1 05 397
PROHIBITION
The Era of Excess
PROHIBITION
by Andrew Sinclair
W& /i a preface by RICHARD HOFSTADTER
With Illustrations
An Atlantic Monthly Press Book
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTON TORONTO
COPYRIGHT 1962 BY ANDREW SINCLAIR
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 62-8071
FIRST EDITION
Twelve lines from "A drunkard cannot meet a cork" by Emily
Dickinson are reprinted by permission of the President and Fel-
lows of Harvard College and the Trustees of Amherst College
from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H,
Johnson, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College,
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ARE PUBLISHED BY
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To My Mother
Preface
A GOOD HISTORIAN, set loose on a good subject, will trace out
the pattern not only of his subject itself but also of the whole social
fabric into which it is woven. It is so here with Andrew Sinclair. His
foreground is the American experiment with prohibition one of the
most instructive episodes in our history and he has given us not only
the best account of this experiment but also one of the most illumi-
nating commentaries on our society, for he deals with the ramifications
of the alcohol problem on our politics and religion, our law and medi-
cine, our city and country life, our guilts and fears, our manners and
morals.
'The Era of Excess" is the characterization Mr. Sinclair gives to
the unhappy episode with which he deals; and he has realized bril-
liantly the implications of the central term, "excess/* He sees the
incredibly naive effort to fix a ban on drinking into the Constitution
itself as a final assertion of the rural Protestant mind against the urban
and polyglot culture that had emerged at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth. This assertion, though it
flew in the face of history and human nature, was temporarily success-
ful because it was carried out by the drys with major organizing gifts
and incredible zeal and because it was linked with a passion for reform
that swept the country in the years before World War I.
Like others who have written on prohibition, Mr. Sinclair sees in
it a kind of Protestant revival which led to a crusade against the saloon.
But he sees also, as many have failed to see, that this crusade became
a war of extermination partly because the churches and the saloons
were rivals in the same business the business of consolation. The
cause of prohibition was pressed forward with the unbridled ruthless-
ness of those who are absolutely sure that their cause is just and that
it can be carried to the point of total victory. The prohibitionists did
not mean to limit or control the evils of alcohol: they meant to stamp
them out altogether. Reformers who begin with the determination to
stamp out sin usually end by stamping out sinners, and Mr. Sinclair is
sensitive to the ironies, sometimes amusing but sometimes terrible, to
which this effort at total reform could lead. Before prohibition became
law, the prohibitionists decried alcohol as a form of deadly poison.
vii
Viii / PREFACE
After prohibition was law, they approved the legal poisoning of indus-
trial alcohol, knowing full well that men would die from drinking it.
Excess had this way of turning things into their opposites: an amenity
became a crime; the imposition of controls led to a loss of control; the
churches created gangsters; reformers became reactionaries; purifiers
became poisoners. Excess also made it impossible for the politicians
to fulfill their customary function of compromising opposed interests
and mediating between extremes. That some men may live by principle
is possible only because others live by compromise. Excess destroyed
this nice symbiosis: it converted the politician into a bogus man of
principle, a breed of hypocrite who voted one way while he drank the
other.
To me one of the freshest and most illuminating aspects of Mr.
Sinclair's book is his study of the way in which the movement for
prohibition mobilized popular guilts and fears an aspect of the
movement which other historians have hardly done more than touch
upon. Prohibition could be made an outlet for the troubles of every
cramped libido. In an earlier day, anti-Catholicism had served as the
pornography of the puritan: the inhibited mind had wallowed in tales
of errant priests and nuns. During the prohibition movement both
prurience and fear were exploited by those who dwelt on the linkage
of alcohol and sexual excess, or on the fear of insanity and racial
degeneracy, even of the racial self-assertion of the Negro. Mr. Sinclair
has given us a full and instructive exploration of the medical and sexual
mythology of prohibitionism.
But Mr. Sinclair is a humane historian, and he has not written his
book to ridicule or belittle prohibitionists or as an ex parte plea for
the wets. He is far from blind to whatever there was of validity in the
case of the drys. The old-time saloon particularly, he believes, in the
rural areas and the small towns was often a filthy and repulsive
place. He observes that the wets also responded to the era of excess by
making claims for the benefits of repeal as absurd as the earlier
promises of the drys. And, above all, he is careful to remind us that
alcoholism today is a serious medical and social problem. The dry
lobbies had saddled the country with a vicious and ineffective reform;
Mr. Sinclair concludes that the wet lobbies performed a similar if less
sweeping disservice to the country by insisting upon absolute repeal,
and thus replacing overstrained and ineffective controls with no federal
controls at all. Some readers may quarrel with this and other con-
clusions, but I doubt that informed students of Americana will quarrel
with the judgment that he has given us the definitive study of prohibi-
tion for our generation.
RlCHAHD HOFSTADTER
Contents
Preface by Richard Hofstadter vii
Prologue to Prohibition 3
ONE: The Roots of Prohibition
1. God Made the Country 9
2. The Psychology of Prohibition 23
3. The Exploited Terror 36
4. The Churches against the Saloons 63
5. The Politics of Reform 83
6. Creeping Barrage 106
7. Trimming for the White House 129
8. The Turncoat Congress 152
TWO: The Dry Tree
9. Prelude to Deluge 173
10. The Toothless Law 178
11. The Respectable Crimed 220
12. Dry Defense 242
13. Masters of Inaction 252
14. The Amphibious Congress 269
15. Last Victory 285
THREE: The Blight of Repeal
16. The Spreading Change 309
17. Jamaicas of Remembrance 326
18. The Wet Counterattack 334
ix
X / CONTENTS
19. The Restive Congress 350
20. Dry President, Divided Commission 361
21. The Fanaticism of Repeal 369
22. The Blighted Roots 400
Epilogue to Prohibition 413
Acknowledgments 417
Note on Bibliography 419
Notes 421
Index 463
Illustrations
Dry Logic 17
Women's Crusade, 1873 25
Two Anti-Saloon League Posters 40, 41
Dry Terror, 1911 52
Going into Captivity 58
The Attitudes of Geography:
The Third Prohibition Wave, 1907 to 1919 66
Rural and Urban Population, 1910 66
The Old American Stock, 1910 67
Prohibition Churches versus Temperance Churches,
1916 67
Driven Out of the Church 72
The Old-Time City Saloon 74
The Saloon Doors 78
Workers' Saloon 82
He Can't Put It Out 114
The Foe in the Rear 123
Volstead Rules the Waves 187
King Canute! 199
A Moonshine Still 202
Bathtub Gin, Cagney Style 204
Still Packing Them In 213
De Facto Enforcement 217
Uncle Sam's Home-Brew 223
AlCapone 228
Wet Exchange 231
Searching for Hip Flasks 234
The National Gesture 283
xi
Xii / ILLUSTRATIONS
Hosanna! 305
The Hydra-headed Monster 315
Easy Riders 319
Night Club Entertainment 323
"Here's How!" 337
"Beers Bad for Our Workers" 347
Fruit Juices 355
The Leaning Tower Shows Signs of Collapse 359
"Don't Mind Me, Go Right On Working" 363
Law Enforcement 403
Rare before Prohibition 409
Common during Prohibition 409
PROHIBITION
The Era of Excess
Prologue to Prohibition
When deplorable excesses happen, I hear many cry,
"Would there were no wine! O folly! O madness!" Is it
the wine which causes this abuse? No. If you say, "Would
there were no wine!" because of drunkards, then you must
say, going on by degrees, "Would there were no night!"
because of thieves, "Would there were no light!" because
of informers, and "Would there were no women!" because
of adultery.
ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM
The Saloon Bar
A bar to heaven, a door to hell
Whoever named it, named it well!
A bar to manliness and wealth,
A door to want and broken health,
A bar to honor, pride and fame,
A door to sin and grief and shame;
A bar to hope, a bar to prayer,
A door to darkness and despair,
A bar to honored, useful life,
A door to brawling, senseless strife;
A bar to all that's true and brave,
A door to every drunkard's grave,
A bar to joy that home imparts,
A door to tears and aching hearts;
A bar to heaven, a door to hell
Whoever named it, named it well!
ANONYMOUS
THE SUCCESS of those who wanted to prohibit the liquor trade in
the United States seems inexplicable now. As Jonathan Daniels
wrote of his father, Josephus, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the
Navy, "I doubt that any later generation will quite be able to under-
stand the prohibitionists. I do not, I do know that my father . . .
brought to the prohibition movement hope and sincerity." 1 Yet it is in
3
4 / PROLOGUE TO PROHIBITION
this capacity to inspire hope and sincerity in intelligent men that un-
derstanding of the prohibition movement lies. Many Victorians felt
in all honesty that progress and science, reform and learning were on
the side of prohibition. The new and fashionable science of eugenics,
developed by Sir Francis Galton, seemed to point towards the elimina-
tion of alcohol in order to improve the race. The progressive movement
sided with the prohibitionists in trying to get rid of the corrupt city
machines and the vice areas based on the saloons. Most medical re-
search seemed to be in favor of the banning of liquor for the sake of
health and hygiene. The social work carried out by the settlements in
the slums found drink as much an enemy as poverty and often pointed
to the connection between the two evils. The rising tide of women's
rights seemed to make prohibition certain; a woman's vote was pre-
sumed to be a vote against the saloon. Even before the Great War
identified beer drinkers with Germans and the Kaiser, the consumer of
alcohol appeared a reactionary. His selfish imbibing was a last protest
against progress, a deliberate effort to weaken his children and deny
the future.
The success of the prohibitionists is, in fact, easier to understand
than their defeat would have been. For they had control of the best
part of the communications of the time. They had organization, money,
and a purpose. The leaders of opinion were often on their side. They
had been indoctrinating the young for thirty years in the public schools
and through their mothers. History, optimism, and improvement were
their supporters. With hope and sincerity, the prohibitionists looked
forward to a world free from alcohol and, by that magic panacea, free
also from want and crime and sin, a sort of millennial Kansas afloat on
a nirvana of pure water.
