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HOW
WE
WERE
Prohibition Revisited
HENRY LEE
77*7
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.
It'
How Dry We Were: Prohibition Revisited, by Henry Lee
1963 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book, or any portions thereof, in any form, ex-
cept for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-9831
Prentice-Hall International, Inc.
(.London, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris)
Prenticc-I lall of Canada, Ltd.
Prentice- Hall dc Mexico, S.A.
Printed in tlic United States of America
3966 7-T
Dedication
For all the "brave men who went gayly dawn to the sea
in ships on Rum Row,
For all the honest 'leggers on land, the honest Dry cops,
few as they were, and the honest Wet politicians,
For the thousands who died, the millions who somehow survived
mans attempt at instant millenium,
But particularly for Marion
Who listened and listened and listened.
Acknowledgments
A man never knows how many kind friends he has until he
undertakes to write a book. In recent years, it has become a fashion
among writers to emulate Gibbon, and a book rarely appears that
was not five to ten years or more in the making. I cannot claim such
awesome gestation, but thanks to my friends' pooled knowledge and
reminiscences, I can confidently assert that this volume represents
more than a century of research, most of which was enthusiastically
pursued at some depth in the field.
I want particularly to thank Mr. C. L. Chapin, president of
Repeal Associates Inc. in Annandale, Va., successor organization to
the gallant Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, who
carries on the fight against Dry propaganda. Without his advice and
material, this book might still have been possible, but not very
probable.
I want equally to thank Messrs. Robert Gordon Shand and
Reuben Maury, managing editor and editorial writer of the New
York News, for their permission to avail myself of the brilliant
Maury editorials of the period. And my deepest appreciation to other
colleagues on the News: Messrs. Francis Stephenson, Theodore
Dibble, Worth Gatewood, Howard Wantuch, Arthur Sieblist,
Kermit Jaediker, along with those who will no doubt punch my
nose when they find their names omitted, purely due to my feckless-
ness.
For the reminiscences furnished by Mr. Fairfax M. Cone, execu-
tive committee chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding, and Mr. Harry
Neigher, the veteran columnist on the Sunday Herald in Bridgeport,
Conn., I am most grateful. Mr. Howard Cohn, executive editor of
Pageant magazine, generously volunteered his original research notes
for an article in Pageant in January, 1959, on the return of beer and
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
whisky. I am also indebted to Popular Boating for material I once
wrote for that magazine on the sinking of the I'm Alone.
To many fine, anonymous reporters of the day whose stories I
consulted in newspaper files, I owe a fraternal debt.
If there are errors, the sin is mine.
Contents
1. A Day to Forget J
2. The Best People Drank! 14
3. But the Good People Didn't 21
4. The Coming of the Drought 31
5. With Portents and Prophecies, the Game Begins 44
6. Shhl Speak Easy 55
7. And They Drank All Night 60
8. Desperate Improvisations 72
9. "Daddy, That Man's at the Door" 84
10. They Come hy Sea 96
11. And They Die at Sea 109
12. Waiting Ashore 118
13. Meanwhile, Back on Dry Land 125
14. The Righteous Do Not Bow 135
15. The Good Guys Are Almost as Bad 151
16. Here, Here, What's Going On! 160
17. Laugh and the World Laughs with You 173
18. Ladies Notorious vs. Ladies Censorious 180
19. How Much Did They Drink 193
20. Sopping Wet and Howling Mad 207
21. Wholesome Is as Wholesome Does 219
22. A Glorious Day! 233
Index 241
A Prohibition Calendar
180823 citizens of Saratoga County, N.Y., meet under Dr. Billy F.
Clark and organize first American temperance society to oppose
hard liquor.
1833 First National Temperance Convention meets in Philadelphia.
1836 Second National Convention endorses abstinence from beer and
wine in addition to hard liquor.
1846 State Prohibition in Maine.
1851 Maine strengthens law, providing imprisonment for third offend-
ers and permitting search-and-seizurc on complaint of three
persons.
1851-
55 "First wave" of State Prohibition. Dry laws enacted in Con-
necticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode
Island and Vermont.
1856 New York State Dry law held unconstitutional.
1856-
1903 All "first wave" states repeal their Dry laws. Maine enacts new
Dry law in 1858; Massachusetts goes Wet in 1868, Dry in 1869,
Wet again in 1875.
1856 National Temperance Society is formed in Westerville, Ohio.
1869 National Prohibition Party organizes in Chicago.
1874 First national convention of Women's Christian Temperance
Union held in Cleveland.
1876 National Prohibition by Constitutional amendment urged by
Prohibition Party.
A PROHIBITION CALENDAR xi
1880 Kansas initiates Prohibition by state Constitutional amendment,
1880-
89 "Second wave" of State Prohibition. Constitutional Prohibition
adopted in Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, Rhode Island and
South Dakota (Iowa, Rhode Island and South Dakota later
repealing their amendments).
1893 Anti-Saloon League is formed at Oberlin, Ohio.
1903 Bar is closed in Capitol basement in Washington.
1907-19 "Third wave" of State Prohibition is adopted in 29 states.
1913 Webb-Kenyon Law bans transportation of liquor into Dry
states.
1914 House passes resolution to put Prohibition in Constitution by
majority vote but fails to give necessary two-thirds vote.
1917 April 6, U.S. enters World War I and following month
Congress bans sales to men in uniform. August 1, Senate ap-
proves submission of 18th Amendment to the states; December
17, House concurs.
1918 January 8, first state, Mississippi, ratifies the 18th. November
21, wartime Prohibition is adopted, ten days after signing of
Armistice.
1919 January 16, 36th state, Nebraska, ratifies the 18th. July 1, war-
time Prohibition goes into effect, six months and twenty days
after signing of Armistice. October 27, President Wilson vetoes
Volstead Act, which is almost immediately repassed over his
veto.
1920 January 16, 18th Amendment goes into effect. June 7, Supreme
Court upholds Volstead Act and rules unconstitutional New
York State law allowing 2.75 beer and wine.
1921 In March, New York passes Mullan-Gage state enforcement act.
July 4, Shacmas O'Sheel leads first New York protest parade.
1922 Expense of a year's police enforcement of Mullan-Gagc law
estimated at $1,000,000.
1924 U.S. and Great Britain ratify treaty to allow search of vessels
within one hour's run (twelve miles) of shore.
xu A PROHIBITION CALENDAR
1927 Bureau of Prohibition established in Treasury Department. Fred
Palm, violator of Michigan State Dry laws, receives life im-
prisonment.
1930 Bureau of Prohibition is transferred to Justice Department.
1931 Wickersham Commission report is made public.
1932 March 14, by 227 to 187, House defeats measure to allow
States to continue or abolish the 18th Amendment May 18,
Senate defeats 4 per cent beer bill and House defeats 2.75 per
cent beer. June 15, Republican national convention adopts sub-
mission plank. June 29, Democratic national convention approves
outright Repeal and immediate modification of Volstead Act.
December 5, House defeats Garner Repeal resolution, 272 for
and 144 against, six votes short of required two-thirds.
1933 February 16, Senate passes motion to submit 21st Amendment
repealing the 18th to state conventions by 63-to-23 vote. February
20, House concurs by 289-to~121 vote. April 3, first state,
Michigan, ratifies. April 7, 3.2 beer comes back and there are
nationwide celebrations. Nov. 7, with Repeal already ratified by
33 states (including Connecticut and Rhode Island which never
ratified the 18th), voting in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah
assure needed approval by three-fourths of the states. December
5, formal ratification of popular vote by state conventions in
Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah. At 5:32Vi P.M. (New York
Time), Utah becomes 36th state to ratify, and Prohibition is
dead.
A Day
to Forget
For an old rummy, or perhaps because of that very fact, J.B.
displayed a remarkable will to live.
Despite being pronounced officially dead in the summer of 1919,
he lingered stubbornly till the middle of the following January.
Then, when even his closest friends considered the end inevitable,
he was waked with clinking glasses and sad songs in hotels, clubs
and private homes throughout the land.
For although he was in deep disgrace with the law, most of the
churches and the better element generally, JJB. was, like so many
old rummies, an engaging guy with a wonderful, unpredictable
sense of humor.
And the best joke he ever pulled was that, after all 4he premature
obituaries and the triumphant pealing of church bells by his godly
enemies he didn't die at all. He was only sleeping.
J.B., of course, stands for John Barleycorn, a fine old English
name that dates back to the early 1600s. His presumed demise,
temporarily at first during World War I "emergency" Prohibition
and then supposedly forever under the 18th Amendment typifies
the thirteen years, ten months and eighteen days of the Prohibition
era: the longest, saddest, wettest, craziest, funniest, bloodiest adven-
ture in reform in American history.
From the Salem witchcraft trials to the imaginative religious cults
of upstate New York, aberrant social crazes of one kind or another
had intermittently afflicted the country. The drinking man always
posed a particularly ringing challenge, though the righteous med-
1
2 A DAY TO FORGET
dlers had to overlook some awkward facts of history in lumping him
indiscriminately with the godless, the fallen woman and the gam-
bler.
The saintly Pilgrims themselves had brought beer, brandy and
gin in the Mayflower, and their successors, clearing the wilderness,
taming the savage, pushing ever westward, had little medicinal
solace for mind or body other than the New England rum, moon-
shine, hard cider, applejack, rye and bourbon that they made or
carried with them on their strikes into the unknown.
Nonetheless, theological, legal and idealistic minds had tirelessly
been harassing the drinker by prayer, statute and exhortation. As
early as 1777, the Continental Congress urged that the various
state legislatures "pass laws the most effectual for putting an imme-
diate stop to the pernicious practice of distilling grain, by which the
most extensive evils arc likely to be derived, if not quickly pre-
vented." The legislatures saw little merit in the suggestion, but the
harassments continued.
Many times during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, villages,
cities, or even sections of cities, counties and whole states went Dry,
then often recovered their senses and became Wet again. Though
"the liquor interests" served as a convenient symbol of all that was
bad in American life, the impractical Drys played surprisingly prac-
tical, cynical politics themselves. Opportunistically, they took advan-
tage of each new fit of exaltation and reform that sporadically
afflicted the land to edge forward their own cause.
At the time the United States somewhat rashly contracted in
April of 1917 to make the world safe for democracy, many states
had their own Prohibition laws. More than 60 per cent of the
people and 80 per cent of United States territory were under
Prohibition. Now was the time to strike!
The boys in khaki had scarcely adjusted their puttees when, in
May of '17, Congress forbade liquor sales to them. That September,
the Food Control Bill went further, banning the manufacture and
importation of distilled liquor for beverage puqx>ses and giving
President Wilson discretionary power to reduce the alcoholic con-
tent of beer and wine or prohibit their manufacture altogether.
Thanks to a typical Dry trick, "wartime" Prohibition was smug-
gled into the imperative 1918 Agricultural Bill in the form of a
rider. California Representative Charles H. Randall, the only Pro-
A DAY TO FORGET 3
hibition Party Congressman, engineered this belated "conservation"
measure which became law on November 21, 1918 ten days after
the Armistice had been signed. And its prohibitory effective dates
after May 1, 1919, for the manufacture of beer and wine, after
June 30, 1919, for the sale of all liquors were projected even
further into the peaceful future.
But irony, like common sense, was lost on the Drys. They were
too busy executing their supreme coup. In the hysteria of the
moment, while the recruits were marching in mis-step to the railroad
stations and the bands serenading them in brass and the mayors
seeing them oft with ferocious orations, the Drys were quietly strik-
ing for permanent, nationwide Prohibition.
Seven of their leaders, mostly Anti-Saloon League brass, drafted a
proposed law (the first section was later accepted word-for-word by
Congress). On August 1, 1917, with the doughboys still over there,
the Senate, after only thirteen hours of debate and part of that
under the ten-minute rule, voted to submit the 18th Amendment
for ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the state legisla-
tures. The following December 17, after one day's cursory debate,
the House concurred. In the treacherous mood of the moment, a
total of 347 Senators and Representatives had set in motion the
machinery to bring about "an endless era of efficient sobriety."
Between January 1918 and January 1919, with Mississippi lead-
ing, 5,081 legislators in thirty-six states voted approval, and, as
Frederick Lewis Allen notes in Only Yesterday, the country accepted
Prohibition "not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly/'
So the boys came marching home, and our greeting to them was
an announcement by the Secretary of State that by a total of 5,428
Congressional and state votes, America would go totally D-r-y when
the 18th became operative a year hence. Fortunately, he could
bypass the fact that few, if any, of these 5,428 politicians had been
elected on national Prohibition pledges.
Finally, on January 16, 1920, the great law went into effect, and
it was henceforth forbidden, presumably forever, to manufacture,
sell, transport, import, or export "intoxicating liquors" to perform
their ancient, kindly service to mankind, a service disdainfully
described by statute as "beverage purposes."
Backing up this grand design was the National Prohibition Act,
better known as the Volstead Act, which spelled out the practicali-
4 A DAY TO FORGET
ties of enforcement and undertook the challenging semantic task of
defining "intoxicating liquors."
These were construed as alcohol, brandy, whisky, rum, gin, beer,
ale, porter and wine, plus any spirituous, vinous, malt or fermented
liquor, liquid or compound, whether medicated, proprietary, pat-
ented or not, and sold under any name, that contained Vi of 1 per
cent or more of alcohol by volume and was "fit for use for beverage
purposes/' As that sickening legal concoction known as "near beer
would shortly demonstrate, the more precise definition would have
been "sub-beverage purposes/'
In many parts of the country on that ghastly January 16, devas-
tating storms stalled traffic, mule-like Model T Fords broke the
cranking thumbs of countless motorists and only the milkman's
horse could get through the drifts. Thus, in her sometime prophetic
manner, Nature ushered in a tumultuous period in American
history that would witness an unprecedented attempt by the fed-
eral government to enforce a police regulation, demanding that
122,000,000 people accustomed to drinking more than 2,000,000,-
000 gallons of alcoholic refreshments yearly now pursue total
abstinence. With God's precious gift of hindsight, a federal in-
vestigatory body observed a decade later, "This was certainly an
ambitious undertaking for any government."
Closely following the national income tax and followed closely
in turn by women's suffrage, the 18th Amendment doomed Amer-
ica's traditional, masculine laissez-faire. No longer could a man
strictly minding his own business spending, saving, drinking as he
personally saw fit rely on the same treatment from his government.
Instead, in alliance with the new petticoat voters and their male
camp followers, the government would largely dictate a man's
spending and drinking habits.
Of course, between the new clear-headedness enforced on man
by statute and the decency which the lady voters would certainly
inject into the sordid game of politics, the dreamers foresaw a
wholesome new era dawning and the half-doors of the saloons
swinging shut behind father for the last time. Actually, during the
saloon days at least one saw father's feet, but once the peep-holed
full doors of the speakeasies replaced the open establishments, and
after the 18th came in, father disappeared and one no longer saw
much of mother, either.
A DAY TO FORGET 5
"The old days when father spent his evenings at Cassidy's bar
with the rest of the boys are gone, and probably gone forever,"
Elmer Davis reported. "Cassidy may still be in business at the old
stand and father may still go down there of evenings, but since
Prohibition mother goes down with him."
Mother's elbow-bending was only one of a hundred sociological
symptoms that showed the dawning Dry Era to be more confused
and schizophrenic than wholesome. As women sampled their new
suffrage, they also sampled the headier freedoms of drinking, not
just with father but often unescorted in mixed company till all
hours of the morning and in worse deadfalls than father had ever
known. With her raucous shouts of "Hello, sucker!" Texas Guinan,
belle of New York's booze clubs, soon replaced the gentle Irene
Castle as the nation's pinup girl, and the sweet young college girls
were as thoroughly coarsened as the women, A few years ago, in
her eighties, Belle Livingstone, the witty, irrepressible queen of
Park Avenue, reflected with uncharacteristic seriousness on this
unhappy aspect of Prohibition. 'We taught 'em delinquency in our
days of defying the law in the Prohibition era," she told the New
York World Telegram-Sun. 'Women went into the bars, which
they never did before. It's a sin for the people to scream that the
kids are actin' badly. We bred the delinquents, I'm afraid."
Toting hip flasks, drinking and necking in the rumble seat, Pro-
hibition youth set a formidable mark for today's delinquents to shoot
at because liquor, even though it made you sick, was "smart" and
"passing out" was smarter. When genial Frank Ward O'Malley,
"die best known reporter in America," gave up his home in Brielle,
New Jersey, and went into European exile because of the 18th,
he interviewed a number of French-Swiss headmasters at a private
school's convention near Lausanne.
"I could not find one headmaster or master who ever had heard
of a hip flask or a drinking scandal of any sort in his school," he
reported, though Lausanne had a wineshop on every business block,
sometimes right alongside a school.
"But here's the point," O'Malley told an interviewer. "Full one-
third, perhaps more, of all those absolutely temperate youths and
misses are Americans. They are blood brothers and sisters of the
hip flask young scamps who, since the passing of the Volstead Act,
have been carried out feet first blotto from high school dances
6 A DAY TO FORGET
held within a ten-minute ride of my home town on the Jersey
Coast."
On a frightening scale, the police in almost every precinct in
every city were corrupted because bootleg money, unlike dollars
from the prostitution or narcotics rackets, was "clean" graft. Besides,
politicians, from the mayor down, would not tolerate unauthorized
raids. In New York City, a captain (who was to become an out-
standing Commissioner after Repeal) suffered years of exile in an
outlying precinct because of his unwanted honest views on enforce-
ment. And the poor Commissioner who held office there during the
first five Dry years confessed to an interviewer a quarter of a century
later:
"Prohibition was 75 per cent of my trouble. I had gambling and
prostitution under control, but I could not enforce this unpopular
law/'
In fact, during the present Dry Era, 32,000 speakeasies replaced
the 15,000 legal drinking places of prc-Prohibition New York, and
that ineffable man of God and total abstinence, Bishop James
Cannon Jr. of Virginia, deplored the soaking wet metropolis as
"literally Satan's seat." But the same could have been said anywhere
across the land, and when the staid Quaker City investigated its
Police Department, a grand jury was amazed at the thriftiness of
the Philadelphia cops.
At a time when inspectors made $3,000 to $4,000 and captains'
salaries were from $2,500 to $3,000, one inspector was able to bank
$193,553.22 and another, $102,829.45. One captain had deposited
$133,845.86, two more had more than $60,000 each and seven
others had put aside nest eggs ranging from $14,000 to $32,000
apiece. Nationally, the federal government had to dismiss some
1,600 Prohibition enforcement agents over the years for crimes
ranging from bribery and extortion to theft, perjury and forgery.
But the demoralization of the police was far from the worst of
Prohibition's sins. The whole American political birthright of blunt,
pioneer talk was sold for legislative seats by politicians who made
themselves the slaves, willingly or otherwise, of Wayne Wheeler,
who was the driving force of the Anti-Saloon League and in the
accurate, respectful words of his own secretary, "the most masterful
and powerful single individual in the United States/'
A DAY TO FORGET 7
Wheeler held President Harding in the palm of his hand and
terrorized all but the bravest Congressmen. The Drys pursued a
strategy of revenge, going after the scalps of Wet leaders, and they
were generally successful at it. In the North, their angels were
chiefly rich and middle-class Republicans, but they never hesitated
to knife an outstanding GOP Wet and let a Democrat, even a Wet
Democrat, win, provided he was a political nonentity.
Never before or since did such a curious, ruthless lobby capture
the Congress of the United States, and for thirteen years the
hostages of the Anti-Saloon League talked and voted Dry, surrep-
titiously drank themselves and pussyfooted. (The stealthy word
came to symbolize Prohibitionists.) "Got to keep it from the
Nigrahs," the Southern Congressman explained between hiccups.
In disputations more complicated, furious and fruitless than those
waged by the theologians of the Middle Ages, Wet lawyers and
Dry prosecutors noisily argued how the restrictive 18th could be
legally accommodated within the letter and spirit of the Bill of
Rights. It couldn't be done, of course, which made the stately briefs
all the more absurd.
For the most par,t the courts went along with the comedy, and
the shadow land steadily narrowed between the Dry national good
and the individual's shaky right to the pursuit of happiness in his
possession and consumption of the demon stuff. Private clubs were
not safe one honest prosecutor, though personally a Wet, raided
his own and the ancient concept that a home, however modest,
is a free man's castle suddenly became archaic.
In Peoria, a judge ruled that failure to report a liquor law viola-
tion is a felony itself, thus making a felon of a fellow who took a
drink and didn't tell. The United States Supreme Court refused
to intervene against Michigan's vicious parlay of interpreting liquor
violations (even personal possession) as felonies and then giving
life sentences to four-time losers under a habitual criminal act.
Apparently, this did not impress the highest court as "cruel or
unusual punishment."
Even the Great Dissenter, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
handed down a unanimous decision, to which most of us would
express violent dissent today. He ruled that the Dry ferrets could
seize any barrels, botdes, bottle caps or corks, capping machines,
8 A DAY TO FORGET
labels or similar equipment "offered for sale in such a way as
purposely to attract purchasers who want them for the unlawful
manufacture" of intoxicants.
"You can't logically call this an idiotic decision/' the New York
News, loud, clear voice of metropolitan Wets, argued surprisingly.
No, the editorial went on to say:
"It is the law itself that is idiotic, and that makes not only our
highest court but all the rest of us look like a national convention
of idiots."
During those thirteen years when idiocy passed all the resolutions,
the gang guns roared insolently in the big cities, and florists grew
rich on the mourning wreaths that accompanied each extinct hood-
lum to his grave. But the guns of trigger-happy Prohibition agents
and associated enforcers roared almost as loud, and probably 2,000
or 3,000 officials, suspects and bystanders were killed during raids
or wild auto chases.
Being a passer-by was a particularly hazardous condition in those
days of deplorable marksmanship when the Prohibition men so
often aimed at tires and hit people or "stumbled," firing with equally
lethal effect.
In Niagara Falls, New York, Jacob Hnnsen, secretary of an Elks'
lodge who had never been in trouble, refused to stop early one Mny
morning in 1928 when he mistook two Coast Guardsmen (not in
uniform) for highwaymen. They opened fire, and a bullet gouged
out his right eye, lodging in the back of his skull. He died after
four months of extreme suffering. No liquor was found in his car.
Even Pennsylvania Avenue, "Washington, D.C., was not safe
for a Congressman. In February of 1924, U.S. Senator Frank L.
Greene of Vermont was walking home with his wife when he
heard shots. As he stepped toward an alley to investigate, he walked
into a brisk gun battle between Prohibition agents and bootleggers,
and a Dry bullet hit him above the left eye. For a month, lie lay
near death.
When such distressing accidents occurred, the federal prosecu-
tors, suddenly turning defense lawyers, plucked the government
killers from outraged local authorities into the asylum of the U.S.
courts. There, they might or might not be prosecuted on man-
slaughter charges, and if they were, they usually were acquitted.
Since 1833, the law had provided that federal officers be prosecuted
A DAY TO FORGET 9
in the federal courts for any acts committed in their official capacity,
and by the Volstead Act, Congress had extended this comfort to
Prohibition agents.
Hence, it was perfectly legal for the Feds to use writs of habeas
corpus as flying carpets on which they could whisk their gunmen
out of local and county jails. Even the Supreme Court said so.
Congress, the tribunal explained somewhat dryly, had "not without
reason assumed that the enforcement of the National Prohibition
Act was likely to encounter a lack of sympathy and even obstruc-
tion . . ."
However, as the casualties among the innocent and mistakenly
suspect mounted with increasingly reckless "shotgun enforcement/'
protests also mounted steadily. In Survey Graphic magazine, the
gentle and respected Jane Addams, who most appropriately was to
receive the Nobel Peace Prize, suggested:
'What the prohibition situation needs, first of all, is disarmament.
If this necessitates federal control of the sale of firearms, so much
the better; but whatever is necessary for the final results, the federal
agents should be promptly taught some other methods than those
of gunmen.
"It is their business to bring lawbreakers into court and not to
punish them on the spot."
Unfortunately, the worst sin of all in those Dry years was that
Prohibition corrupted even the Prohibitionists. Though there were
countless high-minded people among them, they came to accept
lies, deals, brutalities, death by gunfire, poison liquor and increasing
alcoholism with a kind of three-little-monkeys myopia.
"Did I ever lie to promote Prohibition? Decidedly, yes. I have
told enough lies 'for the cause* to make Ananias feel ashamed of
himself. The lies that I have told would fill a big book." So stated
W. E. (Pussyfoot) Johnson, one of the most strenuous dry agitators,
in a magazine article.
And in a debate on the Senate floor, Senator Smith W. Brookhart
of Iowa dismissed the protests against Dry murders as sentimentality.
"When we get Senators in this Chamber talking sense, instead of
all this gush stuff about murders by men who make mistakes once
in a while," he orated, "we will have a better attitude toward the
bootlegging question."
Eventually, as the various legal, social, religious, political and
10 A DAY TO FORGET
criminal absurdities were piled upon each other, the "best people"
began publicly debating whether they should obey the national
law. Even the clergy could not agree among themselves whether
God or the Devil had loosed Andrew Volstead on the land. Though
probably most still gave the questionable compliment to God, a
surprising number of clerics publicly stated their objections in
Temperance or Prohibition, a book published in 1929 when the
whole controversy was nearing the blow-off point.
In the most forthright terms, they labeled Prohibition "a huge,
ghastly, costly failure" . . . "neither constitutional nor Christian"
... "a system foisted upon the American people by a minority of
the democracy during a time when we were subject to fits of hys-
teria." To civilized nations, said one clergyman, we must appear
"as a nation of morons, in independent reasoning power below the
capacity of a ten-year-old," and a rabbi added:
"It has contaminated all classes. The old saloon at least did not
invade the school and the home. So much cannot be said for the
bootlegger."
This same year 1929 Congress authorized appointment of a
National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. This
eminent body of ten eminent citizens under an eminent lawyer,
all appointed by President Hoover, briskly attacked the whole mess.
Nothing like it had been attempted since the Committee of Fifty
under Educator Seth Low began looking into the "liquor problem"
in 1893, eventually coming up with five 400-page volumes of re-
ports.
After laboring for eighteen months, Hoover's "Wickcrshnm Com-
mission" delivered a five-volume, 2,984-page report, but despite the
size of the baby, the commissioners were obviously as confused as
everybody else in the country. Two of the eleven endorsed Repeal,
seven urged modification or revision of the 18th Amendment, and
only two stood for its continuance without considerable overhauling.
However, as a Commission, not as individuals, the group recom-
mended that the experiment continue! And President Hoover chose
to accept this unclear mandate to carry on the sorry game which
he had onee incautiously called "a great social and economic experi-
ment noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose/'
The Wickersham Commission was one of the last wonderful
A DAY TO FORGET 11
futilities and confusions of the Dry Era, and inspired this poem in
F-PA's column in the New York World:
Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it.
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime,
Nevertheless, we're for it.
Eventually, of course, the madness subsided, and reluctantly,
painfully, some of die staunchest Drys who were not completely
blinded by power or prejudice repudiated all the far-reaching
nobility, social, economic and otherwise, of Prohibition.
William Gibbs McAdoo, twice a Dry candidate for the Demo-
cratic Presidential nomination, and the very Dry John R. Mott,
head of the International Missionary Council of the World's
Alliance of the Y.M.C.A., called for Repeal or resubmission of
Prohibition.
Then, on a June day in 1932 when a well-known haberdasher
was advertising "crisp, cool, white linen suits'' made of "Pre-Shrunk
Imported Irish Linen'' for only $1475, came the shocker. Ex-
claimed the three-column lead headline on Page One of the New
York Times:
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JR. OUT FOR REPEAL;
SAYS DRY LAW EVILS OUTWEIGH BENEFITS;
URGES WET PLANKS IN BOTH PLATFORMS
More temperately, the News said:
ROCKEFELLER URGES
REPEAL OF DRY LAW
HE HELPED TO PASS
After more than three decades of unswerving personal, public
and financial dedication to the Dry cause, John D. Jr. had "slowly
and reluctantly" come to believe that the abolition of the saloon and
12 A DAY TO FORGET
"certain other benefits" of the 18th were "far more than outweighed
by the evils" incurred.
And these evils, he somberly warned, "unless promptly checked
are likely to lead to conditions unspeakably worse than those which
prevailed before."
Now the end of the sad comedy was near, and when it came, it
came quickly. In November of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt over-
whelmed President Hoover in the White House race, but in those
days, Inauguration was not until the following March 4. Before
FDR could launch his New Deal revolution, the lameduck Con-
gress in February of 1933 the same Congress which less than a
year earlier had beaten down several Wet measures agreed to sub-
mit the 21st Amendment (repealing the 18th) to state conventions.
Less than two months later, a repentant Michigan, no doubt now
ashamed at having handed out life sentences for liquor violations,
was the first to ratify the new amendment.
As the stately formalities were hurried through one state after
another, a benign and understanding Congress gave the thirsting
citizenry the stopgap gift of legal 3.2 beer, almost as potent as the
3.7 stuff of the good old days. Coast to coast on April 7, they
celebrated "New Beer's Eve."
In Los Angeles, blonde Jean Harlow, bustiest actress of her day,
smashed a lager bottle on a beer truck convoy taking off for hotels
and restaurants, and back on Broadway, Jimmy Durante, who had
the schnozzola for it, sang:
Roses are red, violets are blue; *
I'll dunk my nose in three point two.
During the next months, Repeal rode a flood tide and when at
5:32Vi P.M. (New York time) on Friday, December 5, Utah
became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, the New York Journal hap-
pily concluded its unhappy calendar of the Dry Era:
"TODAY, December 5, FINIS."
But though it was over, it wasn't really over. The comforting
rationalization that bootleg bribes didn't really smell led directly
to the corruption problem that plagues so many police departments
today, the acceptance of "clean" graft from gamblers with political
connections.
Prohibition inspired lessened respect for the law which, like lady
A DAY TO FORGET 13
drunks and corrupt cops, has persisted as a heritage of those
thirteen nationally misspent years. In the end, only the under-
world had profited, and the enormous amount of money involved
was diverted into respectable enterprises which are still administered
by executives who learned their business ethics in Cicero, Illinois.
Any inherent good in Prohibition, whatever minuscule amount
there was, was buried along with its bones in December, 1933.
Many of the evils that it wrought live after it to harass us unto this
day, as we shall see as this little farce of man's humanity to man
unfolds.
But, first, we must answer the anguished cry that came from the
lips of an old rummy in Bridgeport and tens of thousands of lips
in Erie, Peoria, Ashtabula, Oakland and all the other cities on
that day to forget, January 16, 1920.
"How did this happen to us!"
The
Best People
Drank!
In my home town when I was a boy, there lived a wholesale
liquor dealer who had gotten rich on the quick turnover of his wet
merchandise. Somehow, he heard of a Latin motto which he was
assured on good authority translated into "Time flies/' the very
essence of his success. Thus, when he came to build a mansion,
standing out in protruding bricks on his imposing chimney, was
the elegant phrase:
Tempus fugit.
Late one night, one of his customer's customers at the retail
level, unsteadily working his way home, felt mildly annoyed as his
eyes gradually focusscd on the pretentious Latin phrase. Tiptoeing
into the liquor dealer's yard, he scrawled in white chalk under*
neath the motto:
And rum did it.
Similarly, rum deserves approbation by association in the very
founding and development of America, To appreciate the enormity
of Prohibition, we should first stitch a drinking man's sampler of
how much whisky has done to settle a continent, float our little
bobbing ship of state and generally facilitate life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.
Two-thirds of our strenuous history, and by far the most rugged
part, was written before the general availability of good medicine
or even reliable anaesthesia. For toothache, broken leg, common
cold, pneumonia, snakebite, scalp wound or the subtler miseries
now treated by the psychiatrists, there was only one obvious relief,
THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK! 15
and thank God not yet enough Prohibitionists to dam the supply!
During the Mayflower's long voyage, the muscular young cooper
who guarded the Pilgrims' casks of beer and pipes of gin and
brandy had a name familiar to every school child. He was John
Alden. And the stuff he guarded so conscientiously, a historian of
the voyage emphasizes, was "no small or unimportant part, from any
point of view, of the provision supply."
Once ashore at Plymouth Rock, the Saints comforted themselves
like any group of drinking men cast loose in an arid land with a
dwindling supply. When their own stores ran out on the first
Christmas, the Mayflowers skipper took pity on them and passed
around some of his own beer. An early exploring party exhausted
its "aqua vitae" (probably Hollands gin) and at last found a brook,
"being y c first New-England water they drunk of."
Understandingly, Bradford, their fellow Saint and historian,
adds that the tasteless liquid "was now in thir great thirste as
pleasante unto them as wine or bear (sic) had been in for-times."
Even as the Seventh Cavalry, the Pilgrims in extremity could
drink water. Fortunately, by the time the first Thanksgiving was
celebrated the following year, the situation had eased, and there was
wine, red and white, "very sweete & strong," made of the wild
grape.
Politically, "Hollands/ 1 "strong water," "schnapps" or "aqua
vitae" lubricated their meetings with the Indians. On the first visit
of the great chief Massasoit the Pilgrims fed him gin, which may
have been one of the reasons he came back later in a cooperative
spirit. As they hammered out a peace treaty, Massasoit tossed off a
"great draughte" which "made him sweate all the while after," but
deplorable as it may have been to give firewater to an Indian, that
pact endured more than four decaoes until the chief's death. Rum
did it.
In fact, as we shall shortly see, drinking became something of
a problem in the chaste and righteous litde colony, but we should
not unfairly single out the Pilgrims as tippling more than average
in those hard-drinking days.
A decade later, when the Puritans followed the Saints to Mas-
sachusetts, the Arabella's hold sloshed invitingly with forty-two
tuns of beer, 10,000 gallons of wine and, almost as an afterthought,
fourteen tuns of fresh water. In the 1650s, a traveler deplored the
16 THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK!
Maine seamen who brought back "a bark laden with the legitimate
blood of the rich grape" from the exotic wine islands and then, as
their own best customers, drank themselves into stupors for as long
as a week.
In the second academic year of the country's first college, charges
were lodged that Harvard students had been left "wanting beer
betwixt brewings a week and a week and a half together." For
this and other serious offenses, the first master, Nathaniel Eaton,
and his wife, who had supervised the victualing, were fired. The
situation was gotten under control, and two centuries later, Thomas
Hill, a serious-minded fellow destined to become a Harvard presi-
dent, wrote his parents, "There is a scandalous degree of profanity
and wine bibbing here, I don't care who says to the contrary."
Even Rhode Island, that high-minded spinoff from narrow
Puritanism, liked its glass, or several glasses. In the mid- 1700s,
there was one licensed tavern keeper for each hundred of the white
population, and indeed only strong early training could account
for a rather remarkable feat of toastmanship reported by the Provi-
dence Gazette when the townsfolk celebrated repeal of the Stamp
Act in March of 1766.
After a parade and an edifying discourse by the Rev. Mr. Row-
land at the Presbyterian meeting house, the celebrants flocked to
the court house and drank to His Majesty's health in a preliminary
way. They then adjourned until 4 P.M. when, reports the Gazette,
"they drank thirty-two of the most loyal, patriotic and constitu-
tional toasts." This overwhelming demonstration of affection for
the monarch was followed in the evening by the firing of 108 sky
rockets and "an elegant boiled collation." At 11 P.M., "every heart
full fraught with joy and loyalty," they lurched home to bed.
Nor, as the Drys always maintain, was such bibulous activity
restricted to the giddy metropolitan sections of the country. As
America built, it drank. A French niarquis marveled that the
Connecticut pioneers of the 1780s could build a cabin in forty-eight
hours and transform it into a substantial home within the month.
Rum did it.
"In America, a man is never alone, never an isolated human
being," the marquis noted. The neighbors pitched in cheerfully
to help him, the only recompense being "a cask of cider drunk in
common and with gaiety, or a gallon of rum."
THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK! 17
And the prices were right.
In the 18th Century, Scotsmen who fished on the Newfoundland
Banks brought along homemade Scotch in hig vats made of timbers
from old sailing ships. (Together with the peat water, the bacteria
of dead cod impregnated in the timbers first gave Scotch its special
flavor, according to naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson.) The Scots got
to swapping their whisky for food and other provisions from die
New Englanders, Sanderson says, and the Yankees were paying
only a penny a mug for real imported stuff.
Of course, the most popular distilled drink was rum, practically
a New England monopoly, which was made out of Cuban and
West Indian molasses.
However, as men struck west over the Allegheny Mountains,
whisky distilling became popular with the new settlers, especially
those of Scotch descent, and a man's right to tend untaxed pots
caused the gravest insurrectionary threat of Washington's adminis-
tration, as we shall see.
Early in the 1800s, an appreciative Englishman named Samuel
Crabtree, then wheeling westward through Ohio, Indiana and the
Missouri Territory, found surprising diversification and still-bargain
prices. "Good rye whisky, apple and peach brandy, at forty cents
per gallon, which I think equal to rum. Excellent cider at three
dollars per barrel of thirty-three gallons, barrel included."
Politically, liquor had a decidedly closer, wanner association than
tea had with the very founding of the United States. To the taverns
repaired the Sons of Liberty for their plottings and refreshments
and often mine host was a veteran of the militia or Indian fighting
and ready for more trouble, if needs be.
Indeed, it may not be too long a pull of the historical bow to
say that a now-vanished tavern was the very cradle of our liberties.
At that "dispensary of good cheer" in Dedham, Mass., known as
Woodward's Tavern, the famous Suffolk Convention was organized
on September 6, 1774. Its resolutions to fight if necessary are
credited with having had strong influence on the earliest Con-
tinental Congress.
"Was it (Woodward's) not the birthplace of the American
Revolution?" a speaker cried at Dedham's 200th anniversary, and
we await with interest the Prohibitionists' reply.
When Washington came to the solemn moment of taking leave
18 THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK!
of his officers, he might most appropriately have done it at City
Hall Park where the Declaration of Independence had first been
read to the troops. The place chosen, however, was a tavern,
Fraunces, still standing in downtown New York. Washington did
not take leave of Samuel Fraunces, the innkeeper. He made him
steward of his household while he was President.
In fact, first as he was in so many things, Washington couldn't
even be considered a runner-up in the abstinence movement. When
he dined at 3 P.M. he enjoyed small beer, cider and Madeira
wine, often several small glasses of the latter. Like him, Jefferson
would have suffered considerable annoyance had he lived under
the Dry blanket of the 18th Amendment. In his declining years,
Jefferson doubled the glass and a half of wine prescribed by his
physician "and even trebled it with a friend/'
All through the early 19th Century, Americans drank as their
ancestors had, paying no more attention to the rising clamors of
the Drys than they had to. Even in Puritan I lartford, Conn., where
the whipping post still stood in the public square during the first
two decades of the 19th Century, a historian emphasizes, "There
was no Prohibition noticeable in Hartford then, for it would have
been hard work to compete with the rum from Barbados and the
fine wine from Madeira."
Then something happened.
The historians blame immigration (which sounds like a cut at
the Irish), the tremendous growth of the cities (always fair game
as though more people are necessarily worse people) and perhaps
the bad habits picked up by the Boys in Blue and the Boys in Grey
as they also incidentally killed each other.
At any rate, from just before the Civil War until 1880, the liquor
traffic jumped sevenfold. In his most engaging book, Lost Chords,
my late, dear friend, Douglas Gilbert, for whom I will ever turn
down an empty glass, lovingly traces the effect on the popular
songs of the time.
In the late 1860s, they sang:
Out of the tavern I've just stepped tonight*
Street, you are caught in a very had plight.
Right hand and left hand are both out of place;
Street, you are drunk, it's a very clear case.
THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK! 19
Still later, the songs lamented the alcoholic, and Gilbert ex-
plains:
"Almost, the '80s could be called the saloon age. Pubs were
everywhere, and liquor was cheap. A sizable snort of rye or bourbon
could be had for ten cents in the most flamboyant emporium, and
the universal price for beer was five cents in a goblet the size of a
goldfish bowl/'
Thus, in "I See YouVe Been Drinking Again/' the bride of a
year deplores her mate's unsteady return after an evening of ten-
cent whisky:
You promised tonight you'd, come sober
And spare all my sorrow and pain . . ,
But 1 heard that your step was unsteady,
I knew that my hopes were in vain,
When you stumbled and fell in the hallway
I knew you'd been drinking again.
Similarly, in "The Old Man's Drunk Again" father is the target
of exhortation:
Oh father, dear, come home.
Quit drinking like a sow.
You've drank away the bed and stove,
Dont swallow up the cow.
Why must you be a bum,
And sleep out in the rain?
The neighbors sigh as they pass by
The old mans drunk again.
But in those more artless days when the middle class favored
such archaic drinks as cherry cobbler, rum and gum, brandy smash
and other forgotten concoctions, all was not woe and lamentation,
to wit:
Fizz, fizz, glorious fizz.
I own it with meekness,
I've got a strong weakness,
For fizz, fizz, nothing there is,
To equal the flavor of glorious fizz.
However, the Drys roared right back in song. Thus, in Melodies
for Temperance Band of Hope, Leeds Selection published in 1858,
they sang (to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne"):
20 THE BEST PEOPLE DRANK!
Let drinking customs be forgot
And never brought to mind.
Come, moderate drinkers, topers, sots,
And leave your cups behind.
And the British Band of Hope Melodist offered this refreshing
salute to aqua, pure aqua, sung to the plaintive melody of "Home,
Sweet Home":
'Mid the sparkling of glasses, or goblets of -wine.
Look they ever so tempting, pure -water be mine.
It gives neither headache, nor heart-ache nor pain.
No trouble attends it, no loss but all gain.
Hail, hail, water hail!
Twill make the checks rosy which wine has made pale.
And so on, at disgusting length.
It now becomes our lugubrious duty to retrace our steps and
discover how this one particular fanatic minority rather than the
Vegetarians, the Millcrites, the people who still insist that the world
is flat or any other crackpot cult could have forced its narrow will
on an overwhelming majority.
Though the history of alcoholic enjoyment is undeniably spotted
by the over-indulgence of weak, foolish and sick men, three cen-
turies had proved that the vast majority of Americans cherished
tender but strong bonds of affection for the stuff.
3
But
the Good People
Didn't
Perhaps the seeds of Prohibition were planted right at Plymouth
Rock. Only two decades after the landing, Bradford was puzzled
that wickedness could erupt "in a land wher (sic) the same was
so much witnessed against, and so narrowly looked unto, & severely
punished when it was knowne." Nonetheless, all the prying "could
not suppress y breaking out of sundrie notorious sins (as this year,
besids other, gives us too many sad presidents and instances),
espetially drunkennes and unclainnes . . ."
About the same time, Peter Stuyvesant was deploring the situa-
tion in his town. So many burghers had deserted their proper
occupations that "almost one full fourth part of the City of New
Amsterdam have become bawdy houses for the sale of ardent
spirits, tobacco and beer." He tried without noticeable success to
remedy the matter.
Plymouth cracked down, banning liquor sales "either within
doors or without, excepte in inns or victualling-houses allowed."
Several persons wangled licenses, but a sort of character test was
applied, and none was issued to a tapster who "drinks druncke him-
self."
Probably the earliest temperance organization was founded in
Litchficld County, Connecticut, in 1789, but before then, there
had been strong cries at least for moderation, some of them from
unexpected sources. For example, from that delightful early
American, Nathaniel Ames, "Student in Physick and Astronomy,"
21
22 BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDN'T
almanacker half a dozen years before Benjamin Franklin and long
the keeper of Dedham's patriotic tavern.
"Strong Waters were formerly used only by the Direction of
Physicians; but now Mechanicks and low-liv'd Labourers drink
RUM like Fountain-Water, and they can inlinitely better endure
it than the idle, unactive and sedentary Part of Mankind, but
DEATH is in the bottom of the Cup of every one/ 1 his Almanack
for 1752 warned.
Aside from the little Litchfield movement, the beginning of the
American temperance agitation is generally listed as 1808 when
twenty-three citizens of Saratoga County, New York, organized a
society under Dr. Billy F. Clark to fight hard liquor. A decade
Inter, the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemper-
ance was formed.
Under the giddying influence of a major religious revival, the
movement gained quick momentum, chiefly in New England and
the northern states, through the churches. One of the first and
most improbable of victims was the hard-bitten little Army of the
United States. About 1819, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun
banned the use of liquor altogether, and late in 1821, General
Winficld Scott burst into print in the National Gazette with an
ambitious "Scheme for restricting the Use of Ardent Spirits in the
United States."
Scott's plan, which consumed twelve columns of newsprint, was
aimed primarily at rum, brandy nnd whisky, the enlisted man's
beverages of choice that led to drunkenness, "the greatest source
of disease and insubordination in the rank and file of an army."
In the convenient manner of temperance advocates, he had at hand
a table to document the alarming national situation:
Drinkers Gallons
"Hard drinkers daily becoming sots; and who, 300,000 10,265,625
on an average, consume three gills each day
or 34 7/32 gallons a year
"Sots rapidly descending into the grave; who 150,000 8,554,687
on an average, drink five gills each a day or
57 1/32 gallons a year, irregularly drink in
quantities from a glass to 5 pints a day
"All Indians not included in the census; 350,000 2,074,288
whose intemperance is only limited by their (numbers supposed)
means."
BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDN'T 23
Presumably, like most of the original temperance advocates who
were far more tolerant and enlightened than their Dry sons and
daughters, "Old Fuss and Feathers" would have settled for light
wines and beers.
To Jefferson, too, wine was the answer to whisky. In 1818, he
wrote to a friend that "I rejoice, as a moralist," at the prospect of
reduced duties on wines, explaining:
"It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the
rich. It is a prohibition of its use in the middling class of our
citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whisky,
which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine
is cheap; and none sober, where the only antidote is the bane of
whisky."
As thousands of little temperance societies burgeoned in various
states and the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance
came into being in Boston in 1826, the emphasis was chiefly against
hard liquor only and for salvation through personal effort, not by
statute.
As late as 1833, when some 6,000 local societies boasted more
than a million members and temperance was strong enough to hold
its first national convention in Philadelphia, the same spirit pre-
vailed. At that time, a proposal was rejected that beer and wine be
included in the abstinence pledge. In the general temperance
commotion, however, there was one casualty. At Plymouth, the
Pilgrims' descendants abandoned their sometime riotous tradition of
toasting their dead with strong waters.
The rise of the teetotal movement was dismayingly swift. The
first public temperance meeting in Providence, held in April of 1827
at the First Baptist Meeting-House, passed resolutions that "fell
far short of total abstinence," a local historian records. Only
fifteen years later, the city had four or five total abstinence societies
with more than 3,600 members, and the Rhode-Island State Total
Abstinence Society, in existence less than two years, claimed a roster
of some 30,000.
Between 1833 and 1851, there were four national temperance
conventions, and in his book, Prohibition in the United States,
D. Leigh Colvin, an undeniable authority on the subject (he
once ran for President as a Prohibitionist), traces the gradually
hardening attitude of the do-gooders.
24 BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDNT
From moderation, which might have gotten them somewhere,
they advanced to abstinence from ardent spirits then to total
abstinence, moral suasion, anti-license agitation and finally, state
prohibition. In other words, by the middle of the 19th Century,
they had girded themselves to bother the devil out of everybody
else, personally and politically; a hobby which was to occupy their
time happily and, in many cases, profitably for time without end
unto this day.
There is some historical ground to hold Alexander Hamilton
responsible for the first opportunistic injection of the whisky issue
into national politics.
In 1789, at its first session under the Constitution, Congress
left-handcdly selected July 4 to begin a never-ending attack on the
drinking man through the weapon of taxation. But at least this first
levy was largely protectionist, being limited to an import tax on
ale, beer, porter, cider, malt, molasses, spirits and wine.
Hamilton was not satisfied. Less than two years later, largely at
his instigation, Congress added an excise tax of nine to twenty-six
cents per gallon on spirits distilled from grain. To Jefferson, the
tax was "an infernal one," and in western Pennsylvania, the home
of many small whisky stills, all hell broke loose.
Even a hasty reduction in the tax (accompanied by an upping of
the import duty) failed to end this "Whisky Rebellion," nor did
stern Presidential proclamations accomplish anything. Understand-
ably, the frontiersmen held dark suspicions about what was being
done to them at the home office back in Washington, and they re-
acted with frontier vigor.
Once again, the Liberty Pole was defiantly raised, there were
inflammatory speeches at mass meetings and cries of "Liberty and
no excise!" Some federal revenue officers were tarred and feathered.
Finally, President Washington ordered up an overwhelming force
of 15,000 militiamen (almost double the number of Revolutionary
effectives he had commanded back in January of 76).
In driving; rain, sometimes in mud up to their knees, they slogged
over the Allegheny Mountains in the fall of 1794, Hamilton right
with them. The "rebellion" collapsed bloodlcssly and anti-climati-
cally, and though there were numerous arrests, most of the protesters
were released or pardoned. However, the show of force had two
significant aftereffects.
BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDNT 25
The frontier confirmed its dislike for the Federalists, which long
lingered as an important factor in our national life. And there is
some belief that Hamilton proposed the pestiferous excise tax in
the first place largely in the hopes of inspiring local protests. These,
in turn, would provide the excuse for the Federal government to
demonstrate its new powers granted hy Congress.
Certainly the liberal Jefferson deplored the adventure. He felt
that from over the mountains there had been no firm evidence of
any trouble "more than riotous/*
Prohibition by state fiat, rather than high license fees, local
option or any other hit-and-run harassment, began in Maine in 1846
with a rather weak law (from the Drys' point of view). In 1851,
in the impetuous manner that was later to mark the Prohibitionists'
political bully boys, Neal Dow of Portland set out to correct the
situation.
Dow, twice mayor of Portland and later a wounded, captured
hero of the Civil War, was one of those fighting sons whom Quaker
families so often surprisingly sire. He attacked with his own bill
"for the suppression of drinking-houses and tippling shops ' to put
not teeth but fangs into the old law.
Even his best temperance friends demurred that the measure
was too radical for passage, but Dow bulled ahead anyway, getting
it before a legislative committee in Augusta. The committee suc-
cumbed and with its unanimous blessings, the bill was printed the
same evening.
The following day was the last of the session, a time when, as any
legislative shyster will tell you, strange and wonderful proposals
are most easily smuggled into law in the happy confusion of ad-
journment. In such circumstances, the "Maine Law" was adopted
and though there were later changes, remained for some seventy
years as a challenge and an inspiration to the Drys in other areas.
Quickly, in Prohibition's "first wave/' a dozen other states from
New England to the far reaches of Iowa and Nebraska followed
Maine's heady example, though all later regained their sanity by
repeal votes or nullifying court decisions.
Massachusetts developed a particularly painful neurosis over the
issue, going dry in 1852, wet in 1868, dry in 1869 and wet again in
1875. New York, on the other hand, in words and music prophetic
26 BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDNT
of the 20th Century, managed to get some laughs out of the dreary
subject.
In the early 1850s, Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour
bravely breasted the "first wave" by vetoing a proposed "Maine
Law" as unconstitutional. Thus, when he ran for reelection in 1854,
the dying Whigs were able to capitalize on Prohibition as the major
campaign issue.
Their candidate was a somewhat obscure upstate Dry legislator,
Myron H. Clark, best known then for his firmness in holding down
railroad passenger fares to two cents a mile. Clark attracted a catch-
all following, not the least unimportant or fanatic of whom was
I lorace Greclcy, editor of the New York Tribune.
Prohibition was only one of Greeley's innumerable dreams, but
he espoused it with special passion. Even 3V2 per cent beer was
poison, he was wont to trumpet, and what this country needed was
"forcible" banning of all intoxicating liquors. In retrospect, it is
somewhat consoling to note that Horace Greclcy lived and died a
good half century before his proper time. He had the wild en-
thusiasm, the blinding narrow vision and the mastery of personal
invective that would have made him the arch Dry propagandist of
the Prohibition Era.
Out of the total of 313,299 votes cast in 1854 for the two guber-
natorial candidates, Clark beat Seymour by the resounding margin
of 309 votes, which the Drys interpreted as a loud, clear call from
the electorate for Prohibition. In answer to this whisper which only
their ears could hear, the Legislature dutifully passed, and Governor
Clark signed, a bill modestly called "An Act for the Prevention
of Intemperance, Pauperism and Crime."
This wholesale regeneration of mankind within the state limits
was set for July 4, 1855, when the law would go into effect and
men would have a new freedom, this time from the shackles of
Demon Rum. There were many, however, who grumbled that they
would get out of the state rather than accept this new Fourth of
July "freedom."
Fortunately for them, down in New Yorlc City two of the worst
rogues in American political history were plotting out of no high
motive to make a delightful farce of the "Act for the Prevention of
Intemperance, etc." One was Mayor Fernando Wood, front for the
gamblers, saloon keepers and prostitutes, who had rarely, if ever,
BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDN'T 27
been accused of an honest act and the other was District Attorney
A. Oakey Hall, a rogue aristocrat from the South.
With an outpouring of virtue that gulled the Drys, Wood an-
nounced his intention to exact full compliance "whatever shall be
the personal consequences to myself." He then publicly asked
Hall's advice on the constitutionality of the new Prohibition law.
Hall gave it a thumbs down, and the presumably shocked mayor
consulted his own mouthpiece, the Corporation Counsel, who
agreed with Hall.
Mayor Wood now hesitated to go against such eminent legal
opinion "until it is superseded by absolute judicial declaration/'
And another thing. District Attorney Hall had noted that the ex-
piring license system died as of May 1 and the new law didn't be-
come effective until July 4. Much as it pained him to report this
legislative oversight, Wood felt impelled to proclaim that in the
interim "no obstacle exists to the free sale of liquor in this city, and
that it can be sold the same as any other commodity." Of course,
he warned severely, the old civil penalty against Sunday selling
still stood a fine of $2.50.
