from Canada, or bringing it by boat from overseas…
How to: “So You Want to Be a Bootlegger,” from @SatEvePost.
* W.C. Fields
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As we scoff at the law, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that city authorities in the California beach town of Santa Cruz announced a total ban on the public performance or playing of rock and roll music, calling it “detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community.”
It may seem obvious now that Santa Cruz’s ban on “Rock-and-roll and other forms of frenzied music” was doomed to fail, but it was hardly the only such attempt. Just two weeks later in its June 18, 1956 issue, Time magazine reported on similar bans recently enacted in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and in San Antonio, Texas, where the city council’s fear of “undesirable elements” echoed the not-so-thinly-veiled concerns of Santa Cruz authorities over the racially integrated nature of the event that prompted the rock-and-roll ban… (source)
On an orthogonol (and personal) note: the important (and revolutionary) work of @b612foundation (on whose board I sit) is featured on the front page of this week’s New York Times Science Section: “Killer Asteroids Are Hiding in Plain Sight. A New Tool Helps Spot Them” (unlocked).
“No pressure, no diamonds”*…
And sometimes no pressure means no deep clean. David Buck, on the remarkable story of pressure washers…
Some say that necessity is the mother of invention. But more often, it seems that happy accidents play more of a role than they’re given credit for. Such is the case with the pressure washer. Born of an accident in one man’s garage, the pressure washer would go on to become a staple of industrial and household work.
Our story begins in the small town of Moon Township, PA. A small town situated along the Ohio River, Moon Township is actually part of the Pittsburgh Metro area. Settled in the 18th century, the area was named “one of the best, affordable places to live” in the northeast by BusinessWeek back in 2007. But that isn’t the town’s only claim to fame: one of their residents was responsible for creating the precursor to the pressure washer as we know it!
It all started when Frank W. Ofeldt II was working on his whiskey stills at home. In 1926—seven years before prohibition officially ended—Ofeldt noticed something unusual: the steam from his whiskey stills was removing grease stains from his garage floor. Ofeldt knew his way around steam engineering and immediately saw potential in using the steam-cleaning technique in an invention…
From Prohibition to art projects, how the pressure washer revolutionized the way we clean outdoor surfaces—and occasionally, lends itself to creative solutions: “Under Pressure,” from @saltyasparagus1 in the ever-illuminating @readtedium.
* Thomas Carlyle
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As we spray it down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1925 that Secretary of Agriculture Howard Gore empaneled 21 state highway officials and three federal Bureau of Public Roads officials as the “Joint Board on Interstate Highways,” charging them to come up with a unified approach to marking and numbering “interstate routes” in the United States. They briskly came up with the numbering system (East/West highways are even numbered; North/South, odd-numbered) and the distinctive “shield” design for U.S. route markers. Their work in identifying the routes themselves– intensely political, as towns and cities fought to be on the main highways– took many years.
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