The prohibitionists had no doubt that they would win their battle
against the demon drink. Not only was God behind them, but also his-
tory. By the time of the Civil War, thirteen states had tried prohibition
laws. Although this number shrank to three after the war, five more
states joined their ranks after 1880. Again the second wave of prohibi-
tion receded until only three states remained, but the third wave en-
gulfed the nation. The foundation of the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union and of the Anti-Saloon League before the close of the
nineteenth century gave the prohibitionists a disciplined army, ready
to exploit politics and the American people in the interests of their
chosen reform. The refusal of the liquor trade to regulate the saloons
of its own accord and the national psychology created by the First
World War were sufficient to give victory to the prohibitionists. From
January 16, 1920, until December 5, 1933, a period of nearly fourteen
years, the American people were forbidden by the Eighteenth Amend-
PROLOGUE TO PROHIBITION / 5
ment of their own Constitution to manufacture, sell, or transport any
intoxicating liquor. Although no one was forbidden to buy or drink
intoxicating liquor, the Volstead Act, passed by Congress to enforce
the Eighteenth Amendment, tried to prevent the illegal trade in liquor.
It failed, and national prohibition also failed. The origins, politics, les-
sons, and results of that failure are the matter of this book.
The questions which occupied the American people in the first three
decades of this century were not the questions which occupied their
Presidents. While the White House was concerned with trusts and^
taxation and tariffs and foreign affairs, the people worried over pro-
hibition and Romanism and fundamentalism and immigration and the
growing power of the cities of the United States. These worries lay un-
der the surface of all political conflicts. For the old America of the vil-
lages and farms distrusted the new America of the urban masses. Pro-
hibition was the final victory of the defenders of the American past.
On the rock of the Eighteenth Amendment, village America made its
last stand. As Walter Lippmann commented in 1927:
The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribe to the Pope, to
Babylon, to atheists, and to the devil, is simply the new urban civiliza-
tion, with its irresistible scientific and economic and mass power. The
Pope, the devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are a mythology which expresses
symbolically the impact of a vast and dreaded social change. The
change is real enough. . . . The defense of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment has, therefore, become much more than a mere question of regu-
lating the liquor traffic. It involves a test of strength between social .
orders, and when that test is concluded, and if, as seems probable,
the Amendment breaks down, the fall will bring down with it the
dominion of the older civilization. The Eighteenth Amendment is the
rock on which the evangelical church militant is founded, and with
it are involved a whole way of life and an ancient tradition. The over-
coming of the Eighteenth Amendment would mean the emergence of
the cities as the dominant force in America, dominant politically and
socially as they are already dominant economically. 2
The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first. The
old order of the country gave way to the new order of the cities. Rural
morality was replaced by urban morality, rural voices by urban voices,
rural votes by urban votes. A novel culture of skyscrapers and suburbs
grew up to oust the civilization of the general store and Main Street.
A technological revolution broadcast a common culture over the vari-
ous folkways of the land. It is only in context of this immense social
change, the metamorphosis of Abraham Lincoln's America into the
America of Franklin Roosevelt, that the phenomenon of national pro-
hibition can be seen and understood. It was a part of the whole proc-
6 / PROLOGUE TO PROHIBITION
ess, the last hope of the declining village. It was less of a farce than a
tragedy, less of a mistake than a proof of changing times. The right of
the new to their novelties is no more sacred than the right of the old to
their nostalgias. The great error was, as H. G. Wells said, the "crown-
ing silliness" of writing a liquor law into the national Constitution.
Note on Vocabulary
Prohibition seems so long past that even its vocabulary has largely disappeared.
In this study, various terms are used which were once current. They are defined
here.
Jdky Cooker
Ardent Spirits, John Barley-
corn, Rum
Blind Pi'g, Blind Tiger
Bootleg, Booze, Canned Heat,
Home-Brew, Hooch, Moon-
shine, Shine, Smoke
Bootlegger
Dispensary System
Dry
High-License System
Hijacker
Local Option
Modification
Prohibition
Repeal
Rum Row
Saloon
Speak-easy
Wet
A distiller of homemade alcohol
Nineteenth-century terms for all hard liquor
An unlicensed saloon
Various types of illegal liquor made before,
during, and after national prohibition
A maker and distributor of bootleg liquor
The sale of liquor through state-owned retail
liquor stores
A supporter of prohibition
A policy of charging the owners of saloons
a large annual tax in order to regulate the
number of saloons
A robber of a bootlegger
An election in which communities could vote
to close up the saloons within their area
A change in the wording of the Volstead Act
to allow the manufacture and sale of light
wines and beer
The banning by statutory or constitutional law
of the saloons and /or of the liquor trade and/
or of all liquor; also a psychological attitude
favoring legal coercion on moral grounds
The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment by
another amendment to the Constitution
A line of liquor ships outside United States
territorial waters
A legal drinking place between the Civil War
and the Volstead Act
An illegal drinking place during the period of
national prohibition
An opponent of prohibition
1
PART
The Roots of Prohibition
CHAPTER
1
God Made the Country
In the last fifty years a vast change has taken place in
the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken
place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar
and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new
voices that have come among us from over seas, the going
and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of
the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and
past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of
the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the
lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-
America. Books, badly imagined "and written though they
may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household,
magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers
are everywhere. In our day a fanner standing by the stove
in the store of his village has his mind filled to overflowing
with the words of other men. The newspapers and the
magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal
ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike
innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is
brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will
find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best
city man of us all.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Winesburg, Ohio, 1919
The vices of the cities have been the undoing of past
empires and civilizations. It has been at the point where
the urban population outnumbers the rural people that
wrecked Republics have gone down. There the vices of
luxury have centered and eaten out the heart of the patriot-
ism of the people, making them the easy victims of every
enemy. The peril of this Republic likewise is now clearly
seen to be in her cities. There is no greater menace to
democratic institutions than the great segregation of an
element which gathers its ideas of patriotism and citizenship
from the low grogshop and which has proved its enmity
to organized civil government. Already some of our cities
are well-nigh submerged with this unpatriotic element,
which is manipulated by the still baser element engaged
in the un-American drink traffic and by the kind of politician
the saloon creates. The saloon stands for the worst in
9
10 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
political life. All who stand for the best must be aggres-
sively against it. If our Republic is to be saved the liquor
traffic must be destroyed.
PURLEY A. BAKER
The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook, 1914
THE FIRST American colonists brought over the doctrine that coun-
try and village life were good, while city life was wicked. The sturdy
yeoman farmer was considered to be the backbone of England, the
essential fodder of her army. The creeping enclosures which displaced
the farmers from the earth of England were evil, as were the land
speculators and absentee owners, corrupted by the luxuries of the
Court and of the great wen, London. The city was the home of vice,
and the royal palace hid covert Popery. It was to flee these persecut-
ing enemies that the Mat/flower crossed the first frontier, the Atlantic
Ocean.
In the new colonies, however, the courts and cities grew again. They
were the center of British government, garrisoned by British troops,
filled with grogshops and brothels. The aristocrats of America lived
there. But nine out of ten Americans lived on the farms, and their
brief incursions into the cities only confirmed their prejudice against
the urban Satan. When the American Revolution broke out, the battle
lines quickly set themselves up along the division of piedmont and
tidewater, except in New England, where there was a strong sense of
community between town and country. The British could hold the ports
and major cities. Tories who fled there would find protection. Mean-
while, the colonists held the back country, and could gain victories
whenever the British ventured out of the cities. Even if the American
colonists won the war because of the intervention of the French fleet,
the surrender of Yorktown still seemed to be more the triumph of the
farmer than of the seaman.
The new Constitution carefully protected the rights of the country.
The composition of the Senate settled to this day the unfair representa-
tion of the country at the expense of the city. The new capitals of the
state governments were founded far from urban mob and power, in
isolated villages, such as Albany or Harrisburg. And American writers,
politicians, and philosophers, secure in the comfort of urban life, cre-
ated a eulogy of rural virtues which was accepted across the length
and breadth of America as the truth, even when industrial might and
agrarian depression had turned the flattery into a falsehood.
The first of the wiajor revolutions of modern times was the agrarian.
GOD MADE THECOUNTRY/11
It preceded the Industrial Revolution. The urban masses which manned
the factories could not have been fed without improved methods of
agriculture. Thus the radicals and intellectuals of the eighteenth cen-
tury were interested in farming as the newest and most progressive of
the sciences. Benjamin Franklin and the American Philosophical So-
ciety, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all proselytized the
farming discoveries of Arthur Young and Lord Townshend. Agri-
cultural societies, fairs, and journals sprang up across America. To be a
farmer at the time was to be in the forefront of science and progress. It
was also to be better than the city dweller.
The French philosophes had made fashionable the doctrine that
man's nature was good although the corruption of society had turned
him evil. Therefore, the man closest to nature was the least corrupt.
He was freer than the townsman because he was economically inde-
pendent, and more important because his toil satisfied man's first need,
the need for food. Jefferson put forward this creed clearly in his Notes
on Virginia.
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever
He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He
keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the
face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a
phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. 1
The radical intellectuals of nineteenth-century Europe turned to
praise the machine rather than the plow. Karl Marx approved of the
conquest of the country by the bourgeois cities, and the rescue of the
villagers of Europe "from the seclusion and ignorance of rural life." 2
But America remained largely an agricultural nation. Politicians and
novelists were quick to praise the majority of the American people.
Nativity in a log cabin was considered to be part of the availability of
Presidents. When a candidate for the White House did not have the
necessary uncivilized background, such as General William Henry
Harrison in 1840, his party manufactured a rude childhood for him.
Meanwhile, a long line of writers from James Fenimore Cooper to Wil-
liam Dean Howells hymned the Eden of the wilderness and the
Canaan of the village. Moreover, Mark Twain made fun of Hannibal,
Missouri, only to show his love for the place. Not until the end of the
century and the publication of Edgar Watson Howe's The Story of a
Country Town and of Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads was
there a serious effort to picture the bleakness and squalor of life on the
farm and frontier. Indeed, these two books were viciously attacked by
the literary critics, who were deceived by the Western myth into think-
12 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
ing that the farmer's life was a mixture of cornhusking, roast pork, and
contented cows. Garland pointed out that fanners hated milking and
hogs, and that their most common neighbors were army worms, flies,
mosquitoes, heat, and the smell of manure. Those who actually lived
in the prairies supported him. One woman wrote, "You are entirely
right about the loneliness, the stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of
lies. Give the world the truth/' 3 Yet even Garland ended his life the
victim of the lies which he had tried to correct, writing sugary flatter-
ies of farm life for urban magazines.