The humorless Drys realized that the slow tugging motion they
felt was the pulling of their leg by Wood & Hall. Shortly, as Wood
issued his instructions to the police, the Drys felt a severe yank.
On the one hand, Wood demanded that the distasteful law be
"faithfully executed, sustained and carried out" and, on the other,
warned the cops that they might be held 'liable to severe personal
responsibility" if they misinterpreted a baffling legal "explanation"
of their new powers and duties. Before long, the state Court of
Appeals spoiled the fun by throwing out the act as unconstitutional.
In typical Prohibitionist fashion, the Drys tiptoed in the back
door early in the Civil War with a comprehensive act that not only
taxed liquor sales but also put all breweries and distilleries under
federal licensing. From 1862 right down to World War I, the
manufacturers had to submit elaborate records, bow to federal
policing and accept discriminatory taxation. In fact, for a long series
of years, the liquor traffic contributed more than a fourth of our
national revenue! *
1 This impressive statistic comes from the Report on the Enforcement of
the Prohibition Laws of the United States made by the Wickersham Com-
mission, dated Jan. 7, 1931.
28 BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDNT
No doubt during the Civil War, there was excessive drinking
sick and frightened boys in both Armies, which greatly agitated the
Drys, though as always they were blind to cause and effect. Many of
the loudest Prohibitionists had also been the loudest Abolitionists;
now that they had their war, they couldn't understand why it wasn't
being fought along Dry, genteel lines.
That curious and somewhat sinister character out of the San
Francisco Vigilante movement, Lafayette Curry Baker, chief of the
U.S. Secret Service, belonged to the Sons of Temperance. He
counted 3,700 "fountains of ruin," or groggerics, in the Washington
area.
On die eve of a major battle when the Federals hastily needed
100 supply wagons, he claimed, not five sober government teamsters
could be rounded up. Like Carry Nation several decades later,
Baker attacked with axes, smashing the supplies and leveling the
squalid buildings. This early muscle boy of the movement, who
never cursed or drank but sometimes killed, seemed to have the
President's confidence. Nonetheless, Lincoln didn't like the right-
eous smell in the air. "Prohibition will work great injury to the
cause of temperance," he once observed. "It is a species of in-
temperance itself."
As in so many other things, Lincoln's gentle wisdom was ignored,
and Prohibitionism became a logical ingredient of the unreasoning
Reconstruction Era. Both major parties had the good sense to remain
aloof, so the Independent Order of Good Templars, a society of
abstainers, started the political ball rolling.
At its instigation, a curious collection of 500 political nonentities
from twenty slates met on September 1, 1869, at Farwcll Hall in
Chicago. Most were totally inexperienced in politics, and quite a
few were women sitting for the first time on equal terms with men
at a political convention. Best known, and not exactly a national
celebrity, was former Congressman Gcrrit Smith of New York
state, a former Abolitionist with a new broom of fanaticism to ride. 2
2 Obviously, in equating the Abolition and Prohibition movements, I am
not kft-hanclcdly defending slavery or segregation, any more than in eas-
tigating Prohibition am I espousing intemperance. Both movements, I feel,
had the same fanatical intolerance that to a large degree worked against
the very praiseworthy goals that they pursued. And Gerrit Smith was not
the only Abolitionist turned Prohibitionist. In his salad days at Harvard,
BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDN'T 29
By barely more than a majority vote, these political innocents
agreed to form the National Prohibition Party. The same fall, a
Prohibitionist ran for office in Ohio, and there were Republican-
Prohibitionist candidates in both Maine and Minnesota. The party
hopefully entered the 1872 Presidential race with James Black, a
Pennsylvanian, who polled all of 5,607 votes.
As the whole history of this splinter group was to demonstrate,
when Prohibition is honestly, nakedly presented as a national issue,.
Americans just don't want it The best the Prohibitionists ever did,
this century or last, was in 1892 when they also threw in women's
suffrage, currency reform and other planks. General John Bidwell,
who had commanded the California militia in the Civil War, got
271,058 votes, less than 2Yi per cent of the electorate.
One thing the Prohibitionists could do with remarkable political
effectiveness was to put the sweet-smelling kiss of death on their
own favorites. The most notorious example occurred in the old
Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City during the 1884 Presidential
race between Republican James G. Elaine and Democrat Grover
Cleveland.
At a "ministers' meeting" with 600 clergymen, Blaine let his
attention wander as the Rev. Samuel Burchard, a Presbyterian min-
ister, denounced the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism
and Rebellion." All the reporters covering die meeting completely
missed the damning phrase, as apparently did Blaine himself, wha
failed to make an immediate repudiation.
But a Democratic "spy" who had been tailing Blaine to every
meeting scurried back to Cleveland headquarters a block away, and
by late afternoon New York was flooded with sensational posters
aimed at the large Catholic vote. Cleveland was the victor in the
Wendell Phillips was credited, curiously, with defeating the first attempt to
form a temperance society there, but in later life he became a Prohibitionist.
His associate, William Lloyd Garrison, once edited National Philanthropist,
a temperance journal in Boston, and no doubt had deep personal feelings,
on the subject, his brilliant father having ruined himself by drink. The
Abolitionists' credo, later to be faithfully followed by the Prohibitionists, was
well expressed by Garrison in the first issue of his anti-slavery journal, The
Liberator. "I am aware that many object to the severity of my language,
but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as un-
compromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak
or write with moderation. No! no! . . ."
30 BUT THE GOOD PEOPLE DIDN'T
election, taking the pivotal state and the Presidency by the squeak
plurality of 1,047 over Elaine.
Later, the good Dr. Burchard observed that if he had been made
against his will an instrument for good or evil by Providence, he
was willing to abide by the consequences. No doubt this edifying
spiritual attitude gave great consolation to the man who would have
been President but for his supporter.
But if the Prohibitionists could not impose their will openly and
honestly, there were many devious strategics at hand, and didn't
the dry and shining end justify the questionable means? Of course!
4
The Coming
of the Drought
An undeniably good and gentle man, the Tipperary-born Father
Theobald Mathew pointed out to the Drys the tactic that, in their
hands, was to most loudly disturb the peace.
Starting in Ireland, Father Mathew reputedly influenced five
million total abstinence pledges, inadvertently wreaking great
financial hardship on his own brother in the process. In a re-
markable conflict of interest, the brother, a wealthy distiller, helped
him until he found his own business ruined by the burgeoning
temperance movement.
In 1849, Father Mathew visited the United States and on a swing
that took him from Boston down through Virginia, Tennessee, Mis-
sissippi, Arkansas and Missouri garnered another 600,000 total
abstainers. He was unusually popular; so much so that he was the
first foreigner since Lafayette to be given a seat on the floor of
Congress. Only in Boston was there a cloud on his reception. With
the tact of a Tipperary man in a strange land, he declined to join
the anti-slavery societies which, of course, outraged the Aboli-
tionists.
Not long after the turn of the century, my father had the honor
to serve as Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut when the town was
somewhat wild and wet. He accepted the realistic, old-fashioned
philosophy of containing the uproarious elements within a "dis-
trict/* being that kind of Yankee who felt a great distaste for people
who insisted on minding other people's business.
Thus, he never spoke of his most illustrious predecessor in the
31
32 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
mayoral chair, Phincas Taylor Barnum, the circus man, who was
probably Bridgeport's richest citizen and greatest benefactor.
Barnum had been a Prohibitionist, and as mayor had delivered
some of his choicest oratory for the Dry cause. In his 1875 message
to the Common Council, he cried, "Spirituous liquors of the present
day are so much adulterated and doubly poisoned that their use
fires the brain and drives their victims to madness, violence and
murder."
To limit the liquor traffic, "to lessen this leprous hindrance to
happiness," he pleaded, would also be "a work of mercy, as well
as justice/' However, despite this eloquent pitch to soul and
pocketbook, nothing particularly came of Barnum's hopes, then
or afterwards. In his own town, the promoter of The Greatest Show
on Earth was never able to plaster his notoriously misleading sign,
"Tins way to the egress," on the insides of the swinging doors.
In fact, many years later when the 18th Amendment descended
with a dull thud on Bridgeport, a number of the brewers and
saloon keepers in my home town quickly gained an unhappy na-
tional distinction. Less than nine months after the Volstead Act
became operative, they were fined $750,000 for violating it.
Another somewhat erratic endorser of the temperance cause was
the superb John L. Sullivan who took to the lecture platform to re-
port from personal experience that Kid Rum had a more damaging
solar plexis punch than Gentleman Jim Corbctt.
When in proper condition, John L. would go a few rounds
behind the lectern, and my lather, the late Henry Lee (no Prohibi-
tionist, but a man who believed in civili/xxl moderation), sometimes
introduced him. When John L. broke training, so to speak, and
encountered my father, he wanted to kneel and kiss his hand.
This somewhat bothered my father s conscience, even though he
was a Connecticut Yankee, and years later he told me how he had
solved the moral dilemma in his introductory remarks. "Here,
gentlemen," he would intone with a straight face, "is a man who
knows this problem from both sides."
If national politicking failed them, if the platform stompings of
such celebrities as Sullivan and Barnum left most ordinary drink-
ing men unmoved, what could the Drys do next? Unfortunately,
in the way fanatics are, they were stubborn, resourceful and far
louder than their numbers warranted.
THE O)MING OF THE DROUGHT 33
The U.S. had antedated Europe by a decade or more in founding
the very first temperance societies, and in international movements
we had also pointed the way with the Good Templars. Now in
1874, with the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, we maintained our wholesome lead, though at the cost of
how many saddened husbands and fathers we will never know.
The driving spirit was Frances E. Willard, a spinster professor at
Northwestern University, and thanks to her book, Glimpses of
Fifty Years, we can pinpoint the dreadful time and place of her
conversion to the petticoat temperance crusade.
It was in 1874 on Market Street, Pittsburgh, at Sheffner s, an
old-fashioned saloon with a high, heavily-corniced bar, fauceted
barrels of whisky, sawdust-strewn floors and a few round tables
with chairs. For a year, the determined local ladies had been demon-
strating by ranging themselves on the curbstones outside the
saloons, singing such appropriate hymns as "Jesus the Water of
Life Will Give" and kneeling in prayer "on the cold, moist pave-
ment/' For the most part, the saloon keepers and their patrons
accepted the noise philosophically, but Sheffner was too polite. The
day that Frances Willard happened to go slumming with the girls,
he allowed them inside. The leader placed her Bible on the bar,
read a Psalm, briskly rendered "Rock of Ages" and then courteously
invited the neophyte Frances to do the praying.
"It was strange, perhaps, but I felt not the least reluctance/ 1
she remembered long afterwards, "and kneeling on that sawdust
floor, with a group of earnest hearts around me and behind them,
filling every corner and extending out into the street, a crowd of
unwashed, unkempt, hard-looking drinking men, I was conscious
that perhaps never in my life save beside my sister Mary's dying
bed had I prayed as truly as I did then. This was my crusade
baptism. The next day I went on to the west and within a week
had been made president of the Chicago W.C.T.U/'
Almost immediately, the W.C.T.U. became the national mother-
in-law, scolding politicians, masterminding the educators, even
overruling the physicians who sometimes dared prescribe whi
as medicine. When poor Ulysses S. Grant lay near death and
unable to swallow, his doctors injected brandy into his arm to re-
vive him. The W.C.T.U. was outraged that the general had thus
been plied with intoxicating liquors, though the truth was that he
34 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
had sometimes sampled the stuff in the past Not without reason,
the unregcneratc labeled the Indies the "We See to You/'
Despite the well-deserved ridicule, the movement burgeoned
dismayingly and in scarcely more than three decades there were
branches in every state, with 350,000 Helen Hokinson types in
10,000 towns flaunting their ribbons of purity. (Today's claimed
membership, praise be, is down to 300,000.)
Aside from generally disturbing the peace, the greatest damage
caused by the W.C.T.U., often in alliance with the National
Temperance Society and Publishing Mouse (its boast: "1,000,000
pages of propaganda"), was in the field of education. Small children
were brainwashed into signing total abstinence pledges, wearing
the lapel ribbon of abstinence, and chanting such inspirational po-
etry as "Come, Sign the Pledge/'
Young man, why will you not sign the pledge,
And stand with the true and the brave?
How dare you lean over the dangerous ledge
Above the Inebriate s grave?
Typical of the material made available to schools by the Na-
tional Temperance Society was a booklet, "Exercises and Dia-
logues/' its opening number titled "The Alcohol Fiend." The
science chiefly taught in those simpler days was physiology, and
its textbooks were slanted with dire warnings about the evils of
rum and tobacco on clean young American bodies. One school
proudly acknowledged that a W.G.T.U. official had revised its texts.
In some states, the organization forced through compulsory legisla-
tion to get its propaganda into the schools.
To a generation that weighs the legality of prayer in the class-
rooms, it is startling that that repository of childish inspiration,
McGufTcy's Reader, would openly attack a legally operating busi-
ness. But McGuffey's did with this denunciation of the licensing
system:
Licensed to do thy neighbor harm;
Licensed to kindle hate and strife,
Licensed to nerve the robber f s arm,
Licensed to whet the murderer's knife.
Licensed like spider for a fly,
To spread thy nets for man, thy prey;
THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT 35
To mock his struggles, crush his soul,
Then cast his worthless form away.
Despite their very great nuisance value, the ladies just didn't have
the political muscle power that was needed. As early as 1885,
amendments were proposed in Congress to prohibit the manufacture
of and dealing in intoxicating liquors. The next year, and again
in 1888, Senate committees acknowledged growing opinion in
favor of national compulsory legislation in cooperation with efforts
by the states. But even the Drys could not provide enough fertilizer
to nourish these little seeds of Prohibition, and they died.
In Ohio (also the home state of the National Temperance
Society), the Drys formed the Anti-Saloon League at Oberlin in
1893. This, proudly, was "the Church in action against the saloon/'
and on its grandiloquent birth certificate its general superintendent,
the Reverend Francis Scott McBride, wrote: "The League was born
of God/'
Theoretically dedicated to work from within the established
parties, ASL obviously would tolerate no delicate adjustments or
peaceful compromises that reasonable men might employ to work
out realistic solutions. Its strength and weakness alike, the League
was strictly rule-or-ruin.
"It has been led by Him and will fight on while He leads,"
McBride sang. "The one thing that stands out is that those things
in the way of progress of the Kingdom of God must get out of the
way."
When the "third wave" of state prohibition crested in the 20th
Century, this monopoly on holiness with its web of state Anti-
Saloon Leagues was in the forefront of the fight. Now most of the
Dry pressure came from the South and West rather than staid New
England, and as the clear waters of temperance began to lap
dangerously dose to Washington, the national legislators them-
selves were among those to suffer first. In 1903, the bar in the
basement of the Capitol was closed.
In the bracing and sometimes biting winds of reform that blew
against business generally in the tum-of-the-century period, the
liquor interests naively played into the enemies' hands. Using the
Standard Oil trust agreement as their model, they merged eighty
distilleries into twelve, thus outraging the anti-monopolists. "We
thought we could make better profits and create a more stable busi-
36 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
ness by organizing into a trust," a distiller innocently explained to
an investigating commission.
Similarly, they offended other reformers by bucking pure food
legislation, at the same time failing miserably to educate the public
in the chemical intricacies of alcohol. In the early 1900s, very little
whisky carried the government label of purity. Most of it was a
blend of pure straight whiskies or a rectified concoction in which
the straight stuff was mixed with neutral spirits and other in-
gredients.
Made properly of the proper substances, rectified whisky is no
more deleterious than a straight or blend, but the liquor interests
apparently lacked the Madison Avenue skill to get this point
across. Brandishing a quart bottle of alcohol in his hand, quivering
with the just rage of a Solon from the great bourbon state of
Kentucky, Representative Augustus O. Stanley rose on the floor of
Congress one summer day in 1906 and orated:
"I want to say this, that T hove no objection to a man blending
two kinds of whisky, but I do object to his making any kind of
whisky 'while you wait/ Hero is a quart of alcohol. (Me held up
the filthy stuff for his colleagues to see.) It will eat the intestines
out of a coyote. It will make a howling dervish out of an anchorite.
It will make a rabbit spit in a bulldog's face. It is pure alcohol and
under the skill of the rectifier, he will put in a little coloring matter
and then a little bead oil. (He illustrated.) I drop that in it.
"Then I get a little essence of bourbon whisky, and there is no
connoisseur in this House who can toll that hellish concoction
from ihc genuine article, and that is what 1 denounce. (Applause.)
"I say that the coloring matter is not harmful, I say that the
caramels arc not harmful; but I say that the body, the stock, of the
whisky I made is rank alcohol, and when it gets into a man, it is
pure hell/' (Applause)
Despite such attacks the liquor interests, had they acted wisely,
might still have postponed or averted Prohibition, As we rounded
the turn into the 20th Century, so sedate an organ of opinion as
the Boston Transcript, edited by Brahmins for Brahmins, regretted
the local record of 26,000 drunks in a year, but nervously added
that "an evil sure to exist under any circumstances can better be
kept within bounds by restriction than by Prohibition/'
THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT 37
A few years later, after almost half a century of complete state
Prohibition, New Hampshire changed to a licensing system. Then
Maine, that aqueous Gibraltar, beat back repeal of its constitu-
tional Prohibition clause by only a handful of votes. As late as
1915, when the "third wave" of Prohibition was rolling high,
40,000 Chicago Wets paraded in protest against Sunday closings of
the saloons.
But the liquor interests made two fatal mistakes. They bragged
and they laughed.
Let the "cold waterites," as they called the Drys, rear their silly
billboards. ("Saloons cannot run without Boys. Have you one to
spare? Think it over.") They, "the interests," controlled "the largest,
unified, deliverable vote," the Wickersham Commission was to
attest years later, and they exercised this political power "arrogantly
and ruthlessly," according to Mark Sullivan.
In fact, when two pure food and prohibition measures were
killed in Congress in the early 1900s, an official of one of the liquor
associations sent a letter to the trade, indiscreetly taking credit for
the defeats. The National Association of State Dairy and Food
Departments, organized by the state chemists, got the admission
printed in the newspapers and the Congressional Record.
By mid-1908, when the United States Brewers' Association met
in Milwaukee, the "interests" were sufficiently worried to launch a
"dean house" campaign against "the immoral saloon," meaning the
dives of the time. Still their spirit was carefree enough to laugh
uproariously at a fake telegram of "condolence," ostensibly from
the "Prohibition State Convention of Minnesota now in session."
"Your business is doomed as your outposts are now carried and
the Prohibition army is about to move against your main body,"
read the wire, more prophetic than funny. "The church and society
have now declared and the State will soon say 'The saloon must
go/"
There was more good dean fun a few years later when William
Jennings Bryan took office as Wilson's Secretary of State and made
a prissy stipulation that he would serve only water and refreshing
grape juice at diplomatic affairs. Reportedly, some of the diplomats
got well even overly fortified in advance so they could last
through the arid dinners. The Russian Ambassador, pitiably rack-
38 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
ing his brains, was said to have remembered that he had last quaffed
water some thirty-four years previously as a sprig in the Czar's
Embassy in Rome.
Ludicrous, of course, like most of the Prohibitionists' antics; but
so astute an observer as Mark Sullivan thought that Bryan's
"pious example led the public to drink less, became, indeed, one of
the forces that, stimulating Dry sentiment in the West and South,
brought national Prohibition/'
There was increasing voluntary temperance, he explains, one
banquet-goer reporting that of forty-six affairs he attended in the
winter of 1913-14, sixteen were completely dry and eighteen "semi-
arid" (one cocktail). But because of "the breathless reform," the
"aggressive benevolence" in the air, Sullivan says, "gradual progress
in self-imposed moderation or voluntary abstinence was too slow,"
As the "third wave" of state Prohibition foamed angrily through
the South and West, the Drys nonetheless keenly suffered one
major frustration. By Supreme Court decision, liquor enjoyed
interstate immunity. Thus, the police powers of the Dry states
were impotent to stay its importation from their unregeneratc sister
states. Nor could they interfere with its sale and delivery within
their own borders in the original packages in which the wet goods
had arrived.
In 1913, in its first major surrender to the Drys, soon to be
followed by total rout, Congress put the bung on this source of
supply through the Wcbb-Kenyon Act. The measure, which made
interstate commerce the obedient servant of any state that pro-
hibited the shipment, sale or use of intoxicating liquors, was vetoed
by the President, then quickly re-passed over his veto by both
I louse and Senate.
Nonetheless, even into the following year when West Virginia
became the ninth completely dry state and many others wore spotted
with "local option" counties, the liquor interests still were laughing.
The Panhandle state's enforcement chief was appropriately named
Blue, and one of his first edicts (a forecast of the many absurd rul-
ings to come!) was that a fellow could drink in a friend's home
provided he hadn't gone there for that purpose.
In Wheeling, boniface August Traubert handed out droll cards
to his patrons as the enforcement date neared, "July first will be
the last of August. 1 ' And others gaily placarded their premises,
THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT 39
"Don't be alarmed if after July 1 you spit talcum powder/* The
same year, in the first Congressional action on a national Prohibi-
tion amendment, the House narrowly beat back the Anti-Saloon
League's resolution introduced by Alabama Congressman Richmond
P. Hobson.
Actually, the measure enjoyed an eight-vote majority, but failed
to pass because a two-thirds vote was necessary. Things weren't so
funny anymore, and yet the liquor interests chose the critical year
to rub stinging alcohol into their opponents. Despite state Prohibi-
tion and local option, they announced, there had been an increase
of almost three gallons in per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks
over a ten-year period. And the huge capital investment in the
liquor industry, they bragged, had reached $1,294,583,426 (con-
siderably more than the $915,715,000 later reported by die United
States Census Bureau). Surely, they would have been wiser to have
kept their mouths shut!
By '17, the Dry wave was a raging flood, and that percipient ob-
server, Mr. Dooley, said heavily to his confidant, Mr. Hennessey:
"King Alcohol no longer rules th' sea or th' land. Th' ladies have
got that binivolent oV dishpot on his knees beggin' f'r mercy an'
they're sayin' to him, 'Did ye have mercy on us?' an' ar-re gettin'
ready to chop off his wicked oY head. Take a dhrink, me boy,
whether ye need it or not. Take it now. It may be ye'er last.
"I used to laugh at th' pro-hybitionists; I used to laugh them to
scorn. But I laugh no more; they've got us on th' run . , . Whether
ye like it or not, in a few years there won't be anny saloons to lure
the marri'd man fr'm his home, furnish guests for our gr-reat
asylums an* jails an' brighten up th' dark sthreets with their cheer-
ful glow . . ."
Now, even a million stubborn little Dutch boys with big strong
thumbs could not have held back the waters. Early in '17, the Anti-
Saloon League's Year Book joyfully noted that twenty-five states,
that is more than 35,000,000 people, were under Prohibition. As
one of its first measures early in January, the Senate passed a bill
to bar the sending of liquor ads into Dry territory. Congress went
on to ordain Prohibition (taking effect at varying times under vary-
ing conditions) for the District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii and
Puerto Rico. President Wilson signed an amendment to the war-
time Food Control Bill that halted production of distilled spirits
40 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
for beverage purposes as of September 8 and allowed him to com-
mandeer whisky both in stock and in bond at his discretion.
'17 was also the Dry vintage year when an incredible bit of
folly occurred at the highest legislative level. Congress passed and
sent to the states for ratification the proposed 18th Amendment
to the Constitution, which provided:
"After one year from the ratification of this article the manu-
facture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the
importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United
States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof, for
beverage purposes, is hereby prohibited."
Two other clauses gave Congress and the states "concurrent
power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation" and es-
tablished a seven-year deadline for ratification by the necessary
three-fourths of the states, diirty-six at that time.
Cliche thinking charitably exonerates Congress because of "the
spirit of the times." The banners were flying, the bands were play-
ing, the public was in the mood for righteous reform at any self-
sacrifice. Such an apology does considerable disservice to die de-
viousness of the Drys.
Consider a now-forgotten Ohioan, Dr. Howard Hyde Russell,
who labored zealously in the Dry vineyard; "the leader of the divine
plan to unite the churches of America in the Anti-Saloon League
for the destruction of die beverage liquor traffic." "To him, under
God, is traceable the conception and execution of that plan. Every
step in his career has been evidenced by divine guidance in prepara-
tion for this apostolic task." Thus spake Wayne B. Wheeler.
The high water mark in Dr. Russell's divinely inspired ministry
came when the Prohibition Amendment was still pending in Con-
gress and he entered into a holy conspiracy with Sebastian S.
Kresge, the dime store tycoon, to force die measure through. To-
gether they sent out thirty-five different high-powered letters of
financial solicitation to 135,000 select businessmen and manu-
facturers. Thirteen thousand responded with contributions. A few
days before the submission vote, die two apostles met in Kresge's
Detroit office and out of the 13,000 contributors selected the 2,400
who seemed most promising. By telegram, they urged them to flood
Congress with wires demanding submission of die amendment to
the states.
THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT 41
This early use of pressure-by-telegraph brought amazing re-
sults. One high-principled Dry sent seventy-five telegrams (each
signed differently with names of his subordinates), and Dr. Russell
bragged, "We blocked the telegraph wires in Washington for three
days." Congress reeled under die phony paper barrage, the first to
wave the white flag being Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio.
Though personally opposed to the Amendment, he feared the
political weight that Dr. Russell and Wayne Wheeler, both Ohio
residents, might exert against him back home. Prudently, he told
the Dry leaders that the flood of telegrams indicated the favor
of the business world toward Prohibition, and that he accordingly
would sacrifice his own opinion.
The story of this pretty little hoax on Congress was related by
Dr. Russell himself to a large money-raising meeting for The
Cause in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Mayflower in Washing-
ton. Kresge, Apostle No. 2, was present, and after pledge cards
had been passed around, Dr. Russell was able to announce a con-
tribution of $500,000 from the nickel-and-dime king. Many others
promptly raised the amounts of their pledges, and still more signed
who hadn't expected to give anything. The war chest thus raised
helped the Anti-Saloon League to further its pressure work through-
out the states in behalf of ratification.
As '17 ended, there was a sombre portent from the highest court
that the beleaguered Wets could expect little protection from the
Constitution. Upholding Idaho's Prohibition statute, the United
States Supreme Court ruled that a state "has power absolutely"
not only to ban the manufacture, transportation, sale or purchase of
liquor within its borders but even to prohibit gifts of the stuff.
And, as Justice McReynolds emphasized, that wasn't all. He
wrote:
'We further think it clearly follows from our numerous deci-
sions upholding Prohibition legislation that the right to hold in-
toxicating liquors for personal use (our italics) is not one of those
fundamental privileges of a citizen of the United States which no
state may abridge."
Thus, wherever the law so willed, a citizen heretofore fortunate
in the possession of a well-stocked cellar now found himself in a
preposterous situation. He could not move his wet riches to safety
outside of the state or give them away, nor could he keep them.
42 THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT
Aside from the ultimate desecration of destruction, there was only
one thing to do, and many did it.
With sad but resolute hearts, as quickly as possible, they drank
themselves back into the good graces of the law.
Morally, legally, politically, America had now been brainwashed
by the Drys. The rural and less-citified areas were overwhelmingly
Dry, and the land was honeycombed with local-option oases that
gushed only pure water. Thus, the seven long years allotted for
ratification of the 18th Amendment were telescoped into a year
and eight days.
On January 8, 1918, Mississippi became the first state to ratify,
and the fanatics' ark surged forward, as the old New York Tribune
brightly observed, "as it a sailing-ship on a windless ocean were
sweeping ahead, propelled by some invisible force." Today, of
course, we know that much of the wind came from the WCTU
and the Anti-Saloon League.
On January 16, 1919, their job was done; Nebraska, the thirty-
sixth state, ratified. Late that same year, the Volstead Act, officially
the National Prohibition Act, passed Congress, and all that now
remained a minor matter! was enforcement. In one of those
magnificent wrong guesses that thunders down the ages, no less an
authority than John F. Kramer, first of our many Prohibition Com-
missioners, announced confidently:
"This law will be obeyed in cities large and small, and in villages,
and where it is not obeyed it will be enforced. The law says that
liquor to be used as a beverage must not be manufactured. We shall
see that it is not manufactured. Not sold, not given away, not
hauled in anything on the surface of the earth or under the earth
or in the air,"
More level-headed, but just as wrong in the long run, Internal
Revenue Commissioner Daniel C. Roper, later Secretary of Com-
merce under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, confided to
the New York Sun:
"The Prohibition law will be violated extensively at first,
slightly later on; but it will, broadly speaking, be enforced and will
result in a nation that knows not alcohol/'
Responding graciously to the dry toasts of 600 well wishers,
William Jennings Bryan told a 60th birthday dinner at the Aldine
Club in New York: 'The liquor issue is as dead as slavery." Even
THE COMING OF THE DROUGHT 43
that shrewd, unimpressed observer of the metropolitan scene, the
old Morning World, was badly fooled at first. With the drought
officially in effect at 12:01 A.M. on Saturday, January 17, 1920,
the World mourned in its Friday editions:
"Tonight's the night. Poor old John Barleycorn, doomed to
breathe his last at midnight, is dying game. It looks as if his last
breath will be strong enough/'
In the News, a chewing gum ad expressed crocodilian grief over
the enforced disappearance of the cocktail hour ('We fear it will
not be Au Revoir, Old Timer, but Goodbye for keeps") and oppor-
tunistically suggested a refreshing stick of gum as a substitute
appetizer.
That stormy night, pen and copy paper in hand, a World man
kept the death watch on old J.B., hitting the Knickerbocker, the
Astor, the Claridge and Jack's to observe the mournful festivities.
What he found wasn't what the city editor had expected, but was
considerably more startling and significant.
5
With Portents
and Prophecies,
the Game Begins
As the date of America's self-imposed drought loomed closer and
closer, the giddier elements allowed themselves to be distracted by
such novelties of postwar life as bobbed hair, skirts all of six inches
off the ground and the gigolo. The avant garde read James Branch
Cabell's ]urgen, but there also was, thank heavens, wholesome read-
ing fare like Lad: A Dog, Albert Payson Terhune's affecting story
of a collie.
On stage and in Tin Pan Alley, '19 had been a vintage year of
song, and they sang, whistled or danced to tunes like "Baby, Won't
You Please Come Home/' "Carolina Sunshine," "Dardanella,"
"I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles/' "In My Sweet Little Alice Blue
Gown," "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody."
Thinking drinkers, however, resisted the distractions of sex and
song. Increasingly uneasy, they favored a song of the year before,
"Every Day Will Be Sunday When the Town Goes Dry," and the
more prudent and affluent among them took steps to avert this
calamity. They bought up huge stores of hard stuff which they de-
posited in warehouses and even safe deposit vaults.
In fact, one thirsty cartel of whom I personally knew took the
entire stock of a small distillery and carried away the whiskies,
cordials and liqueurs in dump trucks owned by one of their asso-
ciates who was a road contractor. Never in the history of the road
construction industry, I was told, had dump trucks been driven
with such delicate care.
44
WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS 45
On Monday, January 12, 1920, the Prohibition Bureau in
Washington took official cognizance of this seemingly laudable,
squirrel-like endeavor. Five days hence, when the 18th and the
Volstead Act became operative at 12:01 A.M. on Saturday, the
Bureau warned, all the pathetic little liquid acorns would be subject
to federal seizure.
Late that Thursday afternoon, the Federal Court in New York
City sustained the Bureau, dismissing an agonized plea for an in-
junction against the ruling. As the news got about, there was a
panicky reaction, especially in the larger cities.
With big moving vans, private cars, taxis, even baby carriages
and children's express wagons, the hoarders rushed to die various
places of deposit and hurriedly removed the bottles to their own
cellars. Only homes would be exempt from federal snooping, the
Bureau had said, and the public had not yet suffered enough ex-
perience with Dry enforcement to feel any doubts.
About die same time, prophetic of so many idiocies yet unborn,
the Bureau solemnly ruled that if malefactors were caught toting
forbidden hip flasks, their pants would be classified as the vehicles
of transportation. And thus possibly subject to confiscation! Men
were more modest in those days, and the pronouncement caused
considerable disquietude.
Finally, on Friday evening, there were the obsequies for old
J.B., milder for the most part than people had expected. This was
due partly to the weather, which was bad, and pardy to the prices,
which were unconscionable.
Here and there, in the Manhattan hotels, there were bring-your-
own whisky wakes around botde-filled caskets and genuine sorrow
as the mourners totted up the costs.
Before WWI, highballs and cocktails had generally been two-
for-a-quarter. For the best whisky, it was only a dime to fifteen
cents a shot. Now, a highball with an ounce of whisky was any-
where from forty to eighty cents in saloons, from $1 to $3 in the
best restaurants, and cocktails had practically vanished. In Chicago,
a fifth of whisky was priced at $10 to $15, and in New York, $12
to $18, with champagne as high as $40.
Sugar then was equally scarce, and normal men marvelled at one
Wall Street broker who seemed to be an almost pathological victim
46 WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS
of his own sweet tooth. For only a hundred pounds of the white
stuff, he reportedly gave away four bottles of burgundy, two
bottles of gin and a bottle of whisky.
Thus J.B/s last night, Friday the 16th, the World man, hitting
the various night spots, found the festivities anti-climactic almost
till midnight. Then, expecting, as he later plaintively wrote, "to
behold a swirling throng of merrymakers/' he posted himself at
42nd Street and Broadway, The Crossroads of the World, at 12:01
A.M. on Saturday the 17th as Volstead came to stay.
"Not 200 persons were in sight," he reported disgustedly.
The New York Times, then as now more distracted by datelined
doings than local events, gave its full attention in an eight-column
Page One headline to the easing of the Russian crisis and the organ-
ization of the League of Nations. Its left-hand lead column noted
absent-mindedly:
JOHN BARLEYCORN
DIED PEACEFULLY
AT THE TOLL OF 12
In the relieved manner of the Times recording something genteel,
a subhead added, "A Few Restaurants Held Wet Funeral Cere-
monies, But There Were No Orgies Here." The News found little
ironic consolation in the fact that one of the major blowouts of the
incoming era was given for a celebrity with the timely name of
John Drinkwater.
The ads of the day blandly reflected business-as-usual. A major
department store was offering men's "gold-filled" watches for only
$9.50. The Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, N.J.,
urged that everyone catch Enrico Caruso the following Monday
evening at the Waldorf-Astoria (and thereafter visit any Victor
dealer to hear his records).
Probably the liveliest, and at least the happiest event was a jim-
dandy little celebration by some gay dogs at the Robert Treat Hotel
over in Newark. It was tossed by the Anti-Saloon League.
At the witching hour, as the wine changed into water, Colonel
Daniel Porter, first of New York's many impotent enforcement
chiefs, loosed his Prohibition agents on the metropolis. At 12:05
A.M., a Brooklyn boniface was caught in the horrendous act of
doing what he'd been doing for forty years serving a glass of
WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS 47
brandy and was held in $1,000 bail. About the same time, a Chi-
nese restaurant on the upper fringes of Times Square near 47th
Street and Broadway was raided.
There were, however, no immediate wholesale raids as none
seemed necessary. Of the new law, Colonel Porter said in all seri-
ousness, 'The penalties for violation are so drastic that the people
of New York will not attempt to violate it."
It was indeed a time of roseate prophecies. The Anti-Saloon
League, having shouted so loud and so long about whisky, consid-
ered itself an authority on all aspects of the problem. Prohibition,
the League guessed, could be enforced for about $5,000,000 yearly.
Congress appropriated approximately $3,000,000 but the total was
somewhat higher if Dry expenditures by allied services like Customs
and the Coast Guard are reckoned in.
For a time, there seemed to be a slim possibility that enforcement
might work. The underworld adopted what dignified journalistic
circles like to call a wait-and-see policy. That is, die hoods hesitated
to rush into this strange new business before they had calculated
demand, profit and probable federal resistance. And from the public
came no immediate demand for their services.
Many good citizens were still buoyed by the idealistic self-denial
that had made WWI an ennobling adventure, and many sustained
themselves with their private stocks, refusing to look ahead to the
day when the cellar would run dry. Even the veterans, resentful
that Prohibition had been enacted behind their backs, were tem-
porarily mollified. What certainly seems a more than coincidental
date, the government chose January 16th for distribution of some
4,265,000 bronze Victory medals to soldiers, sailors, nurses and
others who had seen wartime military service.
Yet, sadly, on the very first day of enforcement and in the next
few months, there were portents as sombre as the prophecies were
glowing.
The clich6 has it that Prohibition had to flop because an unpopu-
lar law simply cannot be enforced against the public's will. There
is, however, much more to learn from Prohibition than this oft-told
lesson. After all, Communism and Nazism subsequently proved
that with sufficient skill and ruthlessness, a madness can be fastened
on a people.
Why then did Prohibition fail? Only a decade after the original
48 WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS
brave little appropriation, Congress was practically quintupling its
Dry expenditures to almost $15,000,000. Yet, following the brief
early obedience to the law, enforcement remained spectacularly in-
effective. The reasons for the failure can be grouped under the
two P's Personal and Practical the same little P's which can
frustrate any reform, however praiseworthy.
Volsteadism had not been long in effect when a peculiarly trying
man, William H. Anderson, state superintendent of the Anti-Saloon
League, clamored for the removal of Mayor John F. Hylan and
other high New York City officials. They had attended a banquet,
and liquor had been served. Anderson typifies the first P, the one
that very shortly alienated middle-of-the-roaders from the Drys. In
fact, Anderson even alienated his own Anti-Saloon League and
went to prison because of some hanky-panky with the books. He
liked to picture himself as a martyr to the cause and accused his
League of selling out to the Wets. In his arrogance, wild language
and bias (which led to a flirtation with the KKK), he was not
untypical of many Dry leaders.
Even the Wickersham Commission was to accuse the Dry organ-
izations of abandoning their efforts to win over the public by propa-
ganda. InsteaclTas Anderson tried to do to "Red Mike" Hylan, they
demanded drastic enforcement "with a spirit of intolerant zeal," this
attitude in turn inspiring "an equally intolerant opposition."
Nor was this decade-later hindsight. While Prohibition was pend-
ing, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue nervously pleaded as
early as 1919 for "unreserved cooperation , . . from those moral
agencies which are so vitally interested in the proper administration
of this law. Such agencies include churches, civic organizations,
educational societies, charitable and philanthropic societies and
other welfare bodies." He didn't get it, poor fellow. Just unasked
advice and scoldings.
And while New York hotels were bustling with pilgrims to the
city's springs of outlawed refreshment, little thought was given to
the economic plight of a quarter of a million other Americans for
whom alcohol, in one way or another, had meant a livelihood.
The 1910 census had listed 70,000 wage earners engaged in the
manufacture of beer, wine and spirits, 68,000 saloon keepers and
101,000 bartenders, all now violently separated from the only jobs
they knew. A few breweries converted over to the manufacture of
WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS 49
cheese, ice cream, cereal beverages and other insipid products, but
nearly all the huge investment (estimated at close to $800 millions
back in 1914) was a loss.
Similarly, the near-$91 million distillery business was practically
ruined. The survivors that shifted to the manufacture of industrial
alcohol had to move from Kentucky, Illinois and other traditional
distilling states to Louisiana and other areas where the raw material,
blackstrap molasses, was in abundant supply.
This was the practical side the Drys ignored. They thought, if
they gave the matter any thought, all these individuals who had
suffered such Volsteadian economic dislocation would seek legal
new occupations and cheerfully support the law that had made
them jobless. Instead, they formed a large reservoir of resentment
and talent which was shortly tapped by the makers, distributors and
purveyors of illicit whisky. 1
There was an interesting aspect of the Personal factor which the
World's man spotted while he was keeping his deathwatch on old
J.B. and, in retrospect, it really made his story.
In a night spot, he discovered "one good-looking, well-dressed
girl" drinking wine for several hours with a dozen male escorts.
"Then they decided they must have cocktails," he reported. 'The
cocktail supply had run out, so they had to go another place."
Knowing a good story when he saw it, he followed.
"The girl was an unusual sight, leaning up against the bar," he
wrote. "Such a thing was never seen in that place before. The men
insisted that she be served, so she downed her martinis with the
best of them."
1 In all fairness, I must report one unexpected dividend from Prohibition
which, I believe, has been largely overlooked. With its cumbersome equip-
ment, the early oil industry made too little of one oil product, too much of
another, wastefully burning off the excess. When die distilleries closed
down, their designers and builders, of course, were thrown out of their
jobs like the poor bartenders.
Turning their attention to the oil industry, they introduced entirely new
concepts of distillation. "You might say that Prohibition advanced the
automobile business ten years because we couldn't have run modern motors
on the only products we had previously been capable of distilling," a veteran
oil man assures me.
Of course, narrowly examined, this like most of Prohibition's blessings,
was a mixed one. Better gas and faster motors mixed poorly with bootleg
whisky, and the sad results littered the highways for years.
50 WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS
Unfortunately, this Eve of the olive with such awesome capacity
is lost in anonymity. But she was the prototype of several million
cocktail mammas of Prohibition days, and all the Dry scoldings
could not obscure the fact that their virtuous law was wreaking
most unvirtuous results on the womanhood of America.
Politically, Prohibition was to founder for any number of reasons.
There was the swinging pendulum of idealism and disillusion. The
18th and the Volstead Act, the Wickersham Commission sadly
noted, "came into existence, therefore, at the time best suited for
their adoption and at the. worst time for their enforcement." There
was almost complete lack of governmental cooperation; town, city,
county enforcement agencies resented state officials, and all of them
resented the Feds.
There was the arbitrary and highly exasperating definition of
intoxicating liquor as anything more than Vi of 1 per cent. Certainly
no rounder, Oliver Wendell Holmes had once written:
Man wants lout little drink "below
But wants that little strong.
And VL of 1 per cent being so far below the threshold of intoxica-
tion, not only the hard-whisky drinkers but also the shirt-sleeved
beer guzzlers and the connoisseurs who knew, or affected to know,
the bouquet of the best wine years all were equally offended.
Inept as they were in their personal and political relationships,
the reformers, as reformers usually are, were at their worst in the
realistic matter of implementing what they had brought about. On
the comfortable assumption that they were privy to the wishes of
God, who also had made the grape, the hop, the corn, the barley,
the apple, the peach and the dandelion, the Drys really expected
to mop up the land with a minimum of effort. They might as well
have tried to prohibit kisses on a honeymoon!
What they actually did, of course, was to touch off a civil war
that was to know no geographical, racial, economic or social bound-
aries, and January 17 was its Fort Sumter day. On that day, a
tawdry little army of less than 950 Prohibition agents, carelessly
selected, ill trained, poorly paid, took to the field to win that war.
Prohibition directors for the various states were appointed under
the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the agents were hired without
regard to the Civil Service laws. "These noble snoopers," as Herbert
WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS 51
Asbury called them, drew down between $1,200 and $2,000 yearly.
A few earned between $2,000 and $3,000, but of all the original
force throughout the country, only three made more than $60 a
week. Atop their native inability, was a total lack of training. It was
seven years, in fact, before any effort was made to give even the
key men special training.
Theoretically they, in cooperation given most grudgingly by the
Coast Guard, Customs and the Border Patrol, were to seal off almost
12,000 miles of Adantic, Pacific and Gulf shoreline, almost 3,000
miles of boundary on large lakes and connecting rivers, 3,700 miles
of land boundaries a total of nearly 19,000 miles of land and water
borders in all! Even after five years of Prohibition, the border patrol
force totalled less than 300 Customs and Prohibition agents.
Mack Sennett cops in mufti, they also were supposed to penetrate
the mountains where haughty hillbillies tolerated no furriners, to
paddle through the Dismal Swamp and the Everglades, to seek out
malefactors who hid themselves in hundreds of river islands along
the Mississippi and all the other great streams. Geographically,
America had been made for the moonshiner.
Besides stomping into speakeasies, chasing (and usually losing)
the bootleggers' fast Packards and running down smells reported
by suspicious neighbors, they had dozens of other impossible tasks.
There was the problem of legal but nauseous "near" beer, which
was real beer submitted to the indignity of de-alcoholization. In the
fine old tradition of their craft, many \naumeisters resented this
spoliation of the original foaming product, and the Dry agents had
to make sure that they did not succumb to artistic integrity.
Industrial alcohol was legal, too, being fortified with ingredients
that made it unpotable and sometimes fatal. However, as the gallons
passed through many hands from manufacturer to point-of-pur-
chase, there were as many opportunities to make it potable again.
Somehow, the agents were supposed to chase the drums through
the maze of commercial distribution lest the poisons be illegally
extracted and the stuff rendered safe for human consumption. 2
2 Rep, William L. Sirovich, a soft-hearted Democratic Congressman from
New York, suggested that non-poisonous denaturants be substituted in in-
dustrial alcohol. Indignantly, Prohibition Commissioner James M. Doran
denounced the proposal as a device that would allow diversion of millions of
gallons for bootleg purposes. Better dead than Wet!
52 WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS
Then there were the druggists who often sold their pure "medic-
inal" stock to bootleggers, replacing it with rotgut for the sick
people, and the doctors who found die prescription racket more
profitable than callbacks.
And die farmers, too. In sections of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and
other Midwest states, they no longer could ship entire corn crops
to the distilleries, and barley growers lost their market for the best
grades, formerly bought at premium prices by the breweries. But
the corn market picked up noticeably in die South, and in other
sections many farmers converted grain and fruit crops into illicit
liquor for a spot of ready cash.
Yearly, it seemed, their cider got harder as the prices went up, and
sometimes they even stuffed their pumpkins with sugar. Twenty-
one days later this produced a liquor or sorts, though the farmers
had to be careful lest the cows get drunk on it.
Right in the big cities, gang-operated breweries with false busi-
ness fronts made beer that ran in pipes through the sewers for
distribution from another drop. On the outskirts and up in the
hills were the little private entrepreneurs with one-gallon portable
stills costing only about $6 or $7. Once they had peddled enough
stuff to save up $500, they were really in business with a machine
that could sweat out as much as one hundred gallons daily.
Within weeks, the tragi-comedy of impossible enforcement by
incompetent men was begun across die country, but before that,
before 1 A.M. on January 17th, the underworld struck first. Half a
dozen masked men, identity unknown to this day, overpowered
eight trainmen at a railroad switchyard in Chicago and hijackec
$100,000 worth of medicinal liquor from two freight cars. Says
Judge John H. Lyle, a man who lived through the long Chicago
horror, in his book, The Dry and Lawless Years:
They were the pioneers; the advance guard of an army of scoun-
drels, chiselers and killers who were to murder, maim, corrupt and
prosper as criminals have never prospered throughout Prohibition's
fourteen bloody and scandalous years.
It was only one of so many portents!
In New York, very much like the over-worked sorcerer's appren-
tice, Colonel Porter's tigers, 180 of them, began ranking the first of
countless, tedious "Dry roundups" ... In Camdcn, N.J., 300
Til* TCMI'KUAMK <i:iAl.WI|i IU. WI
Culver Pictures
Back in great-grandmother's clay, when the girls went slumming, this
is how they did it. They kneeled, prayed, sang hymns outside the saloons,
greatly distracting the 'poor drinking men, most of whom had fled there
in flu* find- nlnrp rn <r/r MM'JIV frnm ihmr wivf*5 nnrl morhirs-in-ljl\V.
Tin* greal, the in-
comparable John L. Sul-
livan fought a gallant,
but oft (MI losing battle
with Kid Hum. Know-
ing the subject from all
sides, he was an im-
pressive lecturer in be-
half of the temperance
movement.
This old gentleman
was as ferociously Dry
as be looked. He was
Dr. Howard Hyde Hus-
sell, founder of the
Anti-Saloon League,
which operated the
most powerful and ruth-
less lobby in the history
of American politics.
Hatchet in band,
here is Carry Nation,
the Lizzie Borden of
the Dry cause, caught
in a rare moment of re-
pose. Cam' believed in
direct action, personally
wrecking joints, but in
all fairness, \\e must
admit that here she has
some of the quiet charm
of Whistler's mother.
The Empty Stocking
Thirty-Six States Can Change This
BY
Constitutional Amendment
SERIES 6 No 1?
Site: 10x13 inches
Price: per set of 20 P0ter. J>nlpad, .20 wnti^jwr
Typical Dry prop-
aganda. Daddy (top
center) has drunk up
the family's food, fuel
and furniture and little
Marigold (below) will
get nothing from Santa
Clans this Christmas
if she lives that long.
When jumpi'iT Billy Sunday rassled the Devil, poor
hornhcad always losl two out of three falls. Bui Kid
Hum was a tougher opponent. Billy shook him up a
lew times, never pinned him to the mat.
The\ just don't
make Southern Con-
gressmen the way they
used to! A sartorial tri-
umph. Senator Tom
Helliu of Alabama was
also one of the great
talking machines of the
Dry cause. He he-
labored not only the
Wets but also Tam-
many, Wall Street, the
Catholics and the Ne-
groes.
Hail the victorious Coast Guard! This was one Rum Row ship that
didn't get away. The cutter Perry has a line aboard the Consuelo II,
caught with 5,000 cases of whisky aboard.
Yon would un-
doubtedly look just as
sour if you had given
your name to the Pro-
hibition Enforcement
Act and then lived to
see how little good it
wrought. Worse, Min-
nesota Congressman
Andrew ]. Volstead was
a victim of that curious
law of politics by which
any solon who gets his
name on a bill is there-
The rummies came nol only In sou, but also In river. On ihe Cana-
clian side of the Detroit Hiver," this rum runner is watching with field
glasses for a signal from his American lookout thai no Prohibition agents
are around. Then, in his little, fully-loaded outboard molorhoat beneath
the piling, he will make a speedy dash to Prohibilionland.
Its hard to believe, but the story goes that the schooner Roxic car-
ried torpedoes filled with whisky which were to be fired shoreward and
towed underwater by smaller craft. And here's the photographic evidence
They caught em by land, too. The state troopers are loading gin,
confiscated in a raid, into the rear of their doughty little Model T Ford!
Fellow in the middle doesn't seem to have much heart for his work.
While this gentle-
man doesn't figure too
prominently in our
story, we wanted to
present him for his-
tory's sake. The real,
original Eliot Ness!
Wide World Photos
George \\ r . Wickersham was an eminent New York attorney who
headed a enmmission of equally eminent lawyers and jurists; these men
studied Prohibition long and carefully. The results? Well, yon won't he-
lieve it lill yon read some Wiekersham Commission prose for yourself.
With all the gusto of a
landing at Tripoli, (ieneral
Smedley Uiitlcr, Marine hero,
took over as chief enforcer
with a determination to dry
up Philadelphia, lie had a
few happy moments like the
scene above, but even a
Leatherneck could not rout
the American thirst, and
when he left, Philadelphia
was as Wet as ever.
WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS 53
saloon keepers were showered with a thousand indictments charging
unlawful selling . . . From Detroit, armed Prohibition agents were
rushed to Upper Michigan near Iron River to suppress a "mm
rebellion," Grandiloquently, Major A. B. Dalrymple, enforcement
chief for the state, stained the snows with the contents of nine
barrels of homemade red wine, and Upper Michigan was made safe
forVolsteadism . . .
Prematurely, the New York Commissioner of Public Charities
announced the closing of the Bellevue Hospital alcoholic ward
because "there are so few patients," a deficiency which Prohibition-
time drinking was to correct ... In Hartford, Conn., four vendors
of poison whisky, accused in some thirteen deaths, were impris-
oned . . .
While one Prohibition agent was sprung by a federal jury in
New York for the killing of a chauffeur, another was found shot
to death in Bayonne, N J., the day before Christmas . . . Then, at
4:05 A.M. on the day after the holiday, outside the Blue Bird Res-
taurant near 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, New York, occurred
the most ominous portent of all.
Monk Eastman, a ferocious gangster of the old school, whose
body bore a score of bullet and knife scars, at last fell dead with five
slugs in his head. Once Monk's bully boy services had commanded
$1,500 on Election Day, but he did such a soldierly job overseas in
WWI that Governor Alfred E. Smith re-enfranchised him.
After the murder, there were reports that Monk had relapsed
into his old carefree habits and his death had probably resulted
from a territorial quarrel in the newfangled whisky racket. It made
an appealing story an upstanding, old-fashioned thug falling be-
fore the faceless new organization men of syndicated crime and I
hate to spoil it.
The truth, however, seems to be that an old crony killed Monk
in a petty quarrel following an uproarious Christmas night drinking
party. As hundreds of Dry agents were to similarly claim in later
years, the friend mistakenly thought that the unarmed Monk was
reaching for a gun. So he reached first, shooting in self-defense, and
with that story, he drew only a three-to-ten-year stretch in prison.
Nonetheless, Monk's sad departure had a certain sombre sig-
nificance. The crony who did him in had, only a few years earlier,
beaten a similar rap for killing Joe (The Bear) Falkner in Brooklyn.
54 WITH PROPHECIES, THE GAME BEGINS
Between the two killings, he had been arrested on several other
occasions on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to picking
pockets. But when he shot Monk, there was no question of adding
any weapons violation against him. He was legally armed.
He was a Prohibition agent.
As even intelligent Drys now began to realize uneasily, never
had God moved in more mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
Still, in the irritating, yet naively ingratiating spirit of the early
'20s, the will-to-believe persisted in the face of facts and portents.
It was a mood impossible to recapture today, perhaps best typified
by a mild little French druggist with neatly trimmed beard and
mustache who preached auto-suggestion for the treatment of illness.
The doctors, more accustomed to throwing business the druggists'
way than having the druggists take it from them, belabored Philip
Emile Coue and his do-it-yourself threat to their services.
Imperturbably, Cou6 went up and down the land, preaching,
"Every day in every way, I am getting better and better." He at-
tracted huge, enthusiastic followings, and Cou6 institutes sprang
up around the country. Upton Sinclair, for one, gave Cou&sm a
ringing testimonial. Mrs. S., he said, had thus been cured of the
varicose veins and headaches that had plagued her for years.
"I do not heal people/' Cou6 said. "I teach them to cure them-
selves. The only change in my system is that I no longer tell people
to think hard about their getting well. Just the mechanical repeti-
tion of the words which record on the unconscious mind is suffi-
cient,"
In a less ingratiating manner, the Drys practiced their own form
of auto-suggestion. Resolutely, they ignored all that was happening
about them as normal men struggled to re-adjust to the strange,
harsh new law that had been imposed upon them.
Seeing and smelling no evil, or pretending that they didn't, the
Prohibitionists repetitiously bawled, "It's in the constitution" to the
tune of "John Brown's Body" with the triumphant tagline, and it's
there, there to stay!. Some were able to maintain this remarkable
auto-deception right to the end.
6
Sbb!
Speak Easy
Before the bubble burst soggily in '29 like the ersatz effervescence
of Prohibition champagne, the Drys attributed to Volsteadism all
the febrile prosperity of the '20s. Millions of clear-eyed American
workingmen, no longer malingering because of Monday hangovers,
were producing more, making more, saving more, buying more.
Thus, with difficulty, we resist the somewhat malicious tempta-
tion to lay at the Drys' door the depression, the twenty-third in 130
years, which arrived the same year as Prohibition and persisted for
a good two years. Curiously, however, except for Prohibition, the
bad times might have been worse.
Thanks to Volsteadism, the renovation business enjoyed a mild
boom. All over the country, hammers pounded cheerfully and saws
whined as the outlawed cafes and open saloons made themselves
presentable to the authorities and public by becoming speakeasies.
In most cases, the alterations were simple. Except for the bars, the
main rooms were left undisturbed; they were now respectable, if
somewhat forlorn-looking, restaurants. The bars were moved back
behind strong doors into what had been the kitchens, and the
kitchens were re-located downstairs. Thus, with a minimum of
refurbishing, business was continued on the old stand.
Door fitters were in especial demand, for the high-minded new
decor insisted on elimination of the swinging doors that had graced
the old, open saloons. In addition to decorum, the proprietors felt,
thick oak defenses would slow any raiders while the evidence was
being poured down the drains. Too, when the Feds hit on the
55
56 SHHl SPEAK EASY
nasty device of actually padlocking raided premises, a need devel-
oped for several doors. No sooner was one locked with all the
majesty of federal law than a second door was opened practically
alongside, and the clientele suffered no inconvenience.
In New York's Greenwich Village, a speakeasy popular with
newspapermen and Dry raiders alike found need for seven doors to
maintain the service its customers had come to expect. Sometimes,
six would be padlocked at once, but always, as luck would have it,
the time limit on one of these would be expiring just as the agents
were padlocking the seventh.
Right through the shaky experiment, little Hoboken, a short
ferry ride across the Hudson River from New York City, retained
a delightful illusion that the 18th really didn't exist. At many inter-
sections, saloons occupied all four corners, and especially among
the arty set, it became a thing to ferry over for clams and beer
served by pretty barmaids.
On Water Street, a bowling alley was converted into a speak
with a hundred-foot bar and two street addresses. Any night, one
of the two addresses might be padlocked, but the next evening, the
sixteen bartenders were just as busy, sliding bottles the full length
of the long bar with breath-taking accuracy.
You just came in the other door, and when you went out, ac-
cording to the custom of the house, you were given a four-ounce
botde to take with you. Understandably, each Dry raid was greeted
with raucous shouts of "Set 'em up in the other alley!"
As a fledgling reporter, blase and worldly-wise as only a twenty-
year-old can be, I prided myself on knowing and being accepted
in the speaks of my town. Sometimes, I drank a superb wine made
by an elderly, mustached Frenchman from his own grapes and
served in his kitchen with Gallic charm. To him, of course, Prohibi-
tion was incomprehensible; as mad as the prohibition on brothels
which thus menaced the chastity of virtuous girls.
Often, I visited sleazy, second-floor converted apartments, bar-
renly furnished, with tables serving as makeshift bars and usually
a slot machine or two. Somehow, though fastidious drinkers didn't
particularly mind whether they entered by swinging doors or full-
length peepholed ones, they disliked drinking places without real
bars. They seemed furtive.
In Connecticut, two of the wettest towns were New Haven,
SHH/ SPEAK EASY 57
which is understandable considering the pride Yale men take in
their presumed carrying capabilities, and Waterbury which was
practically wide-open.
Once after a game in the Yale Bowl, I remember, I started down
the rickety stairs to the cellar washroom in a farmhouse that had
been converted into a speak. Halfway down, I saw a uniformed
cop below me. As I hesitated, he yelled, "Stick 'em up! This joint
is raided!"
I froze and at the scared expression on my face, he laughed up-
roariously. He was just there, of course, to get a drink, collect the
precinct's payoff or control the collegians, so often a problem to
proper law enforcement in New Haven.
In Waterbury, reportedly, the Dry agents never made one suc-
cessful raid. They then operated out of New Haven, and to their
misfortune the license numbers of their speedy blade sedans and
touring cars were notorious in Waterbury. Sentries were posted
on every access road outside the city, and as soon as the Drys roared
hopefully past, the sentries phoned ahead. Each speak relayed the
alarm to the next one, and by the time the raiders hit, the patrons
were all virtuously drinking ginger ale. Once, when the Dry cara-
van screeched to a halt at Waterbury's big central green, a friend
of mine, then a newspaperman in the town, was waiting, "Hi,
f ellows!" he said brightly. "I heard you were in town/'
Of course, all of this the re-carpentering of the premises, the
setting up of sources of supply, the arrangement for police and
political protection didn't happen overnight. But, considering that
one of America's greatest industries was being born, the job was
done with remarkable speed.
At first, the Wickersham Commission nostalgically reported,
violations were "cautious, relatively small in volume and compara-
tively easy to handle." It was "soon after 1921," WC felt, that the
"marked change" took place. As usual, the commission was trying
to say the nicest things possible about Prohibition.
To Frederick Lewis Allen, a more unbiased observer, the changed
feelings about Prohibition were "bewilderingly rapid." In Only
Yesterday, he says, 'Within a few short months it was apparent that
the Volstead Act was being smashed right and left and that the
formerly inconsiderable body of Wet opinion was growing to sizable
proportions."
58 SHH/ SPEAK EASY
Certainly within a year, Broadway fell victim to the furtive new
ways, becoming "a mere Main Street of motion-picture emporiums
and synthetic orange juice booths," and the New York Times softly
deplored that dissipation now "ran in ugly subterranean channels,
unlit by glamour or the romance of beauty/'
In a style that curiously blended undertones of Margaret Mead
and Ed Sullivan, the Times pontificated:
"Out of such ruins, a night life was to be reconstructed a night
life that would hold out an appeal alike to the hardened old rounder
and to the unsatiated flapper, tingling with curiosity.
"The answer has been a group of cafes that call themselves clubs
although technically they have no more right to the name than
has the Waldorf-Astoria. But the very name 'club' is a part of the
general scheme of surrounding patrons with the psychology of
privacy and intimacy which psychology has been no small factor
in ousting the clammy dread of the law that had placed its damper
on Broadway's spirits since July, 1919.
"The very architecture of the new places is part of the propa-
ganda. The successful 'club' is full of booths and alcoves and cozy
wall benches, which somehow contribute to the atmosphere of
'just us members' , . ."
In time, from Broadway west to Pasadena and back to Tremont
Street in Boston (where I remember a joint directly across from the
Commons), the speaks proliferated wildly into the hundreds of
thousands. Perhaps, in all, they totalled 500,000 or more.
Just in New York, as early as 1923, the estimate was 5,000, later
upped to 32,000 (more than double the 15,000 places where a man
could have gotten a drink legally in pre-Volstead days). In fact,
a magazine writer asserted the city boasted more speaks than there
had previously been legal places in the whole state.
"Everybody over 15 could get a drink," he wrote, "and almost
everybody did."
We writers are sometimes accused of exaggerating for the story's
sake, so let me introduce the testimony of Frederic R. Coudert Sr.,
an eminent leader of the bar in New York. After a decade's experi-
ence with the Dry laws, he told Congress early in 1930, the city
had ten speakeasies for each pre-Prohibition saloon.
Today, except in an occasional late-late movie, they have van-
SHH/ SPEAK EASY 59
ished as completely as the snows of yesteryear. So let us pay a
sentimental return visit to a few of them including those curious
dives opened by the government with federal money for the pur-
poses of entrapment.
7
And They Drank
All Night
Between 56th and 57th Streets on the Avenue of the Americas
(which old New Yorkers, with a stubborn disregard for Pan-Amer-
ican relations, still insist on calling Sixth Avenue), the latter-day
archaeologists of the building trades industry recently made an
important find.
Their power shovels, scooping out the excavation for a new
twenty-one story apartment building, uncovered, in almost perfect
preservation, the artifacts of those dear, damp, dead days of the
'20s now gone beyond recall. There were the stucco walls still
showing green, blue and yellow decorations, the wilted palm trees
that had masked the supporting columns, and the bar.
Nostalgic tears in his eyes, one of the builders identified the
Pompeian discovery as a Prohibition-time joint once known as 'The
Cave." You entered the lobby of an apartment house on 57th Street,
descended to the cellar and rapped on a locked door. After perform-
ing satisfactorily what Heywood Broun called "the cleansing ritual"
of identification, you were admitted into a room 100 feet long and
27 feet wide and groped your way through the haze of cigaret
smoke to bar or table.
As speaks went, "The Cave" didn't go far. Drinks were somewhat
steep at $1.50, and the only entertainment was furnished by a
player piano, though often the show people among the clientele
rendered impromptu songs or funny sayings. "The Cave" did boast
one minor distinction. When 57th Street had been widened, the
60
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 61
building line was pushed back seven feet at surface level, but not
the cellar.
Thus, the subterranean refugees from Volsteadism sang, drank
and disported themselves directly under the sidewalk where the
heavy feet of the law pounded and the roadway which carried the
Dry agents' cars on their ceaseless, futile raids.
Sadly, none of the antiquarian societies that profess interest in
preserving historical sites cared about 'The Cave/' and with another
nostalgic tear, the builder gave orders that it be filled in and lost
forever behind the retaining walls of the new apartment house.
In only three decades, the casual march of progress has destroyed
most of New York's 32,000 speakeasies more thoroughly than the
thirteen years of concentrated wreckage inflicted by the hammers
and axes of the Dry despoilers. And those which made the transition
to legality on the old stand, with a state liquor license now virtu-
ously hanging on the wall, changed so shockingly that they might
as well have been torn down. When Repeal was in the air in the
early '30s, Heywood Broun, a sensitive observer of the speakeasy
era, foresaw what might happen. In his introduction to Manhattan
Oases, Al Hirschfeld's guide to noted New York speaks, Broun
wrote wistfully, "Surely some imaginative spirits will retain the
locked door and the sliding panel even after a dull legalism has
been conferred upon their activities." l Alas! As quickly as they
could get their state licenses and renovation loans, the newly legal
joints refurbished their comfortably dark and shabby premises with
lighting that hurt the eyes, dreadful tubular modern furniture,
loud-colored plastic seat coverings and a generally offensive open
atmosphere.
Oii sont les neiges d'antan? Some day, at considerable cost and
historical effort, The Museum of the City of New York will have
to recreate for future generations a small, murky room in the decor
of the '20s which somehow projects an atmosphere of companion-
ship, gayety and a sort of pleasant furtiveness.
In the meantime, before the era has become sufficiently dust-
covered to attract serious historians, we can make a sentimental and
frivolous return journey with the mind's eye. Our guides are brittle
newspaper clippings, personal memories, the reminiscences of
1 Al Hirschfeld, Manhattan Oases (New York: R P. Dutton & Co., Inc.).
62 AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT
friends and the considered judgment of that pioneering Duncan
Hines,AlHirschfeld.
Of the three dozen spots that he chronicled, Al considered The
Mansion, in the West Fifties off Fifth Avenue, "the most preten-
tious place in New York" and definitely "one of Prohibition's
greatest blessings/* Here, in the former mansion of a banker, still
adorned with the costly chandeliers, drapes and tapestries installed
by the original owner, gathered celebrities of the political, theatrical
and sporting worlds.
If, by some distressing accident, their well-known faces were not
immediately recognized at the door, they flashed a wooden card of
admission. Immediately, uniformed attendants jumped to attention,
escorting them into the imposing entrance hall and bowing them
toward the grand staircase.
In the excellent second-floor dining room, meals could be ob-
tained for a surprisingly reasonable $2, and at the circular bar in
the adjoining room, drinks began at $1. As leading municipal
figures sipped thoughtfully, putting aside the cares of state and
Tammany, a band played discreetly. Unlike less important places,
The Mansion was not too proud to serve ale and even beer, and on
the third floor was a games room.
Another elegant spot in the same neighborhood, its entrance hall
tricked out in gold, ivory and a profusion of mirrors, was the Club
Napoleon. Here the food was expensive, the drinks (including ale)
served by four barmen were priced at $1. There was, however, an
unfailing festive note as the luminaries of musical comedy favored
the Napoleon and often burst into unpremeditated song.
Here one night, the festivities were somewhat dampened. Gang-
ster Larry Fay succumbed to the occupational risk of his calling,
being shot and killed in the joint.
For elegance, you could also patronize the beautifully decorated
Mona Lisa on W. 56th, just off Fifth, which was one of the few
spots recognizing any distinction in the drinking habits of the sexes,
offering its clientele the choice of a ladies 1 bar, gentlemen's bar and
"coeducational" bar. Over at the Park Avenue Club which, like
most of the plush midtown speaks, was controlled by the tough
Owney Madden syndicate, there were $45,000 worth of Josef
Urban decorations.
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 63
To the spectral disgruntlement of many proper old New York
families like the Wagstaffs and Rhinelanders, the speaks overran
the former brownstone town houses on their block or 52nd Street,
between Fifth and Sixth. Here could be found Jack and Charlie's
"21," reputedly the third speakeasy in town, and by Al Hirschf eld's
testimony, "probably the only place on the island where you can
call for Dewar's, Teacher's, Walker's Black Label or any other
brand of whisky and get just that." As a practical precaution, "21"
possessed a raid-resistant bar equipped with a chute down which
in time of trouble sad to relate! the rare and genuine evidence
could be slid to its destruction at the rocky far end. Even after
Repeal, the alien revel lingered on 52nd Street. Since speaks were
the predecessors of modern-type night clubs, the end of Prohibition
and the advent of hot music naturally transformed the block into
Swing Street. Then, following the ban on burlesque in New York,
Of course, from Harlem to Hell's Kitchen, from a spot with a
horseshoe bar on W. 40th right alongside the Public Library to a
75-cent-a-drink oasis for serious drinkers run by a Chinaman on
Lexington Avenue in the 30s, the speakeasies spread all over town.
Down in Greenwich Village they gathered sometimes six deep
at the bar of Julius', located on a corner of Waverly Place, or ad-
mired the rough-log, mounted-elk's-head decor of The Stonewall
on lower Seventh Avenue. They exclaimed nostalgically over the
cigar store Indian outside Bill's old-fashioned place in the 50s east
of Fifth and the silver dollars inside set into the floor. Back again
in the roaring west 50s, they marvelled at that ichthyological land-
mark, The Aquarium, the bar of which was one huge, gola-trimmed
aquarium. This place, by the way, was taken over after Repeal by
writer Ann Pinchot and her husband, Ben, the theatrical photog-
rapher, who converted it into a studio.
Apparently, for generosity, if you'll take Al Hirschfeld's word for
it, The Dixie, which lurked behind a cigar store in the 40th west
of Sixth, was about tops. In addition to first-rate brandy for only 50
cents and superior draft beer at a quarter, the management every
so often held open house at which beefsteak, unlimited whisky and
cigars were all free.
Of course, in the intimacy of these closed saloons, the person-
64 AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT
ality of the bartender was a significant factor. In fact, the Village
spot, John & Andy's, remained known as Julius' in tribute to such a
dominating force behind the wood even after he had left.
Many of the best bartenders were white-thatched, dignified men
of integrity of the old school. All through Prohibition, they paid
their $1 .50 monthly dues to the Bartenders' Union, patiently wait-
ing for the madness to pass. The antics of women drinkers and the
abandon of the hip-flask, coonskin-coat collegiate crowd genuinely
shocked them, but with their regulars they maintained an almost
pastoral relationship.
When the regulars had too much, the old-timers recognized it
first, and cut them off firmly, without appeal, but with a com-
pletely inoffensive firmness that is rare today and becoming rarer.
Equally, with an intuitiveness that approached extra sensory per-
ception, possibly because most of them were Celtic, they recognized
the cases who needed just one or two more to achieve that mysteri-
ous equilibrium with which they could then face the outside winds
and home. In such emergencies, the old-timers unhesitatingly ex-
tended credit or even lent the money out of their own pockets.
At the other extreme were the young hooligans, spawned of the
times, who made sloppy drinks, concocted anything more com-
plicated than a Manhattan or Martini with a scowling laborious-
ness, and quickly resorted to the authority of the baseball bat,
supposed to be used only for crushing ice. Often, they got their
own places because they were more businessmen than artists, but
to many, especially the women drinkers, they had a certain evil
charm. In a day of gangsterism, they were hand-me-down gangsters,
and it was smart to know at least one of them by first name.
For such thugs, with the muscle and the money, borrowed or
stolen, Prohibition was their finest hour, and the profits could be
enormous. The Club Napoleon, for example, reportedly grossed
$20,000 to $30,000 weekly, and the El Fey Club, operated by
Larry Fay with Texas Guinan (of whom much more later) as the
hostess, showed a profit of more than $10,000 for several months.
But in the respectable neighborhood joints, where old-fashioned
honest men tried to pursue their lifelong calling under basically
dishonest conditions, Prohibition never was the bonanza it's been
cracked up to be. On the one side, they were squeezed by the
constantly increasing demands of graft by federal agents and city
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 65
cops, and on the other by the extortion of "protection** money by
gangsters and the marauding of hijackers and holdupmen.
One of the smaller speak proprietors once confided to a news-
paperman that he didn't mind paying the beat cop because, after all,
he scared off gunmen. But those plainclothesmen! Not only did
they want money, they also would bring along half a dozen friends
to drink on the house. "In the old days, I used to pay $1.10 for a
bottle, pour out 26 drinks at 15 cents a throw and make myself
$2.80," he explained. "Now I pay $5 a bottle, pour it out for $9
and make $4. My rent's doubled because the gink (landlord) is
afraid of a padlock, and the cops and federal men wait in line to
say hello. "And, brother! How they say it!"
Just to cover his graft expenses, another proprietor said, he had
to tack an extra quarter on the price of drinks.
The more affluent clubs retained well-known hoods to drop
around regularly, their fearsome faces exerting a calming effect on
the clientele. When this failed, the more obstreperous offenders
were summoned to the manager's room and quietly reproved, some-
time to the extent of a brief unconscious spell.
But the hooligans weren't always at hand, and when disorders
erupted behind their backs, the speaks definitely could not call the
riot squad. Unless the helpful beat cop was nearby, the mayhem
and monetary damage were severe.
On one occasion at the Club Dover, while the spotlight was
concentrated on Jimmy Durante's nose, two hostile tables at far
ends of the dub began hurling champagne botdes at each other.
Four spectators were knocked out, but in die finest tradition of show
business, Jimmy's nose never twitched, and he completed his rou-
tine, miraculously unscathed.
In addition to graft, extortion and violence, several other factors
made a speakeasy man's life not a happy one. There was for him the
ever-present danger of a raid which would mean arrest, at least
temporary disruption of business and possibly the disastrous loss of
his entire investment through padlocking of the premises. Com-
pared to the steady patronage enjoyed by the pre-Pronibition saloons
and restaurants, business was smaller and more erratic.
In the fickle way of the '20s, the novelty-seeking clientele often
would drift to a new competitor down the block, and a lot of the
old carriage trade now drank in clubs or had the stuff delivered to
66 AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT
their homes by hootleggers. Finally, when the proprietor got home
after a trying day behind the wood and took the shoes off his aching
feet, his wife and daughter were waiting to reproach him for their
lowered social status in the neighborhood.
Allowing for inevitable local variations which make this such an
interesting country, approximately the same conditions obtained
through most of the U.S.
One of the interesting exceptions was San Francisco. The Blue
Fox, one of the largest speaks and later one of the city's greatest
tourist attractions, was directly across the street from die Hall of
Justice which also housed the City Jail. However, in the fond
memory of one native, San Francisco managed to satisfy its thirst
without letting the gangs get out of hand.
For Fairfax Cone, executive committee chairman of the advertis-
ing agency Foote, Cone & fielding, the 'most vivid recollection of
the Prohibition years in San Francisco is of the rather sophisticated
attitude of the city toward the problem.
"So far as I know, we had no gangs; at least we didn't have any
outside ones because these boys were met at the ferry and escorted
back across San Francisco Bay and put on trains headed for wher-
ever they had come from."
To Fax, the significant thing is that San Francisco "which had
its red light district knocked out at the time of the first World's
Fair in 1915, learned to run its tenderloin without bothering much
of anybody, and it was able to take on Prohibition in much the
same way."
Wistfully looking for a silver lining in Prohibition's cloud, the
Wickersham Commission reported, "Speakeasies, even where they
approximate the old-time open saloon, have few of the attractions
which were used to bring customers to those drinking places and
induce them to stay there and spend their money. Probably a much
greater number of those who patronize them can afford to do so
than was true in the case of the saloon. Thus the closing of the
saloon has been a gain, even if speakeasies abound."
Having made this tortured concession to the Drys, the Commis-
sion felt impelled to add, "But the saloon was not an unlawful
institution. Where it was not carried on in defiance of the law, its
patrons were not assisting in maintaining an unlawful enterprise.
Against the gain in eliminating the saloon must be weighed the
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 67
demoralizing effect of the regime of more or less protected speak-
easies upon regard for law and upon law and order generally/'
So tell us, Dad, what's the answer? "Unless the number of speak-
easies can be substantially and permanently diminished," WC con-
cluded, "enforcement can not be held satisfactory." This is an
excellent example of WC's merry-go-round approach that made its
report unique in style and content.
The national guessing game of the Dry years was estimating the
number of speakeasies that flourished through the land. As early
as 1926, a retiring assistant U.S. Attorney in New York City said
that, at best, the authorities could lose only 125 monthly, at which
rate they would require fifteen years to shut them all down pro-
vided no new ones sprang up. But, experience showed, each time
a joint was padlocked, fresh blood (usually the employees. of the
closed establishment) opened anywheres from one to four spots in
the same neighborhood to attract the locked-out business.
Official statistics and reassurances, nervously intended to placate
the Dry vote, were almost meaningless, except to indicate the gigan-
tic size of the problem. In 1931, the heyday of the closed saloon,
the federal forces of righteousness under New York Prohibition
Administrator Andrew McCampbell raided 6,217 speaks, mostly in
Manhattan and the Bronx, double the number raided the year
previously. They also hit 386 night dubs, 171 breweries, 94 cutting
plants and 64 drugstores. They made 17,513 Prohibition arrests and
confiscated 459 stills, almost 1,500,000 gallons of beer, almost 400,-
000 gallons of hooch and 122,510 gallons of wine.
The next spring, Colonel Amos W. W. Woodcock, the irrepres-
sibly optimistic National Prohibition Director, who often talked
like a prize-fight manager on the eve of the big bout, drafted a
special squad of sixty Dry agents. The men were given sectional
maps of New York and instructed to make a speakeasy census. No
raiding, fellows, just the facts about the number of speaks, restau-
rants, night clubs, cider stubes and beer parlors where liquor could
be sold.
Apparently, years of over-faithful sniffing had dulled their sense
of smell, for Woodcock's pollsters found only 2,182 speakeasies in
Manhattan (a patently ridiculous figure!), plus 927 restaurants,
266 cordial shops and 119 night clubs.
A much more reliable source was Major Maurice Campbell, the
68 AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT
ided former chief of New York's Dry forces ("I was sold out
right and left all the way up to Washington"). The aggrieved
major, who had changed sides, becoming editor of Repeal, made
his own personal wet census in mid-1931 and found a conservative
minimum of 222,225 speaks throughout the country. More prob-
ably, he said, there were 500,000.
By the Campbell count, New York state led with 42,000, and
Illinois was a close second with 40,000. Pennsylvania (20,000)
and California (15,000) ranked third and fourth while Massa-
chusetts, Michigan and New Jersey, which each had 10,000, were
tied for fifth place. Wisconsin, he surprisingly reported, boasted
7,500, and even Ohio, spiritual home of the Drys, contained 5,000,
thus putting it in the same category as her diree shamelessly Wet
sisters, Connecticut, Maryland and Louisiana.
The Dryest, Campbell said, were Delaware, with only 250; the
District of Columbia, Idaho, Wyoming, with 500 each; and the
two Dakotas, with 1,000. Even "bone Dry" Kansas had 1,000.
These emporiums ran the socio-economic scale down to the level
of the unspeakable "shock houses," mostly located through the
Bowery and poor Lower East Side neighborhoods of New York.
The wood alcohol they peddled sent their shabby patrons reeling
into the streets where they collapsed, blinded, paralyzed and often
dead.
By the dozens, they were found lying in hallways and gutters
and routinely transported to the wards or morgue of Bellevue Hos-
pital, ancient refuge of the metropolis outcasts. In the fall of 1928,
when there was an outbreak of poison booze in the city, the author-
ities counted twenty-nine dead widiin a few days and at least twice
as many hospitalized, half of whom were also expected to die. Since
the first of the year, there had been almost 700 such fatalities.
Almost as shocking were the intermittent disclosures that the
federal government itself sometimes went into the speakeasy busi-
ness for the purposes of entrapment. With shady characters as the
front men, the Feds used Government funds to set up joints and
catch grafting local cops.
One of the most flagrant of such cases occurred in Norfolk, Va.,
where, at local request, three agents of the Prohibition Unit were
ordered to smoke out graft among members of the local police force*
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 69
Their super-sleuthing resulted in sixteen suspensions, resignations,
dismissals and probations for various cops.
But they didn't stop there. They set up a speakeasy and later a
distilling plant to get evidence of liquor conspiracies!
Their antics were exposed when the U.S. Senate demanded a
full accounting of undercover federal enforcement methods. Gen-
eral Lincoln C. Andrews, then Commissioner of Prohibition, and
Commissioner of Internal Revenue David H. Blair hastily obliged
in a two-weeks' period.
Both General Andrews and Commissioner Blair strongly con-
demned such law-breaking to catch law-breakers, but as Blair ad-
mitted to the Senate, the damage had already been done:
'When it became noised about that the federal government had
set up this barroom to trap and catch policemen, the entire force
of policemen were incensed at the government officials. Of course,
it will be many years before we can hope to get the proper coopera-
tion from the policemen in Norfolk as a result of this attempt to
catch them by committing an unlawful act and by setting a trap to
help clean up a local situation which should have been taken
care of by local people."
There were virtuous promises of never again!, but you know
bureaucracy. On July 1, 1930, the Prohibition unit was transferred
from the Treasury to the Justice Department, and only six months
later, Representative J. Charles Linthicum, of Maryland, reported
to the House that the Norfolk caper was being replayed in the
Midwest.
"Prohibition operators, in cooperation with the district attorney
of Indianapolis, deliberately set about to build up a sensational
police scandal by the establishment of a speakeasy in that city/*
he charged.
Using government money, Linthicum related, two Dry agents
sent in from Chicago set up "a liquor dispensing establishment"
on East 22nd Street in Indianapolis and placed "a Negro informer"
in charge. They got their wet stuffs through one Taylor, "a notori-
ous bootlegger."
Colonel Woodcock unhappily admitted the existence of this
federally-supervised speak to Congressman Linthicum, but despite
the preposterously illegal operation, five policemen were convicted
on the evidence and sent to the penitentiary.
70 AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT
Even where entrapment was not practiced, policing of the speak-
easies was a thirteen-year-long friction point between Feds and
locals. Like nagging wives, the former were constantly demanding
more work andcooperation from the latter and, like most nagging
wives, they weren't getting it.
In New York City, for example, the ebullient Grover Whalen
warred so lustily, for a time, when he was Police Commissioner that
his raiding forces became known as "Whalen's Whackers." In short
order, his men broke up almost 600 speakeasies and in January,
1929, they were hitting more than sixty a night. Whalen explained
that he was getting 500 letters daily from distraught wives, sisters
and fiancees. Their men were frittering away their money and their
health in joints up and down the block, and Whalen, as the de-
fender of femininity, was determined to put a stop to it. 2
Only seven months later, Whalen had undergone a complete
change of heart. The state Court of Appeals ruled that the speak-
easies could be prosecuted under the state nuisance law, and Fed-
eral Prohibition Administrator Maurice Campbell promptly sent
Whalen 300 photostated copies of complaints that had been re-
ceived by the Feds. He suggested that Grover go get 'em. For three
hours, Whalen went into deep consultation at the Lawyers' Club
with Chief Inspector John O'Brien, in charge of the city's uni-
formed police; a representative of Chief Magistrate William Mc-
Adoo; and the prosecutors in four of the five counties that make up
New York City. They were unanimously agreed, Whalen reported,
that federal agents had just as much legal right as the city police or
any citizen to initiate nuisance proceedings in the Magistrates
Courts.
Further, he said, using die city police for nuisance enforcement
2 Somewhat less chivalrously, The News suggested that some of the
women had been in a temporary pet, that some of the complaints might
have come from Dry zealots and then asked practically:
"What is to prevent Eric, die popular oootlegger at No. 17 Blank St.
from writing a heartbroken note signed 'Just a Mother/ and complaining
against his rival, Marcellus, at No. 21? And why shouldn't Gouverneur,
who plans to open a joint at No. 23, write three or four letters designed to
clear the block of both Eric's and Marcellus' competition?" All through
Prohibition, The News was remarkably sound on all aspects of the national
problem*
AND THEY DRANK ALL NIGHT 71
would require another 5,000 men on the force at a cost of $15,000,-
000 to the city taxpayers. Tardy, he suggested to Campbell:
"If you are unwilling to discharge your sworn obligation to the
federal government or wish to make a confession of your inability
to effectively direct the activities of your department, for which a
large proportion of a $36,000,000 appropriation is allotted, the ad-
mission should be made primarily to your superiors in Washington,
instead of 'passing the buck* to the state law-enforcing officers,"
Even for a high public official, it was a long sentence, but over-
night Grover Whalen became just about the most popular man in
town. As you will recall, he went on to become the official gardenia-
wearing city greeter whose smiling, mustached countenance was
forever appearing in the newspapers and newsreels.
Inexcusably, but understandably, the disdained Dry cops resorted
to reckless and often-fatal tactics as they found themselves increas-
ingly despised by public and police alike. More of that later, but
for the time being let's recall a quiet, entirely different aspect of
those years that were so vexatious and yet so much fun in retro-
spect.
8
Desperate
Improvisations
Home brewing, a painful, odoriferous and sometimes explosive
operation, had been gradually forced upon the workingman even
before the advent of Prohibition.
As early as 1908, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company
took want ads for "sober" workers. Further, B. and O. reassured
the wreck-conscious riding public, all its people who had anything
to do with train operations had to be total abstainers. The same
year, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel Corporation forbade its employees
to partake of liquor on or off duty.
And in the fall of 1922, delighted that the 18th was now "a
part of the fundamental laws of this country/' Henry Ford went
even further. Brusquely, he warned each of his auto workers in
Detroit that possession of beer, wine or liquor "on his person or in
his home" or the mere odor thereof on his breath, "will cost a man
his job, without an excuse or appeal being considered."
"Politics," Henry said roundly, "has interfered with the enforce-
ment of this law, but so far as our organization is concerned, it is
going to be enforced to the letter."
From Westerville, Ohio, a little Sahara surrounded by many
pleasant oases through the land, came the happy cry, "Patriot!,"
from the headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League. Of course, folks
a bit more sensitive to civil liberties were dismayed. What right
had Henry to stick his nose into his workers' homes where even
the United States government presumably could not enter without
a search warrant?
72
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 73
Even forgetting civil liberties which were pretty well forgotten
during the '20s, the law permitted drinking in a person's own
home or in a friend's home if he were a bona fide guest there.
An individual could keep a stock of liquor in his home. Though
this proviso probably didn't apply to many of Henry's auto work-
ers, if he had more than one home, he could keep stocks in all
of them. However, once the cellar or cellars ran dry, he could
legally replenish his supplies only by wangling medicinal prescrip-
tions from physicians, the limit being a pint every ten days. He
couldn't even accept a bottle as a gift.
However, these Big Brother antics by Big Business in the fields
of steel, rails and autos were aped by Dry Little Business which
forced discretion, if not whole-hearted compliance, on the thirsty
workingman. Since he could not publicly drink or buy whisky, he
was driven to other shifts at home, hoping the boss would not
actually stomp into the house on an inspection tour. 1
And thus were born two outstanding Prohibition types who soon
were to total in the millions.
The first was that comedian to his friends and despair to his wife
and children, the do-it-yourself home braumeister and/or vintner
who smelled the cellar to the heavens and cluttered the kitchen
with his bottling equipment as he struggled to make the hops and
berries do his bidding.
The second (of whom more later) was the friendly, smiling
bootlegger whose Model A Ford or long black Packard was seen
in every residential neighborhood. Within the hour, he could be
relied upon to make discreet deliveries to the door of stuff always
"right off the boat."
The 'legger was the logical retail development of the rapidly
growing wholesale business in smuggling and domestic manufac-
ture, but the home brewer was more of a surprise to Drys and
1 Things don't change. The popularity of vodka cocktails today among
clergymen, doctors, lawyers, bankers, civic workers and other eminent
personages is largely accounted for by the fact that they leave no whisky
breath. In fact, one of the pioneer American-made vodkas strongly advertised
this great practical advantage until others in the liquor business and the
ever-vigilant WCTU protested. The trade's annoyance is understandable,
but one would think that the WCTU which for years had been yelling
about the "reek" of whisky on men's breath would have welcomed the
74 DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS
government alike. In the beginning, they grossly under-estimated
the determination of common man to drink even if he had to flood
his own cellar.
Shortly after the 18th went into effect, a Kansas City Star
reporter put "this home-brewing business" up to Dr. A. B. Adams,
chief chemist of the Treasury Bureau which measured beverages
for the Volsteadian alcoholic ceiling.
"Nothing to that," the Doc assured him confidently. "It's too
much trouble for uncertain results. They may try it once or twice,
but not more."
Trouble it was, and often the results were more than uncertain.
They were downright disastrous. Too many times the bottles would
blow their caps, and a man sitting in his living room quietly listen-
ing to Station KDKA, Pittsburgh, would hear from below a series
of sharp pop-pojp-pops and the soft thud of corks hitting the cellar
ceiling. By the time he got below, a liquid of peculiar smell and off-
brown color would be running all over the floor. The planning,
working and waiting of many weeks were ruined.
Even when the brew was patiently nurtured through to success,
the results usually weren't worth the effort. At least, all the home
brew that I sampled had a sour, mashy taste, and I suspect the
brewers only liked it, or pretended to, out of pride of fatherhood.
Once, I remember, I was dating a girl, and as a signal mark of his
approval, her father gave me a glass of homemade stuff.
Manlike, I tossed off half at a single gulp and uttered an involun-
tary, strangled "Jeez!" Things between the old man and me were
never the same after that.
Shortly, the Drys awoke to the fact that the closed cellar had
replaced the open saloon. On the second anniversary of Prohibition,
the WCTU launched "The Star in the Window Campaign," urg-
ing every home and place of business where liquor was never used
to proudly fly a blue flag with a white star in the center and the
message: "We are Americans. We support the Constitution."
Mrs. Ella Alexander Boole, WCTU president, pushed the sub-
stitution technique. In her book, Give Prohibition Its Chance, she
seriously recommended, "One way of giving Prohibition its chance
is to serve delicious, non-alcoholic drinks." She confided the recipe
for a delicious, non-alcoholic fruit punch which I will gladly supply
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 75
to anyone sending in a stamped, self-addressed envelope, thus spar-
ing other gentle readers the nauseating details.
Despite all appeals to taste and patriotism, however, despite the
muffled explosions from below, home manufacture not only sur-
vived but grew mightily down the years. In the late 1920s, Mark
Sullivan estimated, many homes "millions perhaps" boasted
home brew paraphernalia. Malt preparations for beer were sold
openly in the grocery stores. New York City alone counted more
than 400 "malt and hops" shops which supplied the ingredients
and apparatus for the biggest single do-it-yourself kick in American
history. Here the father of the household browsed happily during
his lunch hour, buying bottling equipment, caps, "genuine Spanish
corks never used before," wine presses and crocks.
From two such widely separated and disparate seats of culture
as Massachusetts and Texas, I can supply first-hand descriptions of
home brewing and the equally trying art of home distilling. Perhaps
fortunately, die precise formulae have disappeared, but even today,
some three decades later, the aroma lingers on.
Never mind! A lot of work, a lot of heart went into the opera-
tions. In fact, there was so much work, so many spoiled batches,
such a curious taste to the stuff pronounced unspoiled that a ques-
tion arises. Why didn't the Drys have the realistic good sense to
welcome the kitchen brewer? Only absolute dedication could
have made a man a drunkard on the stuff.
Certainly home brew did not possess the frighteningly habit-
forming quality of the wine described by evangelist Billy Sunday
in his horror story of the innocent country boy who attended "a
fancy dress ball I ought to call it a fancy undress ball," There he
met a hot kid with "hair like a raven's wing, a neck like a swan,
teeth like a ledge of pearl in a snowdrift, wearing just enough
clothes to pad a crutch, who with difficulty persuaded the young
man to take his first glass of champagne/ 1 Tracing the poor boy's
further downfall, Billy briskly concluded, "Four months later, he
died of delirium tremens and before he died, he attacked his feeble
and dear old mother and broke a chair over his father's head, and
it took four strong men to hold him down on his death bed."
My recollection of a brief and happy dalliance at Harvard in
the early '30s is that for the most part we purchased gin at uncon-
76 DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS
scionable prices from the Cambridge townies. Sometimes, we drank
wine in the Italian restaurants in Boston, or beer in Jake Worth's
superbly preserved German establishment or rotgut in speaks near
the Commons where Harvard students were tolerated, though not
welcomed. Then we would browse hopefully, but never success-
fully, through Scollay Square, hoping to meet up with some of the
fast burlesque girls from the Old Howard.
However, a dassmate reminds me that with a most praiseworthy
respect for tradition, and under great odds, there was also among
the undergraduates on-premises manufacture and consumption of
beer, a beverage mentioned in some of the earliest records of the
school.
The procedure, he recalls, necessitated peeling enough potatoes
to more than cover the bottom of a bathtub, dumping potatoes and
peels alike into the tub and permitting the mess to ferment for
days. Sugar, yeast and water were added at appropriate times in
appropriate amounts till the tub was half filled.
Eventually, the concoction, now bubbling dangerously close to
the tub brim, was drained off in those old-fashioned blue bottles
which had rubber stoppers and clamp-on porcelain tops. During
the long-drawn-out process, of course, no baths could be taken, and
my friend remembers that once in his small house, three bathtubs
were simultaneously in use.
While this severely restricted the facilities for ablutions, the
results probably about 38 proof in my classmate's nostalgic recol-
lection more than compensated for minor personal discomforts.
Cousin to this brew was bathtub gin, a miserable dilution of
pure grain alcohol with a jigger of glycerine, a few drops of juniper
juice and water.
As a newspaperman making about $30 a week, I couldn't often
afford bootleggers' price, so with a friend who had attended a
textile school and was therefore versed in chemistry, I would sneak
back to the office at night and make a pint or two.
In its better days, the building had been an elegant men's dub,
and our City Room was its old reading room adorned at either end
with imposing mantelpiece carved with Horatian sentiments. The
eastern mantelpiece urged, Durn vivemus, vivamus (While -we live,
let us live) and the western end replied, Dulce est dissipere in loco
(very loosely translated by us as It's fun to get drunk here).
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 77
Depending on our mood, we toasted sometimes Dwn and some-
times Dulce, but what I particularly remember probably explains
why I can't tolerate the smell of gin even to this day. Having
poured the stuff into paper cups, we drank it neat and quick. We
had to; otherwise, if we waited more than a few moments, the
gin would eat right through the waxed bottom of the cup.
Practically all the stuff that came out of the cellars, bathtubs and
furtive little "alley breweries" of those days was frightful in taste
and strength alike. In its characteristically self-defeating way, Pro-
hibition actually encouraged beer drinkers to consume a brew of
higher alcoholic content than they had quaffed in the good old legal
days. Technically, a light beer requires top fermentation which was
impractical in home or small-quantity production.
The desiderative, a clear brew cloudless as a June day and with-
out sediment, was rarely achieved. To this day, a Southern friend
of mine admiringly remembers his father's patient gallantry as he
tried year after year to darify his product.
"Poj) was a perfectionist/' he explains. "He hoped to outdo Bud-
weiser." The fact that Pop also was secretary to a Southern Gov-
ernor, a prominent and sincere Dry, did not dissuade him. Pop
thought of everything. In addition to the conventional apparatus
and supplies, he bought a hydrometer, a thermometer-like instru-
ment which measures specific gravity and thus the strength of
spirituous liquors. He installed shades on the back porch to achieve
the proper coolness. From a printer, he ordered private brand beer
labels which carried his name.
When Pop was brewing, he would first cook up a stew of canned
malt, yeast, sugar and distilled water. This was then deposited in a
50-gallon crock on the shaded back porch and covered with cheese-
cloth to sit for two to three weeks. During this critical period, Pop
made frequent inspections of the crock. He studied the gooey liquid
which reminded my friend only of a thick, brown shaving lather.
He paid particular attention to the hydrometer floating on top to
check the alcoholic progress. He adjusted and re-adjusted the
shades.
The moment of decision when to bottle? was a trying one.
If he miscalculated and bottled prematurely, the stuff would ex-
plode, as frequently happened anyhow.
One Saturday afternoon, when the magic moment had seemingly
78 DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS
arrived, my friend was hastily summoned to the kitchen to help
out with the bottling. All the paraphernalia, bottles, caps, capping
machine, were strewn about the room, and work was about to begin.
At that moment, unannounced, in the friendly, easygoing South-
ern way, the Governor dropped in for a chat. For a minute or so,
there was silence. But despite his strong convictions, the Governor
was a tolerant man, and he made only one uneasy observation.
"For God's sake," he said, 'pull down the shades! This could
ruin me politically/'
Because malt syrup was so generally available, even the Wicker-
sham Commission acknowledged that for a time there had been
"an increasing amount of home brewing among the average city
dwellers." But, WC liked to think, the cellar braumeisters later
became discouraged because of the general inconvenience of the
operation, the "poor quality of the product" and "the law cost of
procuring whisky." A strange testimonial to the efficacy of Prohbi-
tion from an agency committed to its perpetuation!
In the more serious business of distilling, the statistics on con-
fiscations give some indication of its popularity. The first year ef
Prohibition, only 32,000 stills were seized. Some five to six years
later, the number had more than quintupled to 172,600, though
General Lincoln C. Andrews, the Prohibition Administrator, con-
fided to a U.S. Senate committee that he doubted his men were
finding more than one in every ten.
Still later, a Wickersham Commissioner deplored the "tremen-
dous number of stills," the "great increase" in the number of
them, and "a universality of operation extending all over the coun-
try." Of course, such observations and statistics encompassed the
big, commercial operations as well as private cellars. But even
home distilling, WC confessed, "in some localities has at one time
or another reached large proportions."
"Few things are more easily made than alcohol," the Commission
complained, hinting that even the chemist's hand was raised against
the good and the Dry. Then, in unquestionably the least con-
troversial statement of the whole long report, WC added of home
distilling, "The product is of poor quality, but it is cheap."
I personally remember with dismay Northern-made corn whisky,
sometimes so raw that it was clear as water. In my opinion, it was
a dreadful drink, though some of my friends, through the patient
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 79
cultivation or complete elimination of their taste buds, professed to
acquire a taste for it. There was, too, the formidable "Jersey
Lightning/' an interpretation of applejack on the part of New
Jersey's farmers. By legend at least, they sometimes buried the stuff
above the frost line, thus freezing off all unnecessary liquids, the
alcohol surviving triumphant.
The product is of poor quality, hut it is cheap.
Home brewing inspired many legal, as well as personal, per-
plexities. Belatedly but nonetheless heart-warmingly, Representa-
tive Franklin W. Fort advanced the theory on the floor of Con-
gress early in 1930 that the operation was perfectly within the law.
After all, Section 29 of the Prohibition law allowed the individual
to make non-intoxicating cider and fruit juices exclusively for his
own use in his own home.
Promptly, Prohibition Administrator E. C. Yellowley disagreed.
Section 29, he said, gave no quarter to a beverage "which, if kept
long enough, will become intoxicating/*
"Cider made for beverage purposes is supposed to be treated to
keep it from working/' Yellowley said sternly, "and grape juice
which might become intoxicating must be sterilized to keep it law-
abiding. As to home brew, by which I suppose Mr. Fort means beer,
there is a statute specifically prohibiting the manufacture of it
even for medicinal purposes."
Then he struck at the heart of the matter. "There is no such
thing as legal beer"
Yellowley was a tough, honest Dry agent, a statement I never
make lightly. 2 Yet even this grizzled old mop had to make a con-
2 Yellowley, best remembered for setting up a special Dry squad that in-
cluded a young eager beaver named Eliot Ness, was an energetic federal
revenooer for forty-seven years. When he recently died at the fine old age of
eighty-eight, the New York Herald Tribune likened him to "a parching
desert sun" who had 'left a trail of temporary aridity in San Francisco,
Detroit, Chicago, Washington and other major cities/' In 1921, he swept
into New York City swearing to make the city Dry, and not too many
months later admitted that $500 million and a million agents would be
required to end all drinking in the metropolis. Nonetheless, he tried gallantly
again the next year and the next. With no greater success, though he
hauled in customers to force them to tell where they'd bought the stuff and
threatened to hold all patrons of raided premises as material witnesses,
whether or not they were personally caught drinking. He was a Scourge, but
he was honest.
80 DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS
fession. He knew of no instance in which an individual had been
prosecuted for making home brew or other light beverages for
personal consumption. "But that fact doesn't make it legal," he
protested unhappily. "J ust because we can't invade a person's home
to see if he has a batch of beer in the kitchen doesn't mean that such
a person isn't breaking the law."
Federal legal sources agreed that when beer, wine or cider, in
their ignorant way, stepped over the Volsteadian line, their maker
or possessor was "technically" a violator.
A Supreme Court decision went further down this path. Makers
of liquor-producing apparatus were deemed subject to prosecution
if their wares, and these included everything from yeast to raisins,
were sold for use in violation of the law. In New York City, Dry
agents personally served warnings on the "malt and hops" shops,
which were reinforced by raids on several of diem and confiscation
of $45,000 in stocks.
It was beginning to look bleak for the boys down cellar when
Col. Amos W. W. Woodcock, the prohibition director, made a
public surrender unprecedented in federal enforcement history.
Home brewers and vintners, he announced, could consider them-
selves safe from federal molestation.
"Search warrants issued against private homes can be obtained
only on the presentation of evidence of sales," he explained. "As a
criminal law problem, it is extremely difficult to get evidence."
Besides, he said, only a jury had the power to rule whether
homemade beverages were "intoxicating in fact" and thus illegal.
Matter of fact, he added, home wine could even be transported, if
neither "intoxicating in fact" nor for commercial purposes. Curi-
ously, he wouldn't say as much for beer.
Poor Amos had scarcely gotten the smell of raw malt out of his
nose when a lapsed toiler in the Dry vineyard, no less than the
former occupant of a high federal office very much like his own,
threw him a long, slow, outside curve.
For almost eight years, as Assistant Attorney General of the
United States in charge of Prohibition enforcement, Mabel Walker
Willebrandt had ranged the land for Volstead. 'That Prohibition
Portia," as Al Smith testily called her, had interpreted the law
narrowly, prosecuted widely, hobnobbed with the WCTU.
Now, as thousands of Dry sisters cried piteously, "Say it ain't
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 81
so, Mabel!," she had resigned and become the lawyer, reputedly
at more than $50,000 yearly, for a giant cooperative of California
grape growers with assets running into the millions of dollars.*
Mabel's new friends wanted to market Vino-Glo, a syrup con-
centrate of California grapes, which they hoped to sell all over
the country in kegs of five, ten or twenty-five gallons. Only trouble
was the concentrate could ferment into a wine of about 12 per
cent alcoholic content. So the woman who once had been nominated
by WCTU and Anti-Saloon League brass to become "Prohibition
Czar of America" asked Amos whether it would be illegal to sell
the stuff.
For Amos, it was a poser, A few months earlier in St Louis, a
couple of Dry agents had purchased some ordinary grape juice in
a store on the proprietor's representations that it would turn into
wine if allowed to stand without addition of a preservative.
For two months, they let the grapes work until the alcoholic
content reached 11.8 per cent. Whereupon, they paid a return
visit to the store and arrested the proprietor for having sold a
product "intended" for the unlawful manufacture of intoxicating
liquors. Press comment was most unkind. 4
Amos walked around the question, giving several answers, but
his main thesis seemed to be that "intent" to violate the law was
the legal touchstone. "It is always difficult to establish intent when
a person is doing something that otherwise might be lawful," he
8 Mabel would not concede that she had lost faith in Prohibition. To
Wets and Drys alike, there was monumental irony in the fact that a Dry
administration, through its Federal Farm Board, was lending anywhere from
$16,000,000 to $25,000,000 to the California grape growers. When a
troubled WCTU member raised this point, Mabel replied that she still be-
lieved in Prohibition. But, she said, die also knew "from my long experience
with enforcement that the concentration and marketing of grapes and their
products under a supervised Cooperative agency will mate all die easier the
work of the Prohibition Bureau in preventing the diversion of grapes to
racketeers and bootleggers."
4 'They should have arrested God," snapped the New York News edi-
torially. "Or, if that seems irreverent, let's say they should have arrested
Mother Nature. We mean the power, whatever it is, that made man and
the universe, that causes the stars to move in their courses and the juice of
the grape to ferment." All in all, the News thought, "the hottest number in
the Dry Follies of 1930" was certainly this arrest of a man "for letting
God go ahead and do with grape juice as He always has done."
82 DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS
more or less made clear to the press. "You can't convict a person
for violating the spirit of the law."
Soon, in New York, there was an impudent new development.
On Fifth Avenue, right across the street from the ultra-Dry Marble
Collegiate Church, a competitor of Mabel known as Vino-Sano
was offering attractive yellow packages at $2 each containing wine
bricks or, as the Cincinnati Enquirer promptly called them, "Bricks
of Bacchus." From Bordeau to Reisling, champagne to sherry, there
were more than a dozen varieties. Late one afternoon, as customers
were clamoring for "two blocks of sherry," "a block of Burgundy,"
"a dozen blocks of Rhine wine," Beverly Smith, a reporter for the
Neu? York Herald Tribune, covered the saleslady's demonstration.
A port brick and a gallon glass jug on the counter in front of
her, she explained briskly:
"You dissolve the brick in a gallon of water, and it is ready to be
used immediately.
"Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cup-
board for twenty-one days because then it would turn into wine.
"Do not stop the bottle with this cork containing this patented
red rubber siphon hose because that is necessary only when
fermentation is going on.
"Do not put the end of the tube into a glass of water because
that helps to make the fermenting liquor tasty and potable.
"Do not shake the bottle once a day because that makes the liquor
work."
Of course, there were frightful uproars from the Drys, and the
Wets slyly contributed some water-muddying of their own. Cali-
fornia, whose grape growers were beneficiaries of the huge federal
farm loans, was President Hoover's home state, they pointed out,
and California also had a lot of votes.
Quickly, the fast-buck artists got into the business, ruining it
far more effectively than the Drys could. Some peddled fake con-
centrates containing boiled seaweed or compressed sawdust. Others
went door-to-door, extracting "deposits" and promising to send
the bricks GO.D. which they didn't do, of course.
Only a year after the furore a reporter for the New York Post,
surveying the "malt and hops" shops around town, found the bricks
had vanished from their shelves. One dealer, who had sold 54,000
DESPERATE IMPROVISATIONS 83
of them, thought they must be off the market altogether. The reason
was interesting.
A Brooklyn proprietor, who had made refunds to regular cus-
tomers after they experimented unsuccessfully with the bricks, ex-
plained:
"I guess we're old-fashioned in Brooklyn. We'll make our wine
like our Grandpappies did. You know, I think it did something to
those grapes squeezing 'em into bricks. What happens to flowers
when you crush 'em, my friend? They wilt, don't they?"
'What were they, anyway?'' a wine authority in another shop
asked with scornful rhetoric after the furore had died away.
"Sixty-two per cent glucose! And what is glucose? Sugar made
from corn. And a lot of grape skins clamped together. Wine bricks!
So you soak a wine brick in some water and you pack it down with
yeast and sugar and, naturally, you get some bubbles, some liveli-
ness. It's the yeast does that, my boy, not the grape skins. You
could get a kick out of Aunt Amelia's gooseberry wine if you
added yeast."
So, in essence, the same great untameable force that made home
brewing increasingly popular put the quietus on the "Bricks of
Bacchus" customer preference. Today's marketing men would
understand in a minute, but the important lesson was generally
overlooked at the time.
9
"Daddy,
That Man s
at the Door"
In the driest depths of Prohibition, Winston Churchill had the
misfortune to visit Detroit. From just across the Detroit River, his
educated nose caught the refreshing houquet arising out of Wind-
sor, Ontario. In the factory city itself, there were gallons of the
real, smuggled stuff, but Sir Winston didn't know any of the local
bootleggers, and his host for most of the visit was a sincere man.