As Sinclair Lewis said in his acceptance speech before the Nobel
Prize committee, it was an "American tragedy that in our land of free-
dom, men like Garland, who first blast the roads to freedom, become
themselves the most bound/' It was another American tragedy that the
cities, made by men, first fostered and then destroyed the myth that
God had made the country.
THE WEST AND "THE ENEMY'S COUNTRY*'
THE FRONTIER was the American dream. And dreams are not seen in
their everyday dreariness and dullness. The frontiersmen themselves
were too preoccupied with survival to report their disillusion. They
needed, too, the justification of their own virtue to make their drudg-
ery and hardship bearable. They believed that large profits and the
good life were to be found in the country; and if they did not find
these things in one piece of country, they must move their wagons to
another, not back to the evil cities, which could only offer them jobs
as unskilled workers. "A mighty spreading and shifting" went on all
over the West. 4 Jefferson had forecast that the small fanner would take
a thousand years to settle the land as far as the Pacific. A hundred
years was too little for the restless frontiersman, searching endlessly
for a perfection in nature that was never there, and for speculative
profits in land which often he did not bother to cultivate properly. For
the farmer was a businessman first and foremost, even if his toil was
held to be particularly blessed by God.
The only news from the West that reached the cities was exciting.
Circuses and Buffalo Bill Cody and the heroic tales of the Methodist and
Baptist circuit riders who rode with the Gospel in their saddlebags
all these nleant a land of adventure. 5 The picture was gilded by the
reports of railroad companies and shipping lines, land speculators and
small-town boomers, who advertised easy harvests and quick profits
and free land. Agricultural journals and local newspapers frantically
painted the Western skies into the colors of a peacock's tail to keep old
settlers where they were and to attract fresh ones. For if a small town
GOD MADE THE COUNTRY/ 13
did not grow, it was abandoned; Iowa, in less than a hundred years,
held more than two thousand deserted settlements. Thus the actual
settlers of the West were forced to gild the country myth still more to
attract the new peasant immigrants from Germany and Ireland and
Scandinavia. 6 It was enough to lure immigrants out West. They usually
came with too little money to be able to afford the return fare. In fact,
colorful lying became so much a part of the frontier that it took on the
trappings of virtue. In Texas to this day, exaggeration in the interest of
the state is considered to be a truer version of the truth. A roving
Texan is his country's ambassador, sent to lie abroad.
The West was peopled rapidly by a race of farmers and speculators
and refugees. If the farmers' dream of the frontier turned sour, the
fact of their flight from Europe and the Eastern cities still stayed with
them. Their hope in Western land and easy money was often killed by
the sufferings inflicted by nature, but their hatred of the past only
grew. For the settlers were the disinherited of the cities, those dis-
owned by urban civilization, displaced by industry. They fled to an
agricultural myth which told them that their exclusion was a successful
repudiation of wealth and aristocracy and luxury. Fanners were the
only true democrats. They were the representatives of the best in the
American tradition. The cities held the idle rich and the owners of
mortgages and the dregs of Europe. When William Jennings Bryan de-
nounced the East as "the enemy's country," he voiced a rural prejudice
older than the Declaration of Independence.
Both the hardness of existence and the simple religion brought to
the West by the Baptist and Methodist missionaries buttressed the
fears of the settlers. The world around them was a world of simple
divisions, a world of land and sky, stone and earth, drought and rain,
hail and calm, night and day. The Manichaeanism of fundamental reli-
gion, with its clear-cut right and wrong, and good and evil, fitted into
a landscape of hard and infinite definitions. In the midst of suffering
and toil and frequent death, the pastoral religion and patriarchal law
of the Old Testament peculiarly suited the pioneers. The ritualistic
faiths of Episcopalianism and Judaism and Roman Catholicism, with
their ceremonies and ranks, seemed only to confirm the Westerner's
view of the oppressive cities. But the simple creeds of Methodism,
Baptism, Presbyterianism, and Congregationalism, with their emphasis
on individual toil and the Bible and hell and hope of heaven, seemed
to be the rough and democratic faiths needed in the mountains and
prairies of the West.
Willa Gather, in a series of novels, described the hard truth of the
frontier. She spoke of that Nebraska which produced the great flatterer
of the West and champion of prohibition, William Jennings Bryan. In
14 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
her O Pioneers! she wrote of the sad wilderness and isolation which
drove the settlers into harsh fundamentalism. A boy was leaving the
small town of Hanover, Nebraska, with his family on a horse-drawn
cart.
The little town behind them had vanished as if it had never been,
had fallen behind the swell of the prairie, and the stern frozen country
received them into its bosom. The homesteads were few and far
apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house
crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which
seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of 'human society that
struggled in its somber wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness
that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men
were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be
let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind
of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness. 7
Suffering bred political radicalism in the great plains of the West. 8
The discontent born of poverty and unending labor forged the farmers'
organizations of protest, the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance, the
Populist movement, the Farmers* Union and the Non-Partisan League.
The ideology of these movements was a peculiar mixture of reaction,
xenophobia, and progressiveness. But above all, this ideology was set
in terms of black and white. In the days of Jackson, it was the Bank of
the United States which was held solely responsible for the slump in
the West. Later the Jews, the Roman Catholics, Wai! Street, gold, the
immigrants, the railroads, the trusts, the Huns, and the Reds all be-
came the necessary scapegoats for Western ills. The rural radicals
rarely admitted the guilty truth, that their own plundering of the land
and heavy borrowing from the banks of the East had caused many of
the sufferings which they sought to blame on others.
There is a traditional theory of conspiracy at the grass roots of
American politics. It was at first the product of geography and hard-
ship and religion. Later, when fanning in the prairies became depend-
ent on urban and international markets after 1850, the money power of
the East grew into a real enemy, capable of mining farmers surely and
inexorably. Commercialization, specialization, business methods, new
machinery, improved communications, the mail-order catalogues called
"wishing books," all destroyed the self-sufficiency of farm and village
and made them dependent on the wicked city. Bryan's campaign for
free silver in the presidential election of 1896 was less an economic
* Strangely enough, the farm movements were led by city reformers. Not one of
the seven founders of the Grange was a farmer by occupation for more than a
short period of his life. Between 1892 and 1932, not a single fanner was elected
to Congress. In fact, the leaders of rural reform movements often knew too little
of rural reality to disbelieve the myths which inspired the movements.
GOD MADE THE COUNTRY/ 15
matter than an expression of the rural hatred of Eastern financiers, who
waxed fat under the mysterious protection of the devilish gold standard.
It was in this atmosphere of struggle against unyielding soil and of
crusade against Eastern capital that the prohibition agitators flour-
ished. For they presented the fight of God against the saloon in the
simple terms of right and wrong. Drunkenness was a prevalent and
dangerous vice of the frontier. Men who drank frequently lost ground
in the battle against the elements. An isolated farmer who rode twenty
miles to the nearest saloon might die of exposure if fatigue made him
sleep during his return. The lumber camps and mining towns of the
Far West were packed with saloons and brothels, crooks and whores,
who kept the woodsmen and miners in a state of continual poverty and
fleeced any stray countryman who came their way. Farmers' wives,
who had to remain in isolation and terror on the farm with small chil-
dren, grew to hate the saloons, which kept their husbands in the vil-
feges and took away their money. There was also envy in their hatred.
For they had no relief from the endless chores of farm women: tailoring,
sewing, cleaning, cooking, nursing, grinding, shifting to make a home
where no homes were. 10 They envied their husbands' brief escape into
alcohol and listened to the ministers who told them how to shut down
the saloons, which took their men away.
The women on the farms also wanted decency. For an accepted
standard of decency was their only protection against the rough male
world. The brave efforts towards some style in living, the piano in the
log cabin, the magazine illustrations on the shanty wall, the curtains of
sacking all these represented a fumbling for a civilized way of life
that asks for understanding, not for derision. Moreover, there was a
surplus of women on many farms. The males died off more quickly
than the females. A prosperous farmer often found himself with too
many daughters, whose smattering of education made it impossible for
them to marry the illiterate and uncouth farm laborers. These spinsters
became that American phenomenon, the "schoolmarms" of the fron-
tier. In Europe, secondary education remained in the hands of men; in
America, women took over the country schools and the minds of the
children. The Census of 1900 showed that, even with the influence of the
large city of Chicago, three out of every four teachers in Illinois were
women. Other professions were closed to them.
Thus the education on the subject of alcohol that a respectable
country child received was usually in favor of prohibition. His mother,
his female schoolteacher, and his minister would warn him against the
saloon. Even if the rural proletariat, the hired hands, the loafers, the
livery stablemen, the barbers, and the drunkards encouraged an occa-
sional tipple, no country lad could have a drink without feeling sinful.
16/THEROOTSOFPROHIBITION
The progressive Brand Whitlock noticed in his Ohio village that "if
men of the more respectable sort took a drink, they did it with a sense
of wrong-doing that gave it a spice of adventure, and an invitation to
indulge was generally accompanied by a half-humorous, half-guilty
kind of wink." 11 In fact, even horror could be instilled by careful in-
doctrination. James M. Cox, who was nominated for the presidency by
the wets in the Democratic convention of 1920, wrote that he had
never even dared to look into the village saloon. He was taught to be-
lieve that it was "a den of the devil." It remained so loathly in his mind
that when he became Governor of Ohio, he had the building con-
demned as a fire menace and torn down by the state marshal. 12
For the village saloons were terrible places. They were little better
than shacks, containing a bar, a brass rail, liquor bottles, cigars, a few
tables and chairs, a floor covered with sawdust and chewed tobacco,
and an array of spittoons. They sold bad, cheap liquor, which was not
protected by a brand name. Such local disorder and crime as there was
usually began in the saloons. Fabian Franklin, no friend of prohibition,
conceded that the village grogshop and the bar of the small-town hotel
presented little but the gross and degraded aspect of drinking. 13 Farm-
ers, who had not seen the superior saloons in large cities, would natu-
rally support prohibition to rid themselves of these country cesspools.
In a village society, where everybody knew the business of every-
body else and called it neighborliness, the saloon became the local
devil No one could drink there without being found out. No fight
could start there without being reported. The chief "theater" of the
year, the revival meeting, denounced the place as the entrance to a
future life of fire and brimstone. 14 The saloonkeeper himself was the
outcast of country society. Sherwood Anderson recorded of his boy-
hood that the saloonkeeper, who lived on his street in the Ohio village
of Clyde, walked silently with bent head. His wife and child were
seldom seen. They lived an isolated life. "Could it have been that the
saloon keeper, his wife and child, were socially ostracized because of
the business in which he was engaged? It was an age of temperance
societies and there were two churches on our street. To sell liquor, to
own a saloon, was to be, I am sure, the devil's servant/' 15
In this culture bound together by suspicion and hardship, labor and
earth, the fundamentalist crusade against alcohol was highly success-
ful. It suited the direct judgment of the faithful. The man who was not
for abolition of the saloon must be "a despicable Minion of the Rum
Power and a Tool of Satan/' 10 Bryan spoke for a whole stereotype
when he pleaded in 1910 for a law allowing rural counties in Nebraska
to close their local saloons by vote. "County option is not only expedi-
ent, but it is right. This is a moral question. There is but one side to a
THE FIRST DROP. . , .. .,. ,
"Come in and take a tfrop." The first 4&P M, to Qffher drops. He. dropped his
position, he dropped his respectability, le droppm; m fortune, he dropped his friends, he
dropped finally all his prospects in &Js Kfe^ahdjtis^ hopes for eternity; and then came
the last drop on the gallows, RwAMM
DRY LOGIC
Watchman.
Brown Brothers Photographers
moral question. Which do you take?" 17 By this simplification, any man
who opposed any dry measure necessarily supported drunkenness and
vice. There was no room for the moderate in such a clear-cut world.
Bryan took the argument to its apogee in opposition to a wet plank at
the Democratic convention of 1920, when he asked his famous ques-
tions: "If you cannot get alcohol enough to make you drunk, why do
you want alcohol at all? Why not cut it altogether and go on about
your business?" 18 The questions were rhetorical. Like the jesting Pilate,
Bryan did not stay for an answer.
Not all of those who lived in the West supported prohibition. In the
early days of the frontier, whisky was the most portable form of grain
and served as currency in many parts. The Kentucky distillers rebelled
again the United States government in the eighteenth century because
of the liquor tax and in the twentieth because of the Eighteenth
Amendment. Whisky was their only source of income when crops
failed or soil grew barren, as well as being necessary for health and
"killing the bugs" in river water. 19 Social gatherings on the frontier
traditionally demanded hard cider at the least; it was carefully ex-
empted from the provisions of the Volstead Act. In the days of the fa-
mous flatboats on the Ohio River, an open keg of raw spirits and a
dipper were left on each landing stage. Drunkenness was by far the
18 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
most common cause for discipline in the frontier churches, for the
abundance of liquor made a large section of pioneer society debauched
and whisky-sodden in their land of "sinful liberty/' 20 The later immi-
grants to the West, the Germans and the Irish, the Italians and Slavic
peoples, saw no reason to give up their traditional drinking habits. In
fact, the severity of prohibition sentiment in the West seems to have
been the result of the widespread and continual drinking there. Mod-
eration was never the habit of the pioneers. They either escaped from
virtue through swinging doors or embraced it at the altar.
The extremity of their life forced the Westerners to extreme solu-
tions. Whether an action was good or bad mattered less than that it
should be certain and immediate. Justice, vice, liquor, virtue, all had
to be taken straight and fast. Life was too violent for half measures. It
had to be lived on the saddle, with the vigilantes, at the bar, urgently.
During prohibition, when the rough and speedy lawlessness of the
frontier had invaded the large cities, the great cowboy philosopher
Will Rogers commented sadly on the psychology of a whole nation, "If
we must sin, let's sin quick, and don't let it be a long, lingering sin-
ning." 21
SMALL TOWN AND LAKGE CITY
THE FARMS were, however, too isolated to be of great help to the pro-
hibitionists. Although the rich commercial farmers might support pro-
hibition to get more work out of their hired hands, the political
strength of the drys lay in the villages and small country towns, par-
ticularly among the wealthier people. For the small town was never
the democratic and classless society which it claimed to be. It was
usually divided into a dominant middle-class Protestant group given
to religion and stern morality; an upper-class group of "respectable"
people who did not see that pleasure and sin were necessarily in
league together; Roman Catholics and foreigners; and a "lower" class,
which ignored the morality of the dominant group except for a brief
period after revival meetings.- 2 This dominant village middle class
provided religious fodder for pulpit politics and prohibition and gave
the Ku Klux Klan the majority of its four million members during its
revival after the Great War.
The prohibitionists were always conscious that their support lay in
the country. They carefully attacked alcohol in its urban and foreign
forms beer and rum. They did not crusade with any vigor against
country liquor hard cider and corn whisky. They represented the
cities as full of foreigners making evil profits out of poisonous drinks.
GOD MADE THE COUNTRY/ 19
It was impossible to raise good Americans there. The International
Reform Bureau warned the God-fearing:
In this age of cities it is to be expected that conversions will decrease
if we allow needless temptations about our youth to increase, such as
foul pictures, corrupt literature, leprous shows, gambling slot ma-
chines, saloons, and Sabbath breaking. Instead of putting around our
boys and girls a fence of favorable environment, we allow the devil
to put about them a circle of fire; and then we wonder that they
wither. We are trying to raise saints in hett. 2 *
There was a quality of desperation in the country's fear of the city
after 1896. When Bryan was defeated by McKinley, the country
seemed to have lost its chance to govern die nation. The Census of
1900 showed that nearly two in every five Americans lived in the great
cities. In 1860, it had been one in five, and the cities were now growing
faster than ever, as European immigrants poured into the urban slums.
Within twenty years, more people would live in the cities than in the
country, and the old rural America of the small farmer, on which the
Republic had been founded, would become impotent. It is small won-
der that denunciations of the city rose to the pitch of hysteria on
Chautauqua circuits and in dry periodicals. Alphonso Alva Hopkins,
dry editor and Prohibition party supporter, wrote a typical harangue
in 1908, calculated to appeal to every prejudice in the small-town
mentality:
Our boast has been that we are a Christian people, with Morality
at the center of our civilization. Foreign control or conquest is rapidly
making us un-Christian, with immorality throned in power.
Besodden Europe, worse bescourged than by war, famine and
pestilence, sends here her drink-makers, her drunkard-makers, and
her drunkards, or her more temperate but habitual drinkers, with all
their un-American and anti-American ideas of morality and govern-
ment; they are absorbed into our national life, but not assimilated;
with no liberty whence they came, they demand unrestricted liberty
among us, even to license for the things we loathe; and through the
ballot-box, flung wide open to them by foolish statesmanship that
covets power, their foreign control or conquest has become largely an
appalling fact; they dominate our Sabbath, over large areas of country;
they have set up for us their own moral standards, which are grossly
immoral; they govern our great cities, until even Reform candidates
accept their authority and pledge themselves to obey it; the great
cities govern the nation; and foreign control or conquest could gain
little more, though secured by foreign armies and fleets.
As one feature of this foreign conquest, foreign capital has come
here, and to the extent of untold millions has invested itself in
breweries, until we are told that their annual profits at one time
20 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
reached about $25,000,000 yearly, sent over seas to foreign stock-
holders, who shared thus in their conquest of America, while to them,
in their palaces and castles, American Labor paid tribute, and for their
behoof American morals were debased, the American Sunday sur-
rendered. 24
These theories of conspiracy might be credible to small-town audi-
ences. But they did not convince the great cities, nor their representa-
tives in Congress. The prohibitionists might never have been able to
gain the necessary vote in the Senate and House of Representatives
to secure the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment if they had not
had a murderous stroke of luck. Their chance was the Great War,
and America's part in the slaughter. There is no room for moderation
in war. Woodrow Wilson, agonized by doubt before he read his war
message to Congress, said that what he feared most from the war was
that the people would forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance.
Wilson was correct. "The spirit of ruthless brutality" did enter into the
very fiber of American life, until Harding restored normalcy. 25 Pabst
and Busch were German; therefore beer was unpatriotic. Liquor
stopped American soldiers from firing straight; therefore liquor was a
total evil. Brewing used up eleven million loaves of barley bread a day,
which could have fed the starving Allies; therefore the consumption of
alcohol was treason. Pretzels were German in name; therefore, to de-
fend Old Glory, they were banned from the saloons of Cincinnati.
Seven years after the end of the war, a Pennsylvania doctor was still
suggesting that the name of German measles be changed to victor}' or
liberty measles. 26
In this orgy of simplicity, this crusade for peace through war, this
national bandwagon of unreason and false logic, the arguments of the
drys seemed irrefutable. They were for God and for America, against
the saloon and against Germany. The wets therefore must be for Satan
and for Germany, against God and against America. Briefly, city and
country thought alike. Clarence Darrow was wrong in 1924, when he
said that "the vast centers of population, where all the feeling for
liberty that still persists in this country is kept alive, the great centers
of tolerance and independence and thought and culture - the cities
all of them were wet before prohibition, and since." 27 He had forgotten
the Great War, when the cities were as intolerant and moralistic and
patriotic as any Gopher Prairie.
The war, however, had its shocks for the boosters of the countryside.
The drys discovered to their surprise that more country boys 'were
rejected as unfit from the First Selective Draft than city boys. More
than one in three of the draftees were rejected, mainly on account of
feeble-mindedness. In addition, the draft boards found that city boys
GOD MADE THE COUNTRY/ 21
as a whole were much more fit than country boys. The drys countered
these facts by saying that the fit city boys were merely intelligent
immigrants from the country. As for the problem of feeble-mindedness,
the drys gave the excuse that the idiot city girl caught venereal
diseases, became sterile, and produced no sons for the Army. The pure
but moronic country girl, sadly enough, had a great many illegitimate
babies. 28
The drys always maintained that the country was the reservoir of
strong manhood for the city. In fact the reverse was the case. Although
conditions in the cities were bad, they were not as bad as on many
farms. Child labor laws increasingly protected the sons of factory
workers; nothing saved the children of farmers from exploitation at
the plow and cowshed. Hamlin Garland plowed all day at the age of
ten. 29 He tells of prematurely aged boys of fourteen, with stooped
shoulders from overwork. Disease, ignorance, poverty, filth, all took
their toll in the countryside. Rural slums were, in many cases, worse
than urban slums. If the small towns sent their fit and willing sons into
the cities, they also sent their criminals, their diseased, and their
drunkards. The history of the Jukes family, which contributed thou-
sands of mental defectives and criminals to American society, says
little for the pure Anglo-Saxon stock of the backwoods. The best sight
for a Scotsman, in Dr. Johnson's opinion, was the high road to Eng-
land. The highway to the city was often the same blessing for the
fanner boy.