Henry Ford not only voted Dry, he drank Dry, and he expected
the same of his guests, as well as his auto workers.
With admirable forethought, however, Sir Winston had brought
along his own wet supplies, and one evening, as he was about to
sip brandy in his hotel suite, he learned that Count Felix von
Luckner, the dashing German sea raider of WWI, then hitting the
American lecture circuit, was stopping in the same hotel.
Nothing for it but von Luckner must visit him immediately.
With Churchillian grandeur, the Englishman greeted the German,
exclaiming in wonder that two one-time foes would thus find them-
selves together in an arid and alien land. He poured von Luckner a
generous drink of his fine old Napoleon brandy. They reminisced.
"Have another, Count," Churchill insisted.
Together, softened by nostalgia and the rare wine, they amiably
refought old battles and killed the bottle.
Next evening, after a dry, trying clay of inspection through the
Ford motor plants, Churchill returned to his suite and immediately
called for a brandy.
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 85
Tm sorry, Mr. Churchill/' his American secretary said nervously,
"but you and Count von Luckner consumed the last bottle."
"What!" roared Churchill "Why the . . ."
Unfortunately, Sir Winston did not realize that no stranger in
town need perish of thirst. The same characters who knew where
the girls could be found taxi drivers, bellhops, waiters, counter-
men in diners, almost anyone who dealt with transients had a
phone number if he couldn't prsonally supply a bottle.
Izzy Einstein, the fat little man who waddled to fame as the
most spectacular Prohibition agent in the country, once conducted
a sort of stop-watch survey of such conditions in die big cities. He
was able to get a drink 21 minutes after arriving in Chicago. In
Baltimore, he needed 15 minutes, in Pittsburgh only 11. He
wasted an hour in Washington before a friendly cop gave him direc-
tions, but from a New Orleans cabbie, he obtained his cheers in a
flat 35 seconds.
The important thing was, what kind of whisky?
Lethal beverages like Jamaica ginger and commercial alcohol
deliberately poisoned by government policy with such ingredients
as aldehol, pyridine, benzine, nicotine, mercury and other additives
blinded, paralyzed or killed thousands of drinkers. Magazine writer
Frederick L. Collins, in recalling "the world-famous brothers, two
of the richest men in the world, who died or went blind in a
luxurious hotel in New York," exclaimed:
"No one was safe. It is a miracle that so many of us were spared."
In the fall of 1928, while the Yankees were taking the first three
games from the Cardinals in the World Series, some 32 poison
alcohol fatalities were counted just in a few days on New York's
Lower East Side.
Often, in desperation, thirsty men sucked on tonics and patent
medicines strongly fortified with alcohol, and in supreme folly even
drank vanilla and lemon extracts, shaving lotions, hair tonics, bay
rum and "jake," or Jamaica ginger.
Once in Oklahoma City, where "jake" was easily obtained from
bootleggers and in "blind pigs" at the modest price of half a dollar
for an eight-ounce bottle, more than 300 drinkers were mysteriously
felled. The affliction began iiji many cases with slight muscular
twitches which rapidly developed into paralysis. At least 50 were
hospitalized, and a federal ban was hastily placed on further ship-
86 "DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR"
ments of Jamaica ginger from warehouses in Kansas City and St.
Louis.
And so it went all over the country, thanks to conscienceless
men and curious government policy.
Federal Judge William S. Kenyon was far from a wringing Wet.
But, in his separate statement appended to the Wickersham Com-
mission report, he wrote: 'The use of poisonous denaturants in
alcohol cannot be justified. Death or blindness is too heavy a punish-
ment to administer to one who may indulge in a drink of whisky."
In view of these many threats to life, liver or palate, an ordinary
citizen considered himself lucky when he located a bootlegger of
probity and some standing in the community who looked after his
clients' health as a matter both of conscience and good call-back
business. It was a valued relationship. 1
The front bell would ring, the little child would say, "Daddy,
that man's at the door/' There would be a quick, friendly exchange
of greetings, package and cash, and another transaction one of
several million such that took place daily across the land was
completed. And the estimate is by no means exaggerated.
During the mid-20s, for example, a prosecutor reported that just
in Washington there were 5,000 bootleggers. On this basis, the
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment made the projec-
tion that die national total was 1,100,000 'loggers.
If we credit each of them with only 20 patrons (and with any
fewer how could they support their families?), the national clientele
would total 22,000,000. To anyone who has given much thought
to die matter, this figure set against the 1930 population of slightly
less than 123,000,000 is highly conservative.
In the same spirit of conservatism, let us assume that each of the
22,000,000 bought a pint of whisky a week. After all, in its
medicinal proviso, the Volstead Act allowed that even a sick man
could knock off a pint every ten days. Thus, working the con-
ventional six-day week of the era, the 'loggers were making almost
3,600,000 sales daily.
1 Not by everybody's standards, of course. "Bootlegger" was a favorite
word in Billy Sunday's considerable armory of epithet. The fellow was, said
Billy, "a symptom of three diseases on the body politic a traitorous, vile
citizen who sells the liquor; a traitorous, vile citizen who buys it and a spine-
less official who winks at the proceedings."
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 87
Of course, as in most retail enterprises, business was slack on
Mondays, gradually picking up toward the end of the week, es-
pecially during the social season. At hotel dances, private rooms
were hired for the drinking, but in the private country clubs, where
the center of social gravity was shifting, setups of ginger ale and
White Rock were openly provided for at the big Saturday night
dances. All the member had to do was pour liberally from his pocket
flask. These things of silver beauty sometimes came strangely dis-
guised. Theoretically, the law forbade the citizenry from carry-
ing them, so for the men and women who had everything else,
thoughtful Christmas gifts were vanity boxes and cases for cameras
or opera glasses which ingeniously concealed flasks.
For the most part, the beverage pouring out of them, as Frederick
Lewis Allen sorrowfully noted, was gin, "once the despised and
rejected of bartenders," but now the intoxicant of choice. "A two-
cent drink!" my dad used to say disdainfully, remembering its
pre-Volstead status, and despite all the tediously smart "dry Martini"
jokes, I personally think it's still a two-cent drink today.
There can be no doubt that the bootleggers, like die Dry agents,
got off to a bad, fumbling start when Prohibition descended on the
land in the drear January of 1920. The more responsible and
monied crooks adopted a wait-and-see policy, leaving the field to
the fast-buck boys and irresponsible small fry. Obtaining the whole-
sale supplies was an improvisation rather than the well-planned,
well-executed system of manufacture and distribution that later
developed. Sometimes, disguised as Dry agents, the early leggers hi-
jacked legitimate shipments of medicinal whisky and sacramental
wines which, of course, attracted police interest. The more dis-
ciplined gangs that followed had die good sense to hijack from
each other, thus keeping the cops out of it.
Before all our land and sea borders spouted whisky like a fire
sprinkler system that had gone crazy, the pioneers relied heavily
on the legitimate, licensed "permit houses" for their supplies.
These wholesalers obtained stocks direct from the distilleries and
re-sold them to persons fortunate enough to obtain federal with-
drawal permits. In many cases, these permittees weren't merely
fortunate. They had stolen the permits from government enforce-
ment offices, bribed government workers to get them, or made
counterfeits.
88 "DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR"
By the middle of the third Volsteadian year, the hootleg whisky
business was definitely changing, but perhaps the Dry agents in-
terviewed by the New York Times were somewhat premature in
their opinions.
The Times reported on June 4, 1922, that the Feds "see a higher
type of man entering the illegal traffic than marked the earlier days
of Prohibition/' It was noted that on New York's Lower East Side,
* where formerly large sums were made almost overnight/' boot-
kgg in g had fallen off, and the small fry were quitting the business
or going to work for "the big dealers who have plenty of money."
Not many months later, the New York Herald broke a front
page story, describing in lurid prose a shady kind of commerce being
carried on across the U.S.-Canadian border.
American auto thieves were running cars across the border be-
tween Rouses Point and the St. Lawrence and swapping them for
British and French liquor. American cars were eagerly sought north
of the border; the whisky, of course, was in high demand south of
the border, and so both sides could command premiums.
A high-priced auto would bring $500 worth of whisky (Canadian
price) which could be sold in the States for $1,500 to $2,000. (In
his only understatement, the correspondent noted that one such
transaction weekly would represent "a fairly lucrative" business.)
Similarly, the stolen car, after being hidden for a month or so,
could be unloaded in Quebec or Montreal for $1,000 to $l,50o!
Along the back roads, farmers also shared in the profits, being
paid first to hide the whisky under hay, straw or in the wood lot
and then after the swap, to hide the car. Even when one of the cars
was confiscated, there were profits.
By King's Law, when a vehicle was put up for public sale for
non-payment of duty, the government took half the proceeds. The
Canadian revenooer who had made the seizure divided the re-
mainder with his informer. Indeed, with profits all around, it is
difficult to understand why, as the correspondent breathlessly re-
ported, the crooks were "shooting and fighting and risking life every
hour of the day and night" except when one of the King's stoolies
was unmasked.
Only the innocent original owner really suffered. If his car were
found and he wanted it back, he was required to pay the duty
(amounting to half its value) and a government-fixed price.
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 89
From one section of the country to the next, bootleggers* prices
fluctuated, and the only safe generalization is that they were as
high as the traffic would bear.
Around New York and New Jersey, rye and gin were pretty well
standardized at $4 and $3 per pint, respectively, while beer was 15
cents in Jersey, a quarter in New York. Apparently these prices
were fixed by a cartel In Newburgh, a Hudson River town above
New York, applejack came nicely wrapped, almost gift-wrapped,
as a matter of fact, at $6 a gallon.
One of the best price-fixing systems was adopted by the Buffalo
bootleggers who received a steady stream of supplies via river ferry
and the Peace Bridge from Fort Erie, Ontario. They distributed the
price lists of the Ontario Liquor Control Board to which they
tacked on $1.25 to $1.50 for their own services. This doesn't seem
to have been unreasonable, though of course the dollar went much
further those days.
As Prohibition progressed New York boodeg prices came down
somewhat, especially when ethical 'leggers had to meet the price-
cutting challenge of another Dry phenomenon, the so-called
"cordial shops'' that spread by the hundreds throughout the metrop-
olis. Though illegal, they operated as openly as the package stores
of today. One, in fact, was brazen enough to distribute his business
cards all through the Federal Building including the office of the
U.S. Attorney.
Insiders said that two prominent underworld characters had
gotten out of the speakeasy-supply business to form two rival chains
of cordial shops, complete with their own "unions" for their store
workers. This original venture in labor racketeering involved a $5
initiation fee, $3.50 monthly dues and a $17.50 premium for each
$500 bond in case of arrest. However, the bail arrangements were
efficiently handled through the "unions," and sometimes stand-ins
were available to serve jail sentences for the actual defendants. The
federal dockets were so overloaded with Prohibition cases that, on
occasion, a "Bargain Day" would be held and token $25 fines, with
the alternative of two or three days in jail, meted out to one and all.
For a flat $5 or $10, a federal grand jury was told, the thrifty
cordial people hired Bowery bums to do their time, rather than pay-
ing even the "bargain" fine. Thus, they reduced their out-of-pocket
90 "DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR"
expenses by $1 5 or $20. One character, it was said, had appeared 11
times in court under the names of 1 1 different defendants.
Yes, as the Drys were always maintaining, Prohibition had been a
splendid stimulant for prosperity. Like the King's stoolies, even the
poor Bowery bums got some of its crumbs.
Eventually, the price war with the cordial shops became so
bitter that the retail bootleggers leaked a warning through the press
to economy-minded drinkers. The shops were offering gin at 75
cents a bottle and rye at less than $2.50 a pint. At such preposterous
prices, the 'leggers said, the stuff was bad, and the consumer might
go blind.
Some bootleggers did offer an economy service, delivering alcohol
by the gallon with drops already added. The consumer merely
mixed it with water, one for two, thus making his own gin at a
slight saving,
"You also could be sure that your gin was aged," dryly recalls a
friend who patronized such a service on the West Coast. 'Two or
three days' worth, that is,
"I remember once when my wife mixed our gin only to discover
afterwards that she had added water to gin itself. The man had
made a mistake and sent gin instead of alcohol with drops. And this
was the worst drink I ever had."
In my research, I have repeatedly come across the phrase, "the
worst drink I ever had," and the way it is said, resignedly, amusedly,
sometimes even proudly, but never complainingly, discloses an im-
portant factor in the social psychology of Prohibition drinking.
Heads throbbing but unbowed, men drank determinedly, gallantly,
to demonstrate their displeasure with the law. Today, looking back
on their Spartan youth, they can take comfort in a duty well dis-
charged.
Of course, at the upper end of the spirituous spectrum, "the idle
rich," as they were then enviously called, never experienced the
rigors that presented such an inspirational challenge to the average
man. They may have been idle, but they had a workingman's
healthy thirst, and they could afford to slake it with fine wines,
imported liqueurs, brandies and champagne that spoke French
without an accent.
All through Prohibition, the Feds were particularly anxious to
get their hands on the elegant bootleggers who purveyed by ap-
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 91
pointment along Fifth and Park Avenues. For one thing, there was
more good publicity in a glamorous raid than the knock-over of an
obscure Brooklyn still. Even more important, they desperately
wanted to allay the growing resentment that the common man was
the victim of class-conscious enforcement.
And he was, of course.
The poor man's cheerful, well-lit saloon had been shut down,
and in its place was a dirty, murky speakeasy. The rich man still
drank comfortably and unmolested in his dub. The employee had
to make do on rotgut rye and abide the consequences. His boss
suffered no raking hangovers because he could afford honest, im-
ported Scotch.
Communism, labor, the depression and the New Deal are com-
monly blamed for the rising, often militant class consciousness in
this country. But the inequities of Prohibition were nakedly ap-
parent before any of the other factors assumed equal importance
in our national life and these inequities must be charged with as
much, if not more, responsibility for pitting class against class.
Insensitive though they usually were to anyone else's wants or
feelings, the Dry leaders recognized this dangerous trend, probably
because they themselves for the most part came from small town or
lower middle-class surroundings and darkly suspected the rich, es-
pecially the rich Easterners. Thus, they chivvied the Prohibition
officials to raid night clubs, country clubs, the upper-class bootleg
trade; in other words, any place where people with a few dollars
were enjoying themselves, and anybody who had any connection
with such sinful places.
The Feds tried to placate them, but there were strong counter
forces. The best places and the leading boodeggers enjoyed the
high-level protection of local, state and even national officeholders,
often motivated by the tender strings of personal friendship and
patronage. Even Mabel Walker Willebrandt in her lofty enforce-
ment position felt the pressure from "Senators, Congressmen and
attorneys seeking postponement, delays in prosecution," as she once
complained to a Congressional committee.
Finally, on a June day in '29, with a great hullabaloo, the Feds
announced that they had made a major breakthrough against the
rich.
In thirteen separate raiding squads, forty undercover agents roved
92 "DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR"
New York, hitting a warehouse in Brooklyn, an office on Fifth
Avenue, an eighth-floor suite in an elegant midtown hotel. They
made some three dozen arrests and confidently reported having
smashed a "ring" that supposedly had been smuggling millions of
dollars' worth of the best liquors and liqueurs into the country.
As a good rewrite man of the day jubilantly described the opera-
tion, the "ring" had been "gradually expanding a scientific system
which reaches from the Midi and the Rheims section to the finest
cellars and sideboards in Manhattan, Westchester and Long Island."
There, that ought to make them happy in Kansas!
From the warehouse, the Feds said, they carted away enough
potables to fill two five-ton trucks. In the office on Fifth Avenue,
they seized records containing the names of many prominent
socialites, proving that the "ring" sold "the best only to the best."
But the prize catch was in the hotel suite where, in his bath, the
raiders surprised a French Count of an old aristocratic house.
While the Count was imperturbably deploring the "complete
misapprehension of the facts," Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
Seymour Lowman was crowing down in Washington, 'We have
been trying to get him for a long time." As foreign agents' manager
for a distinguished Rheims champagne house, the Count ex-
plained, he had transacted some business in Canada and then come
to New York only to sail home on the French liner Paris.
The Feds pointed suspiciously to seven cases of Piper Heidsieck,
Pommard, sherry and strawberry brandy (obviously, a French-
man and a Count -would have at hand such liquid amenities for
the enjoyment of friends).
The Count was charged with conspiracy to violate the National
Prohibition Act and held in the unusually high bail of $25,000. The
law did have the minimal decency to let him make his sailing
and imperturbable to the end, the Count departed like a gentle-
man. The authorities had been "most courteous and considerate,"
though their misapprehension remained complete.
For awhile, stories were leaked that the socialites and celebrities
of stage and screen whose names had been found in the records
would be subpoenaed. They might have to testify publicly, the
stories said, and maybe some of them would be prosecuted. And
then the case finally reached the Supreme Court, so many times
the last resort for regaining national perspective.
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 93
The raiders had wrongfully used an arrest warrant as a search
warrant, the court found, and the descent on the Fifth Avenue
offices had been a 'lawless invasion of the premises/' The justices
said the defense contention was well taken that the raid was "ob-
noxious to a constitutional form of government" The court ordered
that the confiscated records be returned, thus sparing the socialites
and theatrical celebrities the embarrassment of exposure, and the
Count, who had never been indicted anyway, was completely ex-
onerated when a federal judge signed an order dismissing the
complaint against him.
However, as the plush velvet curtain descended on the comedy,
a sad little entr'acte came to light.
While the proceedings had been before the courts, the govern-
ment had filed a separate legal action sonorously tided "The United
States Against One Quart Bottle Partly Filled with Whisky and
Other Lots." This asked permission to destroy a miscellaneous
quantity of seized liquors. Included was a $30,000 collection of
1,739 bottles described as belonging to the Count and containing
Gilbey gin, champagne, cognac, and Canadian Club rye. The
vindicated Count obtained a court order for its return, but alas,
all, all had been destroyed. To drinking men, the destruction of
any good liquor is wantonly wasteful. But this was abhorrent! The
100 irreplaceable cases of cognac had been vintage of 1848.
Like the home brewer, the client of the boouegger generally en-
joyed freedom from molestation. After all, the Supreme Court had
ruled that "no person shall manufacture, purchase for sale (our
italics) or sell liquor," which pointedly excepted the private patron
of the trade.
Eventually, however, in their general frustration over the state
of enforcement, the Feds got around to him, too.
In Massachusetts, a Watertown citizen was indicted for buying
two pints. A corollary case involved a New York banker who was
jointly indicted with a Philadelphia bootlegger for conspiracy to
transport liquor. Nobody challenged the fact that the stuff was in-
tended for the banker's own consumption, but because he assertedly
made repeated telephone orders and paid for the liquor, he was
accused of a buyer-seller conspiracy.
With a ten-page decision, Federal Judge James M. Morton in
Boston quashed the indictment against the two-pint purchaser.
94 "DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR"
Though the case was described as the first of its kind, Judge
Morton pointed out, two Circuit Courts of Appeal had "stated ex-
plicitly in their opinion that the purchase of liquor by the general
public is not criminal/' Digging back further, he found that the
Volstead Act itself "clearly eliminates any liability of any kind for
the purchase of liquor/' Had Congress wanted to hold the buyer
guilty, he reasoned, Congress would have said so. The Department
of Justice appealed to the Supreme Court.
In the second case, the bootlegger pleaded guilty and was sen-
tenced to a year and three months. The banker entered a plea
of nolo contendere which is a girlish sort of legal phrase, in effect
meaning I won't say yes and I won't say no to the charge. He was
fined $200. Then he appealed.
Side by side, the two cases wended down to Washington where
Justice went all-out to win them. The Washington Bureau of the
New York Times quoted Dry officials as saying that decisions for
the government, particularly in the two-pint case, "would add
greatly to the effectiveness of Prohibition enforcement."
The Supreme Court refused to intervene in the banker's case. His
nolo contendere had been virtually the same as pleading guilty, the
court said, and his conviction must be sustained. However, the
court gave no legal comfort to the Drys. The court simply refused to
rule on the question whether a buyer who knows shipment is in-
volved in his delivery could be prosecuted.
In U.S. v, Mr. Two Pints, the court sustained Judge Morton. In
the unanimous decision read by Justice George Sutherland, the
reasoning was that Congress had not intended to punish the buyer,
for which there was a practical, if not exactly elevating explanation.
"Probably it was thought more important to preserve the complete
freedom of the purchaser to testify against the seller than to punish
him for making the purchase," the court said.
Of course, despite the police prominence he so often received,
the bootlegger was just the retail arm of a vast, hidden wholesale
enterprise. Usually, he maintained a dignified professional silence
about his particular sources of supply, but these were necessarily
few.
Owlishly, the Wickersham Commission noted five main sources
of the contraband: importation, diversion of industrial alcohol,
illicit distilling, illicit brewing and illicit production of wine. (Ad-
"DADDY, THAT MAN'S AT THE DOOR" 95
ditionally, WC confessed, the diversion of medicinal and sacra-
mental liquors also "has at times and in places assumed considerable
proportions . . .")
Let us first explore the first of the above mentioned sources of
supply importation. It was accomplished with the help of man's
ancient, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, giver of sustenance the
sea.
10
They Come
by Sea
There's always something about the sailor's life that catches the
fancy of man. With salt air as the chaser, the whisky goes down
more smoothly, and between the immensities of blue green water
and blue white skies, tall stories just naturally grow taller.
For thirteen years, impressed into our nation's longest naval en-
gagement as "Carry Nation's Navy," the Coast Guard fought des-
perately with fast cutters, machinegun fire and one- and three-
pounders to repel the incursions of the "Sunset Fleet." But with
faster boats often powered with WWI Liberty plane motors, with
smoke screens, decoy vessels and brilliant evasive tactics, the raiders
fought back, and the rum came through.
Like the sea yarns, Rum Row kept growing until it extended the
length of the Eastern seaboard, from sunny Florida up to the rock-
bound coast of Maine. To this day, no one can accurately calculate
how many millions upon millions of dollars' worth of whisky slipped
through Carry's harassed, outnumbered Navy. No one knows how
many fortunes were made, but the stakes were enormous. A single
shipload was often worth more than a quarter of a million dollars,
i- it Wonder dwt adven tuious men (and often by their own
hghts honest men, for smuggling had been a calling in New
fcngland even before the Revolution) risked their lives and many
tones lost them. The casualties cannot be assessed for it was a furtive
business done in the dark of the moon and on foggy, stormy nights
when prudent fishermen remained snugly ashore.
But dozens of the low-slung grey craft foundered, splintered full-
96
THEY COME BY SEA 97
speed on reefs, fell prey to sea jackals or sank under Coast Guard
shellfire, and since there are no tombstones in Davy Jones' locker,
the only requiems for the lost crews were the reminiscences of old
shipmates.
Up from Nassau, down from the French isles of St. Pierre et
Miquelon, the big ''mother ships/' often sailing schooners with
capacious holds, hove to safely beyond the twelve-mile limit. Their
combined cargoes worth well over a million dollars, they clustered
together for protection against sea-going hijackers, and the skippers
posted special watches armed with Thompson submachine guns.
As they rocked sluggishly in the swells, awaiting the fast litde
"pullers" from shore, their crews companionably swapped visits and
yarns about their romantic, dangerous trade.
There was, they remembered, the Alma, a one-time lighthouse
tender, whose crew had mutinied and stolen the cargo of Bahama
liquors . . . And the hard-luck tug, Ripple. First, she had been
captured by pirates and her crew held off New York for three days
without food. Then she suffered the ignominy of a second capture
by the Feds.
Mournfully, a Down Easterner told of pushing away a fortune
with his boat hook. One night, as he was standing watch, a body
had bumped gently against the port side of his schooner. Probably,
he thought, there had been a fight aboard another rum runner.
Not wanting to get his own ship involved, he shoved off the corpse.
Less than five minutes later, oars splashing, lanterns waving, a
covey of small boats spoke the schooner. "Ahoy, there! Did you see
a corpse float by? Our paymaster fell overboard with $50,000 in his
money belt." The body wasn't recovered.
In a violent trade, death often came wholesale. While standing
off Atlantic Highlands in New Jersey, another whisky seaman
recalled, his mother ship had made a routine transfer of "lush," as
the rummies called booze, to a tug from shore. But it was a green
crew picked up just for the night, and they had a greedy captain.
He overloaded and the crew stowed badly, giving the tug a star-
board list. Half a mile away from the mother ship, as her men
watched helplessly, the tug capsized. All hands were lost, all the
whisky went to the bottom.
But men who live dangerously have a rough-and-ready sense of
humor, and there were funny stories, too.
98 THEY COME BY SEA
Particularly, they liked the yarn about the yacht Allegro because
it was the sort of occupational lapse that might befall any of them.
The Allegros crew had gotten drunk and carelessly hiccuped their
way into the arms of the Coast Guard. Along with their $120,000
cargo of booze, they wound up in federal custody in Philadelphia*
There was, however, uneasy speculation that quick-tempered
Owney Madden, New York gangster and pigeon fancier, who
reputedly owned the lost Allegro, might not see the humor of the
situation.
They remembered the strange misfortune of the little resort and
fishing town on the south Jersey shore within the headland of
Sandy Hook. It was ideal geographically for rum running, and in
their dories and old clamming vessels, the local fishermen did a lot
of it
Eventually, the rattle of night gunfire as rum runners fought off
hijackers so disturbed the summer tourists' sleep that most vaca-
tioners stopped coming back. But the townsfolk didn't really care.
By now, they were so well off that, in a cooperative venture which
included the chief of police, they bought a 3,000-ton freighter as
their own mother ship.
With a trusted crew of civic leaders, they sailed gayly over to
France. There, they took on a full cargo of the finest brandies,
wines and liqueurs, and beat back more slowly toward home, holds
full of liquid gold that represented retirement for all.
And then disaster! Before any of the welcoming home folk could
get out to them in small boats, they wallowed inside the twelve-
mile limit and were captured by the Coast Guard. The whole
town went broke.
The press entered enthusiastically into the harmless game of tall
stories. "Prohibition stories were free game," recalls my friend,
Francis Stephenson, now of the New York News and a veteran of
many years on the Washington scene.
Back in the summer of '25, President Coolidge had an elegant
home at Swampscott, Mass., overlooking the Atlantic, and die
little town was jammed with correspondents from Washington,
New York and Boston. Regrettably, a feud broke out among the
distinguished journalists, and they divided into two hostile camps.
"Things were dull one day as usual/ 1 Frank recalls, "and one
THEY COME BY SEA 99
camp decided to write that a rum ship had been sighted off Cal's
retreat.
"Outraged by this 'scoop/ the rival camp hit Page One next day
with a story that Cal had ordered Secretary of the Treasury Andrew
W. Mellon to clean out the rum ships off his shore. Unfortunately,
this second story came out on the day of his regular press confer-
ence.
"Quite exercised, Cal intoned in his strong nasal way that there
was no rum ship off his coast and he had not asked Secretary
Mellon to do anything about such a myth. The denial didn't get
much prominence. After all, neither camp could throw down the
opposition's story without also throwing down its own/'
Undoubtedly, "the biggest newspaper hoax of the century/' as
the victim itself sportingly acknowledged, took place in August,
1924, when the recently merged New York Herald and Tribune
got wind of a luxurious ocean caf6 supposedly sitting somewhere
off Long Island beyond the twelve-mile limit. Sanford Jarrell, whose
two-year stint on die old Tribune had given his editors the impres-
sion that he was "an industrious and reputable reporter," drew
the assignment. Several days later, he came back with the story,
and what a story!
A five-column Page One headline told the world that New
Yorkers were drinking "sumptuously" on a 17,000-ton floating cafe
anchored fifteen miles off Fire Isknd. "Wine, Women, Jazz and
Revelry," sang the subhead, 'Turn Night Into Day On Mystery
Ship Flying the British Flag."
For three days, reporter Jarrell regaled the city with his clean
"scoop" on the rest of the papers. He had searched two days and
part of the time had drifted "helplessly in an open boat" before he
found the cabaret ship. Aboard, he had rubbed elbows with million-
aire playboys and observed the uninhibited antics of rich flappers
who danced, drank and intermittently gave joyous shouts like,
"This is an epic lark!"
His stories were so detailed, down to his descriptions of the
linen and silverware, that the other papers, along with the Coast
Guard, set out in hot pursuit of the phantom fun ship. No one
could find it, and after several days, the Herald Tribune announced
in some embarrassment the reason why. The floating house of
100 THEY COME BY SEA
revelry had never existed, and the once industrious and reputable
reporter had heen "dishonorably dismissed/' l
Surprisingly, Rum Row relished journalistic attention. There's
often a bit of ham in the sailor, of course, but beyond that, the
businessman type who gradually came into the operation was pre-
cociously sensitive to the importance of the "corporate image, as
it is called today. He wanted the drinking public to know 'that
honest Canadian rye and real Scotch Scotch was getting into the
country. A reassured drinking public, the sound reasoning went,
would be a heavier drinking public.
In the beginning, of course, smuggling was a gay and adven-
turous improvisation. Fishing schooners, their holds still aromatic;
two- and three-masted coastal vessels that had carried pedestrian
commercial cargo; and WWI surplus were pressed into the trade.
Often, these craft served as combined mother ships and pullers,
bringing the stuff so dose inshore that dories could unload them
and on occasion they even impudently docked at piers. The folly of
this technique was almost immediately recognized, and as the
mval war progressed, the mother ships kept farther off our shores,
the Coast Guard ranged deeper out to sea and both sides revved
up their designs, with eminent naval architects impartially lending
their services to one and all.
Bill McCoy, a bronzed, wiry, six-footer from inland New York
state, has sometimes been hailed as the "founder" of Rum Row and
the pioneer who skippered the first "booze boat" in New York
waters. Such sweeping statements are historically dangerous, but
certainly Bill was the most engaging of rummers, with a wit that
charmed even Mabel Walker Willebrandt. He was one of the most
successful, too, making millions but letting them trickle through
his fangers m the come-easy, go-easy way of the free-wheeler,
Bill learned his seamanship as a cadet on the merchant training
ship Saratoga under a no-nonsense skipper, William S. Sims, later
1 letting bygones be bygones, the Herald Tribune ivrote a good-hu-
mored account of its own victimization when Jarrell died in Lon| Beach,
^SJ^T I 1962 ' /^ J* **"***> W w ' rked
nev^apers in the West and South and also did free-lance ficti
&^^ ""?** * ** ****** ** Herdd Tribun *'* o
eluded, but his single caceation remains a classic in that line"
THEY COME BY SEA 101
the famous admiral, and a fellow cadet was Herbert Hartley, who
was to become captain of the Leviathan, the biggest thing afloat in
her day.
"Hartley and I both made our marks/' Bill said proudly in 1923
when the New York World christened him "King of the Boot-
k &
goers.
After going to sea for several years and rising to second mate by
the time he was 22, Bill decided he was old enough to settle down.
He joined a family boat-building business in Daytona, Fla., but
shortly after Prohibition went into effect he succumbed to its adven-
turous challenge.
With every dime he could borrow, he spent $20,000 to buy and
outfit the 65-foot fishing schooner, Henry L. Marshall, at Glou-
cester, Mass. Immediately, he got an opportunity to fetch 1500
cases of whisky from Nassau to Georgia at $10 per case and a
week after making the successful run, ne was back down in Nassau
with $15,000 cash in his pockets.
That did it! He would make his strike and then sail off to the
South Seas in his own boat and there was only one pressing con-
cern on his mind. "I was really worrying/' he chuckled years later,
"if that Nassau bank was big enough to hold all the money I'd
i
make.
Shortly, he pulled off an Old Grandad run into New York City
and after that penetrated Long Island Sound, sailing right up to the
pier in a Connecticut town to unload. And all the time the money
rolled in. He was able to expand, acquiring the 114-foot Areihusa,
a Gloucester fishing schooner, for $21,000 and spending half as
much again to rerig her for extra sail.
"Sweetest vessel I ever boarded/' he said fondly.
By charter and purchase, his little fleet kept expanding in obe-
dience to the law of supply and unslakable demand. On at least one
voyage, he managed to cram 5,700 cases into the Aretkusa. Its
Nassau price of $171,000 doubled out on Rum Row, and doubled
again when it was successfully run ashore. Finally, after much
cutting, the load had a retail value of more than $2,000,000.
Bill felt an honest man's contempt for the sea pirates, but with
such fortunes in his holds, he couldn't take chances. Prudently, he
mounted two Lewis guns, armed his crewmen with Colt .45s and
102 THEY COME BY SEA
also toted Thompson submachine guns, Winchesters and sawed-off
shotguns. Hijackers left him severely alone. 2
Bill sincerely deplored rough stuff, and once went so far as to
save the life of an undercover Treasury agent whom some very
tough characters had trapped in a Nassau hotel. By insisting the
fellow was really a customer of his, Bill got him safely aboard a
departing ship; an act of charity for which he was rewarded not
too long afterwards.
Engagingly, Bill pictured himself as "a free lance/' who was
"enjoying myself and making money without violating any of the
United States laws." After all, he always flew the British flag.
Resourcefully the Feds countered by dusting off a statute of 1799
fixing a twelve-mile limit within which boats were not allowed to
unload cargo. Armed with this antique authorization, the Coast
Guard seized the Marshall and 1,250 cases of whisky nine miles off
Jersey in the summer of '21. Bill was indicted in absentia, which
inspired a comfortable illusion that a "gigantic" smuggling ring had
been smashed, and smashed for good.
For example, Major John Holly Clark Jr., assistant U.S. attorney
in charge of smuggling; cases in New York, admitted things had
been somewhat out of hand the first two years of Prohibition.
Liquor "valued at millions" had been smuggled into the country
along both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico,
Just the Marshall and the still unconquered Arethusa had prob-
ably put ashore 15,000 cases between them, he guessed. But that
sort of stuff was over, all over, he opined, and for a very sound
reason the poor moral character of the men involved in the
business.
The shore runners, he explained, "frequently get drunk or We'
and inform the government" and "bootleggers in general are abso-
lutely unprincipled and do not keep faith with each other." "The
crews are frequently unpaid for months," he went on, "the men
who put the stuff ashore are put off with promises, and the entire
system seems to be one of double-crossing, which spells its own
defeat."
The high moral premise misled the good major into another of
2 However, one winter's night when a hijack boat broke down, Bill let
the thugs aboard. They brought even the handcuffs that they usually used
to manacle their victims. "Nobody dared to go to sleep," Bill said.
THEY COME BY SEA 103
those resoundingly bad prophecies that distinguished Dry enforce-
ment chiefs. "On the whole/' he said, "I believe the amount of
liquor that will arrive by the water route is not sufficient to cause
any real joy to the hearts of the drinking men of the United States/'
Despite Major Clark's optimism, the game was really just afoot.
And it you remember grammar school geography, you will readily
appreciate why the government could never win it.
From Canada and Mexico, from the tiny French isles of St.
Pierre and Miquelon up off Newfoundland down to Central Amer-
ica and the Caribbean islands, we were pleasantly menaced on all
sides. In turn, we were defended by as small a force as ever a great
nation, even our own optimistic country, had ever put into the field.
True, the Coast Guard, Customs Service and Immigration Serv-
ice were mustered into die fight, but they had their traditional
duties to perform and resented die additional chore of policing
public morals, too. So the heaviest load fell on the Dry agents who,
in the beginning, numbered only some 1,500 men. As Charles
Merz, a student of the era, calculated, had they been posted all
along our continental borders and coastlines, an extension of almost
19,000 miles, the men in the attenuated army would have been
twelve miles apart.
So the stuff poured in; streams of smuggled booze became rivers,
then the rivers crested and the strong-smelling floods of good cheer
inundated our defenses.
Gin, real gin, arrived from Holland, and even in cities well in the
interior the Wickersham Commission petulantly detected the bou-
quet of authentic French wines. Down in the Bahamas, the nine-
square-mile island of Bimini became a bustling depot of Canadian
whisky intended for Florida and mm from the West Indies. Belize,
in British Honduras, was a marshalling point for supplying the
Gulf Coast, while, to a considerable extent, the West Indies
shipped to us direct.
And Canada ah, Canada! On this continent, the water sources
are in the north, and the great rivers flow southward, and whisky
obeyed this irresistible natural law.
During the second year of our self-caused drought, Canadian
Customs reported that about 8,200 gallons of whisky and less than
200,000 gallons of malt liquors were exported to the U.S. Six
years later, the whisky gallonage was more than 1,100,000; the
104 THEY COME BY SEA
malt liquor exports to us almost 3,900,000 gallons. Further, these
statistics represented only Canadian-made potables. Additionally,
marked for trans-shipment to the U.S., Canada received wet imports
from abroad equivalent to another 30 per cent. And, to put it
politely in the interests of continued amity with this true friend in
need, the official Canadian figures were a bit on the conservative
side.
If you were to believe the figures, a scandalous drinking problem
had broken out in all the British and French possessions surround-
ing us. In the five-year period ending in 1929, Canada gravely
reported that declared exports of its whisky to the British West
Indies had more than doubled, to British Honduras more than
trebled. But the 93-square-mile French isles of St. Pierre and Mique-
lon which even today have only about 5,000 inhabitants were the
worst problem. Canadian whisky exports to these barren crags
almost quadrupled, and in just one year, of the more than 4,800,000
Canadian gallons declared for export to all places, more than
1,000,000 were marked for these truly tight little isles.
Assuming the same population then, I roughly calculated that
this would represent a daily consumption of more than half a gallon
by every man, woman and child, and these were the big Imperial
gallons, too, not our smaller, sissified gallons!
Of course, the Canadian bureaucrats couldn't pull the wool over
the eyes of a perspicacious investigating body like the Wickersham
Commission. They knew where the whisky was really goino.
Analyzing the Canadian handouts for the three years "ending
in 1929, the Commission noted that re-exports had multiplied by
between Four and five, but that somehow the amounts declared for
us remained stationary. Even token cooperation by the Canadians
the next year which prohibited any further declarations for direct
export to us, failed to console the commissioners.
It would be a mistake to assume that the cutting off of clearance
of liquor from Canada to the United States has achieved its helpful
intention, WC observed sadly. "Continual increase in Canadian
production, with no corresponding increase of Canadian home con-
sumption, indicates the contrary."
some 5 fe 4 ' *l D? 8 *" <* ^nunerce ^ulated that
some $40 000,000 worth of smuggled liquor (including stuff that
came by land) was getting into the country, and the next year
THEY COME BY SEA 105
General Lincoln C. Andrews, in charge of Dry enforcement, went
even further. Gloomily, he acknowledged that his men probably
were seizing a mere 5 per cent of the contraband.
Actually, the boys needed to land only one boatload out of five
to keep in the black, so the business grew enormously down the
years. As an indication of the ineffectual counter-measures, the
value of boats and launches seized during the thirteen-month period
between October 1, 1928, and October 31, 1929, was only about
$691,000, according to a report made to the U.S. Senate. And you
can rest assured that the Dry forces put the top value on their
captures.
Probably most of the whisky reached shore aboard the amazingly
fast little "pullers." Even with fifty cases weighing her down, a
Liberty-powered Jersey Sea Skiff could do 25 mph. Similar souped-
up small craft plied the rivers, especially at Buffalo and Detroit,
and the sporadic enforcement "drives" only scattered the traffic.
And, as WC complained, Rum Row "developed all manner of
ingenious apparatus, using die newest methods of engineering and
of science/' One of the most notable examples was the British
schooner Rosie M.B. When she was caught off Montauk Point,
Long Island, raiders found a $300,000 cargo and a dozen hollow
steel torpedoes, each carrying about forty gallons of liquor. These
were to be fired from Rum Row, then picked up and dragged
under water by small craft, according to the story. Even submarines
were pressed into action against Carry's sea-going forces. Operating
off Cape Cod, a big U-boat of commercial type was known to have
flooded the Cape area with deliveries of wine, ale and beer* And
this wasn't a journalistic "pipe." The Feds themselves said so.
Ironically, U.S. war surplus was turned against the peace and
dignity of the statutorily sober land. When the government men
caught up with the speedy, 135-foot Kingfisher, they discovered
she was one of their own, a converted submarine chaser. And the
mysterious Com-arc-Go, a $100,000 armor-clad vessel found aban-
doned at a dock in Mystic, Connecticut, without navigation papers
or license, had originally been a U.S. torpedo boat.
In fact, things got so out of hand that any craft venturing more
than hailing distance from shore became suspect even refuse boats.
On one occasion, a New York City garbage scow which bore only
the lowly name "E" was seized with $90,000 in liquor in whatever
106 THEY COME BY SEA
you call the holds of a garbage scow, and twenty-one men were
arrested.
Even legitimate freighters with legitimate cargo carried whisky in
falsely-labelled containers, and the harassed Customs men couldn't
begin to spot it all. Honest cargo was not supposed to be delayed
in transit and in the major ports, the docks were too crowded to
permit thorough examination. They tried to spot-check by holding
back one-tenth of all cases, bales and bundles chosen at random,
but the longshoremen and other dock workers would tiptoe up and
switch the bales, thus frustrating them.
Even Major Clark who, you will recall, was a man with a sunny
turn of mind, acknowledged the foreign ship problem. 'With about
a hundred floating saloons coming in daily and probably a thousand
constantly in port/' he confessed, "it would be surprising if a lot
of liquor did not get ashore unnoticed."
Slowly, the forces of justice came to the rescue of the drowning
Coast Guard and Customs Service. The Supreme Court forbade
transfer of liquor from one foreign ship to another in an American
port. Attorney General Daugherty asserted that, even sealed, liquor
could not be brought within our three-mile limit by foreign vessels.
So far as U.S. ships were concerned, they would be breaking the
law if they sold whisky anywhere in the world.
This world-wide Prohibition by Justice Department fiat was too
much for the Supreme Court. Outside the three-mile limit, the
court said, U.S. ships certainly could transport the stuff and sell it,
too. However, both American and foreign flag vessels were denied
the right to carry it into our presumably dry ports. Thus, passengers
from Europe could arrive gloriously drunk (provided they had
finished slopping it up out beyond three miles), but the tradi-
tionally gay bon voyage parties for departees had to be bone dry,
at least if the law were observed.
This obsession of ours to dry up the seas as well as the land
caused intermittent friction with Britannia which, to a large extent
in those days, still ruled the waves.
At one point, Great Britain coldly let it be known that she would
not allow our Customs men to search British-flag vessels beyond the
three-mile limit, even if they suspected whisky smugglers were
aboard. For our part, we complained that the three-mile limit was
THEY COME BY SEA 107
much too confining for the Coast Guard; almost gave Carry's Navy
claustrophobia, it seemed.
In the summer of 1923, Secretary of State Hughes blandly dis-
closed that a twelve-mile limit, or an hour s run from shore, had
been proposed to the British Ambassador. Sir Auckland Geddes,
whose reply was made public at the same time, was not noticeably
pleased. However, righteousness was not to be denied, and within
a year, a treaty providing for this quadrupling of the sweep of our
sovereignty was ratified with Britain.
In the meantime, one of her persistent flag fliers had been run-
ning into difficulties. In addition to the Marshall, Bill McCoy lost
the J.B. Young and the Gardner, and Sir Auckland was said to have
told us that His Majesty really wouldn't give a royal damn if Bill
himself were nabbed.
The Coast Guard received carte blanche to seize the Tomoka (as
Bill had renamed the Arethusa) anywhere within the twelve-mile
limit. After nine months, the cutter Seneca, which had earlier
grabbed the Marshall, caught Bill off the Jersey coast in the summer
of 1923, too late to intercept 4,000 cases of whisky that he had just
unloaded.
Briefly, Bill toyed with die idea of kidnaping the Coast Guard
boarding party back to Nassau. But the young CG lieutenant per-
suaded him that shortly the whole United States Navy would be
in hot pursuit and even his old skipper, Admiral Sims, might come
out of retirement to take up the chase. Reluctantly, Bill discarded
the gay adventure.
En route back to port, however, he made one attempt to slip away
from the Seneca, being stopped only by reproving fire from her
three-pounders.
Bill was convicted in Federal Court, but escaped with a sentence
of only nine months because of the act of federal charity previously
mentioned, and didn't even serve all of that, except technically. He
spent most of the time in a dream gaol so overcrowded that the
wealthier Dry violators were allowed to live in a nearby hotel at
their own expense, so long as they returned to jail punctually at 9
o'clock each night.
"If you aren't in then," Bill swore that the warden warned him,
"you'll have to stay out all night."
108 THEY COME BY SEA
Eventually, with few regrets and less cash, the man who coined
the phrase, "It's the real McCoy," wound up hack in the Florida
boat-building business where he had begun. "It was a great game/ 1
Bill said, "but I quit when it became a business/'
Oh, there was something to be missed, of course. Like that cruise
to the South Seas with the Arethusa, all sails filled, knifing smoothly
through the Pacific swells toward some romantic island.
"My money s gone, my boat's gone, and I haven't gone," Bill
lamented. "I'm afraid now that I never will."
But under the gay bravado, Bill was essentially a humble man
and all in all, he guessed, he was lucky. He had survived. This, as
we shall see immediately, was not always the case.
II
And They Die
at Sea
The War of Rum Row had begun almost in an amiable spirit of
co-fraternity. On both sides were men who knew and loved die sea,
and had seen Navy service during WWL Now, in a humdrum
postwar world, here was the opportunity for action again.
It was fun to stalk at night, to cut loose with siren and search-
light, to lob one-pound shells at bobbing, elusive targets. And since
the shells often fell short, the rummies enjoyed the chases and even
more they enjoyed the ruses they devised to make fools out of their
pursuers. They carried trick smokestacks that made Diesel-powered
cruisers look like innocent work-a-day tugs. Or collapsible masts so
they could race full speed under a low bridge while their frustrated
chasers bellowed at the tender to lift his damned draw. They even
stashed time fuses aboard. If worst came to worst and they had to
abandon ship, everything would go up in flames and the Dry Navy
would be cheated of the spoils of victory.
As one old rummy skipper nostalgically told a writer for Popular
Boating magazine a few years ago, "If drinking the stuff was half
as much fun as running it in was, then I can understand the drunk-
ard's problem/'
But gradually, on both sides, landlubbers got into the action, and
the beau geste game became a deadly, impersonal business. It was
too bad.
In 1924, Congress authorized the calling up of 550 temporary
Coast Guard officers and warrant officers, together with 2,240 en-
109
110 AND THEY DIE AT SEA
listed men. Soon, Post Office walls were adorned with recruiting
posters and government's ancient siren song to young men:
"U.S. Coast Guard, requires men of action who like adventure;
a chance for advancement; one year enlistment"
Under wartime conditions of security and censorship, the men
were mobilized at the old League Island Navy Yard in Philadelphia
in respectable sea-going vessels. These included twenty WWI de-
stroyers (some carrying stars on their smokestacks to show they
had sunk U-boats), mine sweepers and fast coastal motor boats.
The strategy called for picketing of the rum runners by the destroy-
ers, while the lighter craft provided a defense in depth nearer shore.
By 1925, the Coast Guard claimed a 'Victory*' over Rum Row
which newspapermen found hard to accept. And two days before
Christmas the following year, the New York News laconically
reported, "There is no Rum Row, the authorities insist. THE
NEWS received information last night that eight loaded rum ships
are off the Atlantic seaboard. Seven others have virtually disposed
of their cargoes/*
And a venturesome reporter described a trip in a 35-knot, armor-
plated 80-footer with streamlined hull, a tunnelled stern for three
Eropellers and three Winton-Diesel 600-hp engines. Twenty such
tde Monitors or Merrimacs were making two trips weekly from
New York and surrounding ports, he claimed. Over the same hap-
pily wet holiday period, die Coast Guard itself provided indis-
putable proof that the Row still lived. CG captured the Diesel-
motored cruiser, Harbour Trader, with $150,000 worth of Scotch
and rye from those pestiferous little isles of St. Pierre and Miquelon.
Shortly, the proof was writ in blood.
On a drowsy August day in '27, in the Gulf Stream off Florida,
cutter CG-297 overhauled a speedboat carrying a full load of Bimini
rum. She was skippered by Horace Alderman, a meek, bespectacled,
little Jekyll-and-Hyde character from Tampa. Ashore, he was known
as a respectable citizen, a grandfather, and his best friends had no
idea that he ran rum.
When Alderman and his crew of one were taken aboard the
cutter, the rummy suddenly pulled two .45s. "This is our ship
now," he told his crewman, instructing him to go below and stand
by the engines. Then he lined six of the seven-man CG crew on
AND THEY DIE AT SEA 111
one side of the deck, along with Secret Service Agent Rohert K.
Webster who was aboard the cutter just for a day's ride.
The seventh crewman, Bos'n Sidney Sanderlin, who had been
in the pilot house, ignored Alderman's command to halt as he
started down the narrow ladder to the deck. Alderman shot him
dead through the back. Then he told the others that, one by one,
they were going overboard and he would shoot them as they
dropped.
Webster rushed him. Alderman killed him with a shot in the
heart. Coast Guardsman Victor Lamby tackled him by the legs.
Alderman pressed the muzzle against Lamby's chest and fired,
killing him, too.
Another Coast Guardsman, Jodie L. Hollingsworth, dove over-
board and swam back to the stern. He clambered aboard again and
armed himself with a monkey wrench and ice pick. He missed
with the wrench, and Alderman shot him in the shoulder. But now
he was out of ammunition. Hollingsworth rushed him, and though
he clubbed desperately with his guns, the litde man was pinned
down.
Later, he confessed that he had planned to kill everyone on board
and then destroy the cutter. '1 was going to make them walk the
plank/' he said. He was convicted of murder; his crewman, who
turned state's evidence, escaped with a year and a day.
In jail, Alderman got religion and was baptized in a water tank.
After which, on August 17, 1929, two years and ten days after his
atrocity, he was hanged on a gallows specially constructed in an
airplane hangar at the Fort Lauderdale Coast Guard Base. The
surviving crewmen of cutter CG-297 watched.
In this war that was no longer friendly, the Coast Guard had
things to answer for, too . . .
She sat low and sure in the water; saucy, enchanting, faindy
scandalous with the whisper of liquor on her breath. And, like any
femme fatale, mystery and violence surrounded her, too. Even today,
we know little about the silent shore men who gave the sailing
orders or who really owned the I'm Alone.
But we know so much else about her! From the time she dropped
her first cargo of hootch off Cultivator Shoals outside Boston Harbor
112 AND THEY DIE AT SEA
in the '20s till her spectacular death down in the Gulf of Mexico,
the I'm Alone ranged, impudently and intermittently, from Glouces-
ter, Mass., to the Delaware Capes and on down to Trinity Shoals
in Louisiana's bustling Rum Row.
Probably the most legal of the rummers (she scrupulously ob-
served the twelve-mile limit), I'm Alone brought an estimated
$3,000,000 in earnings to her shadowy owners. But she also brought
unhappiness to her last master, a baldish, blue-eyed giant out of
Newfoundland who was a naval hero of World War I and one of
the few of the fine old-timers still left in the trade. Even in death,
the femme fatale wasn't through with men. She took one crewman
with her and posthumously brought death to another man. She
involved the U.S., Great Britain, Canada and France in a com-
plicated international incident that took six years to smooth over.
She was quite a demi-lady.
Fore-and-aft rigged, the ninety-ton two-master was built at Lunen-
berg, N.S., in the early '20s; a typical Nova Scotia schooner de-
signed to ride winter gales in the Atlantic but with the prudent
addition of two 100-hp semi-Diesels to escape Southern calms. Her
hold was capacious enough to stash 2,800 cases of whisky, and her
only drawback was low speed.
Theoretically, at least. She did only twelve knots, it was main-
tained, but that sounds somewhat like the strategic understatement
of the U.S. Navy in disclosing speeds. Whenever I'm Alone leaped
into full canvas from rakish foreboom to topsail, she managed to
show her stern to the Coast Guard cutters. And when they finally
set her up for the kill, it was only after a 200-mile chase that went
on two days and two nights southwest across the Gulf of Mexico.
By Rum Row legend, a Midwesterner in the rum racket drew
up her specifications. Just possibly, it was also whispered, a man
who worked for a member of Canadian Parliament provided her
stores and equipment, after which she made a shakedown cruise to
Scotland.
Sometime thereafter, one of the original and most exasperating
rum runners despite her "slow" speed, she appeared off New Eng-
land. For several years, the Coast Guard dogged her, but never
caught her. Nor did the hijackers whose boarding parties were at
least twice repulsed.
In the fall of '28, some changes were made. New owners took
AND THEY DIE AT SEA 113
her over, I'm Alone was transferred to the Southern rum trade and
49-year-old Captain John Thomas Randall assumed command,
A sea adventurer, he had once skippered a schooner in Arctic
exploration and as a wartime lieutenant commander in the Royal
Navy reserve, he had been flotilla commander for fourteen Special
Service vessels. He was a master mariner and carried a master's
license issued in Cardiff, Wales.
Of his wartime decorations, the Distinguished Service Cross and
the Croix de Guerre with two palms, he would only say offhand-
edly, "Oh, I got into a mixup off the coast of Norway, captured a
couple of German ships and sank two or three more/' He was a
man, no doubt of that.
Khaki shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up for action, his
heavy wartime automatic swinging at his hip, he strode his deck
and roared impartially to his eight-man crew and the United States
Coast Guard:
Tm the master of my ship, and I don't take orders I give them!"
A less courageous skipper would have gotten the jitters on the
very first trip. In November of '28, Randall cleared St. Pierre with
1,400 cases of assorted liquors and fifteen halves of $1 bills for a
rendezvous thirty miles due south of the Trinity Shoals light buoy
off the Louisiana coast. There he was to dispense his cargo to any
"pullers" who could match torn $1 bills with him.