Inevitably, the country began to submit to the rescue operations
of the cities. Culture often follows in the wake of economic exploita-
tion. Although urban and international markets tied the farmer to the
manipulation of world prices by financiers, the same Industrial Revolu-
tion that produced the stock exchange produced the improved com-
munications that made piedmont into a suburb of tidewater. Mass-
circulation newspapers pushed out local newspapers, chain stores
destroyed country stores, cheap branded goods drove out expensive
local products, better highways and automobiles punctured rural
isolation, radio and cinema impregnated the minds of the young with
city habits. Machines were invented to lighten the burden of field and
kitchen on man, woman, and child. Hospitals, doctors, and hired nurses
saved those country sufferers who were being slowly killed by home
medicines. The declining influence of ignorant country preachers and
biased textbooks allowed some relief to women crushed under inces-
sant childbearing and child raising. Slowly, slowly, after the turn of
the century, the American city began to take over the American coun-
try. Yet the country won battles in its defeat. Among these victories
was national prohibition.
22 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
The contagion of war caught up the cities of America in the simple
choices of the country mind. When victory was the aim of the nation,
there was no time for fine distinctions between right and wrong.
To win was to be moral, and any means used in winning were good
means. But while the psychology of belligerence swept through the
United States only in time of emergency, it was always part of the
force behind the leaders and followers of prohibition. They were
militant and aggressive, demanding present remedies for present evils.
The Satan of the saloon was everywhere. It must be abolished so that
the reign of God could begin on earth. Below their inheritance of rural
beliefs, the drys had deeper wellsprings of action. In them, the battle
against King Alcohol always continued; in them, there was a holy
prejudice.
C H A P T E K
The Psychology of Prohibition
All we have to do is to think of the wrecks on either bank
of the stream of death, of the suicides, of the insanity, of
the ignorance, of the destitution, of the little children tug-
ging at the faded and withered breast of weeping and
despairing mothers, of wives asking for bread, of the men
of genius it has wrecked, the men struggling with imaginary
serpents, produced by this devilish thing; and when you
think of the jails, of the almshouses, of the asylums, of the
prisons, of the scaffolds upon either bank, I do not wonder
that every thoughtful man is prejudiced against this damned
stuff called alcohol.
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
The Commoner, July 11, 1913
RECENT RESEARCH on the nature of prejudice has made a mo-
mentous discovery. The cognitive processes of prejudiced people
are different in general from the cognitive processes of tolerant people.
In fact, a person's prejudice is not usually a particular attitude to a
particular question; it is more often a whole pattern of thinking about
the world. 1 The prejudiced person is given to simple judgments in
general, to assertions, to definite statements, to terms of black and
white. Ambiguity is an evil to him because set truth is the good. He
thinks in stereotypes, in rules, in truisms, in the traditional folkways
of his environment. Such education as he receives merely gives him
more reasons for his old beliefs. Indeed, he is the man who was found
frequently in the dominant middle class of the small town, on the
Western farms, and in the Southern shacks, where no complex clamor
of urban life unsettled the mind and brain and eyes from the easy
pairings of right and wrong. He is the man who was the backbone of
the dry cause.
The Eighteenth Amendment could not have been passed without
the support of the psychologically tolerant, made temporarily intoler-
ant by flie stress of war. But when the moderates deserted the drys in
time of peace, the hard core of the movement was revealed. The main
areas of prohibition sentiment were the areas where the Methodist and
23
24 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Baptist churches had their greatest strength. These were the areas that
fathered the bigot crusade of the Ku Klux Klan, which supported
prohibition, among other moral reforms. Although many sincere drys
were not bigots at the beginning of the campaign for the Eighteenth
Amendment, they became bigots or left the cause by the time of re-
peal. Prohibition, an extreme measure, forced its extremes on its sup-
porters and its enemies. Its study becomes a study of social excess.
Although there were reasonable moral and economic and medical
reasons for supporting prohibition, the drys themselves exploited many
irrational motives within themselves and their followers. Among the
leaders of the cause, there was hysteria in their passion to wean the
human race from alcohol. There was what one leader of the Anti-
Saloon League found in another, "an almost revengeful hatred of the
liquor traffic ... a dogmatic and consecrated prejudice against or-
ganized wrong." 2 There was an element of sadism and undue persecu-
tion in the drys' legislative pursuit of the sinner, and in the flogging of
prostitutes and bootleggers by the Ku Klux Klan. There was a thirst
for power, which revealed itself in the savage struggles for position
and prestige within the dry organizations, and in the sixteen-hour days
worked year after year for no profit except self-satisfaction by such
men as Wayne B. Wheeler, the great lobbyist of the dry cause. There
was also a deliberate exploitation of prejudiced mentalities among
their listeners by revivalist preachers such as Billy Sunday. Above all,
until the failure of the World League Against Alcoholism, there was a
feeling that prohibition was a winning global crusade, and that those
first on the wagon would be first in the promised land of earth and
heaven.
Among the followers of prohibition, there were other blind motives.
There was the release from tension offered by the crusade against
wrong. One "chastened crusader" confessed after the Women's Cru-
sade against the saloons in Ohio in 1873, "The Crusade was a daily
dissipation from which it seemed impossible to tear myself. In the
intervals at home I felt, as I can fancy the drinker does at the break-
ing down of a long spree." 8 Allied with this release was an unreasoning
fear of hard liquor, instilled by decades of revival sermons. As a female
supporter of beer and wine wrote in 1929, "It is not love of whisky
which makes real temperance impossible in this year of grace. It is
the fear of it, the blinding, demoralizing terror felt by good people
who have never tasted anything stronger than sweet communion
wine." 4 This terror drove the extreme drys into a stupid and obnoxious
pursuit of the drinker during prohibition, which made the whole dry
cause stink in the nostrils of the moderate. The Durant and Hearst
prize contests for a solution to the prohibition problem revealed its
WOMEN'S CRUSADE, 1873
Brown Brothers Photographers
26 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
distorted importance in the minds of certain drys and gave them wide
publicity. One woman suggested that liquor law violators should be
hung by the tongue beneath an airplane and carried over the United
States. Another suggested that the government should distribute poison
liquor through the bootleggers; she admitted that several hundred
thousand Americans would die, but she thought that this cost was
worth the proper enforcement of the dry law. Others wanted to deport
all aliens, exclude wets from all churches, force bootleggers to go to
church every Sunday, forbid drinkers to marry, torture or whip or
brand or sterilize or tattoo drinkers, place offenders in bottle-shaped
cages in public squares, make them swallow two ounces of castor oil,
and even execute the consumers of alcohol and their posterity to the
fourth generation. 5
This extremism was only prevalent among a small group of the drys,
but it was enough to damn all drys as fanatics. They were not so,
although their spokesmen often were. Yet, living in a time before
Freud and psychology were widely understood, they did not question
their own motives. It was a time when "the figure of God was big in
the hearts of men," and the drive of personal frustration was put down
to divine guidance. 6 Men were not aware of the subconscious motives
which made them prohibitionists; but these motives were none the less
real. Behind the crusade against the saloon lurked the tormented spirits
of many people.
Freud's masterpiece, Civilization and Its Discontents, suggests some
of the unconscious forces that drove on the drys. The childish, the im-
mature, those who had least recovered from the ignorant certainties
of youth sought consolation in an authoritarian crusade, in the same
way that those who cannot bear life without a father often make a
father of God. Refuge from the ambiguities and difficulties of modern
life was, for many of the drys, only to be found in total immersion in
clear-cut moral reform. The saloon was a sufficient Satan to become
the scapegoat of the devil in man. Abolition of the saloon was inter-
preted by the prohibitionists as a personal victory over doubt and sin
in their own lives. With a terrible faith in equality, the prohibitionists
often wanted to suppress in society the sins they found in themselves.
G. K. Chesterton put the matter well:
When the Puritan or the modern Christian finds that his right hand
offends him he not only cuts it off but sends an executioner with a
chopper all down the street, chopping off the hands of all the men,
women and children in the town. Then he has a curious feeling of
comradeship and of everybody being comfortable together. . . . He is
after all in some queer way a democrat, because he is as much a
despot to one man as to another. 7
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROHIBITION/ 27
It was in this wish to extend their own repressions to all society that
the drys felt themselves most free from their constant inward struggle.
Indeed, they defended their attacks on the personal liberty of other
men by stating that they were bringing these men personal liberty
for the first time. According to one dry leader, personal liberty reached
its highest expression where the strongest inhibitions were invoked
and enforced. 8 Moreover, personal liberty was only possible once
prohibition had freed the slaves of alcohol. Of course, in reality the
drys were trying to bring personal liberty to themselves, by externaliz-
ing their anguished struggles against their own weaknesses in their
battle to reform the weaknesses of others. The conflict between con-
science and lust, between superego and id, was transferred by the drys
from their own bodies to the body politic of all America; and, in the
ecstasy of that paranoia which Freud saw in all of us, they would
have involved the whole earth.
Freud, whose own life was hard, considered intoxicants a great
blessing in the human struggle for happiness and in the warding off of
misery.
It is not merely the immediate gain in pleasure which one owes to
them, but also a measure of that independence of the outer world
which is so sorely craved. Men know that with the help they can get
from "drowning their cares" they can at any time slip away from the
oppression of reality and find a refuge in a world of their own where
painful feelings do not enter. 9
Freud saw that the moderate use of liquor was necessary for driven
men, who could not find other interests or gratifications against the
miseries of the world. The prohibitionists, however, presumed that
a man who was denied the bottle would turn to the altar. They were
wrong. They closed the saloons, but the churches did not fill. Lucidly,
drugs, radios, motion pictures, automobiles, proliferating societies,
professional sports, paid holidays, and the relaxed sexual ethics of the
flaming twenties provided new outlets for the libidos of deprived
drinkers. Without these new outlets, the drys might have had to deal
with a psychological explosion.