But off Trinity, the CG cutter Walcott the vessel that was even-
tually to dog him to the kill sighted I'm Alone.
For forty-eight hours they played cat-and-mouse, and then in
disgust Randall cleared out for Belize without unloading. He
killed time in port there for a few days, went on to Nassau in the
Bahamas and then beat his way back up to Trinity.
A large motorboat with a high pilot house loomed out of the
dark, $1 bills were matched, and 800 cases unloaded. I'm Alone
stood out to sea, came back five days later and successfully unloaded
the rest of her cargo to the same mysterious boat.
It went on like that till March of '29 when Randall left Belize,
in British Honduras, and came north again to Trinity Shoals. Sud-
denly, his old enemy, the Wdcott, came on him from the westward.
It was Wednesday, March 20, and Randall's position was 14Vi to
15 miles offshore.
114 AND THEY DIE AT SEA
"I knew positively by my distance run, by time and by the speed
of my ship that my position was correct," he later insisted.
The Coast Guard differed, putting him at 10.8 miles, which was
well within the twelve-mile limit. Randall hove up anchor and
steered a course south by west. The Walcott signalled him to heave
to.
"Captain, you have no jurisdiction over me," Randall signalled
back. "I'm on the high seas outside of treaty waters. I cannot and
will not heave to." The cutter fired several blank shots. Warrant
Officer Frank Paul, her commanding officer, signalled that he
wanted to come aboard.
"Nobody boards my ship unless I ask them," Randall signalled
back.
Then he relented. "You may if you come unarmed," he told
Paul. What followed was a scene out of H.M.S. Pinafore. For
almost two hours over tea, the two skippers discussed the delicate
situation.
Paul reproached the Newfoundlander for being stubborn, which
Randall didn't mind. Then he accused him of having threatened to
shoot him. Randall was shocked.
"Captain, nothing was further from my thoughts!" Randall ex-
claimed. "I did not say such words!
"I give you my word as an officer and a gentleman that I did not
even think of such a thing or say it. And I can swear to you upon
everything I hold sacred that I did not say those words or have any
intention of saying them!
"Do you believe me? Will you take my hand?"
Handsomely, Paul agreed to shake hands. It was now 1 1 : 30 A.M.
Paul returned to his cutter, and the I'm Alone continued south at
7V4 knots. At 2 P.M., the Walcott returned, her signal flags omi-
nously warning, Heave to or I fire.
By megaphone, Randall roared to his late companion over tea
to go ahead and fire. He was given a fifteen-minute breather, which
he ignored. Then four-pounders opened up on him, and shells
whistled through his sails.
From quarter ports, the Walcott also trained rifle fire on the
schooner, and a slug nipped Randall in die right leg just below the
hip, partly paralyzing the limb.
But he had skilfully placed shoal water between him and the
AND THEY DIE AT SEA 115
cutter, and now the Walcott dropped astern as Tin Alone fled
southerly at her "maximum" twelve knots.
AH day Thursday, the chase continued south and east. That
night, Randall took in his sails, heading for a spot twenty miles
east of Alacaran Reef, off the Mexican Coast. Friday morning, he
made his position at roughly latitude 2530 N and longitude 91 W,
about 215 miles south by east from the entrance to New Orleans.
But far and fast as he had run, he was in trouble. The wind had
whipped up to a moderate gale, rough seas were running, and from
the south southwest a second cutter, the Dexter, closed in.
Again, Randall defied the United States government. "You may
sink us, if you like," he roared, "but you may not seize us!"
This time, from only 300 yards range, he really got it. Shells and
rifle fire shredded his sails and peppered his deck.
"Now will you heave to?" the Dexter signalled.
Randall lit a cigar, contemptuously flipped the match toward the
cutter and again refused.
The fire was intensified, and the rigging cut adrift, the bulwark
smashed, the foreboom shattered. Most of the crew huddled aft,
ducking splinters, and the engineer called up that the water was
rising below.
Still Randall waited until his forward decks were level with the
water. "Cut those dories loose and shove off," he shouted. He
limped below for his log books and papers, wrapped them in oilskin
and came back up. As the I'm Alone arched in death, her bow
twenty feet under water, her stern ten feet in the air, he leaped into
the sea.
Clinging to a cabin door, he managed to reach the Dexter with
his men. But one of them, Leon Mainjoy, could not be revived
aboard the cutter. "There's one death you must answer for," Ran-
dall said bitterly.
On Sunday, the skipper and his surviving crewmen were marched
ashore in irons at New Orleans and from Washington to Ottawa
to London, the diplomats spent an unexpectedly busy Sabbath.
Then, when it was disclosed that Mainjoy had been French born,
Paris joined in the outraged protests against American high-handed-
ness.
To a nation historically sensitive to freedom of the seas, Randall
was a hero, even though he had defied our government. "Sea search
116 AND THEY DIE AT SEA
and sinking of vessels led to the War of 1812," shouted that strenu-
ous Wet, Fiorello LaGuardia. 'It can do so again!"
In an unfortunate phrase, Warrant Officer Paul described the
Tm Alone's sinking as "just like a submarine making a crash dive
quick," Randall caught up the phrase and retorted that the de-
struction of his vessel was "the most dastardly crime since the
German U-boat outrages of the last war."
In Parliament, questions were raised, and a Conservative member
of the Canadian House of Commons said roundly that the affair
was an act of war if carried out under instructions of the U.S. gov-
ernment an act of piracy if committed on the initiative of the CG
commander.
Canada conceded our right of search and seizure between the
three and twelve-mile limits, but said that we had no right to fire
or pursue beyond twelve miles. The Coast Guard invoked the
defense of "hot, continuous and unbroken pursuit" after the I'm
Alone, "obstinately and arrogantly," had refused orders to heave to.
"She was armed and the actions and words of the officers were
threatening," the service insisted.
It was a sticky business that could have gotten out of hand.
Finally, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Willis Vandevanter and Sir
Lyman Poore Duff, the Canadian chief justice, sat as a judicial
commission to smooth things over. In 1935, six years after the inci-
dent, they handed down their decision.
Canada, which had asked $386,000, received $50,666 and an
apology from the United States. Randall and his crewmen received
exoneration, plus "material amends" amounting to $25,666. The
owners received nothing for the loss of the schooner and her 2,000
cases of whisky.
Even today, there is a teasing, unanswered question. Though she
flew the British flag and carried Canadian registry, was the I'm
Alone really owned by a New York bootleg syndicate? Our govern-
ment tried to prove so through an affidavit from one of the pur-
ported owners.
Unfortunately, for the U.S. case, he could not be presented for
cross-examination he was killed.
Even today, too, there is a lingering touch of sadness over the
fate of Captain Randall whose spirited defense of his rights on the
seas captured American sympathies. 'Til go to sea again some day,
AND THEY DIE AT SEA 117
but it won't be as a rum runner/' he said jubilantly after his exon-
eration.
He didn't. When he died in Halifax some twenty years ago at the
age of sixty-four, he was working as a landlubberly mining pros-
pector in northern Quebec and Newfoundland. After I'm Alone
went down, he never got another berth at sea.
Matters were settled more quickly in the case of the "Black Duck
Massacre." On a night of heavy fog a few days after Christmas in
'29, Speedboat C-5677, alias the Black Duck, was trying to unload
off Dumpling Light, Newport, R.I., when CG Patrol Boat 290
challenged her. The CG boatswain in command claimed she ig-
nored his siren blasts and two warning shots from his one-pounder.
He finally ordered a burst of machine gun shot to cripple her
rudder, but she turned at the wrong time. Three of her four crew-
men were killed. "They fired without warning," charged the sole
survivor.
Did all the quick fire and sudden death achieve their purpose?
There is no flat answer because the Dry enforcement bosses
played the classic bureaucratic game of talking out of both sides
of their mouths. During most of the year, to placate their vigilant
friends in the WCTU and Anti-Saloon League, they talked fear-
somely of their accomplishments. But around appropriations time,
they would begin singing the budgetary blues to Congress, plead-
ing that only more men, more money would solve their problems.
However, let's take what they said at face value. In early summer
of 1930, five years after the "victory" over Rum Row, the Coast
Guard commander at New London, Connecticut, admitted there
were 150 rum runners between Montauk Point, Long Island, and
Maine. In its 1932 report, the Coast Guard announced "a slight
falling off in the amount of liquor brought to the shores of the
United States for attempted smuggling, but the activities of the
smuggling syndicates were unabated." Probably that has significance
if you ponder it long enough . . *
12.
Waiting Ashore
Early in the summer of 1930, an SOS electrified the Coast
Guard command in the New York area. Off Montauk Point, Long
Island, the yacht Florida was wallowing in distress, and aboard her
was a distinguished fishing party that included New York Mayor
Jimmy Walker.
Leaving Rum Row temporarily unguarded, Carry's Navy sped to
the rescue, only to find that the emergency call had been a hoax.
And while the Coast Guard's back was turned, reports had it, the
rum ships poured thousands of cases ashore.
Happy-go-lucky and shamelessly Wet, Jimmy Walker didn't
resent the unauthorized use of his name, for after all it was in a
good cause. But to the Dry authorities, the embarrassing episode
pointed up an increasingly serious problem. The men ashore, the
canny ^landlubbers who financed and directed Rum Row, just
couldn t be put out of business.
From secret transmitting stations, they directed the movements
of the rum ships by high-frequency radio. They employed seaplanes
that would carry a hundred cases each to make ocean rendezvous
with the mother ships. They had their own buying agents as far
away as London and selling arrangements with land-based ganos
who took the stuff off their hands as soon as it was landed.
The board chairmen of Rum Row were an interesting, inde-
pendent species of the Prohibition underworld; not as honest as the
bluff captains they hired to sail their booze ships, but, on the other
hand, not as murderous as the hoods with whom they trafficked
118
WAITING ASHORE 119
ashore. Primarily, they were astute businessmen who, in addition
to such mundane business problems as supply, transportation, sale
and bad debts, had to calculate the additional overhead of dealing
with, or evading, the law.
Most notorious was William V, (Big Bill) Dwyer, a fleshy, red-
faced native New Yorker who hobnobbed with politicians, fight
promoters, race track figures and other brassy Broadway characters.
In his social circles, Big Bill was officially known as a "sports-
man," a compliment which he tried earnestly to live up to at all
times. He owned race tracks and race horses and became the father
of professional ice hockey in the U.S.
Despite all the hullabaloo, Big Bill was convicted only once and
then only for conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act. He took it like
a man.
After serving thirteen months of his two-year term, Big Bill was
freed on his plea of ill health, and as the News dryly observed, "His
penitence barely outlasted his sojourn in prison/' He got back into
racing, and a few years later, when the Feds knocked off a $2,500,-
000 brewery on Tenth Avenue in New York, they said it was con-
trolled by Owney Madden- and his old friend, Big Bill.
Two or three times, the government interrupted Big Bill's manly
pursuits to charge him with directing a vast rum-running syndicate
that maintained some two dozen vessels, plus speedboats, and its
own liaison airplane to direct the rum vessels to their unloading
positions. He also was accused of keeping the sea lanes open by
wholesale corruption of Coast Guardsmen and once, it was said,
persuaded a Coast Guard captain to use a government cutter to
unload 1,400 cases. Another time, he daringly ran the rum ship
Augusta right up the Hudson River and unloaded almost 5,000
cases.
Dramatically different from Big Bill was a mousy man who wore
$28 Parisian shoes with suede tops and booster heels to increase
his height. But Al Lillien had all of Big Bill's stature in the rum-
running business.
In the inspirational pattern of so many Prohibition successes, Al
was a poor little immigrant boy who reached the top by hard work,
close attention to detail and indomitable drive. Before World War I,
his parents brought Al, aged eleven, from Hungary to Elizabeth,
N.J., where his father set up business as a horse-and-wagon peddler.
120 WAITING ASHORE
The business thrived, the father opened a produce store, and Al
became a delivery driver for him.
Reputedly, he was introduced to the underworld when he made
ice deliveries during a strike under the protection of some goons
from Newark, NJ. Later, as an operator on Newark's 'Whisky
Curb/' he struck it rich on just one transaction. He handled an
order for 30,000 cases, stuck bravely to his price of $2 per case as
a finder's fee and netted $60,000. Soon, he was a middleman be-
tween Canadian distillers and shippers, and though he never carried
a gun, he might as well have. He exacted 25 per cent of the gross
for his services.
What Al did was to substitute modern business techniques for
the cash transactions that had previously depended on matching
either torn bills or playing cards. He set up a neatly-departmental-
ized syndicate. Shipping, shore delivery, trucking, sales and "liaison"
(chiefly bribes) were separately administered, and the money was
now properly handled through banks.
At the main office, the former Oscar Hammerstein mansion at
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., which overlooked the sea, Al kept the
kind of records any big business must keep and kept them in
scrupulous detail. 1 He also maintained his own radio transmitting
station to speed up the movements of the mother ships and the
land deliveries from them.
And this was his undoing.
On the night of March 30, 1929, Forrest J. Redfern, assistant
radio inspector in the Radio Division, U.S. Department of Com-
merce, was enjoying a sort of busman's holiday at his home on Hull
Street in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was knocking around the air waves
looking for stations using false call letters and codes, both obvious
signs that they were up to no good.
At 10:40 P.M., on 3,900 kilocycles, he caught the unlicensed
signal, "4 RD," Mowed by this gobbledygook: "Check 30GLVW
OMSIC OBWOK ARK."
Within the next few weeks, he took down more than 600 similar
messages and, consulting code experts, gradually made sense out of
1 According to the government, these records disclosed that the syndicate
sometimes paid as much as $30,000 weekly in graft, and for just one month
had a $700,000 outlay for "ships, merchandising and operating expenses."
In six months of '29, the Feds charged, more than $2,000,000 was banked.
WAITING ASHORE 121
them. A rum syndicate was industriously spying on the Coast
Guard, despatching decoy boats to feint the CG cutters out of
position and guiding its mother ships into safe positions for unload-
ing.
But where was the mysterious station located?
With a radio direction finder, Forrest Redfern travelled by auto
and Coast Guard boat all over the New York metropolitan area
trying to pin down the source of the messages. It was late August,
almost five months after his first interception, that he narrowed
the search to the Highlands area of New Jersey.
Now, with Special Agent Carlos M. Bernstein of the Justice
Department, Redfern drove slowly through the hot section and
finally pinpointed the messages as coining from a cottage in High-
lands. More messages were intercepted, and phone taps on the
cottage disclosed a call to "The Mansion/' as the Hammerstein
estate was known.
In October, 130 feds made thirty-four simultaneously-timed
raids in two states, confiscated trucks and boats and arrested forty
suspects. Eventually, Al Lillien went to trial with thirty-six co-
defendants on conspiracy charges, but after hearing 2,780 pages of
testimony, a federal jury found them not guilty.
Later, all other charges were nol-prossed, and then early in 1933,
the government tried again, indicting among others both Al and
Charles (King) Solomon, the noted Boston racketeer. This time,
double death violent death intervened.
In January, King Solomon was shot to death in the conventional
manner of Prohibition days "by person or persons unknown," and
two months later, on March 23, Al, at die premature age of 34,
was similarly done in. However, his departure had a certain incon-
gruous fillip that the narrow-shouldered, long-necked businessman
had never displayed in his no-nonsense career.
His body lay in the top-floor hall of 'The Mansion/' and neatly
laid alongside him were his jade-set gold ring, a quarter, a dime, a
nickel and a penny. On the table in the library were a pair of grey
gloves that fitted his hands, two revolvers and two decks of cards,
a King of Spades upturned.
There were the inevitable rumors: that a rival mob was muscling
in, that Al had earlier been the victim of a kidnaping, an occupa-
tional hazard of the day, and then had reneged on paying his
122 WAITING ASHORE
$50,000 ransom. But the "person or persons" who execute murder
out of such professional motives have a lamentable lack of imagina-
tion; they just shoot and run, not pausing to prettify the stiff with
murder fiction clues,
No, the message, if any, in the jade-set ring, the small change,
the grey gloves, the revolvers and the upturned King of Spades indi-
cated some motive deeper and more curious than mere business
misunderstanding. But even Forrest Redfern couldn't crack this
code, and in death Al Lillien became a more romantic and mys-
terious figure than he had ever seemed to be in life.
In the business of getting the stuff ashore, there was a great deal
of amateur activity, insignificant commercially but socially indica-
tive of those zany days.
The best method, which absolutely defied confiscation, was bring-
ing it ashore internally, and at this technique the ship news re-
porters of the '20s were simply superb. From a professional point of
view, ship news reporting had reached its zenith before the laying
of the Atlantic cable, and thereafter went into a long slow decline
because travellers from the Continent brought pretty stale news,
compared to what the cable had already delivered.
However, in the '20s when all the people who were notorious,
beautiful, spectacular or just important in fact when everybody,
except for a few nuts, travelled by boat rather than plane, this form
of journalism enjoyed a certain anachronistic importance. Ship news
assignments were eagerly sought and not only for reasons of profes-
sional pride,
'Think of it!" a veteran of those happy days recalls. "Six days a
week, we drank first-rate whisky free. We drank better than the
Morgans did/'
Occasionally, of course, there were miscalculations of capacity
which presented a grave problem at departure time from the out-
going vessels. To get to the little shore boat bobbing alongside, the
reporters had to descend a carpenter's ladder (that also bobbed with
the waves) from the deck or hatchway opening of the liner.
At least once, to my friend's knowledge, an associate who had
partaken too enthusiastically of the fine, free whisky, iust couldn't
make it
Obligingly, the skipper ordered his men to lower the polished-
WAITING ASHORE 123
plank chute normally used to drop mail sacks into the mailboat The
journalist was roped under the arms and slid down the chute as the
passengers cheered, to which he responded with a courteous tip of
his hat. Yes, they had fun in the '20s.
Often the passengers were equally exuberant. On one occasion,
the son of a Southern Senator who was ferociously anti-Wet, anti-
Catholic and anti-Tammany, arrived from Panama, telling the press
that he'd had "a swell time and seven bottles of Scotch on board to
keep me company ."
The less impulsive passengers and newsmen smuggled the stuff
ashore externally, posing delicate problems of behaviour for the
poor Customs men. Once, when they slapped both hips of 4,000
visitors to the lie de France, there were public outcries of 'Vulgar!"
Veteran photographers still speak fondly of their capacious, old-
fashioned Graflexes (capacity four to five pints), and their repor-
torial associates often suspended a pint or two inside their trousers
between their legs. Hip-slapping would not disclose this form of
portage, but the technique required a certain amount of practice
before a man could walk without a noticeable waddle.
Once, a hard-bitten reporter who made frequent trips abroad (as
a courier for the Irish Republican Army, his friends suspected) was
caught with the goods. As the Customs man confiscated the bottle
of dear, honest Irish whisky and added insult by arresting him, the
reporter began needling him.
He knew what the agent was going to do with the bottle he had
stolen from a poor working man. He would butter up the boss by
giving it to him. Or maybe drink it himself. Or probably sell it
because the Feds were just bootleggers with badges.
'Til show you what I'm going to do with it!" the infuriated Cus-
toms man shouted, smashing the bottle against the side of the ship.'
'Tab, go ahead and arrest me!" the reporter said. "Now where's
your evidence?"
Next morning in court, the judge had to sustain this inspired
defense and discharged the reporter.
But underneath the fun and games, as we shall see immediately,
Prohibition was also working a brutalizing effect on the men who
tried to enforce it and those who evaded it.
Once, in a New Jersey town fronting on the Hudson River, a
rowboat washed up to a dock, its only occupant a buUet-riddled
124 WATTING ASHORE
corpse. None of the cops recognized the deceased, and it was obvious
that a bootleg gang had been up to the old, exasperating under-
world trick of dumping a body far from the scene of the murder.
So the captain in charge of the investigation, who was proud of
his department's record of solved cases, defended local police pres-
tige the only way he could. Putting his 12E foot against the stern,
he gave a mighty push and sent the mystery bobbing and drifting
into some other jurisdiction.
Meanwhile,
Back on Dry Land
During the more than thirteen years of Prohibition, all our ports
of entry by land were thriving centers of commercial stir. Up from
Mexico across the southwestern border came laden pack animals.
Down from Canada roared the heavy trucks and the long freight
trains with sealed cars. Back and forth across the borders there was
the restless flow of tourist activity, indicating a comfortable rate of
consumer spending. And the transportation boom trickled even to
the hinterland where the prosperous rumbling of goods on the
move could be heard all night
Only trouble, it was all wet goods.
The pack trains brought up whisky from Mexico, and the freight
cars brought it down from Canada, concealed in or mixed with
legitimate freight, sometimes whole carloads of it bearing official
seals that had been stolen, bought or otherwise manipulated.
Scotch malt was railed from Canada, and champagne, especially
Mumrn's Extra Dry, flooded into New York in the long pine boxes
used for shipments of fish, consigned there ostensibly from a Cana-
dian "fish company/'
All this rail smuggling was difficult to prevent, the Wickersham
Commission noted, because legitimate rail freight should not be
unduly delayed. "In order to put a stop to it," WC said fretfully,
"cooperation of the railroads is needed, and all companies have not
always cooperated/'
Motor freighting, though in its infancy, was even then a spirited
competitor of the railroads in transporting stuff that gurgled. Nor
125
126 MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND
can you write off the ungainly old touring cars with canvas tops
and isinglass side curtains that crossed the border on ceaseless jour-
neys of friendship between Canada and the U.S.
As rubber and rail boomed, there was also healthy activity in the
small arms business. For the executives behind the scenes who
administered the involved transportation and distribution services
were quick-triggered, and their concept of business arbitration was
shockingly final.
Competition was met with 38 Police Specials and sawed-off shot-
guns, after which the competitor was either privately interred in a
nearby river affixed to a concrete slab to keep him decently buried
or accorded a splendiferous funeral fit for royalty. Say what else
about them that you want, the hoods of the '20s were the last of the
big funeral spenders.
These obsequial excesses were soundly motivated. They kept up
the morale of toe surviving troops, they intimidated both the public
and politicians with the wealth of the underworld, and they satisfied
a curious emotion of otherwise deadly unemotional men. Their
pride.
For example, take Charles R. (Vannie) Higgins, a pint-sized,
unprepossessing litde hood who was twice shot, once knifed and
eight times questioned in homicides. Despite such obstacles, he ran
up a $4,000,000 rum-running fortune, owned the Cigaret, fastest
or the rum runners in the New York area, and a seaplane which was
good enough for him to unload later on the Italian government.
The newspapers hooted at his self-claimed occupation of "lobster
fisherman," and at their nicest referred to him as "the prominent
Brooklyn wet goods importer." But Vannie always kept his dignity.
Lying in a New York hospital bed after a near-fatal knife thrust,
surrounded by solicitous detectives, he said politely to Assistant
District Attorney Saul Price, "I don't want to insult you, but I
don't want to talk to these cops." And he didn't. The misunder-
standing had been a private matter.
On another occasion, along with a small town police chief on
Long Island, a lieutenant, two detective sergeants, four patrolmen
and nine other assorted suspects, Vannie was indicted by the Feds
for conspiracy in a $1,000,000 bootleg operation. Everybody beat
the rap, but Vannie scored the biggest personal victory.
When the prosecutor got off to a condescending start by referring
MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND 127
to him as Vannie, the little hood demanded that he be addressed
as "Mr. Charles R. Higgins," and the judge sustained him. 1
Mr. Higgins' demise was rather sad. On a June night in 1932,
he escorted his wife and mother to the Knights of Columbus hall in
Brooklyn to watch his seven-year-old daughter perform in the grad-
uation exercises of her dancing school.
Coming out of the hall, Mr. Higgins somewhat carelessly ac-
cepted the invitation of an unidentified passerby to have a chat
alongside a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac parked nearby. As he ap-
proached, a scattered spray of twenty-five bullets emerged from
the car, three or four of them finding their target.
By then, gangland funerals weren't what they had been, and
besides there was a suspicion that Mr. Higgins had been on his
uppers, having lost most of his fleet to the Coast Guard. But a few
days later, a mysterious plane flew over his grave, dropping flowers.
It was a thoughtful touch, inasmuch as Mr. Higgins had always
enjoyed flying, sometimes piloting the seaplane himself.
The epitome of burial splendors, almost even beyond the night-
mares of underworld morticians and florists, transpired in Brooklyn,
on July 5, 1927. This was the laying away of Frankie Uale, boss
of the Brooklyn rackets and business sponsor of Al Capone, who
had whimsically gone for a spin in his bullet-proof car with the
windows. down, thereby setting himself up for the conventional
violent departure of his kind from this world. 2
1 Even the small city "ganglets" had their pride. Once, when I was a
very young reporter in Bridgeport, Conn., two racial ganglets whom I
will tactfully describe only as Gangs A and B had a difference of jurisdic-
tion, and the leader of Gang A was killed. To get a follow story, I visited
his headquarters to ascertain the sad arrangements, and had the door
slammed in my face.
1 went back to my office and, considerably braver thanks to the distance,
phoned the headquarters. 'What's the matter with you guys?" I said. "You
yellow? You afraid of Gang B, and have to smuggle him into the cemetery?"
There was an outraged roar, and then the hood said, 'Wait a minute!" He
was back on the phone quicker than that to give me the time, the place
and the bearers.
2 Hearst columnist Jim Bishop, who recently reminisced about Frankie's
definitive obsequies, thus thumbnailed him: "He was a good gangster, as
gangsters go. He never ordered a killing unless someone stood in his way,
and he would buy a ton of coal for a poor old lady anytime, if she threw
her booze business in the right direction. Charity. That s what the funeral
director said Frankie had."
128 MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND
Once, when I was county editor on a small paper, we had a
correspondent in a little town who larded out his inchage with a
sentence that still beats in my brain with the stately meter of This
is the forest primeval. "The floral tributes were many and varied,"
he triumphantly concluded every obituary, "and attested to the
high esteem with which the deceased was held by residents of the
town."
Never until Frankie, however, had I heard of a funeral that in
reality rose to this grandiloquence. A gold rosary in one hand,
Frankie was installed in a $15,000 bronze-lined silver casket which,'
mounted on a passenger car, easily dominated his five-mile-long
cortege. And the floral tributes!
Many and varied, they cost some $37,000, filled thirty-eight cars
and attested to nay, shouted of the high esteem with which
Frankie had been held. The violet hands on a wreath in the shape
of a clock pointed to 4: 10, Frankie's final hour. The tender rib-
boned message on a pillow of roses consoled Frankie down in the
other world, ' We'll get them, kid"
Frankie had been a catalyst of gang crime. He and Scarface Al
Capone had known each other from boyhood on New York's Lower
East Side, and Frankie could remember back when Al was just a
young punk afraid of being arrested as a pimp.
When Frankie achieved some racket eminence, Johnny Torrio,
a transplanted Lower East Sider now getting to the top in the
Chicago underworld, requested that a reliable associate be sent to
him from back home. Frankie chose a man whom Frederick Lewis
Allen described as "a bullet-headed twenty-three-year-old Neapoli-
tan roughneck of the Five Points gang" Al Capone. In later years,
a rum-running partnership between Uale and Capone ended in a
quarrel, and Al repaid Frankie's original kindness by having Louis
(Little New York) Campagna handle the technical details which
made Frankie's funeral obligatory. Frankie was reportedly the first
New York victim of the tommy gun, a weapon first carried by the
Capone mob.
Within a few years, Capone was directing a ruthless army of
700, and murder became such a Chicago commonplace that as
Prohibition roared into its tenth year in 1929, almost 400 gang
murders had been tallied. As his power grew, Capone dictated to
politicians, acquired a lavish estate in Miami, thumbed his nose at
MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND 129
law and order by conspicuous attendance at the theater and other
haunts of the genteel. His armored car was protected fore and aft
by cars full of trusted hoods, and he was often escorted by a dozen
and a half dapper young men who sported the most fashionable
tuxedos and concealed gun holsters.
Fred D. Pasley, one of the great reporters of the period and
whom I later had the honor of working with on the same news-
paper, did a superb biography, Al Capone, in which he spelled out
the frightening power of the man. For the year 1927, the Capone
syndicate, by federal estimate, grossed $60,000,000 from liquor
and beer, plus $25,000,000 from gambling and dog tracks and
some $10,000,000 from vice and various questionable resorts. Later,
the gross soared to some $1 10,000,000.
To Al, Prohibition represented "a fine opportunity for smart
young guys like myself/' and he insisted virtuously, "All I ever did
was to supply a demand that was pretty popular/' But he made sure
that he supplied that demand. Finally, in May of 1932, the Feds
tucked Capone away in Atlanta for income tax violation and later
sent him to Alcatraz. Testimony about his $15 underwear and the
$3,000 phone bill for one year at his Florida home contrasted with
his own modest tax reports. In 1939 he was released and died the
next year, aged forty-two, his mind wrecked by syphilis. It was a
small funeral, six grave diggers serving as pallbearers.
From Boston to New York and westward to the Coast, there
were gangs everywhere, of course. Much as they fought among
themselves, they maintained dose inter-city relationships to solve
mutual problems of supply and distribution. And homicide. By
swapping faceless torpedoes, they could introduce killers, unknown
to the local victims and local police, who flew, motored or trained
into town, murdered briskly and departed.
San Francisco, possibly, was an exception. At least one of my
West Coast correspondents advises me that outside hoods were not
tolerated, and this otherwise urbane city maintained a rather
narrow, isolationist attitude toward the gangs. "Bootlegging was a
strictly local proposition," he emphasizes, "and it was regulated
according to the needs of the community rather than the boot-
here, a tawdry mystique grew up a
some of the finest bad newspaper writing of the century (to whi
130 MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND
I contributed my own modest share). Now, thank heavens, newer,
quieter rackets have taken over. Reporters rarely interview witnesses
who stubbornly insist that all they heard was "backfire," and the
"powerful blade sedans" have roared off into history. The guns of
the booze gangs have blazed for the last time, and the men who gave
the orders Jack (Legs) Diamond, Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll,
Frank (The Enforcer) Nitti, George (Bugs) Moran, Dutch
Schultz, and all the rest have gone to the grave.
Of these men perhaps no one more typifies the kind of oudaw
spawned during the era of Prohibition than Arthur (Dutch
Schultz) Flegenheimer.
In the mid-1920s, he was just another lowly beer operator in the
Bronx section of New York City who enjoyed almost total ob-
scurity. However, Ted Dibble, a friend of mine who then worked
Headquarters for the staid old New York Post, knew a "slip boy,"
a sort of apprentice police reporter, who came from the Bronx. With
understandable local pride, he kept telling my friend about this fear-
some comer.
Then one Sunday, Legs Diamond, who was called "The Human
Clay Pigeon," collected another bullet in his carcass. As can happen
to the best of us, Ted Dibble didn't even know about it till his
office called him Monday morning.
"Sure, I've been working on it," he assured the City Editor with
one of those little white lies that have kept the wives and children
of so many newspapermen from want. "My sources tell me that
that Dutch Schultz did it"
You see, having been caught by surprise, Ted had to come back
hard, and here was a new character, not a tired old face like Capone,
not one usually used by reporters in the automatic follow-up stories
to gang killings.
That afternoon, the Post, which was not ordinarily given to
streamer headlines, came out with an eight-column banner:
COPS SEEK BRONX BEER BARON
The Post was then so conservative that the Times and Trib
picked up the story, and the cops were impressed enough to bring
Schultz in for questioning.
"In the beginning, you know, a punk needs a big publicity break
MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND 131
to get him started," Ted explains. "It gives him prestige with other
mobsters. After that, Dutch was on his way."
Eventually, Dutch lived up to my friend's inspired prediction,
becoming so big, in fact, that he was ordered out of New York
City by the authorities. With his bodyguard Lulu Rosenkrantz and
several of his mob, he took up residence at the Stratfield Hotel in
Bridgeport, Conn., and that is where I come briefly into the story.
Night after night, I used to pass the Stratfield on Main Street
and see the fleshy, moon-faced hood holding court on the sidewalk
for local admirers. He was the biggest freak to hit town since
Barnum & Bailey had closed its winter quarters out near Railroad
Avenue and moved south, and the locals made the most of it.
On the Sunday Herald, a colleague of mine, columnist Harry
Neigher, kept letting fly week after week at Dutch and his men.
Finally, he led off his column with one of those inspired lines which
should not be lost to history:
"Dutch Schultz gives the Police Department twenty-four hours
to get out of town!"
That same Sunday, Harry, who also lived in the Stratfield, awoke
to find that his dog had presented him overnight with six puppies.
He called a friend on die Herald to come right over and help
handle the emergency, and left his door ajar.
"Instead of Charlie, in came six vicious-looking guys, who
circled me in the room and just stared and glared," Harry recalls.
"I had no idea who they were."
"Then a bright idea hit me. 'Six pups/ I said. 'One for each of
you six guys!' It didn't get a yock out of any of die punks."
Just as the silent sextet moved closer, a nightclub owner, for
whom Neigher once had done a favor, passed by in the hall, rec-
ognized the hoods and moved to the rescue.
"Fellers, Harry's a good kid, a great friend of mine, and he
wouldn't hurt a fly." He pointed to the puppies, and his voice
softened. "Look. He even loves dogs/' Hastily, he made introduc-
tions all around,
"Then my friend put his arm around as many of the six guys as
he could handle and moved them out of my room, giving me a new
lease on life."
When Neigher later asked his friend what the six had wanted,
132 MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND
the nightclub owner said simply, "Better you should never know."
A few years later after Neigher had written his friend's obit, the
widow wrote to thank him, adding, {< You know he saved your life
that day at the Stratfield. Dutch Schultz had sent those six men
up to your room to kill you/'
Yes, Dutch was getting too feisty with the press, and whether it's
a ganster, a bureaucrat, a movie star or a Congressman, that means
trouble ahead. Celebrities who get too big for the breeches of the
reporters who helped them get there reveal an arrogance that will
be their own undoing.
Finally, in October, 1935, Dutch was chopped down with some
friends in a Newark restaurant. Before he died, he babbled for
hours in delirium, a police stenographer taking down every word,
and the tortured stream of consciousness makes you doubt that
success had been golden after all.
Will you get me up? O.K. I won't be such a big creep. Oh,
mamma, I cant go through with it. Please. Oh and then he clips
me; come on. Cut that out; we dont owe a nickel; hold it; instead,
hold it against him; I am a pretty good pretzel. Department of
Justice . . ,
Reserve decision police notice. Henny and FranUe. Oh, dog
biscuit, and when he is happy, he doesn't get snappy . . .
A detective asked him how many shots had been fired.
Two thousand. Come on, get some money in that treasury. We
need it . . .
My gilt edge stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please,
mother. Dont tear; dont rip; that is something that shouldn't he
spoken about . . .
The detective leaned closer, and asked who had shot him.
Kindly take my shoes off.
"They're off," the cop reassured him.
No. There is a handcuff on them. The baron does these things . . .
Police, mamma, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle
the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney
sweeps talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth . . .
And, finally, the last word of Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegen-
heimer.
French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me
done.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND 133
One of the very few outstanding hoods to survive unto this day
is Owen Victor Madden, now in his 70s, and he has not done so
without a struggle. Some thirty years ago, when his first wife
divorced him in Reno, the New York Herald Tribune laconically
observed, "He is forty-two years old and has been shot on four
occasions."
But Owney, to turn a tired phrase, has led a charmed life. Lon-
don-born, he grew up in the old Hell's Kitchen of New York's
West Side and acted it. Despite a dozen arrests, including two for
suspicion of homicide, he served time only twice; 7V4 years for the
dancehall killing of a luckless fellow whose sweetheart he had
stolen and later for a parole violation, which detained him less than
a year.
Though he led the old Gopher Gang back before World War I,
the government somehow couldn't find grounds to deport him
back to England. He even gained U.S. citizenship! (The federal
judge involved later explained that he hadn't known much about
Owney's background at the time.) Twice, he has been ordered out
of Los Angeles, he was exiled from New York by the late Police
Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine, and peppery little Mayor La-
Guardia once had him picked up at Madison Square Garden as a
vagrant. But these inconveniences, a fair-minded observer would
have to admit, hardly bear out the preachment that crime does not
pay.
A most exasperating, illogical phenomenon of those days of in-
stant murder was that so many persons, themselves law-abiding, de-
veloped almost a hero worship for the scabrous characters in the
Prohibition gangs. Maybe you can't blame the women too much.
With The Sheik, Rudolph Valentino had touched off a silly ro-
mantic craze, and in the gangs were many slick-haired, marble-
eyed sheiks with the sinister attraction that the rogue male will
probably always have for the chaste female. But what can you say
in defense of the pants-wearing gang buffs who couldn't smell a
bum across a speakeasy table!
Such a male flibbertigibbet began hanging around a bar on New
York's midtown East Side where reporters, fatigued from the day's
homicides, relaxed over nourishing boilermakers. At first, as they
quaffed their rye with beer chasers, they were mildly flattered by
134 MEANWHILE, BACK ON DRY LAND
his goggle-eyed awe at almost touching men who had almost
touched gangsters.
However, he soon made a nuisance of himself with his naggino
insistence that they set up a meet for him with a real, live gangster
any gangster. With the heavy hearts of essentially kindly men who
resort to practical jokes only under the utmost provocation, they
agreed.
Several nights later, a stranger (from one of the newspapers
located on the West Side) swaggered into the speak. Introductions
were made, and the patsy was enjoying himself hugely until the
stranger's eyes narrowed menacingly.
"Say, I know you!" he growled. "You're the guy who tipped the
cops on our last beer delivery/'
He pulled a gun and, as the saying has it, fired at point-blank
range. Miraculously, the patsy escaped, but a reporter alongside him
caught the slug in his chest. Pressing a small packet of ketchup
concealed inside his shirt, he sank to the floor and as the blood ran
out, emoted a death scene probably not equalled since the days of
the melodrama. The killer fled.
"Quick! the cops!" another reporter yelled, tugging at the patsy's
arm.
'Where I can go?" the patsy asked wildly.
"Follow me!"
The reporter led him out of the speak and around the corner
to a grocery store which had one of those big, old-fashioned bread
baskets in front of it. "Jump in!" the reporter ordered. The patsy
did, and the reporter slammed down the wooden cover and locked it.
Several hours later, a cop drowsily walking the midnight-to-8
A.M. post in the neighborhood heard muffled cries from the big
basket and freed the poor fellow. He could make no sense out of
his incoherent story and advised him to go straight home and stay
there till he sobered up. Which he apparently did.
At least, he never returned to the scene of the murder, and that
was all that the essentially kind reporters had hoped for.
The Righteous
Do Not
Bow
While Prohibition was still just a fanatic's dream and not yet a
public nightmare, a portly and commanding figure attired in the
height of Southern Congressional elegance boarded a trolley car
in Washington, D.C., and eased his plump broad bottom onto a hard
cane seat up front where the quality folk like to ride.
"Cotton Tom" Heflin, then a Representative and later the re-
sounding, never-quiet voice of Alabama in the United States Senate,
wore a broad-brimmed black felt hat, a long frock coat, striped
trousers and patent leather shoes with spats. Under his wide, floppy,
blue bow tie, a cream-colored vest rippled down his ample paunch,
and his black-ribboned pince-nez glasses added a misleadingly
scholarly effect to his appearance.
He was, every inch of his 6 foot 2 frame, every ounce of his more
than 200 pounds, a legislator, and his law-making preoccupations
were as varied and antiquated as his attire.
In his forty years in public office, with more than a quarter of a
century of that stentorian service spent in Congress, Cotton Tom
fiercely championed white supremacy and higher cotton prices for
his constituents back home. (But, as he used to say fondly, he was
proudest of his bill which forever set aside the second Sunday in
May as national Mothers Day.)
With equal vigor, he denounced the Catholic Church, Wall
Street, Tammany Hall and the liquor interests, and tirelessly
smoked out the plots of these subversive forces.
At the moment, as the trolley clattered along the broad Capital
135
136 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
avenues, he was most deeply concerned with two issues of the
day: his own pending bill to force racial segregation on the Wash-
ington street cars and the Dry cause. In fact, he was en route to a
meeting of the WCTU to tell the sisters how the battle fared, and
there is a strong suspicion that he had well fortified himself in
advance for the long, dry evening.
Suddenly, his solonic musings were interrupted by an unpar-
donable piece of effrontery. A Negro had refused to yield his seat
to a white lady.
By Gawd, suhl A Nig-rak!
Cotton Tom yanked the bell rope and, as the trolley stopped,
hurled the Negro into the street. He pulled a gun and with more
gallantry than marksmanship fired one shot, missing the Negro but
catching a passerby, a fellow white Southerner from Kentucky at
that, in the backside.
This dbivalric misadventure was quickly smoothed over. Cotton
Tom paid for the Kentuckian's hospital bills, and when he claimed
that he had merely fired in self-defense because the Negro had
attempted to pull a weapon on him, the charges were dropped.
Cotton Tom Heflin was not untypical of the blatherskite Dry
element whose passion, prejudice and intransigeance did so much,
in the beginning, to bring about Prohibition and, in later years, to
wreck their own handiwork. Whom the gods would destroy they
do not necessarily have to first make mad. Stubbornness and arro-
gance can do the trick just as well.
On the floor of the Senate, Cotton Tom once almost got into a
fist fight with that equally fiery but infinitely superior Virginian,
Carter Glass, and the Vice President forced both to resume their
seats.
Beset by "plots" on all sides, Cotton Tom charged that the
Knights of Columbus, at the behest of the Vatican, were trying
t < et ,, US into war ^^ then anti-Catholic Mexico. He received
a "tip" from Detroit that he was to be assassinated with dum-duin
bullets. When some wag sent him a violin and anonymously tipped
the press that Heflin would give a concert at the foot of the
Washington Monument on St. Patrick's Day Cotton Tom was
not amused. He had the violin examined for germs.
In 1928 Al Smith was nominated at the Houston convention, and
Heflin walked out on his own party, charging that it was now
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 137
subsidized by "the liquor interests, Tammany and the Roman
Catholic machine." He campaigned as a "Hoovercrat" and ad-
dressed KKK meetings. 1
In retrospect, '28 was the vintage year of Prohibition and preju-
dice in this country which, Deo volente, we will never see again.
Nakedly, the Dry leaders appealed for the Protestant vote.
At the Ohio Methodist Conference in Springfield, Ohio, that
September, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt
told the 2,000 assembled pastors:
f< You have in your churches more than 600,000 members of the
Methodist churches in Ohio alone. That is enough to swing the
election. The 600,000 have friends in other states. Write to them!
"Every day and every ounce of your energy are needed to rouse
the friends of Prohibition to vote and register . * . Go back to your
pulpits and preach this doctrine/'
"The Democratic candidate has thrown down the challenge/*
sang the sharp soprano voice of The Union Signal, official organ
of the WCTU. "The clergy and members of the church would be
unworthy the name of Christian citizens if they did not accept it."
In Evanston, the WCTU publishing house ran off 10,000,000
leaflets giving Al Smith's voting record "on saloon and liquor bills"
while he was in the New York Legislature. The presses ran day
and night, stopping only once when their rubber rollers melted
from the heat.
At that time, a brilliant Bluenose, a Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa and
widow of a Methodist minister who had been a co-founder of the
Prohibition Party, headed the national WCTU. Plain-faced, square-
jawed, gold-bowed spectacles atip her nose, Mrs. Ella Alexander
Boole was "Cromwellian in her stern Godliness/' a reporter noted,
and she ranged the land for God, for Hoover and for Volstead.
"You can't divorce Prohibition from religion and the home," she
cried.
At the state level, she proudly reported, the WCTU organizations
1 Even Alabama tired of his antics. A mock measure introduced into the
State Legislature urged that he be placed in command of a battleship in
New York Harbor in event of a surprise attack by the Pope. After his
Houston walkout, he was read out of the Democratic Party and in 1930,
seeking Senatorial reelection with a third party, suffered his first defeat
in forty years. Thereafter, he kept in public life only by appointive jobs,
dying at his home in Lafayette, Ala., aged eighty-two, on April 22, 1951.
138 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
published monthly papers "which burned and blazed with en-
thusiasm for the cause, carried ammunition to use against the
enemy and gave information to offset the vicious Wet propaganda."
They provided speakers for rallies, set up instruction schools for
marking ballots, distributed more than 2,000,000 window posters of
Herbert Hoover and erected billboards stating, "The Presidential
highway must be dry/'
In addition to such awesome female energy, there were the loud
male voices of righteousness. Dr. Clarence True Wilson, founder
of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public
Morals, was most strenuous in attacking Al Smith, "the Wet
nullifier of the Constitution."
As his snow white hair, his silken goatee, his mustache and
five learned degrees suggested, Dr. Wilson was privately a gracious
and deeply cultured man. Tolerant of his Wet friends, he went so
far as to say that Clarence Darrow, with whom he often debated
Prohibition, "would have made a wonderful preacher if he had
been soundly converted/ 1 His lively, inquiring mind ranged over
such topics as simplified spelling and the belief that John Wilkes
Booth not only escaped death in the Virginia barn but lived on into
this century in Oklahoma and Texas under aliases.
At the same time, publicly, he was an irresponsible Wahoo on
things like alcohol and tobacco. (The Army was forced to ridicule
his charges that nicotine had "poisoned" the WWI doughboys and
tobacco was responsible for the tremors of "shell shock" victims.)
The mildest doubter about the 18th was "unpatriotic," and the
newspapers, of course, were in the pay of "the Wet propagandists."
He wanted bootleggers killed because "the only good boodegger is
the dead bootlegger." Once, he demanded that President Hoover
call out the United States Marines to make New York and New
Jersey enforce the Dry laws.
From the Methodist Building in Washington, almost directly op-
posite the Capitol, his wild charges and demands emanated almost
weekly in the "clip sheet" of the Methodist Board of Temperance,
Prohibition and Public Morals. You have to look deep into his
background to understand this distressing split personality, per-
sonally so urbane, publicly so irresponsible.
The son of a Methodist preacher who had been converted from
a sailor s life, Dr. Wilson began sermonizing Delaware State
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 139
Prison convicts at the age of fifteen. Two years later he had his own
little pastorate and at eighteen was the youngest deacon ever
admitted to the Methodist ministry. In 1912, he toured the coun-
try in an auto converted into the "Prohibition Water Wagon" and
bravely invaded mines, logging camps and factory districts.
Still in his twenties, he spearheaded a drive in Santa Monica
to dose its fourteen saloons and wholesale liquor establishments,
and the town obligingly went Dry by eighty-seven votes. In
Newark, N.J., he was successful in lifting the liquor license of a
chain of stores which assertively gave minors liquor purchasing
coupons with their merchandise purchases. He swore that he had
personally seen a sixteen-year-old girl drunk on a sofa in the "wine
room" of one of the stores.
Despite his reckless and obsessed reforming, I doubt that he was
a bigot. At least, when he was pastor of the First Methodist Epis-
copal Church of San Diego, he worked with the Catholic Arch-
bishop to dose every rural saloon in the county. No, I think Dr.
Wilson painfully demonstrates the occupational hazard of the re-
former who can so easily become the slave of his own cause, losing
all perspective and most charity in the process.
We cannot feel so indulgent toward another magnificent shouter
of '28, the ineffable Methodist Bishop James Cannon Jr., of
Virginia. The Bishop's devious labors in the Dry vineyard are related
in full in Virginius Dabney's excellent biography, Dry Messiah
(Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York, 1949). But I think we can dis-
pose of him as the New York News once ticked him off: the
"crusty deric with the cruel little eyes and the scorching pen, a
fanatic, a shrewd politician and a tyrant who once was able to
frighten Congress itself."
Most important because he represented the richest and most
aggressive Dry lobby was Dr. F. Scott McBride, a small town
Presbyterian minister from Ohio who rose to dictatorial eminence as
general superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League.
It was Dr. McBride who contended the League had been ''born
of God," and while the statement is open to debate, there was an
incontestably dose and holy association with the churches.
Various church bodies elected the delegates who made up the
state leagues, which in turn elected the 154-member national board
of directors. In the tight chain of command, the national directors
140 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
named an executive committee of twenty and the general super-
intendent. On nominations by the latter, the state leagues elected
their own superintendents.
The League was thus a disciplined, well-interlocked army of
Drys that knew how to get the vote out. A lanky six-footer with
unruly dark hair, Dr. McBride "never objected when his admirers
compared his appearance and mannerisms to those of Abraham
Lincoln," a reporter caustically observed. Nor did he particularly
object to a candidate's politics so long as he was unswervingly Dry.
Before taking over the national post in 1924, he had been
Illinois district superintendent, intimidating the legislature for a
decade and supporting some questionable politicians. "He has
made a truce with the Devil and says it is holy work," thundered
the Chicago Tribune.
Besides getting out the vote, the Anti-Saloon League knew how
to get the money on the line, too. Wayne B. Wheeler, its general
counsel and a mightier Dry than McBride, admitted to Congress,
the League had spent $35,000,000 to bring about Prohibition. 2
Thereafter, from its blessed inception until mid-1926 when
Wheeler was testifying, the state and national organizations spent
another $9,917,576 to keep Prohibition a grand total of almost
$45,000,000 pre-inflation dollars! and if it weren't for them, said
the League, the cause would wither.
"So you say," rumbled that fighting Wet from Missouri, Senator
Reed, "that Congress would go plumb to the Devil if it were not
for you and your paid agents?"
Wheeler made a surprising confession.
"If we did not stay here," he retorted, "the Volstead Act would
be wiped out."
Wheeler deserves (and has received) a book of his own. Like
so many Dry reformers, he came from a rural area of Ohio, and he
first learned to hate liquor when a drunken hand on his father's
2 Wheder's testimony disclosed that cash as well as cause inspired the
Dry tub-thumpers. In 1919, William J. Bryan received $1 1,000 for speeches,
and between 1914 and 1922, Richmond Pearson Hobson, hero of Santiago
Bay, former Dry Congressman and a father of Prohibition, got $171,249,68.
Tussyfoot" Johnson received $18,307.12 over a dozen years and evangelist
Sain Small, $32,654 for a single year.
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 141
farm rammed a pitchfork into his leg* To work his way through
Oberlin College, he peddled rug-making machines and books and
taught in a rural school He went on to become a lawyer, specializ-
ing in the legal aspects of Prohibition, won more than 2,000 cases
against saloons and often appeared for the Anti-Saloon League be-
fore the Supreme Court.
But he was more than a lawyer, he was a masterful politician. Be-
fore he was thirty, he came up against Mark Hanna, Republican
boss of Ohio, who had little respect for the League busybodies.
"Young man," Hanna told him, "y our kind of people are all right
at a prayer meeting, but they are no good at a caucus/'
Wheeler jumped on his bicycle and campaigned furiously against
the Hanna candidate for the Ohio Senate. Raima's man was de-
feated, and in his book, Inside Story of Prohibition Adoption,
Wheeler crowed, "From that time on, we never had any trouble
with Senator Hanna/'
As a protg6 of the Rev. Dr. Howard Hyde Russell, the Anti-
Saloon League founder, Wheeler joined the League in May, 1893,
before his twenty-fourth birthday, serving until his death in 1927.
He never made more than $8,000 yearly plus travel expenses (his
friends said he accepted his last $2,000 raise under protest), seeming
to get his kicks out of controversy and political power.
Using the card index system to keep tabs on public officials, he
became the most feared and efficient lobbyist in Washington; his
sedate tide, "general counsel and legislative representative," didn't
fool the greenest Congressman. He cracked die whip there and
where it hurt most, back in the home district.
Wheeler deserves the greatest individual credit or reproach for
engineering passage of the 18th Amendment; he had a big part
in drafting the Volstead Act and in selecting the obscure Minnesota
legislator who gave the baby his name. He even was believed to
have framed the 103-word 18th Amendment itself, though Sena-
tor Morris Sheppard of Texas (who introduced the legislation)
somewhat testily denied this.
Nonetheless, Wheeler was the top Dry dog, and when he died,
the New York Times said: " Wayne B. Wheeler' meant the Anti-
Saloon League, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. He was
the spokesman of Dry America/*
142 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
To take up Wheeler s "legislative" duties, Dr. McBride clomped
into Washington from the League's headquarters in Westerville,
Ohio, carrying on with the same high-handedness.
Of the League's divine activities he bragged, 90 per cent "clustered
around" elections (an estimate he hastily cut back to 5 per cent
when he was hauled in for questioning by the Senate Lobby
Committee). Even so, he admitted that the League and its state
branches spent $178,000 on politicking in critical '28.
In 1924, the country had been too benumbed, the politicians
too wary to make Prohibition an issue. Now, in '28, Al Smith
threw down the challenge, and Herbert Hoover adopted the mag-
nificent straddle which completely charmed the Drys. With shouts
and whispers, they united the Methodist Board, the WCTU, the
Anti-Saloon League, the Booles, McBrides and all the rest to help
achieve the Hoover landslide. 8
And yet, oh Dry, where is thy victory? Oh, Boole, where is thy
sting?
Brushing aside many disquieting symptoms of popular resent-
ment, the Drys had stubbornly maintained all along that they repre-
sented the joyful will of the electorate. Now they hastened to make
capital out of Hoover's smashing victory.
And yet ... and yet ...
'Who could tell," says Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday,
"whether the happy warrior from the East Side had been defeated
because he was a Wet, or because he was a Roman Catholic, or
because he was considered a threat to indefinite continuance of the
delights of Coolidge Prosperity, or because he was a Democrat?' 1
Worst of all, the Drys had betrayed the profoundest credo of their
own faith. The Christian walks in humility, and they had been
vainglorious, Of the three great virtues, they possessed faith and
hope in abundance, but lacking charity, they had become as sound-
ing brass and tinkling cymbals. In the flush of victory, they didn't
realize that already their cause was at its peak and about to undergo
a long, slow decline.