Yet extremism was not confined to the ranks of the drys. If the
moderate drys were shamed by the excesses and motives of the ex-
treme drys, so the moderate wets were damned by the millions of
heavy drinkers and alcoholics on their side. If some prohibitionists
were compulsive in their craving for water for everybody, some drink-
ers were even more compulsive in their craving for an excess of liquor
for themselves. Alcoholics may suffer from many inadequacies emo-
tional immaturity, instability, infantilism, passivity, dependence,
28 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
pathological jealousy, oral eroticism, latent homosexuality, isolation,
narcissism, and masochism. 10 People who possess such defects are not
to be deprived of their liquor by respect for the law of the land. They
need understanding, not prohibition, which merely drives them into
drinking any murderous substitute for liquor rather than no liquor at
all. For the compulsive drinker drinks because he is compulsive by
nature, as is the fanatical reformer. To deprive the compulsive drinker
of his drink does not cure him. He is merely forced into the search for
substitutes. Equally, the prohibition of a reform to a reformer would
not make him give up all reforms. He would merely turn his neuroses
onto another brand of reform.
The real tragedy of the prohibitionist ideology was that it left no
room for temperance. The dry crusade slipped slowly from a moderate
remedy for obvious evils into a total cure-all for society. The creed of
the dedicated dry would not admit the existence of the moderate
drinker. By definition, all drinkers were bound to become alcoholics.
The moral of the famous propaganda piece Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
was that the first sip of beer always and inevitably led to a drunkard's
grave. So believing, the Anti-Saloon League could not attract moderate
support by allowing the sale of light wines and beers. National prohi-
bition had to be total. Yet if prohibition had been confined to prohibi-
tion of ardent spirits, as the early nineteenth-century temperance
associations had recommended, the Anti-Saloon League might have
had the support of the brewers, the winegrowers, and the majority of
the American people to this day. A survey conducted in 1946 in
America showed that fewer than two-fifths of the adult population
ever drank spirits, either regularly or intermittently. 11
In the early days of their counterattack, the brewers and distillers
matched the hysteria of the drys in their denunciations. They accused
the prohibitionists of being cranks and crackpots, "women with short
hair and men with long hair/* According to the wets, America was
less threatened by the "gentlemanly vices" than by "perfidy and
phariseeism in public and private life." Many men "marked the dis-
tinction between moderation and intemperance," and rich red blood,
rather than ice water, flowed in their veins. 12 The drys were accused
of being
. . . more critical of each other, more self-conscious . . . harder,
drabber in speech. Iced water, ice cream, icy eyes, icy words. Gone
the mellowness, generosity, good humor, good nature of life. Enter
the will-bound, calculating, material, frigid human machine. Strange
that the removal of this thing, supposed to pander to the animal in
us, makes one feel less a man and more an animal, above all, an ant.
. . . Although who knows? ants may drink. 18
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROHIBITION/ 29
The doctrine of prohibition appealed to the psychology of excess,
both in its friends and in its foes. They could find only evil in each
other. Extremes conjure up extremes. The fight against the devil
carries another devil in its exaggerations. With a consecrated prejudice
on the part of the drys opposed to an unenlightened self-interest on
the part of the wets, there was little room left for compromise. Indeed,
the drys were proud of their prejudice. It seemed to them a holy senti-
ment. With Robert Ingersoll, they did not believe that any person
could contemplate the evils of drink "without being prejudiced against
the liquor crime." 14
THE SPECTER OF THE SOUTH
THE EXTREMES of dry psychology were well suited to white Southern-
ers. They had a special use for prohibition. It offered them a moral
refuge from their guilty fear of the Negro, as well as a method of
controlling one of his means of self-assertion. Liquor sometimes gave
the Negro the strength to repudiate his inferior status, It also en-
couraged him to loose his libido on white women, incited, so it was
said, by the nudes on the labels of whisky bottles. 15 Thus the Negro
should be prevented from drinking alcohol. To a lesser degree, the
same rule should be applied to white men, although this reform was
not so urgent. Congressman Hobson, from Alabama, made this clear
in the House of Representatives in 1914, while speaking on his resolu-
tion for a prohibition amendment to the Constitution. "Liquor will
actually make a brute out of a negro, causing him to commit unnatural
crimes. The effect is the same on the white man, though the white man
being further evolved it takes longer time to reduce him to the same
level."
In the same debate, Congressman Pou, of North Carolina, although
he opposed Hobson's resolution on account of the sacred doctrine of
states* rights, did not question the need for racial control. He reminded
Congress gently that the South had been forced to take away the
ballot from the Negro "as the adult takes the pistol from the hand of
a child." 16 * Since the ballot and alcohol were the two means of assertion
given to the Negro, they must be denied to him. By the time of the
Hobson resolution, all the Southern states had discriminated against
the Negro voter and all but two had adopted prohibitory laws against
liquor. The first measure had allowed the second. Congressman Quin,
of Mississippi, stressed this in reference to the South. "Prohibition
itself gained a foothold there and was made possible only after the
* As Mr. Dooley pointed out, the South did actually allow the Negro to vote,
"only demandin' that he shall prove that his father an* mother were white."
30 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
restriction upon the suffrage of the negro/' 17 To Northern drys, even
if the South was in the rout of democracy at the polling booth, it was
in the van of reform at the saloon. If it denied the Fifteenth Amend-
ment, it was rabid in support of the Eighteenth.
This paternalism among the responsible Southern leaders and the
denial of the principle of equality was not confined to the white race.
Professor Councill, the principal of the Negro school in Huntsville,
Alabama, spoke out for the abolition of the saloon as the first step in
the emancipation of his own race. J. F. Clark agreed with him, al-
though from a position of racial superiority:
The saloon is a place of rendezvous for aD classes of the low and
vulgar, a resort for degraded whites and their more degraded negro
associates, the lounging place for adulterers, lewd women, the favorite
haunt of gamblers, drunkards and criminals. Both blacks and whites
mix and mingle together as a mass of degraded humanity in this cess-
pool of iniquity. Here we have the worst form of social equality, but
I am glad to know that it is altogether among the more worthless of
both races. 18
Booker T. Washington was of much the same opinion. Prohibition
would be a blessing to the Negro people second only to the abolition
of slavery. "Two-thirds of the mobs, lynchings, and burnings at the
stake are the result of bad whisky drunk by bad black men and bad
white men/' 19 Negro and white leaders could join together in the
crusade against the saloon, which often incited the racial fears of the
South to the pitch of murder.
Two other forces drove the Southerners towards prohibition. The
first was patriotism. The South was once again the moral leader of the
nation in this reform, and in this reform lay the chance of revenge.
If the North had abolished chattel slavery in the South, the South
would retaliate by abolishing rum slavery in the North. The second
force was the monolithic structure of the Democratic party in the
South. Traditionally, the Negroes voted Republican and the whites
Democratic. The elimination of Negro ballots at the polls left the
Democratic party solidly in control of Southern patronage. The only
chance for the Republicans to regain some form of political power lay
in the proper enfranchisement of the Negroes, which was impossible,
or in the wresting of the moral leadership of the South from the Demo-
crats. To do so, they had to find a popular cause which was both moral
and an instrument of racial control. Prohibition was such a cause. Fear
that the Republicans might seize the leadership of the prohibition
movement, or that the Prohibition party, founded in 1869, might split
the Democratic vote and let in the Republicans, drove the Democrats
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROHIBITON/31
into the dry column in the South. 20 Thus the anomaly of a party based
on the wet cities of the North and the dry rural counties of the South
was emphasized. The quarrel over prohibition brought into the open
a deep fissure among the Democrats that made them ineffective as a
party for a decade.
Other forces conspired to give alcohol a special position in the
psyche of the South. Although white rural Southerners shared in the
nationwide economic and moral drives towards prohibition, they also
suffered from the peculiar compulsions given to them by their environ-
ment. In the Southern character, an overwhelming need to master the
Negro was coupled with a split between Puritanism and hedonism.
This split made the Southerner seek the forbidden as a necessary part
of his greatest pleasure, while a sense of guilt drove him into depend-
ence on the absolution of violence or of orgiastic religion. 21 The ambiv-
alent attitude of the Southern country white toward the Negro, his
emotional cocktail of fear shaken up with lust, was also his attitude
toward liquor. It is no coincidence that Mississippi, the most deeply
rural of all states, is the last state in the Union to keep to the Southern
trinity of official prohibition, heavy liquor consumption, and an oc-
casional lynching. When Will Rogers commented that Mississippi
would vote dry as long as the voters could stagger to the polls, he was
too kind to mention that they would also lynch Negroes as long as they
could stagger to the rope.*
The drys deliberately exploited this darkness in the Southern mind.
Fundamentalist religion often attracted large audiences by the very
emphasis on vice and iniquity, violence and rape, which the mass
media and the yellow press adopted in the twentieth century. An
example can be taken from the work of the Reverend Wilbur Fisk
Crafts. He was very influential, being president of the International
Reform Bureau at Washington, a prolific writer and speaker, and a
pastor at different times in the Methodist Episcopal, Congregational,
and Presbyterian churches. His favorite sermon on prohibition began
with a description of a man in seventeenth-century Bavaria who con-
fessed on the rack that he had eaten thirteen children, after being
changed into a wolf by the devil's girdle. The man was then sentenced
to be put on the wheel and beheaded, once he had been pinched in
twelve places on his body with red-hot irons. His dead body was
burned, and his head was set for many years on a wooden wolf as a
warning.
* There were 573 recorded lynchings in Mississippi between 1882 and 1944.
During this period, Georgia came second with 521 lynchings and Texas third with
489. After the Second World War, the number of lynchings declined dramatically,
since more severe legal action was taken against those who were responsible for
the murders.
32 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
After this edifying start, the preacher continued,
So runs the old chronicle. Has it any parallel in present-day life?
The next time you open your newspaper and read the scare heads
describing the latest lynching horror in the black belt of the United
States, ask yourself what devil's girdle has changed so many negroes
into sensual hyenas. Remember that during the four years of the Civil
War the whole white womanhood of the South, in the absence of
husband and brother, in the death grapple of battle, was at the mercy
of the black population of the plantations.
Yet there was no rape at that time. What, then, had changed the
Negroes? Was it emancipation or education, or the possession of the
suffrage? Or was it the fact, "which for all rational men is a sufficient
answer," that 75 per cent of all liquor sales in the South Carolina dis-
pensaries were to Negroes? Naturally, it was liquor which was the
devil's girdle and brought about the punishment reserved for those
who wore the devil's girdle. "The souls of the black men are poisoned
with alcohol and their bodies in due course drenched in petroleum
and burned/' 22
Of course, lynching was only the extreme manifestation of the
Southern urge to violence in the same way as hoggish drunkenness
and ecstatic shakes were extreme reactions to the saloon and the
revival meeting. There was a responsible and moderate leadership in
the Deep South, composed of such people as Senator Oscar Under-
wood, of Alabama, who opposed prohibition and the excesses of his
countrymen with conviction and dignity. But unfortunately, the very
conditions which made the Western farms and small towns susceptible
to the Manichaean doctrines of the drys were present in an exagger-
ated form in the South. There were few large cities. The hold of the
primitive Methodist and Baptist churches and of the fundamentalist
sects was widespread and powerful. Little industry existed below the
Potomac. Conquest by the North and memories of Reconstruction
lived on. And the cult of purity and white womanhood allied with the
fact of miscegenation and Negro mistresses produced in the white
Southerner a strange discrepancy between stressed morality and denied
fact. In this interval between ideal and reality, the cant of the drinker
who voted dry flourished like a magnolia tree.
INTERNATIONAL MISSION
THE SOUTH adopted prohibition to protect itself against its poor and
its Negroes and its own sense of guilt. Those American missionaries
who supported prohibition at home and abroad had like motives. The
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROHIBITON/33
poor and the colored people of the earth were dangerous when drunk.
Moreover, as the greed of Southern planters was held responsible for
the existence of the Negro problem in the South, so the greed of white
traders was usually held responsible for the corruption of the native
races overseas, Early American imperialism imitated the European
pattern of traders who corrupted the local people with rum and fire-
arms and diseases, followed by clergymen who tried to save those
people from that corruption. In America itself, the defeat of the red
Indians had been made easy by their introduction to rum; once they
had been defeated, they were immediately protected from the con-
sequences of rum by the federal government.
A similar process took place in the Pacific islands. In 1901, Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge had a resolution adopted by the Senate to forbid
the sale by American traders of opium and alcohol to "aboriginal
tribes and uncivilized races/' 28 These provisions were later extended
to cover "uncivilized" elements in America itself and in its territories,
such as Indians, Alaskans, the inhabitants of Hawaii, railroad work-
ers, and immigrants at ports of entry.
The evil which the American missionaries were trying to eradicate
was real enough. As they said, Christian nations were making ten
drunkards to one Christian among backward peoples. 24 Prohibition of
rum traders was obviously a good thing in those areas controlled by
the colonial powers. But when the same paternal attitude was applied
within the home ground of the colonial powers to "handle the hun-
dreds of thousands of God's weak children, who are being ruined and
destroyed through the oppressions of the liquor traffic," the mission-
aries ran into trouble. 25 They could say with truth, "Let no one think
we are neglecting saloons on our own shores in this crusade for the
defense of native races at a distance." 26 But the fact that the colonial
power itself was often a democracy made this missionary attitude
objectionable at home. No American workingman liked to be classified
with those "uncivilized" peoples, whom he was taught to consider
an inferior species. He also objected to the attitude of the missionary,
who claimed to know what was good for labor better than labor knew
itself. Moreover, there was a suspicious similiarity between the views
of the employers, who said that prohibition was good for the efficiency
of workingmen, and those men of God, who said that prohibition was
necessary for the salvation of their souls.
The idea of world-wide prohibition was contemporaneous with the
idea of America as the Messiah of mankind and the Savior of the
degenerate world. The ideology of salvation, which was once applied
by middle-class reformers only to backward races and the American
poor, was applied to the whole globe, after the First World War
34 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
seemed to prove to many Americans that their country was the last
refuge of peace and virtue. In addition, the spate of prohibition legis-
lation adopted by the belligerent powers seemed to herald a world-
wide prohibition revolution. Canada and Russia forbade liquor during
the war; Britain and France and Germany severely regulated liquor.
The Moslem and Buddhist world was also officially under religious
prohibition. In fact, over half the area of the earth seemed behind the
dry banners, and that area was growing. It is small wonder that
William Jennings Bryan could prophesy that "alcohol as a beverage
has been indicted as a criminal, brought up to the bar of judgment,
condemned, and executed. Our nation will be saloonless for evermore
and will lead the world in the great crusade which will drive intoxi-
cating liquor from the globe." 27
The mentality of war and the fantastic hopes of a millennial peace
encouraged the drys' sense of international mission. As the leader of
the Anti-Saloon League said to its assembled delegates in 1919, 'The
President said to make the world safe for democracy. Now, it is your
business and mine, it is the business of the church of God, to make a
democracy that is safe for the world, by making it intelligent and sober
everywhere." 28 The reason for converting the world was simple. It was
the same reason, incidentally, that the Bolsheviks gave for insisting
on the world-wide Communist revolution. As long as a dry America
was surrounded by wet nations, or a Communist Russia by capitalist
nations, neither prohibition nor Communism would be safe. How, in
the opinion of the drys, could prohibition be enforced when the United
States was bounded "on the north by hard liquor, on the south by
liquor, on the west by rum and on the east by no limit"? 29 The best
hope of prohibition, like the best hope of communism, lay in the
conquest of the world.
Of course, the drys saw themselves as the sworn enemies of the
Bolsheviks and of communism. They said that they were the defend-
ers of the law and the Constitution, where the Eighteenth Amend-
ment was enshrined. But they did not mention their revolutionary
destruction of the vast property interests of the liquor trade without
compensation. There were further curious similarities between the
Anti-Saloon League and the Bolshevik party. Both organizations were
founded at much the same time. Both were small, successful, well-
organized minority groups who knew what they wanted. Both ex-
ploited a condition of war to put themselves in power. Although the
drys used propaganda while the Bolsheviks used revolutionary war-
fare, both used the methods most likely to succeed in their societies.
Both groups expected through historical necessity to be the leaders
of a global revolution in the habits of human society. The expectations
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROHIBITON/35
of both groups were quickly disappointed. While Russia settled down
under Stalin to "Socialism in one country/' the United States settled
down to prohibition in one country. Both revolutions failed in their
immediate social objectives, although the names and the language of
the Russian revolution lingered on.
But the analogy can be taken too far. The fact that the drys relied
on the Christian churches and on democratic procedures limited their
success. The methods of the World League Against Alcoholism could
not be the methods of international subversion of the Comintern. 30
When Bishop Cannon demanded of the Anti-Saloon League, "Shall
It Live or Die?" and came to the conclusion that it should live to lead
in the international crusade against alcohol, his suggested methods of
conquest were the usual propaganda methods of the League. "It must
carry to every nation its testimony for Prohibition, by printed page, by
cartoon, poster, in every language, and by trained workers and speak-
ers who will be veritable apostles of Prohibition truth/' 81 That such
a crusade was hardly likely to be effective in Mediterranean countries,
long used to drinking wine, did not deter the leaders of the League.
For, as long as the crusade against liquor lasted at home and abroad,
they kept their power and their jobs and their hopes and their satis-
faction in the good fight well fought. It is the habit of revolutionaries
never to be content with the limits of their gains, and of moral re-
formers rarely to accept less than the conversion of the human race.
The hidden urges behind dry leaders and white Southerners and
foreign missionaries made them adopt prohibition as a panacea for
themselves and for their fellow men. The dry cause brought them
peace from their inner struggles and fears and guilts. They sought to
extend this peace to races and classes which they considered inferior
and eventually to the whole earth. The freedom of the globe from the
evil of liquor would bring the condition of liberty for the first time
to all mankind. In this battle for the good of all, the drys would use
any means to win. For the liquor enemy was evil and could only be
fought by evil. In their exploitation of the fears and weaknesses of
their fellow Americans, the drys were guilty of many questionable
methods, which could hardly be justified by the purity of their
intentions.
CHAPTER U
The Exploited Terror
Ye mouldering victims, wipe the crumbling grave-dust
from your brow; stalk forth in your tattered shrouds and
bony whiteness to testify against the drink! Come, come
from the gallows, you spirit-maddened man-slayer, grip
your bloody knife, and stalk forth to testify against it! Crawl
from the slimy ooze, ye drowned drunkards, and with
suffocation's blue and livid lips speak out against the drink.
Snap your burning chains, ye denizens of the pit, and come
up, sheeted in fire, dripping with the flames of hell, and
with your trumpet tongues testifying against the deep
"damnation of the drink."
JOHN B. GOUGH
Platform Echoes, 1885
The human species, with all its immense advantages, has
made many conspicuous missteps. Its eating habits are such
as to have induced a wide assortment of wholly unnecessary
diseases; its drinking habits are glaringly injurious; and its
excessive indulgence in sex-waste has imperiled the life of
the race.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS OILMAN, 1924
THE POPULAR belief that liquor did a man good was older than the
American colonies. The first colonists brought over from Europe a
taste for ardent spirits and a faith in the healing power of aqua vitae.
Rum was drunk everywhere in the colonies, at weddings and funerals,
at the founding of churches and during the swindling of red Indians.
Childish ills were quieted, if not cured, by small doses of spirits.
Housebuilding, harvesting, husking, quilting, bundling, logrolling all
the particular festivities of pioneer life were incomplete without huge
quantities of hard cider and corn whisky. Alcohol was thought to be
a necessity for heavy work with the hands. In 1927, after sixty years
of medical testimony to the contrary, the truckmen in the old Chelsea
district in New York still thought that they had to start their days with
a nip, while the hatters of Danbury could not work without enough
36
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 37
alcohol to control their "hatter's shakes/' 1 Even now, the brandy bottle
is still in the medicine cupboard, and beer is sometimes prescribed
as a remedy for old age.
The War of Independence was fought partially on Dutch courage
and American liquor. The official ration for each soldier at Valley
Forge was a daily gill or a half pint of whisky, depending on the
quartermaster's supplies. James Thacher, while visiting the troops
there, heard their continual complaints, "No pay, no clothes, no pro-
visions, no rum." 2 The shortage of liquor became so great that General
Gates, president of the Board of War, threatened to seize all the
supplies of spirits that were being held back by profiteers. Only the
unheeded voice of the physician-general of the Middle Department of
the Continental Army, Dr. Benjamin Rush, cautioned against the use
of spirits. He had noticed that the consumption of alcohol seemed to
increase fatigue and lower resistance to disease. The war, however,
was won despite his pleading.