And now, in a sincere attempt on our own part to exercise
wl? W S 1 \ let ^ r ? n Feb ' 28 > 1928 ' to ** d Wahoan, Senator
William E Borah, that Hoover called the 18th "a great social and economic
exDeriment etc/ 1
experiment, etc."
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 143
humility and charily, let us segue back in time and try to find out
how these pious, God-fearing Christians, well-intended for the
most part, had gotten themselves into such a pickle.
The answer is a strange and yet wholly American stew com-
pounded not only of politics and personalities, but also of our in-
corrigible native weakness for vaunting prophecies, the equally
native and naive predilection for perfection instanter, and the
sometimes curious ways of our courts, at least to the spectators eye.
Only a computer could nicely assess the relative force of these fac-
tors, but we will do our best.
Early in 1917, the Webb-Kenyon Act, which pinched off liquor
shipments from Wet states into Dry ones, was upheld by the
Supreme Court. The nine austere men in black thereby signalled
the legal pitches that for years to come would whistle hard and
straight over the plate in behalf of the Drys.
When national Prohibition became operative, several states, the
New Jersey Retail Liquor Dealers Association, the Kentucky Dis-
tilleries and Warehouse Company and an Irishman in Boston who
seems to have been just personally mad about the whole thing
took action, one way or another.
For example, Colorado Wets argued that legislative ratification
of the 18th, without an earlier popular referendum, was illegal,
but the State Supreme Court dismissed this dangerous Jacobin
thesis. Subsequently, by a dishearteningly unanimous decision, the
U.S. Supreme Court agreed that the people needn't be consulted
about such important things as amendments to the Constitution.
There were vain hopes that the then-sacrosanct principle of states
rights might preserve at least decent beer for the workingman.
Maryland rejected cooperative enforcement of the Volstead Act,
thereby taking a "nullification" stand that was to outrage the Drys
for years, and its House of Delegates passed a tentative 3.5 per cent
beer bill. The operative date was pegged on a hoped-for decision
by the Supreme Court declaring "concurrent action" in Dry legisla-
tion by the states meant each could establish alcoholic content for
beverages made and sold within its borders. Also, a vain hope.
In these early days, a bi-partisan Wet bloc adopted a 3.5 per cent
beer bill in New Jersey. It was signed by Governor Edwards, and
the state attacked the legality of the 18th and the Volstead Act in
144 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
the Supreme Court. Wisconsin legalized 2.5 per cent beer, and
Massachusetts tried to legitimatize 2.7 beer, but Governor Coolidge
delicately avoided any legal pother by vetoing the measure.
In New York, where the lower house had the effrontery to vote
an investigation of Anti-Saloon League lobbying, Governor Smith
signed a 2.75 beer bill. Whereupon, Senator Sheppard, the in-
corrigible Texas Dry who had helped frame Webb-Kenyon and had
dried up the District of Columbia by statute as well as ramming
through the 18th, denounced the state as revolutionary and anar-
chistic.
Even in the comparatively minor matter of beer and wines, the
Drys would not yield a percentile of added alcoholic comfort
(which might have strengthened their cause), and despite all the
legal and legislative hullabaloo, the Supreme Court went right
down the line, backstopping them. Wet injunctions were denied
or dissolved, Dry victories upheld.
Firmly, the highest court supported the 18th and the right of
Congress to make Vi of 1 per cent the pallid law of the land. As
early as June of 1920, it was patently obvious that the Wets were
dead before that tribunal, and naturally the lower courts, state and
federal, followed the legal fashion (or precedent as lawyers prefer
to call it) which had been set in Washington.
Some incredible legal proceedings ensued. In Rutland, Vermont,
a man's kitchen and pantry were padlocked off from the remainder
of his home by solemn court order. It seems that while six raids
had failed to yield any alcohol, the prosecutor successfully con-
tended that evidence of alcohol had been found.
Even many lawyers who favored the Prohibition ideal couldn't
stomach it in actuality. Quitting his job as an Assistant U.S.
Attorney, Nathaniel J. Harben pointed out in New York that bags,
trunks or vehicles containing liquor could be confiscated, even
though the owners had not consented to the storing of the stuff,
and the law could thus be twisted to serve the purpose of spite and
blackmail.
And when a judge took pride in his work, the results were more
than dismaying. Occasionally, Federal Judge William H. Atwell
hustled up from Texas to sit in Brooklyn as a visiting jurist, and
Dry malefactors trembled.
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 145
"I somehow can't regard a man who was brought up to know
and appreciate good wines and liquor as being altogether a despi-
cable felon/' he once said. "Under the Constitution and the
Volstead Act, there are millions of criminals in this country and
some of them are the finest people anybody would want to know,
and I know several of 'em/'
But the law was the law. As Grand Exalted Ruler of the Elks,
Judge Atwell "jerked the charter" of Elks Lodge No. 1 in New
York when it was padlocked for Prohibition violations, and on the
bench he administered justice in the breath-taking tradition that
Roy Bean had established west of the Pecos.
Rarely was there a suspended sentence. Sometimes Judge Atwell
imposed fines as high as $500 per pint for possession, and occa-
sionally jailed men for toting a flask. 4
Actually, of course, justice could be tampered with mercy and
understanding, but that depended on the judge. In his book, A
Judge Comes of Age (Charles Scribner s Sons, New York, 1940),
Judge John C. Knox, who was to become the senior judge in the
Southern Federal District, relates such a story.
When a desperately poor Negro was brought before him for
running a still, Judge Knox found by questioning the defendant
that an aunt in the South had only a fifteen-year-old boy to help
her tend her forty acres of cotton. 'We can eat down yonder," the
defendant's wife blurted to the judge. So Knox sentenced him
to South Carolina. Fervently, the defendant promised if ever again
he saw New York "even on a road map," he would "overlook it."
While the legal antics outraged and disgusted the Wets, they
greatly comforted the Drys, of course, and perhaps we cannot al-
together blame them for their burgeoning arrogance. On the highest
authority, they now had it that their cause was wholly legal, as well
as wholly righteous.
4 Altogether, a most curious and contradictory man. Judge AtwelTs custom-
made suits had no pockets and only two slits in the jacket for handker-
chiefs and spectacles; he didn't need money pockets because he always paid
by check. When he was the Dallas Zoo Commissioner, he used to take
the lions for Sunday rides in his car. From 1923 almost until his death
in 1961 at the age of ninety-two, he served on the federal bench. Among
his last judicial actions was his unsuccessful attempt to dispute the Supreme
Court ban on segregation in the public schools.
146 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
Putting warm flesh on this legal skeleton were the amazingly
inaccurate predictions for, and claims of, Prohibition's success which
kept its supporters in a state of spinsterish euphoria.
The first Prohibition commissioner, John F. Kramer, foresaw that
only a generation would be required for the total suppression of the
manufacture and sale of intoxicants. This bone-dry Maine-to-Cali-
fornia Utopia, he explained, would await merely the coming of a
generation ignorant of desire or appetite.
Poor fellow, he obviously didn't have his heart in his work, and
he soon went. 5 Again curiously running counter to Biblical truths,
what the Drys demanded were full-throated prophets of old who
would be prophets not without honor in their own country. They
got them, but in a rich Chesterfieldian paradox, they proved not to
be prophets at all.
Consider Roy Asa Haynes, prominent Methodist Episcopal lay-
man, staunch friend of President Harding and like Harding an
Ohio small town editor. For two decades, he edited The Dispatch
in Hillsboro, a city whose possessed ladies had by their daring
demonstrations against the saloons sparked a Midwest petticoat
march back in 1873. 6
From 1921 to 1927, Haynes served as Prohibition Commissioner.
Knowing as early as 1923 that he had the illegal liquor traffic under
control, he said, "and the control becomes more complete and
i i . i i . ^ * -^
The clamor of the dwindling claque cannot drown the voice of
Truth/' he exulted in his book, Prohibition Inside Out.
"Indeed the tumult is eloquent evidence of the desperate plight
5 Dr. Wilson wrote in a magazine article that Wayne Wheeler had ob-
tained Kramer's appointment, and Dr. Wilson was reproached by the
League for using language "rather carelessly." However, the League did
take care of Kramer afterwards, giving him $7,500 for a year's speeches
while a U.S. Senator read into toe record that Kramer had been charged
with receiving $100,000 from Pittsburgh bootleggers for releasing 4,000
cases of whisky. He was not indicted, and testified for the government.
"The women believed in God and in themselves as among His ap-
pointed instruments to destroy the rum power of America . . . ," Frances
Willard wrote tenderly. 'Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr
work or their embroidery and simply swarmed into the drink shops, seated
themselves and watched the proceedings." The thing died down in about
two months.
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 147
in which the outlawed and expiring industry finds itself today. The
death rattle has begun/'
Wets always believed that the strong-willed Ohioan, Wayne
Wheeler, forced the bumbling Ohioan, Roy Haynes, on the com-
plaisant Ohioan, Warren Harding, but Dr. McBride denied this.
"I presume he was looked up and recommended to the President/'
was all that he would concede. 7
Such contrasting authorities as the president of Union College
and that rootin'-tootin' man of God, evangelist Billy Sunday, be-
lieved the 18th was truly there in the Constitution, and there to
stay. Why, said the prexy, there was no more chance of repealing it
"than there is of repealing the 13th Amendment and restoring
slavery." No more chance, said Billy in his saltier fashion, "than
you can dam Niagara Falls with toothpicks/'
When the stickier question was put up to Mabel Willebrandt
whether the Volstead Act could really be enforced, she answered
somewhat testily and redundantly:
"It can be done when we shut up and keep quiet. When, I
cannot say. I am not given to prophecy. It can be enforced through-
out the country, but New York will be the last citadel to fall."
From such a vociferous lady, this quiet-pleasel argument was a
bit unexpected. But Mabel was not the only person who condemned
too much plain talk for restricting Prohibition's full flowering.
In that same unregenerate New York which always exercised the
Drys, Health Commissioner Harris reported 770 deaths from
chronic alcoholism during 1927, the highest since Prohibition had
gone into effect Vaguely, the commissioner blamed the "tremendous
amount of talk that has been indulged in about the Prohibition
question and its natural effect on people to whom such talk would
lend suggestion/'
In one of the most curious diagnoses in medical history, Commis-
sioner Harris added, "It would appear that an explanation for so
7 Under sharp questioning by Senatorial Wets, Dr. McBride denied know-
ing that "under Haynes there was a shocking condition of corruption in the
Prohibition Department" or that at least four times Wheeler had reportedly
saved Haynes' job when he was about to be removed. After leaving govern-
ment, Haynes was president of a fire insurance company, an investment
banker and managing director of an electrical appliance company. Aged
fifty-eight, he died October 20, 1940.
148 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
many deaths from alcohol could be found to some extent in all this
talk."
Actually, "talk" was no more preposterous than some of the other
arguments advanced by the Drys as they stubbornly ignored the
embarrassingly obvious.
In the faS of 1922 a Literary Digest poll of more than 900,000
persons showed a strong Wet undertow, and the Digest's polls were
still being taken seriously at that period.
Only 38.6 per cent favored continued enforcement, 40.8 per
cent were for modification, and 20.6 per cent already wanted out-
right Repeal.
The big economic guns of the Drys like Professor Irving Fisher
of Yale roared louder. Fisher maintained that the savings in the
national "drink bill" and the increased productivity of sober work-
men were annually adding at least $6 loiltions to the national
wealth. In fact, all the wild prosperity of the '20s was attributed to
Prohibition, including the sale of radio sets which soared from
about 60,000 in use in 1922 to almost 15,000,000 about a decade
later. 8
From Washington, the Drys heard the kind of talk they wanted to
hear, and took it at face value. In both his messages to Congress,
Coohdge nasally lectured on obedience to the Constitution and en-
forcement of the Volstead Act. "Failure to support the Constitution
and observe the law ought not to be tolerated by public opinion/' he
said roundly. 'Whatever is necessary," he promised, would be done
"to put into effect the expressed will of the people" (meaning the
18th!) "and the will of Congress as expressed in the Volstead Act."
Cal was speaking to the Good People, the many, many millions
of Americans who sincerely believed in the Dry cause, taking their
stand "as a matter of principle," and when a man stands on prin-
ciple, you know, you re not going to get anywhere with him by
reasonable arguments.
Let us consider one of these innocents who poured wealth,
8 Wet economists soundly rebutted that under Prohibition we were prob-
ably spending more, certainly not less, on drinking, so there were no sav-
ings in the drink bill. A number of factors like improved machinery
accounted for the increase in productivity, and as to radio sets, well, before
Prohibition, there just hadn't been any to speak of, so no comparisons
could be fairly made. Of course, the Depression, which came before Pro-
hibition departed, pretty much disposed of the "prosperity" arguments.
THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW 149
/ and personal example into the cause and yet, as we
shall see in another chapter, eventually became disillusioned.
In his father's house, there were many rooms, but none, not one,
in all that $600,000 mansion on West 54th Street, for cards, for
dancing even the genteel waltz or (horror of horrors!) for drinking.
Like his father and grandfather before him, John Davison Rocke-
feller, Jr., had never tasted a drop. "I was born a teetotaller; all my
life I have been a teetotaller on principle/' he said.
On his maternal side, there had been the same unquestioning
aqueous conviction, for both his mother and grandmother had been
"among the dauntless women of their day who, hating the horrors
of drunkenness, were often found . . . praying on their knees in
the saloons in their ardent desire to save men from the evils that so
commonly sprang from those sources of iniquity."
About the time of WWI, John D. Jr. foremanned a grand
jury that investigated "the white slave infamy," and this almost first
hand experience with the seaminess of life confirmed his inherited
prejudices. He strongly doubted that the traffic could have flour-
ished at all "without connection with strong drink."
From 1900, John D. Jr. and his father poured huge funds into
the Dry coffers. Perhaps $15 to $30 millions, the Wets suspected.
Not anything like that, John D. Jr. protested.
However, when Volstead came along, John D. Jr. did buy up
and dismantle breweries and distilleries, and he was as gifted as
Cal himself in turning a sententiously inspirational phrase.
"Character implies obedience to law, irrespective of whether one
likes the law, believes in it or is opposed to it," he once said with
a masterful disregard of such American fundaments as the Boston
Tea Party and the Revolution of 76.
"The feelings on the part of many people that the 18th Amend-
ment is an infringement of personal liberty are absolutely on all
fours with the woman who does not believe in the Customs laws
and smuggles, and the footpad who says, This law against high-
way robbery cramps my style and forces me to earn a living.' And he
holds up the next automobile that passes." 9
I underscore that gentle John D. Jr. and many other "outstanding
9 In the same edifying spirit, Movie Czar Will H. Hays ordered Holly-
wood to cut out all the Wet wisecracks and kill any episodes that
encourage or reflect disrespect for the Prohibition laws.
150 THE RIGHTEOUS DO NOT BOW
leaders of the community/* as the newspapers usually called them,
were captives of the cause. But they were among the major forces
playing on the minds of the Dry millions, conditioning them to ac-
cept some pretty shocking things which we will get to shortly.
At the root of the trouble though, and let's always keep the dis-
tinction well in mind, were the "bad guys," the hard-core fanatics.
As Theodore Roosevelt said to William Howard Taft (when they
were still speaking), "If ever there was a wicked attitude, it is that
of those fantastic extremists who advocate a law so drastic that it
cannot be enforced, knowing perfectly well that lawlessness and
contempt of the law follow/'
Or, as H. L. Mencken roundly observed, "All the great villainies
of history have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by tee-
totallers/'
The Good Guys
Are Almost
as Bad
Fred M. Palm, a pudgy-faced barber with rather prominent nose
and ears and the resigned expression of a bloodhound, was strug-
gling to support a wife and four hungry young mouths. He had
done time for breaking and entering (just a youthful prank, he
maintained) and also for counterfeiting (another bum rap, he al-
ways said mournfully).
Then, in July of 1927, two patrolmen in Lansing, Mich., halted
this cop-prone unfortunate with drawn guns. They searched his
car and, finding two pints of liquor, charged him with transporting
liquor. Palm was released on bail, but failed to show in court (he
didn't know the case had been advanced from the original date, he
insisted).
Technically, he was a bail jumper, and Patrolmen Frank East-
man and William Knapp went to his home with a bench warrant
for his arrest. In the classic police maneuver, Knapp politely rang
the front doorbell while Eastman circled the house, slipping in
through the unlocked back door.
There was Palm trying to clamber out a window.
"Come on, Palm!" Eastman yelled fiercely, drawing his gun. "The
jig is up!"
Palm surrendered without protest. Though the cops had no search
warrant, Eastman found a partly filled bottle of gin, and in the
sportive way the police often interpreted search-ana-seizure during
Prohibition, took it as evidence.
Three days later, Palm pleaded guilty to the original transporta-
151
152 THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD
tion charge. Judge Leland W. Carr gave him a sentence of six
months to two years which Palm thought was all, and bad enough.
Then he was confronted with a second charge:
To wi^ that he did then and there, on September 27, 1927, in
Lansing, Michigan, unlawfully have in his possession fourteen
ounces of dry gin, contrary to the form of the statute in such cases
and against the peace and dignity of the people of the State of
Michigan.
Palm again pleaded guilty*
"Have you anything to say concerning why sentence should not
he pronounced?"
Palm shook his head.
"The sentence of this court is that you be confined in the State
Prison at Jackson at hard labor for life! 9
Yes, life!
Michigan, twenty-sixth state in the Union, which had known
civilization since the 1600s, was giving its bootleggers the same
maximum term that it gave to murderers.
This monstrous result was achieved by hooking up the state's
new habitual criminal law, modelled after the New York Baumes
law, with its severe attitude toward Prohibition violations. Four
felony convictions made life imprisonment automatic. And, in
Michigan, mere possession was a felony, though nationally it was
only a misdemeanor unless somehow connected with a sale. 1
As the "pint-of-gin lifer" went to Jackson, there were outcries
not only from the professional Wets but also from many anti-
quarians who called to mind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
What about search-and-seizure without warrant? What about cruel
and unusual punishment?
By law, Judge Carr had to hand down the life sentence, but he
was not unduly depressed about it. Under the wholesome new
code, he predicted, bootlegging would die out in Michigan. The
State Supreme Court backed him up. "Experience teaches that the
fear of severe punishment is more likely to rid the state of prof es-
1 Under Indiana's rough but not entirely medieval state Prohibition law,
gift, possession, purchase or transportation on the person could result in jail
sentence and fine, and just the swell of liquor in glasses or other containers
was prima fade proof of a speakeasy.
THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD 153
sional criminals than any effort looking to their reformation," the
court explained.
Down in Washington, the Supreme Court refused to intervene.
Nor was Palm the only victim of what the Chicago Tribune
called "savage punishment inconsistent with humanity and reason,
against natural feeling and against the nature and the purpose of
the law itself/' Three other men and a woman, the mother of ten
children, also drew life terms. 2
The Tribune thundered at Michigan, likening the situation to
that sorry episode in Massachusetts which saw the burning of the
witches of Salem, "the gawks and gossips ... the half-wits and
incompetents of the village" and identified Salem in American his-
tory as nothing else in Massachusetts could have done. Similarly,
Michigan's law would "arouse general indignation and horror."
Early in 1929, the Michigan legislators got the point, eliminating
Prohibition offenses and other minor felonies from the habitual
criminal law. Later, the five lifers had their terms reduced by
Governor Fred W. Green to 7^-to-lS years which does not seem
exactly the penultimate in gubernatorial charity.
After serving almost six years, Fred Palm was paroled, and on a
July night in 1933, he walked hopefully into a free, though severely
depressed world. "Maybe I can open a small barber shop," he said
tentatively. "They tell me things are pretty tough. Soup lines and
all that. But I've got a good trade, and I'm still young."
The Michigan law, along with the later national Jones Act which
imposed five-year sentences and $10,000 fines for Prohibition viola-
tions, reflected the rising panic of the Drys. Even the Wickersham
Commission conceded that unique and enormous efforts had been
made to enforce Prohibition. 8 But enforcement was nowhere in
sight, so the answer was heavier penalties, heavier penalties.
2 Dr. Clarence True Wilson's Christian reflections on the life sentence of
Mrs. Etta Mae Miller were .as follows: "Our only regret is that the woman
was not sentenced to life imprisonment before her ten children were born.
When one has violated the Constitution four times, he or she is proved to
be a habitual criminal and should be segregated from society to prevent the
production of subnormal offspring."
3 "There has been more sustained pressure to enforce this law than on
the whole has been true of any other federal statute/' WC acknowledged.
"No other federal law has had such elaborate state and federal enforcing
machinery put behind it."
154 THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD
In their frustration, the Drys simply could not recognize that
an impossible law had created an impossible situation beyond the
power of anyone to solve.
Admittedly, at first, the administration of Prohibition had been
a frightful bureaucratic mess. The bosses and agents were con-
stantly changing, and in some districts, an administrator's average
length of service was only six months. In fact, for the first eleven
years, the turnover in the higher administrative jobs was almost 39
per cent; in the enforcement branch almost 40 per cent.
A reliable indication of the calibre of these agents is what hap-
pened when Congress established the Bureau of Prohibition, follow-
ing the eye-opening Senatorial investigation of 1926.
The old Prohibition employees were now required to take Civil
Service examinations; 59 per cent of them flunked.
The whole dreary story is told in some 1650 pages of testimony
and finding by the Senate subcommittee of the Judiciary Com-
mittee. However, except as a gruesome story for efficiency experts
and industrial management consultants, I don't believe many
readers would care to pursue the details.
Instead, consider what happened when a military hero, a thirty-
year Army veteran who had seen service in the Spanish-American
War and World War I, was drafted into service in 1925 to ginger
up enforcement.
Brigadier General Lincoln C. Andrews was named Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury, and for the first time, Customs, Coast
Guard and the Prohibition Unit were re-grouped under a single
official to make a potent task force. In all, General Andrews com-
manded almost 15,000 troops, including 2,000 Prohibition in-
spectors and investigators, 8,000 Coast Guardsmen, 500 vessels in-
cluding the special rum fleet and the several thousand Customs
inspectors at various ports.
Not only the Drys but also the newspapers expected great things
of him. He was "grim," "hard-boiled," "the type that exudes effi-
ciency," and one headline cried respectfully:
WEST POINTER IS FOCH OF DRIVE ON RUM
General Andrews responded by explaining his objectives with a
profusion of military terms. Strategically, he likened the Justice
and Treasury Departments to "two branches of any army. The
THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD 155
job of one being to get information and pave the way for the main
attack, and that of the other to make the main assault. The first
is ours here in the Treasury."
Then he went to work on the tactical details. He offered 25
per cent of any fine as a reward (with a $50,000 maximum) for
tips on liquor shipments coming by sea.
He journeyed to England and was "100,000 per cent successful"
in persuading our reluctant cousins to tighten up enforcement of
their Colonial laws to staunch the rum flow into the U.S. This
dabbling in the internal affairs of another country he considered
"quite an advanced step in international relations."
From President Coolidge, he wangled an order authorizing the
appointment of local officials as federal Dry agents ("a sneak and
snoop" order, said New Jersey Senator Edwards). He tried to set
up mobile squads and change the personnel so bootleggers could
not "get to know the man who is watching him and pay him
$1,000 per month to look the other way."
"Is much of that being done now?" a scandalized Congressman
asked.
"Unquestionably," said the general. He was learning.
The year after he so confidently took up arms, he was saying that
under the current conditions, the Volstead Act could not be en-
forced. His men had seized 172,000 stills and other manufacturing
devices in the year, but they represented probably only one in ten
of those actually in operation. To patrol the borders, he needed
12,000 men, about the size of an Army division.
The next year, exit General Andrews.
In a wistful attempt to change its luck, the government then
named a civilian, former Lieutenant Governor Seymour Lowman
of upstate New York, and within four months of his appointment,
Lowman was making a nervous appearance before the bi-annual
convention of the Anti-Saloon League. The prohibition "armada"
stood at an all-time high of 23,700, which he particularized as
follows:
"The personnel of the Prohibition Bureau is now 4,200, an in-
crease of about 700 over last year,
'The Customs Bureau has about 8,500 employees and operates
to prevent liquor smuggling as well as other commodities.
156 THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD
"The Coast Guard is composed of over 1 1,000 officers and men
and more than 750 boats of all sizes/'
Of course, considering that Custom and Coast Guard had a few
additional chores beyond rum chasing, this was a little white fib,
and nobody knew it better than the Anti-Saloon Leaguers. After
1925, their Year Books had dropped the tables showing arrests for
all causes and arrests for drunkenness. The showing was becoming
too unfavorable to Prohibition.
Other authorities were far less discreet than Lowman. Bluntly,
U.S. Attorney Emory Buckner of New York, who had certainly
done his share of Dry prosecuting, said that Prohibition was not
being, and would not be, "substantially enforced." To a squirming
group of 200 New Jersey clergymen, he spelled out the only sensible
alternatives:
"The government must come through with the price of enforce-
ment or change not only the Volstead Act but also the Constitution
in order to meet precisely what Congress and the taxpayers are
11 *i JL J
willing to support.
And what was the price tag of genuine enforcement?
Already, from public testimony by General Andrews and Dr.
James M. Doran, a career chemist in the Bureau of Internal
Revenue who was promoted to Commissioner of Prohibition, the
answer was on record, 4
Without cooperation by the states, the enforcement bill would
be $300,000,000 yearly!
Now, in a passing flight of whimsy, let's assume that all the
states would cooperate or that, alternatively, Congress would shell
out all those millions. What would the results be?
Total disaster!
In its first decade, federal enforcement had cost a total of
$215,377,757 and resulted in some 550,000 arrests, more than 343,-
000 convictions and $56,683,025 in fines. The pace had been
4 A WCTUite, Dr. Doran's wife, Roxana, invented non-alcoholic cock-
tap, her Lime Fizz and Mint Julep receiving nationwide Dry attention.
Prohibition took something away from the American people/' she said, "but
we can give them something just as good-a cocktail that satisfies but does
not inebriate." Her slogan for America, Till the national goblet legiti-
mately." & 6
THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD 157
stepped up from 10,548 arrests and 4,315 convictions in 1920 to
66,878 arrests and 56,546 convictions in 1929.
In the process, the strain on the courts and penal system had
been almost intolerable and, remember, these statistics do not re-
flect enforcement activity at the state level. There simply weren't
enough judges or jailhouses in the land to cope with total enforce-
ment.
Just for the year 1930, the federal Prohibition prosecutions which
were concluded totalled almost eight times the number of all
federal prosecutions that had been pending back in 1914. Such
cases represented about half of all the cases taken to federal court.
As the quantity of prosecution increased, the quality declined.
Harried prosecutors resorted to the ''bargain method" of accepting
guilty pleas to minor offenses for which the defendants received
small fines or tap-on-the-wrist jail terms.
More than two-fifths of all federal convictions resulted in some
degree of imprisonment, but a spotcheck by the Wickersham Com-
mission disclosed some urban districts with over-loaded dockets
where only 4 or 5 per cent of the sentences had any jail bite. Thus,
the commission pointed out, the whisky underworld could 'reckon
protection of its employees in the overhead."
And the federal courts themselves, once tribunals "of exceptional
dignity," feared for "the efficiency and dispatch of their criminal
business," had descended almost to the level of police courts, fre-
quented by criminal lawyers and bail bondsmen. The overload of
whisky prosecutions "has injured their dignity, impaired their effi-
ciency and endangered the wholesome respect for them which once
obtained," WC sadly concluded.
I apologize for so copiously using one source, but the commission,
you will recall, was tilted in favor of Prohibition, and its mem-
bership included jurists, legal scholars and eminent practitioners
before the bar. Hence, its anathemas on the court-wrecking effects
of even partial enforcement are supremely convincing. I will con-
tinue WCs indictment:
"Prosecutors, federal and state . . . have been appointed and
elected too often under pressure of organizations concerned only
with Prohibition, as if nothing else were to be considered in the
conduct of criminal justice . . . Under the pressure to make a
158 THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD
record in such cases . . . speeches such as had not been known
in common-law courts since the 17th Century have become not
uncommon in our criminal courts in the last decade.
"High-handed methods, unreasonable searches and seizures, law-
less interference with personal and property rights have had a bad
effect on the work of prosecution . . .
'Instances of difficulty in procuring execution of warrants by
United States marshals, scandals in the carrying out of orders for
the destruction of seized liquors, failure to serve orders in padlock
injunction cases, and carrying on of illicit production and distribu-
tion under protection of a marshal or his assistants (sic/), have
brought the executive arm of the federal courts into disrespect . . .
"The procuring of permits, the giving of legal advice to beer
rings and organizations of bootleggers, and the acting as go-between
between law-breakers and political organizations with a view to
protection on one side and campaign contributions on the other,
have made conspicuous a type of politician lawyer who had been
absent from the federal courts in the past . . .
"There has been a general bad effect upon the whole administra-
tion of justice. There has been a tendency to appraise judges solely
by their zeal in liquor prosecutions. In consequence, the civil busi-
ness of the courts has often been delayed or interfered with."
And so on.
In the middle of Prohibition's first year, the federal penal in-
stitutions had contained less than 5,300 prisoners serving terms of
more than a year. By mid-1930, in the five leading federal pens,
almost as many (4,296) were doing time just for liquor violations;
they accounted for more than a third of the total 12,332 popula-
tion.
And there were thousands upon thousands more in county jails
and state prisons all over the country. The grand total came to
50,000, according to some estimates.
If partial enforcement produced these results, full compliance
would be nightmarish! And the federal budget would not be merely
unbalanced, it would be totally deranged. Between enforcement
costs and the lost liquor taxes, Wets charged, Prohibition cost the
country a billion dollars yearly. Nor could the Feds rely on the
states for the backstopping they so badly needed. Half-way through
the dreary thirteen-year game, Frederick Lewis Allen says, the
THE GOOD GUYS ARE ALMOST AS BAD 159
states' financial expenditures for enforcement were about an eighth
of what they spent to enforce their fish-and-game laws.
Once, when Congress was asked to give General Andrews almost
$2,700,000 in extra funds and push his 'army" past the 4,000
mark, Wet Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia impishly proposed an
astronomical raise. He announced an amendment to provide An-
drews with 250,000 agents at an estimated cost of $200,000,000
yearly and thus "show the American people what real Prohibition
enforcement would cost."
But though the Drys controlled Congress, they backed away from
the realistic High Cost of Enforcement. Instead, they nagged,
scolded, bulldozed and threatened the public, hoping for a miracu-
lous turn in sentiment. And they had a miracle coming to them for
their efforts, they felt.
"The dominating thought behind Prohibition/' explained Senator
Sheppard, "is that the ultimate authority for all righteous activity is
a righteous God, and that the most imperative duty resting on man-
kind is to bring all human documents, constitutions, laws and prac-
tices into harmony with His will."
The fallacy, of course, was Sheppard's widely shared assumption
that only the Drys served as God's spokesmen on earth. A good
decade before the 18th, one of the country's most eminent ec-
clesiastics had foreseen the problem in true perspective.
"Prohibitionists all over the country are making an effort to
suppress the use of intoxicating liquors/' Cardinal Gibbons told a
Confirmation class in Baltimore, "and while I hope they will suc-
ceed, I don't think they will.
"Reform must come from within and not from without. You
cannot legislate for virtue/'
i6
Here, Here,
What's
Going On!
The United States Civil Service examination (Series No. 1,
June 1927) for Prohibition agents, investigators and alcohol and
brewery inspectors posed this "Practical Question":
"Assume that you are a Prohibition officer working occasionally
with Agents Jenkins and Thompson, both of whom you have
known for about six months. During the progress of an important
investigation, upon which all three of you are engaged, Agent
Jenkins Approaches you with the statement that Thompson is
crooked' and is negotiating regularly with violators of the National
Prohibition Act. Assume such facts as you may desire, not incon-
sistent with those given here, and state, in approximately 150 words,
what, in your opinion, you should do under the circumstances/'
A very, very good question.
At federal, state and local levels alike, Prohibition was so soiled
with graft and dirty politics that hyperbole becomes understate-
ment in attempting to describe it.
Gaston B. Means, a rascally Department of Justice detective, was
rarely caught in a truth, but his lurid story about collecting Prohibi-
tion payoffs for federal protection under the Harding administration
seemed plausible to many persons, and not only Democrats. While
he watched from one room in a New York hotel, he swore, the
protection buyers dropped $500 to $1000 in cash into a goldfish
bowl in an adjoining room.
In this somewhat circuitous manner, Means claimed, he col-
lected $7,000,000 which he turned over to Jess Smith, collector
160
HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON! 161
for the "Ohio Gang ' in Washington. Smith, who roomed with
Attorney General Daugherty, was later the victim of a questionable
suicide.
Certainly, during the first seven years of enforcement, "the char-
acter and appearance" of many Prohibition agents left U.S. Attor-
neys with "no confidence in the case," and that's the wringing wet
Wickersham Commission talking again. Or, as Mabel Willebrandt
bluntly put it, "It is the lack of quality of the man power in the
Prohibition job, rather than the lack of quality, which has made
the work ineffective."
Major Chester P. Mills, an honest Dry administrator in New
York, charged in Collier's Weekly in 1927 that "three fourths of
the 2,500 Dry agents are ward heelers and sycophants named by
the politicians." One political boss flatly told Mills to let him control
the patronage of his office or quit the job himself.
Among the ingratiating candidates with heavy political support
were a roughneck who had only recently shot a man in a speakeasy
brawl and another impeccable character who had been caught
carrying burglar's tools. Mills was kicked upstairs to an innocuous
job, and an ex-crook whom he had fired as an agent was reinstated
;iintil he was indicted for Prohibition conspiracy.
Enforcement was so corrupt that at one time three Internal
Revenue divisions were concurrently spying on each other and
the Anti-Saloon League, which had its own spies, was spying on
all three. "Some days my arm gets tired signing orders of dismissal,"
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Lowman complained.
There were pressing reasons for his writer's cramp:
In New York state, a former Prohibition administrator, the
former enforcement chief and several Dry agents were indicted in
a bribe scandal estimated at almost $50,000 ... In Florida, a
former Dry chief was accused of having collected $35,000 monthly
in bribes ... In Pennsylvania, a Prohibition Unit stenographer
admitted having accepted $6,000 to feed confidential information
to a brewer.
The cases could be multiplied dozens of times over, and the same
sticky-fingered business was going on all down the line.
The former head of the Prohibition Enforcement Department in
a Far West state was sentenced to five years for violating the state
liquor law. A Midwest state treasurer, who had enjoyed Anti-
162 HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON!
Saloon League backing, was convicted of having tried to arranoe
federal protection for certain breweries that were turning out real
beer.
Down in Florida, practically an entire city administration, includ-
ing the mayor, chief of police, fire chief, president of the city council
and county commissioner, ran afoul of a federal liquor indictment.
In a New Jersey town across the Hudson River from New York,
the mayor, police chief, two detectives, a Customs inspector, a
sergeant of the New York City police marine division and eight
others were found guilty of conspiracy. The town was small, but
not the take. A rum runner admitted that he had paid the indicted
officials $61,000 to protect the landing of a $1,000,000 liquor cargo.
Naturally, the border cities were peculiarly vulnerable to whole-
sale graft and corruption of once-honest Customs inspectors.
In Detroit, where Customs inspectors on the border patrol were
suspected of divvying up $2,000,000 yearly, a "graft trust" in the
patrol reportedly screened new members for character, or rather
lack of it, and gave fatherly instructions in the way the take was
operated.
This constant tutelage was necessary inasmuch as 175 inspectors
were dismissed in a little over a year in a force of 129 men, repre-
senting a turnover of better than 135 per cent. Many of the border
patrol, it was charged, received from $500 to $1,000 monthly from
a fixed tariff of graft imposed on smugglers.
The basic rate per case was $1.87 for whisky and 29V cents for
beer, with rebates given to any ring tipping off the authorities to
unethical smugglers who had evaded the levy. In addition, there
were sometimes "free nights" on the river. By making a flat pay-
ment, the smugglers could run in as much liquor as their little boats
would carry.
Inland, there were the same scandalous goings-on. Brigadier Gen-
eral Smedley D. Butler, the rough-tongued hero who directed the
Marine Corps, was drafted to dean up die mess in Philadelphia and
with even more noise than General Andrews, he took over on
January 1, 1924 as the city's Director of Public Safety.
In a heU's-fire inaugural address, he told his bluecoats:
"The Lieutenants know their districts and the bad spots in them.
Let them go out and clean them up. We won't want any help from
HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON! 163
reformers. We don't want any help from the Marines, or the
Constabulary, or anybody else.
"Good God Almighty, men! Let's do the damned thing ourselves!
Hell! We don't want any pussyfooting squads around. Put on your
uniforms and go after 'em . . ."
When this simple frontal assault failed, Butler resorted to more
intricate military maneuvers. To free the cops from the domination
of ward leaders, he entirely redistricted the police. He set up a
75-man roving squad to hit speaks and night clubs. He launched
one spectacular raid after another.
But energy, showmanship, profanity, even unquestioned honesty
weren't enough. Within two years, President Coolidge ordered him
back to active duty with the Marine Corps, and as one dispassionate
observer put it, 'apparently he left the situation little better than
he found it." Less than two years later, while Philadelphia's Mayor
Mackey was descanting in a church on civic virtue, county detec-
tives were arresting a whole precinct of his cops. The Director of
Public Safety resigned, and some 100 policemen from inspector
down were jailed, arrested, fired or suspended.
During the first half dozen years or Prohibition, the beverage of
choice in Pittsburgh, widely available at soft drink bars and sand-
wich counters as well as the speaks, was "mooney," a moonshine
whisky aptly described by one writer as "this malodorous firewater."
But it was cheap, selling at $2 per gallon.
Then after 1926, something called "administration booze" made
its appearance. It was twice as expensive and twice as bad as the
old stuff and often a greenish scum developed if it were left
standing a few days. However, honest bonifaces who reverted to the
true and tested "mooney" were raided, while purveyors of the
"administration" brackwater received protection.
Eventually, two police magistrates, two state legislators, five ward
chairmen and some twenty policemen, mostly of the rank of inspec-
tor, were indicted, but practically all of them beat the rap.
To the professional Drys and the paid Dry agents alike, New
York state was the Sodom and Gomorrah of Prohibition. Early in
1923, the Legislature repealed the Mullan-Gage Law, the state's
enforcement act. Before Governor Smith had a chance to announce
his position, the Drys goaded easy-going Warren Harding into issu-
ing a heavy-handed warning to Al and the Empire State.
164 HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON!
If any state dragged its feet, the President said, the Feds would
be "compelled" to enter its "territory and jurisdiction ' to set up the
necessary police and judicial functions, whereupon "the most diffi-
cult and trying situations would inevitably arise/' This velvet fist in
an iron glove failed to impress Al. Two weeks later, he signed the
repealer, and the Feds thereafter had to pretty much go it alone,
with token cooperation at best from the prospering cops.
For the first dozen fiscal years of Prohibition, Justice Department
records disclosed $11,473,601 in fines, and sentences totalling 2,378
years, 4 months and 8 days were imposed on 97,665 persons con-
victed of federal violations in New York state. If my laborious long-
hand calculations are correct, that represents an average fine of a
little more than $117 and a jail sentence of about eight days which
makes you wonder if all the enforcement effort had been worth it.
Certainly the cops collected far more than the federal finemasters.
In the late '20s, William M. Bennett, a fighting Welsh Quaker
and Dry candidate for the New York Republican mayoralty nom-
ination, said the 32,000 speakeasies were paying at least $1,000
each yearly for protection. "I feel the Republican Party must have
a candidate who will close them up," he thundered. "I can close
them, and I will."
But, in the devious ways of the Dry politicians, they withheld
financial support from their own man. They simply didn't dare
make Prohibition an issue in New York City which only two
years earlier had voted 8-to-l against Volsteadism in a state liquor
referendum.
As the arrangement was generally understood, the speaks con-
tributed chiefly to the inspector in their particular district. The
breweries and beer distributors handled the beat cops who received
$1 for each half-barrel of beer dropped on their post.
When Rum Row deliveries were made on the beaches of Long
Island, cops rode shotgun as the trucks rumbled through Nassau
County along Merrick Road, nicknamed "Bootleggers' Boulevard."
They discouraged not only hijackers but also nosy Dry agents.
"Sorry, fellows," they'd say if the Feds stopped them. "I just
pinched this one myself, and I'm taking it to the stationhouse."
For this double protection service, the cops received $100 for escort-
ing beer trucks, $500 or more for chaperoning whisky loads.
According to a plaindothesman's testimony before an official
HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON! 165
investigating committee, "high-class, respectable, open-door places"
operated by ethical former saloon keepers were protected by the
blue membership card of the "Liberty League." Theye were exempt
from raids except those specifically authorized by the police higher-
ups, he said.
When one of the investigators accused the witness of belonging
to the "ring" that worked with the blue card licensees, he retorted,
"No, I didn't! If I belonged to that ring, I'd be a magistrate today,
or something,"
Deplorable as it sounds, there also were opportunities for cop to
doublecross cop. I strongly doubt that the following complaint ever
was formally entered on the blotter, but a veteran New York police
reporter delightedly assures me that the larceny really did take
place.
A precinct which covered part of Greenwich Village, the chief
occupation of which was speakeasies, sent a trusted officer around
each week to make the collections. One week, a new face appeared
a day early, explaining there had been a change in arrangements.
Only when the authorized collector showed next day was the fraud
discovered. To know the setup so perfecdy, the impostor most
probably had been a cop and one who at some time or other had
been attached to that precinct. However, though some of the best
detective brains in the department worked on the problem, the
rogue grafter was never unmasked, so far as I know.
To amateur Dry criminologists like F. Scott McBride, the root
of the trouble lay in the profligate cities. "The city is far behind
the country," he once enunciated, "Our job is trying to educate
the city people, to give them a chance to catch up with the people in
the rural districts. In my old home town in Ohio, the people are
Dry, and are living in a new world. They are making real progress."
Actually, many of the little places were just as Wet as New
York, though maybe they were more discreet in pulling down
the shades. But, every so often, the shades flew up disconcertingly,
as in Gypsum, Kansas, when the city marshal allowed he would re-
sign after forty bootleggers had been nabbed in a county roundup.
The ethical rationalizations of the cops were interesting. One
June night, a patrolman in Hempstead, L.L, together with a girl
and two other couples, went on a beach party in nearby Long
Beach and there stumbled upon a smuggling operation. Later, when
166 HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON!
the suspects were tried, the Hempstead cop had to testify. He
admitted having accepted gifts of money and liquor, but denied
being a grafter.
"You'd call it graft if I were a cop at Long Beach/' he said,
drawing a delicate jurisdictional distinction. "But being a cop in
Hempstead, I just call it good money/'
Even when you could persuade the cops to make pinches, you
couldn't trust them with the evidence which they often sold, drank
themselves or gave away to friends. If the cops were so disposed,
they could "toss the joint into the street"; that is, physically wreck it.
On the other hand, when a friend had to be arrested, they could
make the charge innocuous possession, rather than sale. Sometimes,
the enforcement sleuths went even further.
According to Congressman LaGuardia, New York Dry agents
had to read The Social Register before making raids. When a Pro-
hibition chief retorted that the charge was "absolutely ridiculous,"
LaGuardia gave a specific instance of what he had in mind. An
agent raided the home of a socialite reputedly related to Chief
Justice Taft and seized seventy-six cases of assorted liquors, wines,
champagne and whisky, LaGuardia said. His understanding was
that "the liquor was returned with apologies without even a form
of a hearing before a proper United States official" and the socially
offensive agent dismissed.
"I want to determine whether there is to be one sort of enforce-
ment for the rich and another for the poor," LaGuardia cried.
"Whether it is necessary for an enforcement agency to carry a
social Who's Who' along with the statutes of the United States
in enforcing law in New York City."
To the average Joe, who wanted to respect his government even
if he couldn't personally obey the Volstead Act, another sickening
aspect of enforcement was die federal game of entrapment. We
have previously mentioned the government's adventures in operat-
ing its own speakeasies; more and more of them turned up from
New York to Elizabeth City, N.C., to Peoria.
In his book, The Rape of Prohibition, Senator Reed charged
that with the approval of Prohibition officials, a Federal judge for
the northern district of New York instructed Dry agents to engage
in smuggling and rum running. They were supplied with govern-
HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON! 167
ment cash and a car so they could buy liquor in Canada and then
sell it to bootleggers in the neighborhood of Troy and Albany.
By accident, a private lawsuit disclosed the existence of the
"Bridge Whist Club/' a government-owned, government-operated
speak on E. 44th Street near Fifth Avenue in New York. Con-
gressman LaGuardia took it from there.
In its six months' existence, he found, this "prize of stool pigeon
ventures" had run through $45,000 in Federal funds with such
interesting expenditures as $28 for two alpaca coats for the bar-
tenders, $95 for the engraved membership cards and $95 as a
down payment on an upright piano.
Worse, there were cases where enforcement officials at the highest
level dirtied their hands with entrapment schemes.
According to Major J. D. Meyer, the United States Attorney at
Charleston, a raid was made on the "King of the South Carolina
Boodeggers" that yielded eleven stills and 1,300 gallons of liquor.
Perhaps in bereavement for the brother who was killed during the
raid, the "King" decided to quit the bootlegging racket.
Washington then proposed that he be hired as an undercover
man to clean out a section of Berkley County known as "Hell's
Hole" and also to trap a Dry agent suspected of being on the take.
So Major Meyer was instructed to nol-pros the pending liquor
violation against the "King."
Meyer related the scene that took place in Mabel Willebrandt's
office in the Department of Justice when Mabel, and the Prohibi-
tion Administrator for the Southeastern States, plus a special As-
sistant Attorney General all spelled out to him the plans to hire the
"King" because he knew more than anyone else about the illicit
liquor traffic. The arrangement was confirmed in General Andrews'
office.
But all of this the corruption high and low, the favoritism, the
bumbling wasn't the worst of it. What really upset people was
murder. The guns of the law, it seemed, roared almost as loud as
the gangland "backfire" and far more recklessly. Hundreds of men,
even women and children, were killed, and the Prohibition Bureau
did its best to minimize or suppress the evidence.
During the first seven years, Senator Millard Tydings of Mary-
land charged in a magazine article, there were fifty-one killings by
168 HERE, HERE, WHATS GOING ON!
federal officers which the Bureau totally ignored in its records. He
itemized them; hut even as a Congressman, he couldn't get at all
the Bureau files. Thus, of five killings on his list, he could not
determine "whether there were two or three officers named Griffin
in the service, or whether these killings were all hy one man!"
In a nationwide survey of "shotgun enforcement" on hoth state
and federal level, the New York American tallied 1,550 fatalities
from 1920 through 1930, of which 1,056 were civilians. "How
many hundreds more have been killed, no one can say with positive-
ness," the newspaper added.
The heaviest violence seemed concentrated in the Southern states,
which was borne out in an independent study of the official records
by Basil Manly, Washington correspondent for the Evening World.
It was the maddening practice of the federal authorities to inter-
vene and protect a Dry agent who had killed, wantonly or other-
wise. Late in 1928, the Chicago Tribune listed twenty-three cases
in which local murder or manslaughter indictments had been re-
turned against agents, all of whom escaped punishment through
the over-riding federal power.
We had previously cited the killing of Jacob Hanson, an Elks'
lodge secretary, who fatally mistook roughly dressed Coast Guards-
men near Niagara Falls for holdupmen. When two CG men were
indicted for second degree manslaughter in the case, the United
States Attorney took up their defense, and the New York World
commented scathingly, "No shyster lawyer skating on the edge of
disbarment has gone farther to defeat justice than this assistant to
the Attorney General of the United States/'
The federal prosecutor got the case out of the state court and
into a federal tribunal, not in Buffalo near the scene of the shooting,
but at Elmira, halfway across the state which also happened
to be Assistant Treasury Secretary Lowman's home town. Further,
Lowman attended the proceedings and, the newspapers reported,
scanned the jury list. One defendant was discharged by the court,
while the jury (which at one time stood 11-to-l for conviction)
finally deadlocked after twenty hours on the fate of the second
Coast Guardsman. In a retrial at Rochester, about halfway between
Buffalo and Elmira, he was acquitted after eleven hours of jury
deliberation. To the Washington Evening Star, the Hanson case
HERE, HERE, WHATS GOING ON! 169
was "an unforgettable blot on Prohibition enforcement in this
country/'
There was similar federal high-handedness when Customs agents
in Plattsburg, New York, drilled a young man through the back
with rifles. A sheriff who tried to serve a state writ on the local chief
of Customs was told: "Don't dare give me that subpoena! I won't
take it, and you are on United States territory/'
Ordinarily, you think of small town bankers as being rather
conservative, under-spoken gentlemen. But C. S. Johnson, president
of the First National Bank of Plattsburg, was so incensed by the
killing that he fired off this telegram to Assistant Secretary Low-
man:
ONE OF YOUR CUSTOMS GUARDS SHOT A PLATTS-
BURG BOY IN THE BACK IN BROAD DAYLIGHT LAST
SATURDAY MORNING STOP THIS COMMUNITY IS
TIRED OF SUCH ACTIONS BY YOUR EMPLOYEES AND
WONDERS IF WE ARE RAPIDLY APPROACHING CONDI-
TIONS WHICH EXIST IN RUSSIA STOP WE PRESUME
THE USUAL STATEMENT THAT THE ASSASSIN WAS
ACTING WITHIN THE LAW WILL BE ISSUED.
Less than two months earlier at the annual Associated Press
luncheon in New York, President Hoover had gloomily pondered
"the possibility that respect for law as law is fading from the sensi-
bilities of our people/' Now, as the protests against continued Dry
killings flooded into the White House, he promised to give his
personal attention to the matter. For the moment, however, he was
closeted with "the bone dry twins," the good Bishop Cannon and
the kindly Senator Wesley Jones, author of the "Five-and-Ten"
Law . . .
Admittedly, the Wets were somewhat trigger-happy in their
propaganda, shouting "Murder!" more often than necessary when
some bootlegger bit die dust. However, if you studied the meagre,
self-serving reports of the Prohibition Bureau (often based solely
on the testimony of the only survivors, the Dry agents), a dis-
quieting pattern became obvious.
As Democratic Senator Edwards of New Jersey pointed out,
many killings resulted from shots fired "as a warning," and many
170 HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON!
fatalities among suspected culprits had been shot in the back,
indicating that they had been fleeing arrest, not resisting it. The
Senator was deplorably cynical about the "suspiciously large num-
ber* of sad finalities in which the agent purportedly "fired without
intention of killing or as a warning/'
"One can stand a foot away from a barn and not hit it if he does
not want to/' Senator Edwards said.
In an independent analysis, the Association Against the Prohibi-
tion Amendment noted "how often agents' shots have missed the
automobile wheels and hit a man and, on the other hand, how
often agents' wild shots, accidentally discharged, have not missed
a man." In its broadside, Reforming America With a Shotgun, the
Association added:
'We are obliged to assume that the law of chance in both cases
works rather uniformly against the unfortunate person who hap-
pens to be in front of the gun."
Consider poor Henry Virkula, a confectioner in Big Falls, Minn.,
who was driving home with his wife and two children one June
night in 1929. Near Little Fork, two Customs inspectors ordered
him to halt. When he didn't stop within ten feet, blasts from a
sawed-off shotgun ripped through the car in twenty-six places,
killing Virkula at the wheel. No liquor was found in the car.
"I fared into the ground," explained a border agent, "and then
fired two more shots, hoping to flatten the tires."
This tragedy took Assistant Secretary Lowman by surprise. He
had not known till then that agents toted riot guns, and he drafted
an order forbidding border patrolmen to carry anything more lethal
than service pistols. He also announced that he was directing his
forces to draw only in self-defense or to prevent a felony a direc-
tive which had already been spelled out more than a year and a half
earlier in the Manud of Instructions for Officers and Agents in
the Field. The trick was to get them to obey it.
Near Vivian, Louisiana, Sylvester Strickland, a Negro, made the
irreparable mistake of walking along a highway on the same spring
night in 1924 that Prohibition Agent Dearie and two deputy sheriffs
were hunting "a Negro rum runner with a reputation as a gunman."
Unexpectedly, the official report stated, the little posse encountered
"a Negro (Strickland) whom the officers took to be the gunman
but who later proved not to be." Understandably, Strickland fled
HERE, HERE, WHAT'S GOING ON! m
as the three strange men converged on him. Then in the foolhardy
way of so many suspects (if you can believe the reports), he sud-
denly stopped "and made a motion with his hand which caused
Agent Dearie to helieve that he was about to draw a gun/'
Dearie shot and killed him.
The report, which did not bother to state whether Strickland
actually was armed, briskly summed up the mistaken-identity man-
slaughter: "Grand Jury at Cadde Parish, Louisiana, ignored the
charge/'
One of the most shocking cases involved Charles P. Gundlacht,
a hospitable farmer with a German weakness for beer, who liked to
press a glass of home brew on strangers passing his farm near
Leonardstown, Maryland. One thirsty wayfarer, a Washington
Prohibition agent, repaid the old man's kindness by returning later
and destroying all the brew he found. Even that act of vandalism
did not assuage his noble responsibility "to enforce the laws (that)
rests upon every public official," as Herbert Hoover once said. With
three other agents but without a search warrant he returned a
second time to the farm. This time, old Gundlacht was ready. He
met the agents with a shotgun.
"I Know who you are," he said when they identified themselves,
"and I don't give a goddamn."
He warned that he would shoot and, as they continued to ad-
vance, fired a blast that wounded one agent in the knee. Returning
the fire, they dropped him with a shot in the foot. Then, according
to the sworn statement of Gundlacht's widow, they ignored his
pleas and shot him through the head as he lay on the ground.
For this atrocity, one agent won a federal acquittal on the plea
of self-defense, while the cases against the other three were nol-
prossed.
In a calling which so desperately needed public forbearance, if
not cooperation, the Dry agents persistently practiced the most inept
public relations. By the nature of their jobs, Dry agents were the
most detested men in the country, and through some perversity, they
went out of their way to enhance their unpopularity.
As early as 1922, the New York Hotel Men's Association com-
plained directly to President Harding that while their members
were virtuously practicing Volsteadism, liquor was being sold in
restaurants to die economic disadvantage of the hotels. Presumably,
172 HERE, HERE, WHATS GOING ON!
whatever the motive, the Prohibition chiefs should have welcomed
cooperation, hut they did not react quite that way. They made
some token restaurant raids and then at the Hotels McAlphi,
Astor and Ansonia entrapped assistant room clerks and bellhops
into making illicit liquor sales.
During the 1924 Democratic convention at old Madison Square
Garden, Edward C. Yellowley, the veteran rum chaser, was chief of
enforcement for New York. Piously, he forswore any "spectacular"
raids while the delegates were in residence and immediately hit all
over town with half a dozen of his men. He apprehended four cases
of Scotch being surreptitiously trundled into the Waldorf-Astoria
and in other places confiscated several thousand dollars worth of
liquor. It made for good feeling all around.
By 1931, die public image of Dry agents was set; they were
pretty violent fellows. This the agents themselves confirmed when
they discovered a 30,000-gallon concrete mash vat set underground
in a Kansas City, Mo., backyard. They didn't dig it out. With
fifteen sticks of dynamite, they U&w it out.
Even in the late summer of '32, when the cool breezes of Repeal
were beginning to blow, they were hard at it. By now, the Boys in
Blue and the Johnny Rebs were old, old men, and our senior
veterans were really the middle-aged men who had charged with
Teddy middle-aged but still spry enough to lift a glass at reminis-
cence time. And so the Dry agents raided the Milwaukee conven-
tion of the Spanish-American War Veterans. They found twenty-
six half-barrels of beer, too.
And yet, surprisingly, diere -were two Dry agents who, while they
did their duty with hyper-thyroid zeal, nonetheless endeared them-
selves to Wets and victims as well as Drys, and who made their
success with laughs instead of bullets. Properly, they should come
onstage with a fanfare, then a dazzling white spot and finally a
few bars of "How Dry I Am."
Intro-DUC-ing Izzy and Moe With Their fAS-dn-ating Reper-
toire of Quick Changes, Redds and Funny Sayingsl
Laugh
and the World
Laughs with You
Confidentially^the pudgy Me man leaned forward to ,,_ r ~
to the bartender, ''Have you heard the latest story?" The bartender
grinned expectantly. "No, go ahead."
"You're pinched."
In the defiant Fourth of July parade which the Wets staged in
New York in 1921, the same fat little man marched perspiringly.
Some of the paraders, he noticed, were fortified in person as well
as principle, and he tailed them to the source of the supply. Then
he arrested the dealers.
At a German beer garden, as he related in his memoirs, he was
such a noisy funmaker that he was asked to perform a solo. He
obliged and then announced, 'This concludes the evening's enter-
tainment, ladies and gentlemen. The place is pinched, for I am
Izzy Einstein, the Prohibition Agent."
Actually, as Izzy himself admitted in the tide of his book, he was
Prohibition Agent No. I, and there were many in high places who
roundly agreed. "The only Prohibition agent of prudence and
caution," said Chief Justice William Howard Taf t. 'The boodegger
who gets away from you has to get up early in the morning,"
Wayne Wheeler assured Izzy.
To the delighted press, he was "the man of 1,000 disguises," "the
mastermind of the federal rum ferrets," "the Lon Chaney" of
Dry agents. Once, garbed as a gravedigger, spade in hand, he lurked
in Woodlawn Cemetery, keeping surveillance on a nearby house
173
174 LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU
which later yielded two 110-gallon stills, several barrels of mash
and 200 gallons of alcohol.
In one of those triumphs of the headline art, some forgotten
copyreader on the old New York Tribune wrote:
"ALAS, NEW YORRICK/'
SAYS MR. EINSTEIN,
'1 KNOW THE SMELL"
Unlike so many of his confreres, Izzy avoided the rough stuff,
though with his ex-fighter partner, tall, heavyset Moe Smith, he
pinched fifteen to twenty places weekly and once made seventeen
raids in a single night. 'We told them politely, 'There's sad news
here/ " Izzy emphasized.
In fact, Izzy didn't even carry a gun, and while Moe did, he
fired only twice. Once he had to scare off a ferocious dog, and the
other time he shot open a door which a shotgun-toting malefactor
had slammed on Izzy's arm.
Instead, they resorted to masterful disguise, Izzy at various times
playing the roles of iceman, Polish laborer, German immigrant,
fisherman, farmer and once, improbable as it seems, while nosing
out campus bootlegging Izzy disguised himself as a collegian in plus
fours. He used to say that his first disguise in 1920 was as a
violinist, but he rose to such histrionic heights that later he was able
to pass himself off in Chicago as an opera singer. 1
On one occasion, he resorted to disguise wholesale, passing off
himself and ten other agents with mud-smeared faces as a football
team. "Season's over, we can drink/' he shouted gayly in a speak
near the gridiron. The drinks were served, and the joint raided.
Another time, probably on complaint of the trolley company man-
agement, he was assigned to hunt down a saloon near the car barns.
Attired as a streetcar conductor, he asked the bartender to change
a $5 bill "for my run." The bartender suggested that he buy a
drink.
Frugally, Izzy ordered a beer, perhaps recalling that a lady en-
1 "I play the trombone, the piano, the fiddle/' he once told an interviewer.
"How ^ good am I, you ask? Well, I ain't no Heifitz, but I could earn a
living." And, we might add, this versatile little man was a linguist, speaking
eight or nine languages fluently.
LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU 175
forcement agent was once criticized for putting in $248 in whisky
expenses for one month.
'Why don't you take a good drink?" the bartender pressed him.
Izzy sighed and agreed. He pocketed his $4.75 change and made
the arrest.
As a team, Izzy and Moe nicely complemented each other since
Izzy had an acute sense of smell and Moe could hear better than
most people. Late in 1922, the pair, now in the role of "joy riders"
as contemporaneous press accounts quaintly termed it, stalled their
car accidentally on purpose in front of a suspect garage way over
near the Hudson River piers in the West 40s.
Any other joy riders tooling through this neighborhood on a
dreary December day would have aroused suspicion, but Izzy and
Moe gained entree without trouble. Suddenly, standing outside a
small second-floor room, Moe paused. He could hear a liquid being
poured. At that same moment, Izzy's nose told him what the stuff
was.
Izzy gave two soft conspiratorial taps on the door. "Who's there?"
someone called. "It's okay/' Moe said. They entered, and as their
combined senses had told them, liquid was being poured and it was
whisky. They confiscated more than 300 cases, mostly Haig & Haig
Scotch and Burnett's London Dry Gin, together with two barrels of
whisky, worth in all $50,000. 2
As their repertoire widened, so did their fame. Izzy, particularly,
was masterful in any role from an Italian fruit vendor to a judge
solemnly toting a weighty black-bound volume. He could compress
his girth into a snappy tuxedo to mingle with and arrest the uptown
crowd. Once he passed himself off as a Polish count Or he could
look just as much at home on the waterfront in a pair of bagsy
11 r ee '
overalls.
On one of his occasional forays out of town, he dressed as a long-
shoreman in Detroit, making fifty arrests before the populace knew
what had happened. "It was like a cyclone hitting Detroit when I
2 Curiously, though their fame was built on their impersonations, Moe in
later years insisted to a reporter "We didn't disguise none. If we went to
a golf dub to make a pinch and put on golf knickers, the papers said we
were disguised. The only time I saw Izzy disguised, I said, TTake off
gloves' and all he had was a couple of dirty I
176 LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU
hit it," he recalled in later years. "It takes a gpod agent to enforce
this law/'
There was nothing in Izzy's background to account for his un-
deniable theatrical talent. He was born in Tarnow, a medium-sized,
medieval city east of Cracow, Poland, on August 8, 1880, when
Tarnow was still under Austrian rule. At the age of fifteen, he
arrived in the U.S., soon became a citizen and married, siring four
sons.
Aged forty, while working as a postal clerk, he applied for the
Prohibition job, but his 5x5 stature and more than 200 pounds
somewhat dismayed enforcement officials. 'When he walked/'
Herbert Asbury once pictured him, 'liis noble paunch, gently
wobbling, moved majestically ahead like the breast of an overfed
pouter pigeon/'
However, he was hired and shortly persuaded his friend Moe,
who owned a little cigar store on the lower East Side, to join up
with him in the $3,600-a-year job. Three weeks later, Moe almost
quit A whisky ship was lying off New York, its crew reportedly
drunk and willing to shoot it out. Moe was given a .45-calibre
automatic and assigned to the boarding party.
"Believe you me, Moe Smith was the last man up that ladder!"
he later told a reporter. "But we didn't have to fire. Everybody was
too cockeyed/'
Eventually, the price of fame became onerous. Twice in one
day, Izzy claimed in his book, bartenders fainted at the mention
of his name. Another time, according to Moe, they were recognized
while riding a train in New York state from Monticello to Port
Jervis.
"And the engineer, when we got to Port Jervis, he got off and
ran from ginmiU to ginmill, yelling, They're coming! Izzy and Moe
is coming!' " Moe reported disgustedly. Talk about Paul Revere!"
Late in 1925, in a wholesale shakeup of the New York Dry
offices, one hundred agents were fired, among them, the newspapers
reported, "shy Izzy Einstein and silent Moe Smith, Prohibition's
chameleons." The reports were that the Prohibitionists had suddenly
awakened to an embarrassing fact. While all the country had been
laughing with Izzy and Moe, they had also been simultaneously
laughing at the law the two men enforced.
As it turned out, only Moe Smith left then, Izzy tarrying a few
LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU 177
more years, chiefly to investigate a sacramental wine scandal. 3 When
he did leave, he became like Moe an agent for the New York Life
Insurance Company, explaining, "Yes, sir! What was good enough
for ex-President Coolidge is good enough for ex-Agent Izzy Ein-
stein/'
There was inevitable talk that they would lend their talents to
vaudeville or Hollywood. "Chaplin, he's all right, you understand/'
Izzy once said, "but I got some ideas on acting/' Another time,
when there were reports that they might do a weekly dialect comedy
on a national radio hookup, the News reported, "This is Station
B-O-O-Z-E broadcasting Moe and Izzy."
Actually, as prospering New York life agents, the team had no
need to tread the boards for sustenance. In the late 20s, each was
writing more than $400,000 worth of business yearly, selling poli-
cies in numerous cases to the men they had raided.
Probably the secret of Izzy's charm was that he wanted people
to like him, and he used to say happily, "Many of the men I pinched
are now friends of mine." Other friends included Congressmen,
judges, state legislators and Tammany leaders, and when he was
given a testimonial dinner in 1930, a thousand of these oddly as-
sorted friends turned out
Deftly, Izzy turned the affair into a testimonial to his beloved
New York, which he had known and raided so well. "Some people,
especially through the South and West, think New York City is
the worst in the country," he said. "I differ with those people.
New York City is as Dry as any other city in the United States,
Why, I didn't even see any liquor at this dinner!" *
When the Frederick A. Stokes Company published his memoirs
in 1932, relations between the old team who had so loudly and
efficiently confiscated more than 5,000,000 bottles of whisky on
their ceaseless rounds seemed to be badly strained.
'Why do I call my book Prohibition Agent No. 1," Izzy said at
3 As Mark Sullivan explains in Our Times, Prohibition law distinguished
"between wine for the purpose of ordinary elation and wine for communion
in churches, sacramental wine permits for the religious purpose were
fraudulently sought by persons whose interest was strictly laic, and much
wine intended for sacraments went down throats that never sang a hymn."
4 1 don't want to seem captious about a man whose memory I respect
but, in all truth, on an earlier occasion, Izzy did estimate that Manhattan
contained 100,000 speakeasies which employed 500,000 persons.
178 LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU
a literary tea in his honor. "I'll tell you! No. 1 means the best, don't
it? It means the first and foremost, don't it?" Moe's name did not
appear and even in photos where the two appeared together, his
picture was blocked out.
The book was courteously dedicated "to the 4,932 persons I ar-
rested, hoping they bear me no grudge for having done my duty."
In the introduction, Stanley Walker, then city editor of the Herald
Tribune and an authority on the speakeasy era, called Izzy the
"most engaging snooper in history," to which he added a dismaying
thought:
"If every agent had been as industrious, as capable and as intel-
ligent as Izzy, this country would be Dry today, if the courts could
have handled the cases, God forbid."
Later, Moe explained that he had been omitted at his own very
pointed request.
"I told Izzy and I told the publishers that if I appeared in the
book in any form, I'd bring an action," he said. "It was a job, and
I'd rather not talk about it. The publishers were very kind. They
assured me all references to me had been deleted, and they sent
me a book. Izzy would have sent me a book if I sent him $2."
However, a few years later, on the happiest of occasions, the
friendship was resumed. One of Izzy's sons was married, Izzy and
his wife, Esther, were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniver-
sary and Izzy's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Einstein, were cele-
brating their sixtieth. There was quite an affair at the Broadway
Central Hotel, and among the several hundred guests were Con-
gressman Samuel Dickstein, Ernest Langley, former enforcement
chief over Izzy and Moe and best of all Mr. and Mrs. Moe
Smith,
"Here's our old boss!" exclaimed Izzy, carried away by nostalgia
for the days of disguise. "Did we get 95 per cent convictions on our
arrests, or didn't we?"
"You did!" Langley assured him.
Gracing an eight-course banquet were ample supplies of Scotch,
rye, champagne, beer, port, benedictine, sherry, celery tonic and
claret punch for all.
Of the past, Izzy simply said, "That is whisky under the bridge
or over the dam, if you know what I mean. Now when it's legal,
it's okay. But liquor is a luxury today. It was not such a luxury
LAUGH AND THE WORLD LAUGHS WITH YOU 179
during Prohibition* Then there was fair liquor with a low price/'
In February, 1938, aged fifty-seven, Izzy died of an infection
that followed the amputation of his right leg. Moe lived on until
December, 1960, dying at seventy-three. His death certificate listed
only one occupation: ' Revenue agent/'
Though they never played the Palace, Izzy & Moe were the
foremost vaudeville team of the early '20s with their routine of
quick changes, raids and funny sayings, for they got their material
from the inexhaustible ludicrousness of Prohibition itself. And yet,
as the Herald Tribune pointed out reasonably enough, they "never
made Prohibition much more of a joke than it has been made by
some of the serious-minded Prohibition officers/'
While I strongly doubt that Izzy Einstein was much of a student
of the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, he intuitively followed her
sunny line. Laugh, and the world, laughs with you. Cry, and you
cry alone.
And, as we shall immediately see, there were several amusing
ladies who also subscribed to this canary-like, but contagious, phi-
losophy*
i8
Ladies Notorious
vs.
Ladies Censorious
It was a vintage year of song. Even now, so many decades later,
through the crash and roar of rock V roll, some of us still faindy
hear the melodies.
They laughed at "Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean" from the
Ziegfeld Follies and tapped their feet to the catchy beat of the
"Parade of the Wooden Soldiers/' "Somebody Stole My GaF was a
lament, but they sang it happily, and even bad Irish tenors trying
to imitate the sonorous magic of John McCormick couldn't seriously
damage "Three O'Clock in the Morning/'
But '22 was also the second anniversary of woman suffrage, and
the ladies were beginning to feel their oats. More than these grace-
ful melodies, another, now-forgotten song of that year symbolized
their burgeoning freedom, the dawning era of higher skirts, shorter
hair and made-up faces.
"I Wish That I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate."
Yes, the gals were shimmying in '22, shimmying out of their
cool and proper parlors. They were no longer satisfied to curl up
for the evening with the stereoscope and pictures of edifying natural
vistas. They wanted private fun and public responsibility. '22 was
the year that Mrs. Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia became the first
woman ever appointed to the United States Senate, the year that
the Protestant Episcopal Bishops took the radical step of eliminating
"obey" from the marriage ceremony.
It is a moot sociological point whether women were the victims
of Prohibition, sacrificing their ancient charm and mystery to drink
180
Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer came out of the Bronx to be-
come a leading beer baron in New York City. But, in the familiar, fragile
way of most Prohibition gangsters, he was taken suddenly, fatally ill
with lead poisoning.
These dapper de-
fenders of individual
liberty are seen drink-
ing at a speakeasy bar.
With packing boxes for
chairs, it must have
been a pretty crummy
joint, but as the raised
pinkie of the gentleman
seated on the left indi-
cates, it was patronized
by some of the best
people.
Who's that crashing through the door? Why, it's
Izzy (left) and Moe (right), Prohibition agents non-
pareils. Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, scourge of the
speaks!
In later years, Izzy
and Moe became suc-
cessful insurance sales-
men and didn't mind
occasionally sampling
the stuff they had
chased so strenuously,
The Bettmcmn Archive
Naturally, yon had
to be known to get in-
side. The speak propri-
etors were much more
discriminating in their
choice of customers
than the customers
were in their choice of
drinks.
The little girl from the Midwest whose husky, haunting voice sym-
bolized Prohibition gayety. Helen Morgan atop a piano, naturally.
Queen of the
Night Clubs, Queen of
the Speaks, Queen of
the mad, brassy Broad-
way of the 20s Texas
Guinanl
This levity must stop! And this is the lady to see that it does. Mrs.
Ella A. Boole, national president of the Women's Christian Temperance
Union.
Wide World Pho
As always, Belle Livingston accepted adversity with a smile. One of
her many elegant salons having just been raided, she is going through
the familiar routine of entering the paddy wagon.
Two men with an impossible job. Grover Whalen (left) being sworn
in as New York City Police Commissioner by Mayor James Walker. For
a time, "Whalen 's Whackers" hit joints all over town, but what are you
going to do in a metropolis with 32,000 speaks? Precisely.
As a clear indication of their stubborn love for the stuff thousands
of New Yorkers march in the Beer Parade of 1932, organized by Jimmv
Walker. The usually-tardy Mayor was so dedicated to the cause that he
showed up only a few minutes late. United Press International Photo
Bishop James Can-
non Jr., of Virginia, a
notorious Dry, seems to
be shaking his cane at
beer paraders and such
low life. Actually, he is
trying to repel photog-
raphers outside the
court in Washington
where he was tried
(and acquitted) of vio-
lating the Corrupt Prac-
tices Act.
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 181
elbow-toelbow with the men, or whether the poor speaks became
the victims of a feminine insurrection that would have erupted
anyhow.
I have always believed that Volsteadism shamefully coarsened our
women, but in all fairness, I want to give the other side.
For example, take New York City where, everyone agreed, the
flower of our femininity most noticeably wilted during the Dry
years. In 1918, two years before Prohibition went into effect, 1,495
lady drunks were arrested there. The number was not to be equalled
during the first eight years of the glorious experiment, which cer-
tainly indicates that unless the ladies were holding their liquor
better, they must have been drinking less.
And Heywood Broun, that on-the-scene observer, who was noto-
riously Wet in his prejudices, once wrote, "It was not Prohibition
but feminism which demolished the traditional bar of the Gay
Nineties. There was never any chance that the co-educational tide
which engulfed the schools and colleges of our land would be
stayed by the swinging door."
One thing is certain. The 19th Amendment, so closely following
the 18th, had a calamitous effect on the ladies. Dry crusader and
Wet sinner alike they developed an aggressive stridency; Ella Boole
and Texas Guinan were sisters underthe skin.
Frances Willard had been a determined but idealistic and rather
appealing Dry crusader, and so was her former private secretary,
Anna A. Gordon, who became president of the WCTU in 1914.
There was no doubt about Anna's devotion to the cause. During
World War I she organized a Prohibition petition signed by ten
million women which was presented to the U.S. Senate. She sailed
abroad thirty-four times in behalf of the WCTU, But she wasn't a
fanatic.
On a visit to Chicago in the very early '20s, she fell in love with
a relic of pre-Prohibition days. It was an enormous beer schooner,
eight inches high and sixteen inches in circumference which held
twenty-five fluid ounces. In the carefree old days, Michael (Hinky
Dink) McKenna, First Ward Alderman, had sold these foaming
"tubs" for a nickel at his Workingman's Exchange on South Clark
Street. Through an intermediary, Miss Gordon now asked if Hinky
Dink would send her one, and for Christmas, 1924, Hinky Dink
gallantly complied. He mailed a tub out to Evanston, together with
182 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
a poem which had been written especially for the occasion by a
fellow Chicago statesman, Alderman John J. (The Bathhouse)
Coughlin:
Dear, gentle, gracious, efficient president of the W.C.T.U.
This souvenir of pre-Volsteadian days I beg to present to you.
My compliments go with it, and as you gaze upon it, fitted with
flowers sweet,
I prithee remember that it oft contained Manhattan suds on Clark
Street.
But in 1925 that stern and righteous widow, Mrs. Ella Alexander
Boole, took over the WCTU presidency for eight years. Somehow,
I just can't visualize her appealing to Hinky Dink or The Bath-
house paying her poetic tribute. There doesn't seem to have been
much fun in Ella's life.
The daughter of a small town mayor in Ohio, she collected
three degrees and her Phi Beta Kappa pin at Wooster College, also
in Ohio, and there vowed her lifelong dedication against dancing,
the theater, card playing and particularly, of course, whisky.
At twenty-five she married the fifty-six-year-old Rev. William H.
Boole, a Methodist minister and evangelical booze fighter of the
old school. She gave her first temperance lecture on their honey-
moon, and when she was left a widow at thirty-eight with two
daughters, she immolated herself in the Dry cause.
"There can be no moderation/' she preached. 'Temperance
means absolute abstinence."
In her uncompromising conviction, no Dry could be altogether
bad, and she defended even Carry Nation, that tedious crank out
of Kansas who prowled the main street of Kiowa near Medicine
Lodge in 1900 to perpetrate the first of her hatchet attacks on
saloons. "Her methods were illegal/' Ella conceded, "but she served
a purpose." She got people to thinking, Ella explained.
First as the New York state WCTU president, then as national
boss and finally as head of the world-wide organization, Ella Boole
wielded frightening political power. She hobnobbed with wealthy
Dry enthusiasts like Henry Ford, J. C. Penney and S. S. Kresge, and
in the words^of Fred Pasley, an authority on the Dry years, she
commanded "the greatest lobby and the most highly organized
publicity department in existence."
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 183
"At her approach, statesmen, lawmakers and governors bow with
obsequious deference/' he wrote in the New York News, "and die
President of the United States listens to her with profound respect.
For almost a decade, she has dictated legislation, both state and
national/'
Nor should we forget that remarkably ferocious female Dry ora-
tor, Commander-in-Chief Evangeline Booth, of the Salvation Army.
Her emotion-charged eloquence rings of 19th Century hell-and-
damnation, but she actually said the following as late as 1930!
You can hush every other voice of national and individual entreaty
and complaint! You may silence every other tongue even those of
mothers of destroyed sons and daughters, of wives of profligate hus-
bandsbut let the children speak!
The little children, the wronged children, the crippled children,
the abused children, the blind children, the imbecile children, the
dead children. The army of little children!
Let their weak voices, faint with oppression, cold and hunger, be
heard! Let their little faces, pinched by want of gladness, be heeded!
Let their challenge though made by small forms, too mighty for
estimate be reckoned with. Let their writing upon the wall of the
nation although traced by tiny fingers, as stupendous as eternity
be correctly interpreted and read, that the awful robbery of the lawful
heritage of their little bodies, minds and souls is laid at the brazen
gates of Alcohol!
In the face of such thunderous summations for the prosecution,
the poor Wets first had to establish that they were not child killers,
by accident or design. And their troubles were complicated by the
fact that behind Evangeline's eloquence was the cool, driving,
lawyer's mind of another lady militant.
For eight years, as Assistant Attorney General of the United
States with jurisdiction over Prohibition enforcement, Mabel
Walker Willebrandt did more than anyone else in the country to
put fanged precedents into the legal workings of the 18th and the
Volstead Act.
Mabel was the daughter of a country newspaperman, and you
would think Daddy would have taught her better, but since her
birthplace was Carry's state, the result was probably inevitable. She
cherished the darkest suspicions about New York City, Tammany
Hall and that symbol of all that was bad and Wet there, Al Smith.
184 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
The night he won the Democratic Presidential nomination at Hous-
ton in 1928, she despatched flying squadrons of Dry agents to raid
up and down the Broadway area. (Later, after less than an hour's
deliberation, a federal jury threw out a test case based on them.)
She harassed such symbols of frivolity as Texas Guinan and Helen
Morgan, exhibiting the familiar delusion of the Drys that Wet sin
was a metropolitan monopoly.
Actually, right in Ohio, that historical fountain of dear water,
the law was being broken just as brazenly as Mabel should have
known. "Cincinnati must have had a thousand places where you
could buy home brew and hundreds of places where you could buy
wine," a lawyer friend of mine recalls. On one occasion, he repre-
sented a 200-pound widow who worked eight hours a day in her
cellar making home brew and spent another eight hours selling it
and drinking it with her guests, thus supporting four small children.
"I pointed out to the Judge that this was the only practical way
for the widow to make a living and keep her eye on the kids at
the same time/' he says. "I vouched for the quality of her beer
which I had frequently enjoyed with other acquaintances of the
Judge. I asked, What will become of the children?'
"The Judge acquitted her (how I don't know), but told her she
must find some other way to provide for the children. Then he
said, Tour counsel has made such a pathetic appeal on behalf of
your children, Madam, that you may want to merge with him
I understand he is a bachelor/ "
The idea appealed to the widow, though not to my friend. "But
the Judge did her a favor," he adds. "She did marry another lawyer
who succeeded in keeping her out of jail until Prohibition was
repealed/'
Thirty miles upriver from Cincinnati, there was an idyllic little
hideaway in New Richmond, Ohio, presided over by a maiden
lady of impeccable virtue. She churned her own butter, raised gar-
den produce and collected the eggs from her hennery, which she
transported across the river to an order of nuns living in Kentucky.
There she swapped the fruit of her little farm for the fruit of the
nuns' vines which they compounded into a wine, using a recipe
they had brought with them from France.
"Another young fellow and I would drive up the river after work
and have a bottle of wine and play checkers while the lady of the
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 185
house fixed dinner for us," a friend recalls nostalgically. "We could
not buy wine from her to take with us. We had to drink it there.
But she provided us with many pleasant evenings during Pro-
hibition.
There was hardly any good-sized town that did not offer the same
innocent but remember, illicit! pleasures, and yet Mabel grimly
concentrated so many of her grandstand plays on Babylon-by-the-
Hudson. When she wasn't raiding, she was scolding or nagging its
officials for a little more cooperation with the holy cause.
"During my six years in Washington, I have witnessed more
drinking in the national capital than in New York," Congressman
Emmanuel Celler testily replied to one of her strictures.
"I would cherish the opportunity of examining you on the witness
stand under oath. I would ask you to name the places and homes
where you attended dinners and other functions where cocktails
were served. I imply nothing concerning your personal habits. I take
it that you do not drink. In New York, it is called nullification. In
Washington (where 'embassy' liquor is served), it is called jollifica-
tion."
When Mabel urged the irrepressible Jimmy Walker to "pull
together" with Washington, he pointed out that his police had to
enforce some 2,500 sections of the Penal Code, numerous City
ordinances and traffic regulations. Nonetheless, one "White Lights"
precinct had reported 1,593 Volstead complaints during his mayoral
administration to Mabel's Department of Justice which let most of
the cases die.
"Where, therefore, does the record indicate a lack of coopera-
tioni>" Jimmy blandly inquired. He always was polite to the girls.
In a pre-Orwellian suffragette sense, all women were equally
feminine, but some were more feminine than otiiers. We can now
turn in relief to the latter, who presided over the raucous salons of
the '20s. Their genesis dates to our year of feminine ferment, for on
June 6, 1922, the New York Times reported:
"Many individuals, some prominent socially, have fitted up regu-
lar bars in their living apartments and have engaged experienced
drink mixers. The patronage is restricted to the set in which the
owner of the place moves. Several persons have greatly added to
their finances through the operation of the apartment bar. At some
of these places, drinks of the best grade are sold for 40 to 50 cents."
186 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
But the enforcers got around to pruning even these decorous
offshoots of the resistance movement, as was remarked in Beau
Broadway's saucy column in the Morning Telegraph of November
25, 1925: "The onward march of reform abolished the saloon in
favor of the night club or speakeasy (according to the prices charged
for the same brand of booze) and now the padlock is clicking in
favor of the secluded high class flat or apartment. The saloon catered
to males. The night dub featured frails. The apartment combines
the two. Wotta law! Wotta laugh!"
There were in fact at least two species of salon: the sophisticated
places in the tradition of 18th Century France such as delightful
Belle Livingstone operated and the swinging kind of a joint you
would expect of a hostess named Texas. Both species catered to the
simple ordinary kind of man who likes a girl, but not for a minute
did this pull the wool over the eyes of the veteran Committee of
Fourteen which had been stalking sin almost since the turn of the
century.
The way Belle told her story, she had been found under a sun-
flower in the backyard of Mayor John R. Graham of Emporia,
Kansas. Mayor Graham adopted her and gave her an education in
a convent, but put his foot down when she wanted to go on the
stage. After all, she wasn't married. Belle overcame this obstacle by
proposing to a startled Chicagoan, Richard Waring, who was the
first well-dressed man she ran into. They married, and Belle was
free to pursue the gas footlights of the Gay Nineties.
In New York, she was toasted as "The Kansas Sunshine Baby,"
"The Girl With the Poetic Legs" and 'The Belle of Bohemia."
When Waring died, he considerately left his bride of convenience
$150,000. Belle coined the phrase that has been such a cross to
savings banks' promotion Spend it while you have it" and
took her little fortune to Europe.
For almost three decades, she lived abroad, marrying successively
an Italian count, a Clevelander and a London colonel. In her
memoirs, she numbered among her friends the Prince of Wales
(later King Edward VII), King Leopold II of Belgium, Lord Kitch-
ener, Prince Hussein and an interesting cross-section of Americans
that included Theodore Roosevelt, General Pershing, James Gor-
don Bennett and Harry K. Thaw. You name 'em, Belle knew 'em.
After separating from her fourth husband in 1927, Belle, now
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 187
well into her fifties, came to New York. Into the rowdy night life of
the period, she introduced a touch of wit and elegance. Her waiters
were "the sons of splendid families/' the girls about her luxuriously
appointed places were "debutantes," and the prices matched the
atmosphere. Drinks started at $2, and champagne was $25 to $40
per bottle.
"I wish to have a civilized, delightful, joyous, witty group of
people about me/' she explained. "Something of Rabelais, some-
thing of Madame de Stael, everything of happiness. But I could
not afford it, and my friends urged that we have a dutch treat
arrangment"
If you have style you have the world licked, was Belle's motto,
and she lived up to it.
On Park Avenue and the fashionable side streets of the midtown
East Side, Belle operated the nicest Rabelaisian, de Staelian joints
for the nicest and wealthiest sophisticates. Unfortunately, the Dry
authorities had no feel for urbanity, and the raids on her salons
became as talked about as her pet baby python, Elmer.
Early one January morning as she was lounging in Chinese red
satin pajamas in her top-floor living quarters, the raid buzzer alerted
her, and she fled over the rooftops. But the Feds were too fast for
her.
"I ran from one roof to the other, used a rope ladder, jumped and
slid/' she told the press. "I carried along a rug so that I could
stretch out flat the way you do in a sand storm while they passed
over. I tried to lie down flat on the rug, hoping they wouldn't see
me in the dark, but I've got too much of a figure for that, I guess/'
Due to raids, plus a thirty-day prison term and a personal injunc-
tion forbidding her to have any connection with whisky sales,
Belle's career was more publicized than profitable. 1
Gradually she faded into obscurity. She tried without success to
popularize "salons" in Reno and San Francisco, and the town fathers
of Falmouth, Mass., wouldn't even let her try when she wanted to
move there. The last years of her life she was plagued by recurrent
heart trouble and pinched for money, but to the end, she never
lost her zest.
1 The less polished Owney Madden later took over Belle's Country Club.
"Belle had the right idea, but she was kinda careless,'* Madden said. "You
gotta use your skull in this business to keep going."
188 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
Her tiny one-room apartment on East 50th Street was "my Ho-
garthian basement/* she told the cops and police reporters who
remembered her and sometimes visited her. In the cramped New
York backyard was "a wild garden and a couple of white urns so
I can give myself the illusion that I'm on the Riviera. And my
place is like a club. People come in and say, 'Oh Belle, let's have
a couple of Martinis/ "
When this remarkable woman died early in 1957, she was well
in her eighties and had outlived her gayest hours by a quarter of a
century. Nonetheless, as Belle was laid out with pearls around her
neck and right wrist and an orchid at her bosom, a hundred friends
paid their respects, and a Lutheran pastor eulogized her as "a per-
sonality of an era, who, in her own way, extended peace and joy
to many people/' But the card on one of the thirty floral tributes
said it best: 'The hit of the party in this world and the next/'
It was never my privilege to meet the delightful Belle. However,
I count as well misspent the afternoon back in 1930 when I cut
classes at that then less-serious institution of learning on the Charles
and rushed to a record shop on Mount Holyoke Street in Cam-
bridge. Helen Morgan was singing! Even Harvard's languid seniors
were somewhat awed, and though Helen was visibly unimpressed
by the outpouring of callow youth, she sat on the little piano and
sang her brooding songs. In those depression days, a girl would do
a lot to sell a few records.
To the critics, Helen was "Camille on a piano/' "the raffish
nightingale/' "the composite of all the ruined women in the world"
in her haunting delivery. They likened her husky voice to that of a
contralto "with marbles in her throat." To me, as she sang "Can't
Help Lovin' Dat Man," her hit from Sfcow Boat, and the newer,
bleaker 'Why Was I Born?" Helen was the splendid reason they
had to invent adjectives like "blue" and "torch."
Her life was as sad and short as Belle Livingstone's was long and
gay. A little girl out of the Illinois corn belt, she sold ribbons and
worked as a manicurist in Chicago till she won a beauty contest and
got into the chorus line. Amy Leslie, a Chicago drama critic, spon-
sored a trip to New York for her that resulted in engagements with
George White and Flo Ziegfeld. One night at the crowded Back-
stage Club in New York, she sat on the piano so the audience could
see her, some sources crediting writer Ring Lardner with giving her
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 189
that first historic boost. Thereafter, a piano top was always her
perch. Professionally, she was an enormous success, making as much
as $5,000 weekly, but she was overly generous to other show folk,
and for years kidney and liver ailments plagued her. So did Mabel
Walker Willebrandt.
Once when Helen was arrested, Texas Guinan called her "just
a dumb twenty-three-year-old child/' and she was acquitted. But
still the Dry villains pursued her. Helen's story always was that she
was an entertainer, not an owner, which didn't deter the Dry
raiders at all. Whether it was the Helen Morgan Club or Chez
Helen Morgan or Helen Morgan's Summer Home, they not only
raided but also often wielded axes and confiscated the furniture.
After Repeal, Helen went on singing for another eight years.
A first marriage had not worked out, and in the summer of '41, she
married a West Coast businessman. That fall, her recurring ailment
forced her to cancel an engagement in Chicago, and she entered a
hospital in the hopes of having the trouble permanently corrected.
Instead, on October 8, aged forty-one, she died. Of the more than
$1,000,000 she had made in show business, almost every penny
was gone.
In their different ways, Helen Morgan and Belle Livingstone
were rather special, and yet they could have accommodated their
talents to other times, other morals. But Mary Louise Cecelia
Guinan had a rendezvous with the '20s, and only the '20s, "the mad
and roaring '20s" as the well-rubbed phrase has it. Texas didn't
make those years mad, but without doubt she singlehandedly con-
tributed much of the roar.
Everything about her was overpoweringly loud: her dyed blonde
hair, her flashing smile, her huge picture hats, her mink and white
ermine wraps, her inch-and-a-halr bracelet set with 586 diamonds
and her ten-caret "headlight" ring, reportedly a gift from President
Harding. Her voice rang loud and dear above the banging of a
hundred wooden clappers and the loud drone of drunken patrons,
and her "nifties ' bellow at us down the years with undiminished
wit.
Her 'brain is as good as new . . * You never see a smart man
In a night dub ... I want to get as thin as my first husband's
promises . . . He is a good fellow for some other girl . . . Mar-
riage in Hollywood starts with a rough draft there's very little
190 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
work on the continuity . . . I knew her when she was a "bathing
girl, and she's still all wet . . . It's having the same man around
the house all the time that ruins matrimony.
When the national mood adolescently equated noise with mirth,
Tex was a brass band by herself. At a time when conspicuous spend-
ers wanted an excuse to spend conspicuously, she gave it to them
with breathtaking impudence.
"Hello, sucker!" was just the beginning. If things slowed, she
blew a police whistle and boomed, "Come on, suckers! Open up and
spend some jack!" A split pint of ginger ale cost $1.50, and Scotch
was $25 a fifth. In some of her clubs, the cover charge ran to $25
per individual.
"When they drink ginger ale in my place/' she niftied, "they
are drinking liquid platinum, and they like it/' Publicly at least, the
way to Tex's heart seemed "paved with hundred dollar bills/' says
Allen Churchill in The Year the World Went MAD, but spending
couldn't buy her respect.
One night, a wheeler-and-dealer paid the cover charges for every-
body, and gave the entertainers $50 bills. When Texas inquired
the identity of this live one, he shyly allowed that he was in "the
dairy produce business." Whereupon, Tex bawled out from the
floor an unforgettable addition to the American idiom. She implored
her patrons to meet "A Big Butter and Egg Man!"
Not surprisingly, with her prices, Texas prospered, once running
a small investment into a profit of $700,000 in less than a year. The
brass voice had a golden ring for the '20s. At the height of her
opulence, she rode in a bullet-proof car and slept in a bed finished
in ivory enamel, with mirrors at the head and a pink and blue
canopy of silk and lace above. She spoke into a gold-plated, sterling
silver telephone with coral inlay, acquired (but never used) a 14-
caret-gold dinner service of more than 100 pieces, carried a gold
vanity decorated with the crest of the Russian Czar and a gold mesh
bag.
When fourteen, the future "Queen of the Night Clubs" won a
singing scholarship and left her home in Texas for Chicago. There-
after, she was a circus broncho rider, a vaudevillian and a cowgirl
in the two-reelers of the silent days. In 1923, while she was playing
at the Winter Garden in New York, she visited a night dub. To
liven things up, she started singing, and "first thing you know, we
LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS 191
were all doing things." The manager hired her as mistress of cere-
monies.
The following year, gangster Larry Fay angelled the El Fey Club
for her, and there began the succession of writs, warrants, arrests
and padlocks that^were to continue at one location after another
down the years. "I'm nature's gift to the padlock makers,'* she said
on one occasion. It got so that a Guinan band segued gracefully into
"The Prisoner's Song" at the familiar shout of "Raid!" and Tex,
with her never-failing supply of "nifties" when needed, wisecracked,
"Federal Court's my alma mammy."
Nonetheless, her curious retinue of Broadway habitues, big-time
gamblers, columnists and genuine out-of-town suckers faithfully
followed her from padlock to padlock. Tex featured almost nude
and very young girls, she hired genuine talent, like Ruby Stevens,
who was to become Barbara Stanwyck, and George Raft in his
fastest dancing days, but she remained the show. And despite all the
adversities inflicted by Mabel Walker Willebrandt, she remained
faithful to Broadway except for a brief period late in 1925 when
the Texas Guinan Club on West 48th Street was padlocked for
six months,
Tex set up the Miami El Fey Club, but found herself being
constantly importuned by the real estate salesmen of Florida's boom.
"Listen, sucker," she growled. "You take them by the sun. I take
them by the moon. Now let's don't interfere with each other s busi-
ness." Within six months, she was back in New York. She opened
a new spot, the 300 Club, but the same tired old Dry faces promptly
raided her (reportedly while two U.S. Senators were in the joint).
Other clubs, half a dozen or more, followed, but as the '20s
waned, so did Texas' popularity. Her era was running out on her.
In 1931, she thought she could recapture what had been lost by
opening a night dub in Paris. Gayly, she and her troupe sailed on
the liner Paris, only to encounter violent objections from the Labor
Ministry of France. She and her girls were kept under a sort of
house arrest in a hotel until the Paris turned around and brought
them back to the U.S.
Now Texas retitled her revue, Too Hot for Paris, and took her
girls through the hinterland. Late in 1933, way up in Vancouver,
B.C., still trouping, she was stricken with an intestinal illness. She
died on November 5, a month to the day before Repeal, which
192 LADIES NOTORIOUS VS. LADIES CENSORIOUS
was probably a blessing because by now her day was definitely
gone.
Her body was brought back to Broadway, and all night the pro-
cession of mourners passed through the Campbell funeral home.
While the services were being held, a crowd of 7,500 stood outside
in the streets. Tears in his eyes, Heywood Broun said simply, "We
who loved Tex so much will keep her memory in our hearts and
minds, and that will be a part of her immortality/'
At the receiving vault in the cemetery, 2,000 mourners, mostly
women, swept aside a dozen local cops and state troopers. Within
fifteen minutes, the thousands of orchids and chrysanthemums,
even the roses on her coffin, had been carried away.
Tex, it is nice to say, didn't go quietly.
How Much
Did
They Drink?
"The reign of tears is over!" Billy Sunday had cried, heside him-
self with joy, in the dreary January of 1920. 'The slums will soon
he only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our
jails into storehouses and corncrihs,
"Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children
will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent!"
More than seven years later, Wayne B. Wheeler was still trying
to argufy prophecy into reality. "Public drunkenness is rare," he
stubbornly insisted during a Carnegie Hall debate in New York
with Clarence Darrow. "Drink-caused crime has been greatly re-
duced. Drink-caused poverty no longer drains millions in charity.
Alcoholism and alcoholic insanity are far below former figures."
But Wayne was just as dead wrong as Billy and without any
excuse because now the liquid returns were coming in. 1 The
plain, 100-proof fact was that we had embarked on a great, gay,
bacchanalian defense of our civil liberties. Men were drinking
defiantly, with a sense of high purpose, a kind of dedicated drinking
that you don't see much of today.
1 For 1927, the year in which Wheeler was speaking, the states which
had maintained comparable statistics reported a 317 per cent increase in
deaths from alcoholism over 1920. In New York City, such fatalities rose
from 84 in 1920 to 719 in 1927. In 518 communities, allowing for the
increase in population, drunkenness arrests increased more than 125 per cent.
In New York State, commitments for alcoholic insanity rose from 1.9 per
100,000 population in 1920 to 7 in 1927. What heady brew the Drys must
have drunk to overlook such statistics!
194 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
A veteran colleague of mine recalls that lie never drank durina
his pre-Prohibition college days and never drank on the job until
he was covering a murder trial and the prosecutor offered him his
first drink during a recess. After that, as they used to say, Zowie!
"Everybody drank as though there would never be another drink,"
he remembers. "If you opened a bottle, you killed it."
Each swig was a blow in behalf of the Bill of Rights-, and damn
Ella Boole's eyes!
Among those who broke the law to save the Constitution, there
was a conspiratorial camaraderie. One night, after partaking of too
much civic righteousness, another friend of mine drove his four-
cylinder Dodge into a ditch in the Midwest and could barely get
himself out, let alone the car.
When he returned to the scene next morning, the cops were
already getting ready to impound the car because they had found
a quart of wine on the floor. Naturally, they didn't accept my
friend's virtuous protestations that he knew nothing about it. Just
then, an elderly man who lived nearby tottered across the road and
solemnly assured the police that he had seen two boys plant the
evidence. Though a stranger to my friend, he was a fellow Wet.
All through Prohibition, the rainy-Sunday argument was, How
much are people drinking? With the ever-gracious help of hind-
sight and the statistics available on raw materials, manufacture and
the general accessibility of the product, we can supply the answer.
Stupendously!
Speakeasies were the most obvious indication of availability. In
Rochester, New York, a county judge publicly and flatly contra-
dicted the Police Chiefs testimony about the "lily white purity" of
that not very exciting town. In contrast to the perhaps 500 licensed
saloons of the bad old days, the judge said, there were twice as
many speakeasies during Prohibition "although this city is no worse
than others."
In Albany, state capital of New York, my friend, Harry Neigher,
then a reporter-cartoonist on Hearst's Albany Times-Union, nearly
got beaten up because of his cartoon strip, Take It or Leave It.
"One day I drew a sketch of three saloons," he recalls, "and wrote
under it, 'Before Prohibition there were 3 saloons on Eagle Street,
Albany, in the shadows of Police Headquarters. Now there are 18
speakeasies on that street!' "
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 195
In the counter-punching way of Dry authorities, all 18 were
raided as soon as the paper hit the streets, and the Bonifaces imme-
diately arraigned and held in $5,000 bail each. Presumably, the
Feds hadnt dreamed of the speaks' existence till Neigher's strip
appeared. The same evening, Harry was surrounded in an alley by
the victims but managed to talk his way to safety.
Another reliable clue to the stepped-up tempo of Prohibition
drinking lies in the police records of the Wet brethren who fell,
literally, into their arms. In Detroit, for example, drunkenness
arrests increased steadily from 6,590 in 1920 to 28,804 in 1928,
and (except for the year 1926) the rate of arrests per 1,000 inhabi-
tants also rose steadily, from 6.6 to 19.6 during the same years.
And, in all frankness, the nation's capital, where high school
children go in spring to see the cherry blossoms on the Mall and
Congressional proboscises, did not offer any inspirational example
to the sinners back home in the boondocks.
Late in the first decade of this century, the District of Columbia
had enjoyed one liquor license for each 575 inhabitants in its then- .
population of about 310,000. In '17, Senator Sheppard of Texas
corrected this pleasant situation with a bill prohibiting the manu-
facture, importation or sale of liquor in the District which was
signed that November by President Wilson.
Thus, Washington got a Dry head start on some other parts of
the nation but, in retrospect, does not seem to have tried very
earnestly to retain this edifying lead.
Doc Adams, the Treasury chief chemist, whom we have met
before, was interviewed when Prohibition doubly locked the capi-
tol's door. He doubted that there was enough liquor "in the South-
ern mountains to stock the District of Columbia overnight/' Rather
than as just another bum prophecy, I prefer to take his statement
as a tribute to capital capacity because, in reality, there was an
awful lot of likker down in the mountains!
"There was perhaps a slight increase in drinking among mem-
bers of Congress/' says my colleague, Frank Stephenson, who spent
most of those years in Washington. "But it was always kept under
control on Capitol Hill.
"The heavy drinkers continued to get theirs, although the quality
at times may have been much below par. Some of the heaviest
drinkers were Prohibitionists from the South, the Vote dry and
196 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
drink wet* bloc. They had to keep it away from the Negroes, they
always explained/'
A wholesome fraternal spirit, transcending political and geo-
graphical lines, persisted all through Prohibition. Most notable of
die drinking fraternity were two dose friends from opposite sides
of the aisle. Although bitterly opposed politically, Speaker Nicholas
Longworth, the Republican from Ohio, and his successor as Speaker
(and later Vice President) Jack Garner, the Democrat from Texas,
were both rich in their own right and inclined to look on economics
in the same light.
Together, in the Capitol, on the same floor as the House chamber
and almost under the very center of the Dome, they set up a cosy
drinking hideaway. It was furnished in single-minded taste; there
were only a few chairs, an empty desk and shelves of books. How-
ever, it was a distinct Congressional honor to be invited into the
"Board (or Committee) of Education," also sometimes more aus-
terely known merely as "The Library," in deference to the books
behind which the bottles were kept.
No doubt because of Congressional authority and those ever-
green patches of foreign soil that housed the embassies and first-
rate liquor, Washington must be considered atypical in its drinking
habits. All right, let's find a typical town and see how the drinking
accelerated during the ostensibly non-drinking years.
In Cincinnati die night that Prohibition descended, a good house-
holder staggered home sober somehow carrying six gallon jugs
of whisky that he had transported by street car.
He was a moderate, infrequent drinker, who always kept two
bottles on the sideboard containing bourbon and sweet sherry, and
he calculated that his six gallons would last a lifetime. "He was
fifty at the time," his son recalls, "and he lived to be eighty-four!
"Prohibition changed my parents' drinking habits. Before it, they
seldom drank except on special occasions' like weddings or baptisms
or wakes. They never served liquor to their guests who came for
dinner or cards, although the bottle was opened on request.
"After Prohibition, they never played bridge without a highball.
It is hard to understand the change, except that people wanted to
show that they could obtain a scarce article.
"Several years after Prohibition started, my father's whisky supply
had gone, and everyone, it seemed, was drinking in the home.
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 197
People who never owned or served liquor before now thought it was
'smart* to serve it. People with well-stocked cellars of pre-Prohibition
goods suddenly became social lions overnight/'
During the daylight hours, Cincinnatians will tell you, Prohibi-
tion did cut down the amount of drinking. Probably because it
was illegal, people preferred to do their imbibing at night, more
than making up for their daytime abstinence.
"Dances were far from die orderly affairs of 1918," recalls one
native who lived through the transition. "Most people who went to
night clubs carried their flasks or botdes and paid the equivalent of
hard drink prices for setups of soda or ginger ale.
"Rarely did an evening pass without someone passing out or a
fight starting. The raw liquor of those days was not the kind that in-
duced sleep. It made people wild"
This unf estive exuberance so painfully manifest at many Prohibi-
tion soirees developed primarily from the devilish growth of the
cocktail and the increasing popularity of that perfumey clear white
stuff to which I have already several times paid my compliments.
It is interesting to note that as Repeal neared, a Rockefeller
financed study of what to do about legal liquor made this breath-
less discovery: 'We cannot blind ourselves to the popularity of the
cocktail in America. The growth of the cocktail habit has ac-
companied Prohibition, and has indeed been stimulated by it be-
cause bootleggers could more readily furnish alcohol in concentrated
form suitable for making cocktails than they could the bulkier
alcoholic beverages." Hence, the study liberally concluded that
"a closely regulated sale of spirituous beverages by the glass for
consumption with meals" might become necessary. So far as gin
is concerned, I feel it only necessary to cite the definition offered
in the first (1829) edition of our first native encyclopedia, published
by the Americana Corporation. The stuff was described as a "hot
fiery spirit much used by lower classes of people as a dram, and
unquestionably most injurious to their constitution and morals."
Just as, unquestionably, some of the hardest drinkers of those
hard-drinking years were the college students; they drank in the
dormitories and fraternities, at roadhouses and weekend parties, in
the rumble seats so invitingly built for two. I know, I was there.
But the scandalous thing was not so much the quantity as the
quality of the booze consumed on campus. In Paris, the breast-
198 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
beating expatriates could dry their tears with cheap, honest vin.
The real 'lost generation" of the '20s were the college kids who
knew only the high-powered rotgut fed them by the conscienceless
"town/' bootleggers. 2
Intermittently, when conditions threatened to get out of hand,
the deans retaliated. Once, at the University of Minnesota, seven-
teen students were suspended at one time, and the embarrassed
University of Michigan reacted with similar severity when five of its
fraternity houses were padlocked. "They shouldn't raid college
fraternities unless they are going to raid country clubs/' Dartmouth
President Ernest M. Hopkins remarked logically.
Somehow, as the boys in their racoon coats toted silver flasks at
the Saturday football games and their flapper dates unsteadily
waved pennants initialed H or Y or P, Ella Boole descried goodness
in it all. She asked 254 college presidents whether "our young
people are going to the bad," and 225 of them said certainly not.
Under Prohibition, they maintained, conditions had improved at
their institutions. I don't know whether Ella's questions were loaded
or maybe even the prexies themselves were, but there is something
very cockeyed in the results as she reported them.
Granted that visiting British authors traditionally make some
deep and gloomy observation about our manners or morals after
each brief lecture tour. There is nonetheless a sombre ring of truth
in what Gilbert K. Chesterton saw after some eleven years of Prohi-
bition's impact on our young. "Alcoholism has never threatened
disaster as it is threatening America today," he reported, and
Chesterton was far from a prude. "It isn't normal that girls of
sixteen should go to dances and drink raw alcohol."
Not all of Ella's fellow Drys could agree with her. "We are
going to lose the law through our boys and girls," warned F. B.
Ebbert, a leader of the cause in California. "You would be as-
tounded to hear the school students laugh at Prohibition."
In my own case, I was a winter child, and my father was in his
eighties when I packed off to college. He felt some embarrassment
at delivering the expected father-to-son homily and kept it as
brief as he could. "I want you to try to study," he said, "and keep
2 If General Andrews' etymology is correct, bootlegger was a peculiarly
fitting word for these characters. The name, he said, derived from those
upstanding merchants who smuggled firewater to the Indians in their boots.
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 199
away from the girls as much as you can. But under no circum-
stances take dope!"
"I promise, Dad/' I said cheerfully. "Under no circumstances will
I take dope/'
I was so relieved that I completely overlooked a significant omis-
sion. He hadn't said a word about drinking. But this urbane old
man, who had been in local, county and state politics all his life, still
closely followed public affairs. Daily, he read the New York Herald-
Tribune, the Congressional Record and three local newspapers and
at night listened to our Atwater Kent radio. Possibly he was better
posted than Ella and resigned to reality.
The situation in the colleges, I think, can be summarized by a
poll once taken by the Harvard Crimson among fifteen Eastern and
Midwestern colleges. All voted for Repeal or modification, in most
cases overwhelmingly. At Princeton, almost four out of five students
said they drank; at Amherst, the number was more than seven out
of every ten. In fact, of all fifteen, only the University of Pennsyl-
vania reported a majority which did not drink.
Where was all the stuff coming from!
First, despite the sweeping Coast Guard claims of victory at sea
in 1925, Rum Row kept delivering the goods. At Christmas-time in
1926, New York reporters found that an estimated 340,000 cases
were stashed throughout the metropolitan area, and a dozen rum-
ships were standing off or steaming toward the New York coast.
There was no danger of a dry Yule.
Secondly, right at home, there were constantly increasing raw
supplies available for fermentation and distillation. Even the federal
Bureau of Prohibition, notoriously bearish on the farmer's con-
tribution to the drinking man, admitted that for the fiscal year end-
ing in mid-1930, the hops and vines had possibly yielded 683,032,-
000 gallons of malt liquor and 118,320,000 gallons of wine, re-
spectively.
However, the boom in corn sugar was the most spectacular
agricultural event of the '20s. From about 157,275,000 pounds in
1919, production rose 470 per cent to almost 900,000,000 pounds in
1929. Corn sugar, or solid glucose, is an entirely different corn
both from corn syrup, which is liquid glucose, and from corn starch.
The syrup and starch have many legitimate uses, but as far as
the anxious Dry eye could range, there were no new industrial or
200 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
consumer demands at hand or on the horizon to account for the
corn sugar boom. True, the rayon industry had expanded gready,
but even the Volsteadians conceded that didn't explain the 470 per
cent increase.
Actually, there wasn't much of a mystery. In distillation, corn
sugar obligingly leaves no ash and gives off no odor; it is to the
distiller what vodka is to the consumer. And that, of course, was
the answer.
Even allowing for legitimate consumption, more than 600,000,-
000 pounds of sugar remained available for the stills, according to
the Wet statisticians, and these would produce more than 61,000,-
000 gallons of proof spirits.
But that was only one source of raw material.
By 1929, the same sources estimated, cane and beet sugar, largely
used in the Midwest and Mountain states, had surpassed even corn
sugar as the popular source of illicit liquor, yielding some 70,000,-
000 gallons. There was also, they said, the illegal diversion of
denatured alcohol from approved industrial uses which produced
perhaps 15,000,000 gallons of proof spirits.
Molasses was credited with another 10,000,000 gallons, and
corn meal and corn mash, the stuff of choice in the old-fashioned
Southern pot stills, produced about the same amount. 8
To process all this natural goodness, breweries and distilleries
sprang up all over the country.
Many of the legitimate brewers gave up with the advent of
Prohibition, but others hung on by transferring over to cereal
beverages of less than Vi of 1 per cent of alcohol. These were pro-
duced by making and storing beer which was then de-alcoholized
as the cereal beverage was required to be. Obviously, many kegs
came out of rogue breweries, stamped "cereal beverage" but con-
taining the real suds.
Since there just weren't enough Dry agents to go around, the
3 For these estimates, I am indebted to Does Prohibition Pay?, published
by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. Of course, the
Bureau of Prohibition stoutly sought to minimize such agricultural wealth.
For the fiscal year ended in mid-1930, the Bureau insisted, no more than
59,900,000 gallons of 100 proof alcohol could have been obtained from
corn, cane and beet sugar, corn meal or other grains and molasses combined.
Even a Wickersham Commissioner drily called the Bureau's estimate the
lowest he had seen.
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 201
brewers could only be spot-checked, and even if they were caught
and lost their permits, beer production went on unhampered. The
Feds were caught in a paradox; they had no right to enter the
premises without a search warrant, but to get evidence for a warrant,
they first had to enter the premises!
Owney Madden's "cereal beverage*' enterprise, a $1,500,000
brewery on Tenth Avenue in New York, offered an interesting
example of this legal stalemate. Two or three times, the Feds raided
on the evidence or their sense of smell alone, but were rebuffed by
the courts which held that the nose was no substitute for a proper
warrant.
In one proceeding, a Madden defense witness, described as "a
student of the chemistry, biology and engineering of brewing for
twenty-two years/' learnedly explained that the Prohibition Agents
had merely smelled wort. "It contains no alcohol," he added se-
verely, being widely used in nursery beverages and such healthful
preparations as malt tonics and malt syrups.
Actually, wort, a cooled, boiled mash, was the wine brick of
illicit beer production. It was manufactured (legally) 'in large
quantities in a condensed form, but required only the addition of
yeast for fermentation. And while Owney's place was under tem-
porary padlock, the newspapers crassly reported, a green beer was
rushed into town from New Jersey, and a Capone-controlled brew
came over from Brooklyn, apparently to alleviate the plight of the
babies and invalids.
Distilleries were just as much of a problem, as we can judge
from only two or three statistics. Back in 1913, the federal revenuers
seized 2,375 stills throughout the country. Some dozen or so years
later, General Andrews hoped to break the commercial operation
and "get back on the basis where every man will make his own
whisky in his own home for his own consumption. Then I will
have done my work."
Alas for this simple, pastoral thought! Come 1929, and one state
alone confiscated more stills than the nationwide 1913 total, and all
the state and federal seizures were a dozen times higher than '13.
Yet, as the Wickersham Commission despairingly noted, this total,
"great as it has become, appears to leave the total in operation at the
end of any period at least no less than before."
202 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
Come with me into scenic northern New Jersey and visit one
of them.
The main tank, seventy-five feet long and fifty feet wide, is filled
almost to its six-foot depth with yeast, water and cracked corn.
Rails run around the edges so a power agitator can circle and stir
the goo. In twenty-four hours, there is a first run of white liquid
which is poured into eight large stills under the tank. The brew
continues through several processes, eventually winding up in a
double cooker and then the final stills. This plant can daily turn out
6,000 gallons of 170 proof alcohol. 4
Next the drums are transported across the Hudson to be used in
the production of "New York Scotch/' To real Scotch, enough of
the alcohol and water are added to stretch the Scotch sixfold.
Authentic Scotch coloring is then restored, and the mixture even
smells like Scotch. But it still carries the sting of raw New Jersey
alcohol, so it is given an electrical charge for twenty-four hours
which takes out the bite. Now, with the addition of nicely shaped
and initialled brown bottles made by the glassmakers of Jersey City,
and corks that have never been nearer to Spain than Brooklyn,
and locally printed foreign labels, the illusion is complete, and the
stuff seems cheap at 75 cents per drink over the bar.
In the mid-20s, General Andrews warned that less than 2 per
cent of the bootlegged liquor was pure, and that the watered alcohol
would "eventually break down a man's mentality and nervous
system. A few years later, the Wickersham Commission sportingly
conceded that "much of it (was) of good quality/' but still there
were many nervous drinkers.
As man so often does in distress, people turned to their family
An acquaintance of mine happened to be in Texas when "war-
time" Prohibition went into full effect on July 1, 1919, but fortu-
nately the Lone Star State had already been Dry by state law for
a year, and the transition was merciful on the drinking man.
"Relief measures for those who wanted whisky had been pretty
4 For a time, large $100,000 stills were located not only in Jersey, but
even right in New York City. The authorities broke them up, largely as a
peril to life in event of fire or explosion. The distillers then set up smaller
plants of about ten-barrels-a-day capacity, which made life safer but en-
forcement considerably more difficult.
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 203
well established by custom during 1918," he explains. 'The pro-
cedure was through doctors' prescriptions. A doctor got his prescrip-
tion forms in a book of fifty blanks. He signed up a book, and left
it with the druggist. Pay a clerk in the drugstore $3 for a prescrip-
tion, and another $3 for a pint, and you could get good whisky of
well known brands, at will."
Under National Prohibition, the doctors were pretty lucky
fellows. While there were certain irksome restrictions on them, they
were entitled to a hundred prescriptions every ninety days, and
the evidence was that not too many of these went to waste.
In its genteel way, the Wickersham Commission exonerated the
bulk of the profession, but deplored that prosecutions 'Tiave been
necessary from time to time and palpable evasions or violations come
to light continually." A past president of the American Medical
Association went further, bluntly telling a Senate subcommittee
that most doctors were bootlegging prescriptions.
In all fairness to the men in white, they were under constant
pressure from patients and friends, and the only way they could
return a courtesy was to give, not a free diagnosis, but a free pre-
scription.
Thus, on the eve of the '32 Democratic convention that nomi-
nated Roosevelt, a friend of mine in the Midwest obtained a dozen
prescriptions for a half pint each of bonded bourbon from a
physician for whom he had rendered "a great favor." Cheerfully, he
took off for Chicago with enough wet goods to last himself and
close friends through the proceedings.
'The night I arrived at the Palmer House," he still ruefully re-
members, "I made the mistake of inviting one of the delegates to
my room for a drink. He passed the word around, and before I
got my clothes unpacked, my twelve half pints of bonded bourbon
all of them! were gone."
Similarly, the druggists, who were allowed 100 gallons of spirits
every three months, did a flourishing bootleg business, in thousands
of instances, behind the dignified red and green bottles that still
adorned their windows in those days. Some purchased the physi-
cians' pre-signed prescription blanks, and others cut medicinal liquor
with bootleg stuff. The conscienceless swapped their entire con-
signment of pure permit liquor for rotgut, thereby seriously en-
dangering the few genuine applicants for medicinal liquor. In many
204 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
cases, bootleggers had yearly contracts with the druggists to take
all the supply they could spare, paying $144 per case for rye.
Mount Vernon and Old Overholt were particularly prized by the
whisky underworld because they would cut further than many other
whiskies.
General Andrews was deeply concerned by the plight of "the
good and honorable druggist (who) is just as much a servant of the
community in which he lives as the doctor . . . Now along comes
the illegitimate druggist who is bootlegging in medicinal whisky,
and upsets him/' Something should be done for the good druggist'
General Andrews said, and after six months of cogitation, he
thought he had hit upon the answer.
Solemnly, he proposed a private monopoly to manufacture and
distribute medicinal liquor. However, this "Congressionally-created
beneficent monopoly/' as it was called, required $150 million to
buy the stocks of spirits held in bond and another $50 million for
working capital and the acquisition of two distilleries.
Nothing came of it, and "the good and honorable druggist"
shouldered a heavier cross of shame, for the Wickersham Commis-
sion four years later observed that "the number of drug stores has
increased out of proportion to the increase in population/'
Finally, in looking into the extent of Prohibition drinking, we
must not overlook the economic factor. Once again, as in the sunny
days of the early 19th Century, the prices were right!
Of course, depending on geography and degree of competition,
there was a wide fluctuation in them. Thus by 1930, competition
was so sharp in New York City that boys carrying heavy bags of
handbills tramped through apartment houses all over the city to
distribute the bargain price lists. (These listed only the number
of a pay telephone where an employee waited to take the orders
and relay them on to the boss.)
The dodger of one "Jack Shaw, New York," is an interesting
playbill from the period:
Hundreds of satisfied customers enable us to offer you Booth's high
and dry gin, $1.50 a quart; Golden Wedding Rye, William Penn and
Silver Dollar, $3 a pint. All popular brands of Scotch, $4 a quart.
Bacardi, $3 a quart. Bacardi demijohn, $12 a gallon. Alcohol, $9
a gallon, special discount on quantities. All goods of authentic origin
HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK? 205
and flavor analyzed and tested and guaranteed pure. A trial order will
convince you. Immediate delivery. Twenty-four-hour service.
But to get a fair average price, you have to strike a balance be-
tween the modest cost of home manufacture and the much higher
price that was paid by the glass over the bar.
Home brew, for example, could be made for less than 30 cents a
gallon, while beer purchased by the glass in speaks came to $3 to $4
per gallon. Similarly, wine might fluctuate from 80 cents per
gallon up, and the range in spirits, from moonshine or "white mule"
to barroom whisky, was enormous.
Trying to be honest about cost and consumption, the Association
Against the Prohibition Amendment came up with the following
estimate of what we were spending and drinking in the tenth year
of Prohibition:
Beverage Gallons Retail Cost Total Cost
per Gdlon
Beer 790,000,000 $0.50 $395,000000
Wine 110,000,000 $Z30 $253,000,000
Spirits 200,000,000 $11.00 $2,220,000,000
Which added up to a total national "drink bill" of $2,868,000,-
000, putting the bootleg business right up in the category of steel,
autos and gasoline!
In view of all that we have talked about the wealth of raw
material, the manufacturing facilities, the general availability of
the finished product to the consumer and the tempting prices the
Wickersham Commission made probably the most remarkable
apologia of its kind in legislative annals, to wit:
There is a mass of evidence before us as to a general prevalence
of drinking in homes, in clubs, and in hotels, of drinking parties given
and attended by persons of high standing and respectability; of
drinking by tourists at winter and summer resorts; and of drinking
in connection with public dinners and at conventions. . . . Votes in
colleges show an attitude of hostility to or contempt for the law on
the part of those who are not unlikely to be leaders in the next gen-
eration. It is safe to say that a significant change has taken place in
the social attitude toward drinking.
This may be seen in the views and conduct of social leaders, busi-
206 HOW MUCH DID THEY DRINK?
ness and professional men in the average community. It may be seen
in the tolerance of conduct at social gatherings which would not have
been possible a generation ago. It is reflected in a different way of
regarding drunken youth, in a change in the class of excessive drink-
ers, and in the increased use of distilled liquor in places and connec-
tions where formerly it was banned.
It is evident that, taking the country as a whole, people of wealth,
business men and professional men, and their families, and perhaps
the higher paid workingmen, and their families, are drinking in large
numbers in quite frank disregard of the National Prohibition Act.
On the basis of this eloquent defense summation by a commission
that voted perpetuation of the tottering Noble Experiment, I, the
prosecution, rest my case!
2.0
Sopping Wet
and Howling Mad
For his prophetic espousal of aviation, peppery Billy Mitchell had
been broken by the military brass and resigned his colonelcy. Three
months later, Lieutenant Commander Richard Byrd and Royd
Bennett triumphantly flew over the North Pole.
In the Far West, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was just end-
ing a strange thirty-six-day disappearance that she alone believed
had been a "kidnaping." On Broadway, George White's Scandals
introduced a new form of gyrations called the Black Bottom which,
our "flaming youth" found, was more fun than the Charleston.
But one of the most sensational events of the day took place
behind closed doors in the Old House Office Building in Washing-
ton, D.C. From a room just a few steps away from where Andrew
Joseph Volstead once had conducted his pious legislative labors,
there drifted the mild aroma of beer. 1 And in mid-June, 1926, this
bouquet was as illegal, as feloniously significant throughout the
United States as the smell of gunpowder.
Inside the office, an excitable little man gestured at two brown
bottles in an ice-filled bucket and the inviting semi-circle of glass
mugs on his desk. He mixed the contents of the two bottles.
"Both these beverages are legally on sale on the open market,"
he told the assembled press.
1 After serving twenty years in Congress from 1905 to 1923, Volstead
had fallen victim to that mysterious political precept which holds that a
Congressman who gets his name on a law then gets defeated.
207
208 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
"One is near beer, Vi of 1 per cent alcohol. The other is a malt
tonic containing 3.76 per cent alcohol."
He paused a moment for proper dramatic effect. 'Take two-
thirds of the tonic and one-third of the near beer, and you have a
beer of about 2.84 per cent alcoholic content. It is palatable, re-
freshing, pure and wholesome."
He picked up a salt shaker. "By adding a pinch of salt, you get
a flavor of Wurtzberger. By the use of a little more salt, you get
Pilsener. It is perfectly simple. (You needn't be anxious, gentlemen.
There will be at least a little for all of us.)"
The near beer cost ten cents a bottle, and the tonic, Liebig's Malt
Extract labelled for "medicinal purposes/' cost thirty-five cents.
Thus, the blend which the little man somewhat charitably called
* good beer" came to only fifteen cents a glass. 2
'There, boys!" he cried happily as the press sampled the do-it-
yourself brew with some reservations. "Didn't I tell you it was so
simple that you'd be mad at yourselves for not thinking of it? If
the rulings of Prohibition permit us to obtain beer in this round-
about way, why not be sensible about it and permit the brewing of
a 2.75 per cent beverage direct?"
The oratorical question brought sharp answers. "He is simply
advertising a bootleg idea," snapped Wayne Wheeler. "Drug clerks
have been arrested for doing the same thing, and if this mixture
becomes popular as an illicit drink, it will probably be suppressed."
The very next day, the Treasury Department retaliated in its
lame and now-familiar way of adjusting Volsteadian absurdities to
reality. Hereafter, drugstores were sternly warned, they must store
their malt tonic with the medicines, rather than keeping it pleas-
antly cold in the soda fountain refrigerators.
But the Prohibition headquarters in Albany, New York, was
made of stronger stuff. With strange Dry logic, they conceded that
the process of mixing might be legal, but the result would be an
illegal brew, and they threatened to arrest anyone who spiked
near beer with Liebig's.
Up from Washington came the little man to accept the dare. He
2 Hie proprietors of Liebig's Malt Extract were horrified by the publicity
lest it result in increased business. Under permit, malt tonic of 3.75 per
cent to 4.12 per cent alcohol could be legally sold, but the manufacturer
was held strictly responsible for sales other than for "medicinal purposes/'
SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD 209
mixed his brew before a crowd on a Harlem street corner and
passed out samples. A cop sauntered by.
"I'm making beer/' he yelled hopefully to the law.
"Okay, brother."
'Why don't you arrest me?"
Tm no Prohibition agent," the cop said with some dignity.
Instead of ordering the little man to move on, \ie moved on.
This diminutive apostle of 275 beer was Congressman Fiorello
H. (Little Flower) LaGuardia in his happy, gadfly role of punctur-
ing Prohibition.
"Those who wanted beer could find that this wasn't so bad," he
later explained. "It would have delayed complete Repeal, so I
wanted to show it up. Anything that would make Prohibition hurt,
that would enforce it in bitter thoroughness that was what I
wanted." 8
The Drys, of course, passed themselves off as the repository of
the true American tradition. Actually, as we have said before but
can t say often enough to keep the record straight, the authentic
American spirit, our national character, was firmly bottomed first
on rum and then on whisky, never on water, milk or fruit punch.
The literature is incontestably dear on the point.
"Congress allows lemonade to the members and has it charged
under die head of stationery," a certain uncouth but typically
American predecessor of LaGuardia had said in the U.S. House
about a century earlier. "I move also that whisky be allowed under
the item of fuel"
That was Davy Crockett talking. 4
8 Nor did LaGuardia have any genteel reservations about showing up the
Dry leaders, as well as the Dry laws. When Bishop Cannon decided to sail
abroad on the British liner Olympic, LaGuardia cabled, "Desire information
for my files why you took passage on a British, nun-soaked ship instead of
on an American ship. Several first-class bone-dry American ships were
available. How do you justify your action?"
4 With the wonderful poetry of the backwoodsman, Davy went on to
say: 'Tor bitters I can suck away at a noggin of aquafortis, sweetened with
brimstone, stirred with a lightning rod, and skimmed with a hurricane.
I've soaked my head and shoulders in Salt River, so that I'm always corned.
I can walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel, yen like an
Indian, fight like a devil, spout like an earthquake, make love like a mad
bull and swallow a man whole without choking if you butter his head and
pin his ears back."
210 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
Even Lincoln, sacred symbol of the political party which the
Drys tried to capture, accepted whisky as a staple of life and argued
that the "injury did not come from the use of a bad thing, but from
the abuse of a good thing."
"The Americans got no help from heaven or the saints but they
knew what to do with corn," sang Bernard DeVoto with the felicity
of a Harvard man. "In the heroic age our forefathers invented self-
government, the Constitution, and bourbon, and on the way to
them they invented rye . . ,
"Our political institutions were shaped by our whiskys, would be
inconceivable without them, and share their nature. They are
distilled not only from our native grains but from our native vigor,
suavity, generosity, peacefulness and love of accord. Whoever goes
looking for us will find us there."
What, asks DeVoto, is "our highest tribute to a first-class man"
(and I would update the question by asking if plastics, automation,
nuclear physics, gin or vodka have yet made the compliment
obsolete)? "He s a gentleman, a scholar, and a judge of good
whisky"
It was in this gusty spirit, a curious compound of respect for the
real past and irreverence for the unrealistic present, that the Wets
of Prohibition days fought their up-mountain fight. They fought
gayly and bitterly, logically and often frivolously, without the
discipline of the regimented Drys, but with slashing wit, with quick,
warm protest against Prohibition's many daily injustices and a
nagging appeal to the basic common sense of Americans,
Scholar, socialite, Revolutionary scion and first-generation Ameri-
can, they were a strange cocktail of all our classes in an era before
status was such a dreadfully important thing. In some respects, I
think, they were our last loose association of free men who were
motivated not by fear of this-or-that but by courage, who didn't give
a damn for adverse opinion, who stood up to personal abuse without
whining or flinching. Maybe, in fact, the dismaying odds quickened
and steeled their spirit.
They couldn't look to the courts, they knew.
During the first decade of Prohibition, there were more than a
hundred decisions by the Supreme Court, some 3,000 by the lower
Federal courts and several thousand more by the higher state
courts which, almost overwhelmingly, supported the Dry law and
SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD 211
its enforcement. Chief Justice Taft, who originally had opposed
the 18th, later defected from the Wet cause, and Herbert Hoover
went so far as to appoint a former paid lecturer for the Anti-Saloon
League to the Federal bench in Kansas.
In fact, the legal situation became so preposterous that manu-
facturers of model trains had to obliterate the naughty word "beer"
from their freight cars. Thus, the neat little Schlitz car with
hinged double refrigerator doors bore the curious legend, "Schlitz
That Made Milwaukee Famous," and thousands ofpuzzled little
boys asked, "Daddy, what does that mean?"
Nor could the Wets look to Congress for relief.
In 1927, Tom Heflin said contemptuously that the Wet advocates
in the Senate "could all fit in a taxicab." Both fear and hypocrisy
seemed to dominate the lawmakers, and the Wets just couldn't
break through the double curtain. In a confidential poll of 200
Senators and Congressmen in 1931, two-thirds wanted Repeal or
modification, though they admittedly didn't vote their convictions.
Some frankly said that they were afraid of the Anti-Saloon League's
wrath.
On another occasion, an anti-Prohibition organization tried to
force a showdown on Congressional hypocrisy by compiling a list
of solons who drank Wet and voted Dry. However, the Senate
Lobby Investigating Committee rejected the list, the chairman
delicately ruling that it "would only cause embarrassment to a lot
of people."
Whatever their station, such niceties did not equally apply to
the Wets, and some of the highest-placed among them were sub-
jected to gutter vituperation. As early as 1924, Nicholas Murray
Butler, president of Columbia University, courageously asserted,
"No man who values his reputation for good sense and sincerity can
continue to say that the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act are
either enforced or enforceable." And he never wavered in his
Wetness down the years. It was unforgivable!
"Nicholas Murray Butler ought to have the decency to resign,"
Billy Sunday once spluttered to the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta,
Georgia. "There he sits sneering at Prohibition while young men
listen to his words. If that isn't anarchy, if that isn't treason, Bene-
dict Arnold was a Sunday School teacher!"
There was the rich and elegant Stuyvesant Fish who presided
212 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
at the first mass meeting of the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment at Carnegie Hall. He made speeches denouncing
Prohibition and then found himself embarrassingly entangled in a
written conflict with his own Episcopal superior, Bishop William T,
Manning.
There were, too, in this brave, fastidious company, the La-
Guardias, the Al Smiths, the Jimmy Walkers, whose ancestors not
only had missed the Mayflower but had barely reached Ellis Island
at all before the age of sail ended. The vituperation they took was
the worst of all.
Today, it seems, I can still hear Al Smith's rasping lower East
Side voice, still see "The Happy Warrior" so improbably accou-
tered with a brown derby as his helmet and a tilted cigar as his
cocked lance. But, in retrospect, his '28 Wet campaign rings almost
Milquetoastish.
While Hoover was sonorously approving the "great social and
economic experiment/' Al was asking for a Volstead Act amendment
providing a "scientific definition of the alcoholic content of an
intoxicating beverage/' Then each state could go her separate way,
provided her standard did not exceed that prescribed by Congress.
Secondly, he wanted states' rights for popular referenda on the
subject so that any state, if it so voted, could manufacture, import
and sell alcoholic beverages within its borders, "the sale to be made
only by the state itself and not for consumption in any public
place."
Certainly the proposals did not merit the whiplash that he suf-
fered. To one Baptist Fundamentalist clergyman in New York who
struggled against modernism, evolution, prize fighting, dancing,
liquor and die stage, Al Smith was "a good cheap truck driver type
of barroom politician and the best friend of the forces of reaction,
immorality, vice and crime in the nation today." 5
5 In all fairness, not all the clergy was blindly Dry. Bishop Charles Fiske,
Manning's counterpart in the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, found
the Volstead Act 'lias resulted in worse drinking conditions among young
people than we had before; that it has increased enormously among them
the use of strong distilled liquors often poisonous and dangerous; that it
has corrupted officials, has brought about an increased disrespect for law
and is class legislation discriminating ... in favor of the rich who can
get what they want, and against die poor." To this, Father William J.
Rafter, who worked with Bowery derelicts as director of the Holy Name
SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD 213
This blunderbuss aimed at Smith had reinforcements in the
thousands from lay and clerical Dry leaders of equally liberal turn
of mind. Except to document the abuse that the Wets sustained,
there's little point in rehashing those old unhappy hates and
prejudices of '28. So, with two quotes from our familiar friend Billy
Sunday, who among the Drys had the rare virtues of wit and
terseness, we will close the topic.
Billy predicted (for once rightly) that Smith had "no more
chance of being elected President than the Pope has of being made
Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan." And his post-election
diagnosis of the defection by the Southern Democratic states was
that "they wouldn't let a man roll into the White House on a wine
and beer keg/'
Much of the bitterness centered around New York state, which
in a 1926 referendum had overwhelmingly voted Wet (1,763,070 to
598,484) with only nineteen of the sixty-one counties holding in
the Dry column. Yet, with their unique logic which we have re-
marked before, the Prohibitionists indicted the politicians who ac-
curately reflected majority will.
"We'll take care of you!" Senator Brookhart once threatened in
a debate with Clarence Darrow, who of course wasn't a New Yorker
to begin with. "New York will have an enforcement act, and if it
doesn't do its duty by the Constitution, then we*!! do it for you!"
Similarly, at an "Indignation Meeting to Protest Against the
32,000 Local Speakeasies/' a jurist of some eminence accused New
York of "constructive treason" in having repealed its Dry law and
refusing to pass a substitute. He mentioned the names of Al Smith,
Mayor Walker and Police Commissioner Whalen and then, with
an unmistakable inference, added the phrase, "perjurers and traitors
to the Constitution, their country and its flag," Perhaps we shouldn't
take this too seriously, though. Only 300 persons were indignant
enough to turn out and listen.
New York was not the only Wet state to balk at setting up its own
costly enforcement apparatus, an omission which the Drys de-
nounced as "nullification" and the Wets insisted was minding their
own damned business as they saw fit.
"No state is called upon to provide enforcement machinery for
Mission there, added, 'Prohibition is the worst thing that ever came to the
Bowery."
214 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
the federal income tax, or the Narcotics law, or the Mann Act,
or any other federal enactment that I know of," Maryland Governor
Albert G Ritchie argued with rebuttal-proof logic. "They are the
laws of the federal government, and the federal government sets up
its own federal machinery to enforce its own laws. Why, then,
should any state be obligated to set up machinery to enforce just
one out of all the thousands of federal laws?"
There was only one answer to simple, intelligent argument like
that, and Clarence True Wilson had it. Send the Marines into
Maryland, he demanded.
Indeed, for timid Wets, these were days that tried men's souls
and the weaker among them literally lost their minds. One New
Yorker killed himself, leaving a despairing note that "the whole
nation is in the grip of dangerous fanatics, gangsters, racketeers and
political fakers who have ruined the best country in the world."
Another threatened officers and agents of the Anti-Saloon League
with death.
Eventually, though, the Wets got a foothold in Congress. When
F. Scott McBride was brought before the Senate Lobby Committee,
a courageous Wet, Senator John J. Elaine, Republican from Wis-
consin, challenged his grandiose assertion that the Anti-Saloon
League had divine antecedents.
Q. What gave you the conception that the Anti-Saloon League
was born of God? Did God give you a message?
A. The fact that it was born at a prayer meeting and further that
we do our work in close connection with the churches.
"Oh, I know that you put on the cloak of religion," Elaine said
tartly.
"No, we don't use a cloak."
"Do you regard your organization as the Son of God?"
"I repeat that I believe our organization is led by God. It is an
instrumentality of God, and anything that stands in the way of
the Kingdom of God must get out of the way."
"My own view," said Elaine, "is that I don't believe God would
approve some of your practices, and I think it unfortunate for the
moral forces of the country that the League should call itself a divine
agency. It is a sacrilegious and an outrageous thing!"
From the Dry claque in the audience, there were hisses. McBride
rose to his feet, starting to repeat his former statements. The com-
SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD 215
mittee chairman also rose, and the interchange that had taken some
of the air out of the Leagues pretenses was over.
By now, to stiffen Congressional spines, the Wets had strong
organizations of their own. There was the Association Against the
Prohibition Amendment, brilliantly directed by W. H. Stayton
in Washington, which had two duPonts, Pierre and Lammot, as
heads of its executive and finance committees; the Crusaders; the
Moderation League and, at last, a feminine answer to the insuf-
ferable righteousness of the bow of white ribbon flaunted by the
WCTU.
The Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform was
formed in the spring of 1929 by a lady who could be accused only
of impeccability. Mrs. Charles H. Sabin had also been a founder
of the Women's National Republican Club and was the first woman
to serve on the Republican National Committee.
In only four years, with flourishing divisions in more than half
the states, the organization had grown to a membership of more than
a million. W.O.N.P.R. was as articulate and aggressive, in a nice
way, as the WCTU, and was the first to declare that any Repeal
amendment should be referred to state conventions of the people,
rather than to the state legislatures. Mrs. Sabin took a leading role
in persuading Congress to adopt this course and, to get a little ahead
of our story, her group rendered unstinting service, at the state level,
for ratification when the repealing amendment finally was sub-
mitted.
I know that I am shamelessly prejudiced, but there is still another
group the writers, God bless them who deserve a few wet
leaves of laurel. Maybe they can't balance a checkbook or meet a
payroll, but thus unencumbered, they sometimes get the bigger
things into perspective.
There was Fred Pasley, whom I've previously mentioned, who
with his perceptive reportorial eye neady ticked off the schizo-
phrenic hypocrisy of Prohibition as he found it at the Monticello
Hotel in Charlottesville, Virginia. In each room, he noted, "was a
Gideon Bible at the bedside and on the door of the bathroom, a
combination corkscrew and bottle opener." It could have been any
hotel, U.SA, 1920-1933, and had motels yet been invented, they
would have been similarly equipped.
There was Heywood Broun who with one stiletto thrust could
216 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
draw more Hood than a McBride with a thousand swipes of his
claymore. "It is not in my heart to be severe about the old-time
saloon," he once wrote, then added with nostalgia for the new-
fangled speakeasy, "There is no reason in the world why those who
do not want the old saloon to come back should not join hands with
those of us who ardently contend that the new style speakeasy
should never go away/' He got no takers.
And that writing man of action, Frank Ward O'Malley, "the
best known reporter in America," who pulled up stakes altogether in
1929 because he was "too old to battle against the Prohibitionists,
the third-rate politicians and the half-witted business executives
who run the United States/'
When he arrived in Marseilles, he announced, "I have nothing to
declare but a load of unhappiness to get away from the United
States/ 1 He was joining 100,000 other American &nigr&, he said,
but he was not disloyal, he thought his exile would be short-lived.
"Perhaps, meanwhile, the United States will regain its freedom
and gain relief from a distorted mentality/' he said. "Perhaps every-
one will learn to mind his own business and not bother about what
his neighbor drinks/' 6
In the end, I am sure, it was the writers who gave the Wets their
strongest, straightest arrow, the only one that can penetrate the
over-padded posteriors of pompous majorities and dictators-
Laughter.
They laughed when a distillery offered its stockholders a dividend
consisting of whisky, and the Dry authorities reacted in outrage.
They laughed when a jury in Columbia, South Carolina, meditated
three hours, drank forty-seven bottles of the evidence and then re-
turned a verdict of guilty.
They laughed at Amos W. W. Woodcock, the well-meaning
Prohibition boss, who set up a "school" for Dry agents with the
former principal of a small rural high school as the dean. His sug-
gestion was that schoolboys, pedalling furiously, might track the
bootleg trucks to their lairs.
They laughed with Al Smith who said coyly, "I never take a
drink until sundown/' and with Jimmy Walker who organized a
a j- i . * - f 1932 ** his fifty-seventh year, "O'Malley of The
Sun died in Tours, France, before the dawn of Repeal. In keeping with a
pact that he had made with his wife, he was buried where he
SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD 217
"Beer Parade" in which more than 100,000 protestants, with floats,
marched along Fifth Avenue and over to Central Park West. Jimmy
himself led the line and, as the newspapers reported almost in awe,
the dilatory mayor was "only ten minutes late/*
"America's greatest sin today is good-humored indifference to
existing conditions," Mabel Willebrandt snapped.
As the cruel, rising sound of laughter echoed even into the
humorless Dry strongholds, the Wets pressed their new advantage
in Congress. In 1930, no less than seven resolutions for repeal of
the 18th Amendment were submitted to the House Judiciary Com-
mitteethe first time since Prohibition had gone into effect that
any Repeal resolutions had been formally entertained by a Congres-
sional committee. Joyously, the Wets proclaimed their feelings.
Frederic R. Coudert Sr., one of the most eminent members of the
New York bar and an obstinate, self-proclaimed wine drinker,
sweepingly denied any federal or state enforcement of the law in
New York. "It won't be done, can't be done, and is not being done,"
he said.
From St. Louis, former Senator George H. Williams, whose own
seat had been taken by a Wet, reported that nullification was a fact,
and that the prosecuting attorney, of all people, had been elected
on such a program. In Cleveland, added former Assistant Secretary
of War Benedict Crowell, the people had definitely turned against
Prohibition, and drunkeness arrests had soared 1,000 per cent since
the law went into effect.
A most respectable man, Dr. Samuel Harden Church, president
of Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, dismissed Bishop Cannon as
just a bucketshop gambler and opined that if Jesus returned to
earth, he would be censured by the Methodist Board of Temper-
ance, Prohibition and Public Morals, by the Anti-Saloon League
and the WCTU after which the Attorney General would jail
him.
Ah, but what of the industrial efficiency that Prohibition had
brought about? No different before or after, testified W. W. Atter-
bury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Whisky hadn't been
a serious problem even before Prohibition, added Pierre duPont,
board chairman of E. I. duPont de Nemours.
Even in those relatively forthright and uncomplicated days,
psychiatry was making itself felt, and a professor came up from
218 SOPPING WET AND HOWLING MAD
Johns Hopkins to opine that the country was displaying symptoms
of Prohibition shock not unlike "shell shock," as the psychiatrists
then described what they now call "battle fatigue." However, even
this interpreter of dreams and moods hit upon a laughable point.
There is scientific suspicion, he said, that the individual with no
outlets such as cursing, smoking, chewing or drinking "must have
some very interesting secret vices/'
As the laughter rose and rose, the unregenerate became more and
more unregenerate.
In New York City, the "cordial shops" brazenly displayed whisky
bottles in their windows, sold the stuff openly and distributed
price lists carelessly.
"We raid them again and again," said Prohibition Administrator
Andrew McCampbell as he tried manfully to inflict a last Dry
Christmas on the metropolis in 1932.
"Day before yesterday, we raided a cordial shop, arrested the man
on duty and removed the equipment. He was bailed out, and the
shop opened yesterday. So we raided it a second time last night,
but it's open again today. What can we do with them so defiant?"
Yes, the smell of victory was in the air, and that same year when
he renewed his campaign for Congress, the little man with whom
we opened this chapter scarcely mentioned Prohibition,
"The bandwagon boys are attending to that," said Fiorello
LaGuardia. "The fight is over. I'm not interested now that it's all
over but the shouting."
Wholesome Is
as Wholesome Does
If the Drys could relive part of their past, depressing as the
watery thought is, they probably would choose 1929 and 1930.
Superficially at least, they were in control of the White House, the
Congress, die courts and the country itself; their only opposition,
they felt, came from a loud, unrighteous minority whose personal
habits and public posture were equally deplorable.
It was true that violence and corruption, as reported daily by the
biased Wet press, remained stubbornly prevalent. People still were
drinking, gangsters still dropping to the monotonous accompani-
ment of "backfire," cops still taking bribes. The State Department
made public correspondence among Dry, Coast Guard and Customs
brass showing there had been widespread corruption among federal
officials.
Even the Coast Guard, that honor-bright service, was tarred inter-
mittently. At the New London base, wholesale courtmartial proceed-
ings accused some three dozen Guardsmen of theft or drunkenness.
There had been, it seemed, a scandalously high old time the night
the rummy Flor-Del-Mar was unloaded there. Sometimes, Guards-
men were charged with selling gasoline to the rummies prac-
tically treason, from the Dry point of view. And during a riot at
Boston's hallowed Faneuil Hall, CG recruiting posters were torn
down and destroyed.
But by now the good element had so firmly adjusted the rose-
tinted spectacles on their thin noses that they overlooked the ob-
vious.
219
220 WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES
The president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs
remarked to the Mount Pleasant Chapter of the WCTU in Wash-
ington that she had travelled the length and breadth of the land.
And, girls, she had not seen one intoxicated person nor had she been
offered owe drink.
From the socially rarefied area of Rittenhouse Square came re-
assuring word that the smart people were no less Dry than their
brethren in the hinterland. A Philadelphia grand dame reported that
1,137 society matrons and wives of government officials had con-
fided in a secret poll their opposition to the custom of serving drinks
to guests. Only 247 (probably Democrats or nouveau riche, any-
how) were in favor of its continuance.
Yes, on a clear day, with the right glasses, the Drys could see a
very rosy dawn. Mr. Coolidge, a good man, was going out, and Mr.
Hoover, a strong man who had campaigned unreservedly in de-
fense of law and order, was coming in. There was optimistic talk
that the great Dry voice out of the West, William Borah, would
quit the U.S. Senate and personally storm and take the last Wet
ramparts as United States Attorney General. 1
On a more modest level, the Anti-Saloon League of Rhode Island
thought up a devilish plan for the first annual "Rhode Island State
Citizenship Convention" held under League auspices. The conven-
tion approved a scheme whereby every Protestant church member
in the state would become an active Prohibition informer for the
government. The League was charged with the responsibility of
distributing printed blanks among the congregations so suspects
could be catalogued. (I don't know what came of it, but it was a
pretty cheeky thing in the state (along with Connecticut) that
had refused even to ratify the 18th.)
With some justification, the Drys could now believe that Mrs.
Henry W. Peabody's clear bugle call two years earlier to the
1927 bi-annual convention of the Anti-Saloon League had at last
been heard. "Eve is not responsible for the present political situa-
tion/' Mrs. Peabody had said briskly, "Adam thus far having had
1 The country was at least spared this calamity. Of Borah, the New York
News said editorially, "His belief in Prohibition does not carry a willing-
ness to take off his coat and fight for Prohibition with any more dangerous
weapon than his mouth. 11
WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES 221
control of politics. Women, however, are not satisfied with the
present enforcement of the law." 2
Even before Hoover took over, the lame duck Congress of '29
made a going-away present to the Drys. The Senate passed the
Jones bill which quintupled the penal ante on Volstead Act viola-
tions to a maximum of five years in prison and/or a $10,000 fine,
and this led to the insolent Dry showdown in the House of Repre-
sentatives that I will try to recreate for you.
The faces peering down from the gallery are harsh, unyielding
faces of long-suffering zealots. Impatiently, they follow the legisla-
tive byplay for the kill that has to come.
A Virginia Representative tries to exempt at least first offenders.
He wins on a rising vote. The Drys call for tellers. His amendment
is beaten.
No compromise!
Tammany Representative John J. O'Connor, who makes no bones
about what he thinks of the Prohibition law, manages to get the
floor.
Satirically, he proposes another amendment that the maximum
penalty be increased to capital punishment. O'Connor has betrayed
his oath in admitting disrespect for the law, a Dry Congressman
charges.
On the floor, O'Connor reads the oath to defend himself and
bellows back:
"Are you supporting the Constitution, or are you bowing your
knees in submission to the organizations which are above the Con-
stitution!
"Are you pledging your full faith and allegiance to the Constitu-
tion, or are you doing it for the Anti-Saloon League, whose leader
and dictator sits there in the corner, watching your every move, and
who is sending messages down here somewhere?
2 To tell the truth, Herbert Hoover did his best. During his four years,
he increased jail populations from 22,000 to 53,000 with Prohibition con-
victions, and the number of convictions rose from some 40,000 to 82,000 in
1932. In retrospect, it seems too bad that the League in 1927 had listened
more to Mrs. Peabody's trumpet blast than the still, small voice of Miss
Cora Frances Stoddard, of the Scientific Temperance Federation in Boston.
Law alone could not solve the problems of alcoholism, she reasoned gently;
also necessary was education in tne reasons for a law's objective.
222 WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES
"He sits up there Dr. McBride, the super-President of the
United States. Many of you know he is there. That is the Constitu-
tion and that is the Amendment you are supporting, and not the
18th!"
A Republican Congressman from Ohio who doubles as an Anti-
Saloon League lecturer waves up to the boss. McBride acknowl-
edges the salute with a smug and wintry smile.
No compromise!
"This ghastly bill is the last word in legislative inebriety!" Loring
M. Black Jr., O'Connor's fellow Democratic Congressman from
New York, protests despairingly.
"It is written in the ink of intolerance with the pen of Puritanism.
It suggests Lord Jeffreys, Bluebeard and the slave galleys! Accord-
ing to this act, the Master Himself would go to jail for five years
for the Miracle at Cana."
But, no compromise!
The Anti-Saloon League had been driving several years for this
bill, and Mabel Willebrandt wants it, too. The Dry steamroller
crushes down debate, pushing the measure toward adoption, 283-
to-90, in less than two hours.
On March 2, two days before he gingerly adjusted the top hat
on his head and handed the country over to Herbert Hoover,
Calvin Coolidge signs the harsh "5 & 10" law.
Now the Prohibitionists held the country in their cold, dry
palm.
Enforcement was getting tighter and though, of course, it could
never be much more than a joke, the Feds were reassuringly noisy
about their work. This served the double purpose of harassing the
Wets and placating the Drys. 8
Thus, the New York City squad drew many resounding Dry
amens and hallelujahs for a much-publicized raid on the Hollywood
Restaurant. They netted all of eleven flask toters for illegal posses-
8 As late as the summer of 1932, Prohibition Boss Amos W. W. Wood-
cock was assuring the WCTU's Seattle convention that all was well. His
Bureau was enforcing Prohibition much better "than the sophisticated
realize" and had "driven the liquor traffic to cover," he said. There were
he even insisted, "practically no open sales of intoxicating liquor in the
United States." A thirsty fellow had to seek out the stuff.
WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES 223
sion. The worst they could do to the restaurant was to file a charge
of 'maintaining a nuisance" (because the Hollywood had sold
soft drinks and cracked ice)! But they reaped enough columns of
newspaper space to keep a paid-by-the-inch country correspondent
in coal for a long winter.
The courts remained Dry and to some degree got even tougher.
A federal judge in Illinois coupled the shiny new "5 & 10" law with
a Congressional act of 1790 and came up with one of those decisions
that make the layman worry a little about the processes of legal
More than a century and a quarter earlier, Congress had de-
fined as a felony the failure to report any serious crime to the
authorities. Now Judge Louis Fitzhenry applied this antique act to
the Jones law. Thus, by his reasoning, if a fellow bought a drink
from a bootlegger or knew someone who possessed liquor and didn't
tell, he himself became a felon subject to the penalties of the
Jones law! 4
Possibly this decision had more psychological than legal sig-
nificance for curiously, despite their seemingly intrenched position,
the Drys were beginning to run scared. And in their classic rule-or-
ruin manner, they reacted with bluster and stepped-up propaganda
drives.
The redoubtable Senator Sheppard of Texas demanded an
amendment to the Volstead Act to punish that worst of Prohibition
malefactors, he "who incites the sale, who induces the transportation
and, indeed, the manufacture of liquor" the purchaser.
Dr. Doran preferred an "educational" campaign, and his Bureau
of Prohibition whipped up pamphlets for use in the schools. One
of these tracts addressed to the teachers suggested several inspira-
tional slogans:
"It takes two to make a "bootlegger."
"The 18th Amendment helps us to have beautiful homes, more
convenient homes and money in the savings "bank"
For arithmetic classes, the pamphlet suggested:
4 This absurd ruling was too much for the Prohibition Bureau and the
chief counsel himself doubted that it would become a basis for prosecu-
tions. Out in St. Paul, the now almost-forgotten Andrew Volstead protested
it. However, Senator Jones, author of the "5 & 10" law and acting Senate
Republican leader, thought it was just dandy.
224 WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES
Problems having to do with the increase in value of property in
your own locality formerly occupied as saloons or as breweries and
of property adjacent thereto, the difference in the number of people
employed, and the increase in taxation, the increase in number and
amounts of savings accounts, the increase in the number of insurance
policies, the increase in number of home owners, etc.
For those rather dreary classes which were called "current events"
back in my school days, die pamphlet added :
Current events relating to the 18th Amendment. A study of news-
papers as to bias. Are they friendly or antagonistic to the 18th Amend-
ment? Can their reporting and editorial writing be depended upon
to be fair or must one read with caution and discrimination?
Not altogether surprisingly, Dr. Doran withdrew the pamphlets
when a certain "misconception" arose as to the purpose.
Even the chitchat columns in the newspapers every so often
got their wind up for the Drys. Jay E. House, who had served a
couple of terms as Mayor of Topeka, reported in the Philadelphia
Public Ledger and the New York Post that thirteen out of fourteen
of the "best homes'* had served him liquor when he returned on a
visit to cut up a few old touches in Topeka. From Governor Clyde
M. Read down, the officials of "bone dry" Kansas were shaken.
State Attorney General William A. Smith and Assistant Shawnee
County Attorney John J. Schenck both rummaged through the
society columns in the back issues of the Topeka newspapers to
find who had entertained House. The hosts were then subpoenaed
to answer these questions:
Did you entertain Jay E. House last winter? Did you serve
liquor? Where did you get it?
After the first round of what you might call socialite sleuthing,
Attorney General Smith announced darkly, "Someone has been
doing a good bit of lying about liquor." And House, feeling as
relieved as only a Wet Kansan a long way from Kansas could feel,
added:
"If a thing like that could happen in Topeka, it could happen
anywhere. It may help the country to a realization of the plight it
is in. The rule-or-ruin attitude of the Anti-Saloon League and
kindred organizations is the greatest menace this country is called
WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES 225
upon to face . . . It has reached the point where we have freedom
only by fighting for it"
Yes, '29 ancTSO, those vintage years of H 2 O, held uneasy portents
tor the Drys. They even hegan fighting among themselves.
Only five years earlier, Mahel WiUebrandt had been a darling of
the WCTU, invited as an honor guest to its golden jubilee in
Chicago in 1924. Now she was questioned rather sharply for hav-
ing instructed federal attorneys to exercise "wise discretion" in cer-
tain Prohibition matters. Blandly this woman who had unleashed
raids along Broadway the night of Al Smith's nomination told the
sisters, "Enforcement by harassment is never justified!"
Again, when she observed that Wayne B. Wheeler had guided
the Anti-Saloon League ' 'into dangerous shoals by too much polit-
ical activity/' F. Scott McBride barked back indignantly. He
denounced the irresponsibility of a few Drys who were selling
"articles, to Wet and Dry newspapers as well as to Wet magazines,
panning Wayne B. Wheeler, the man who carried the burden of
the battle in the heat of the contest . . ."
Clarence True Wilson was so nervous over the outcome of a
Literary Digest poll on Prohibition that he proposed to a group of
Methodist ministers that all Drys vote twice if they got the oppor-
tunity. Even for the cause, the men of the doth couldn't stoop to
this. Wilson withdrew the proposal, though still grumbling that
the Wets were all voting several times. When the American Legion
plunked for a liquor referendum, he was beside himself. "There
was a marked absence of the sober, well-behaved, typical Ameri-
can," he said of the country's defenders. 'The other crowd is in
power . . . That is why such numbers of staggering drunks dis-
graced the uniform and yelled for beer."
As the two good years ran down the drain, the tempo of dissolu-
tion quickened. It had been bad enough back in 1924 when vio-
lence even in the nation's capital had been dramatized by the
nearly fatal misadventure of Vermont Senator Frank L. Greene.
Walking on a downtown street in Washington, he heard a com-
motion, went to investigate and was hit in the crossfire of shots
between Prohibition agents and bootleggers. He lay near death for
weeks.
In Washington itself, 1931 witnessed a shocking demonstration
226 WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES
of Prohibition-caused hooliganism. Hijackers invaded the Legation
home of Dr. Don Carlos Leiva, charge d'affaires of the Salvadoran
Legation, beat him up, pegged shots at him and stole seventeen
cases of diplomatic liquor. Secretary of State Stimson despatched
a note of sympathy, President Hoover despatched his own doctor,
but the wounds of doubting and confused Drys all over the country
could not be so easily bandaged.
Also in 1931, the time bomb that Herbert Hoover himself
had planted eighteen months earlier exploded with a muffled roar,
raining platitudes and inconsistencies in all directions. In previous
chapters, I have been more than generous in helping myself to
some of the more savory slices of ham from the report of the Wicker-
sham Commission. As you will remember, the Commission heard
enough witnesses and dug up enough facts and statistics to realize
that Prohibition was a problem.
I will add only one point. Two of the eleven commissioners
plunked for Repeal, and one of these was so indignant he wouldn't
even sign the report. Five others favored revision and only four
Jobs or Mr. Micawbers, depending on how you prefer to judge
them, recommended further trial.
However, as a body the august commission recommended more
money and more improvements all down the line "so as to give to
enforcement the greatest practicable efficiency." To make its bewil-
dering report a bit more bewildering, the conclusions and recom-
mendations were subject to appended reservations, explanations or
approbations by the eleven individual commissioners.
Carefully sorting out the Wet chaff, Herbert Hoover gave his
approval to the Dry kernels. And in words she no doubt regretted
the next year, Ella Boole purred:
"From this day henceforth, the President is not only the outstand-
ing Dry champion of the Republican Party, but the leader behind
whom the Dry forces of America will rally their support."
People were still translating and debating the now-you-see-it,
now-you-don't prose of the remarkable Wickershamites, when our
quadrennial madness afflicted the country with more than usual
severity in '32.
The Drys got up early that year and scurrying down to St. Peters-
burg in February for the Southern convention of the Anti-Saloon
League, made plain that they hoped to replay '28.
WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES 227
Pointing the gun of righteousness at dissenting heads, a Baptist
dergyman cried Anarchist!" at those who stand "for personal
rights against the Constitution." A lady who had exiled herself from
Massachusetts .because the Bay State repealed its Prohibition law
went turther. Those attacking the Constitution "should be removed
from high office as disloyal to their oaths." They meant Wets of
course. ' '
F. Scott McBride threatened both major parties. The League
would put up $100,000 to defeat any Wet nominee for President,
he warned. Shortly afterwards, he hurried up to Pennsylvania to
inject religion into primary politics. General Smedley Buder was
the Leagues man for the U.S. Senatorial nomination, and McBride
bluntly told the Pennsylvania clergy, 'We can win if the ministers
will help us get the registered vote into the ballot box on Primary
Day. '
While they were bullying the politicians, the Prohibitionists suf-
fered a stunning, unexpected defection from their cause. John
L>. Rockefeller Jr., regarded as the most prominent individual in
the ranks of Prohibition supporters," according to the New York
Times, reached a painful and public conclusion.
^ Against his original bright hopes, he had found under Prohibition
that drinking generally has increased; that the speakeasy has re-
placed the saloon, not only unit for unit, but probably twofold if
not threefold; that a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited
and financed on a colossal scale; that many of our best citizens,
piqued at what they regarded as an infringement of their private
rights, have openly and unabashedly disregarded the 18th Amend-
ment; that as an inevitable result respect for all law has been
atly lessened; that crime has increased to an unprecedented
lence, he said, he supported Nicholas Murray Butler's proposal
that Congress submit the question of Repeal to the people, though
he cautioned that the 18th should be obeyed while it still remained
on the books. 5
5 To which the New? York New$ took exception with a conmorhsense
argument: "Of course he speaks in all sincerity, tut the suggestion is
ridiculous ... If New Yorkers could unanimously take and keep an oath
not to drink any alcohol until Mr. Borah and a sufficient number of other
Senators from the cow and cotton states should give them ' "
why, we would never have another drink as long as we live
228 WHOLESOME IS AS WHOLESOME DOES
The events leading up to Rockefellers conversion have been
variously reported. According to one story that is still sometimes
related today, his son, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller,
then a sprig at Dartmouth, took his father on a personally con-
ducted tour of Manhattan, showing him a number of speaks in one
neighborhood. "And, Pa/' he supposedly added, "they're all on
your property/'
The story sounds a bit too pat, and Nelson himself is said to have
denied it. More reliably, Rockefeller's difficult turnabout is said to
have followed a long powwow not only with Nelson but also with
his older son, John, and several dose associates including George
Wickersham, chairman of the commission.
The obvious sincerity of the man impressed all but the most
fanatic Drys, and for once they challenged an opponent's facts
and conclusions, rather than his motives. Even Bishop Cannon
was charitable by his own lights, citing "the influences which
surround him, living as he does where literally Satan's seat is, in
the home city of Alfred E. Smith, of Jimmy Walker and of the
Tammany tiger."
Among Wets, the joy was unrestrained. In Tarrytown, New
York, near the Pocantico Hills estate of Rockefeller, the local tele-
graph office had to put on an extra man to handle all the congrat-
ulatory wires. More significantly, the about-fac 