In 1784, Dr. Rush published his famous pamphlet, An Inquiry
into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and Mind. 3
He advocated complete abstinence from ardent spirits. In an appendix
called "A Moral and Physical Thermometer," he made the case that
rum paved the way to the debtor's cell and the gallows, while small
beer and occasional cups of wine or cider led to strength of body and
length of life. His writings were the basis of the temperance sermons
of the great preacher, Lyman Beecher, who later became an advocate
of total prohibition and helped to spread the war against rum across
the whole of the United States. Beecher appealed to God's law as well
as to medical knowledge in his Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions,
Signs, Evils and Remedy of Intemperance. 4 The wandering mission-
aries of the West echoed his words everywhere. By 1834, some million
Americans were enrolled in temperance societies. They signed the
pledge after appeals to their reason and morality by the respected
leaders of their communities.
In 1840, however, a new method of spreading the dry gospel was
discovered. The Washingtonians, a society of reformed drunkards,
found out that hundreds of thousands could be made to sign the
pledge after hearing the confessions of saved alcoholics. The techniques
of persuasion of the Washingtonians appealed to the heart rather
than to the head. Mass meetings, processions of thousands of small
girls and boys in Cold Water Armies, torchlight rallies, titillation by
descriptions of the life of sin followed by redemption through repent-
ence these were the weapons of the new advocates of temperance.
Although the Washingtonian movement declined rapidly, its tech-
niques and speakers remained behind. John H. W. Hawkins, John B.
38 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Gough, and their imitators spoke to millions in the cities and small
towns. 5 Their coming was the highlight of the dreary year in country
villages. The most lurid of Brand Whitlock's memories of his little
Ohio town was that of the "dashing and romantic fellow," who re-
counted the fascinating adventures of the life of sin on the temperance
platform.
It was as thrilling as anything in Night Life in New York, a book of
shocking revelations showing just how wicked a place New York was;
it was sold by subscription only, and was not at all Fit for the Young.
But the Reformed Drunkard was even better than the book; he had
been there and had seen it all himself, and that made it more real. 6
Indeed, the chief worry of the local small boys on signing the pledge
was that they themselves could not become Reformed Drunkards.
The original drives behind the temperance movement in America
are clear. There was a sentiment of nationalism, a feeling that self-
control was necessary to the working of American democracy. There
was an urge towards social reform, a campaign against drunkenness
and prostitution and crime. There was the need to protect the home,
the wife, and the children of the drunkard against disease and want.
There was the power of evangelical Protestantism, which condemned
liquor as the Devil's own drink. There was thriftiness, the knowledge
that alcohol makes men work less and play more. And there was,
finally, the success of the movement. In 1851, Neal Dow secured the
passage of the Maine Law, which banned the sale of liquor through-
out the state. 7 Twelve states followed the lead of Maine in the next
four years. After using moral suasion and emotional appeal, the
prohibitionists found their most effective method of influence in legal
coercion. The Civil War, however, brought about a slump in all reform,
dry or otherwise.
THE HTPPOCRATIC LIE
AFTER THE Civil War, the prohibitionists found new weapons. Medical
research into the effects of alcohol was flourishing, particularly in
Germany, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. The early findings of scien-
tists were usually against the use of liquor. Veneration for science was
increasing in America itself. The temperance societies set out to diffuse
the results of medical research through pamphlet and pulpit. But they
were careful ta diffuse only that scientific data which was in line with
their beliefs. (The research which supportedJGqds ban against drink
was good; the research which found for the n^oderate use of liquor
was faulty, biased, bought, or downright evilJfThe drys perfected
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 39
techniques for misrepresenting scientific experiments, for quoting out
of context, for making final dogmas out of interim reports, and for
manufacturing literary water bottles out of laboratory test tubes. 8
Instances of the misuse of medicine by the prohibitionists are legion.
Dr. Thomas Sewall made six drawings of the stomachs of corpses.
These drawings were labeled "Healthful," "Moderate Drinking,"
"Drunkard's," "Ulcerous," "After a Long Debauch," and "Death by
Delirium Tremens." Reproductions of these were made for seventy
years by the drys. The violent pigments of Grand Guignol were used
to terrify the simple into teetotalism. 9 Another favorite trick of tem-
perance lecturers was to drop the contents of an egg into a glass of
pure alcohol and to tell their audiences that the curdled mess was
similar to the effect of liquor on the lining of the human stomach. A
similar horror technique was the threat of spontaneous combustion.
The medical journals of the 1830's and Charles Dickens, in Bleak
House, testified that drunkards might suddenly catch fire and burn to
death, breathing out blue flame. The idea that children conceived in
drunkenness would be born defective was stressed and documented. 10
Widespread use was made of medical statistics to win over the
intelligent. The dry propagandists were among the first to discover
the modern device of bemusing the opposition with facts and figures,
while forgetting to mention any contrary evidence. Laitinen's studies
of twenty thousand Finnish children were widely touted to show, to
two places of decimals, that drinkers lost more of their children than
abstainers. 11 Contemporary studies of three thousand English chil-
dren were ignored because they seemed to prove that drinking parents
did not lose more of their children. 12 The drys wanted to show that
parents who used liquor were murderers of unborn babies. Their
selected statistics merely buttressed their preconceptions. It was un-
fortunate that their devotion to their cause exceeded their devotion
to scientific truth.
Another fault of the drys was argument by false inference. For
instance, in the same year that Stockard was writing, on the basis
of his experiments, that "it is highly improbable that the quality of
human stock has been at all injured or adversely modified by the long
use of alcohol," 13 the eighteenth edition of a phenomenally successful
dry textbook on hygiene, How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living
Based on Modern Science, still stated that "Dr. Stockard has also
shown in mice, on which he has experimented, the effect of alcohol on
the germ-plasm is distinctly injurious. It is a fair inference that the
use of alcohol by parents tends to damage the offspring." 14 The same
textbook quoted evidence by an obscure doctor in Battle Creek that
nicotine sometimes produced degeneration and sterility among rats.
40 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Defective Children
hcreased With
ALCOHOUZATION
of FATHERS
Among th 0*fof iv*r KpU*p*y. **/. m//rf*tf/>* and St. f/tu 0o/>c
219 Children of Occasional Drinkers
Hi DEFECTIVE
130 Children of Regular Moderate Drinkers
67 Children of Regular Heavy Drinkers
S3 Children of Drunkards
Alcoholism and Defects of Brain
and Nerves Go Hand in Hand
Bunge: Graphische Labellen Zur Alkolfrage, 1907, p. 169.
ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE POSTER
"This fact should at least give the human parent pause." 15
Argument by analogy was another favorite method of the prohibi-
tionists. Contemporary scientists frequently experimented with the
effects of alcohol on small animals. Although they were careful to say
that the results of their experiments could not be applied to the human
species, the drys repeated time and time again that human babies
would suffer from drunken parents as badly as the litters of intoxicated
dogs, fowls, guinea pigs, mice, frogs, rabbits, and albino rats. 16 What
hurt a rat would hurt a man. Were not both living creatures? Yet the
same people who argued that a man who drank a cocktail a day might
harm his children as much as an alcoholic rat his posterity were the
leaders of the fundamentalist crusade against evolution. When William
Jennings Bryan rose to defend the Bible against Darwin in Tennessee,
his dry supporters could see no correspondence between men and
monkeys,
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 41
ALCOHOLISM
AND DEGENERACY
61 CHdrtnta 10 Very Temper* Farife 57 Cttta to 10 MM** Mis
^Modfato fancy 26 DM Jn In fancy
Mad *fc 1/H urn Dane* 1 Heal St. Vftu9 Donee ~ IdMfc
2W9r*Baekward. not Idiot* e Ww* Idiotic
^vere Deformeof $ Wer* Deformed
^^ ^^ Hi ^H
SWonDwarftd
5O were Normal
I Hi
lOWereNormaf
Demme: The Influence of Alcohol on the Child. Investi-
gations in Berne, Switzerland, 1878-1889. Families lived
in same section and were similarly situated except as
regards intemperance.
ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE POSTER
Often the drys wrote straight lies about medical research. Experi-
ments on thirty thousand white mice showed that alcoholized parents
did not produce defective progeny. 17 Although the fertility of the mice
was decreased, this selective process strengthened the species. Yet the
Scientific Temperance Journal, the compendium of medical knowledge
for the drys, continued to quote the results of these experiments as
proof of their belief that alcohol caused "a persistent transmissible
injury to the males/' 18 Up to the present day, alcohol is still miscalled
a poison in temperance publications, although it is no more than a
mild sedative if taken in small quantities.
The brewers and distillers also distorted and suppressed medical
42 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
evidence, although they were less efficient than the prohibitionists.
They insisted on calling beer 'liquid bread"; the drys retorted by call-
ing apples "God s bottles" and by saying that the wets might as well
caU a chaw of tobacco "liquid milk." 19 The United States Brewers'
Association tried to influence students in its favor by putting out a
bibliography entitled Five Feet of Information for Impartial Students
of the Liquor Problem. But the impartiality of the recommended read-
ing was questionable. Highly praised was Dr. Robert Park's The Case
for Alcohol, or the Action of Alcohol on Body and Soul. This treatise
stated that "man is made for Alcohol, or Alcohol is made for man,
which comes to the same thing. On the meat side, Alcohol is a sort
of broth prepared specially with loving care and evident skill. . . .
Alcohol is an aliment superior to sugar; the reason for that being that
for the same weight it contains more aliment." 20 Similar claims for the
food value of liquor were made until the brewers realized in the thir-
ties that they were depriving themselves of half their market. 21 Women
would not drink liquor which might make them fatter. Since that
time, advertisements for beer and spirits have stressed the refreshing
qualities or snob value of a particular brand of drink.
But until the passing of prohibition and the reversal of their roles,
the drys were always on the attack and the wets on the defense. The
drys chose their battleground, and the wets had to meet them there.
Eugenics was the fashionable science, and the wets could not deny its
claims. Percy Andreae, the chief publicity expert of the brewers, had to
confess to the New Jersey State Chamber of Commerce in 1915 that
"race-betterment has become the dominant well, I will not say fad,
because the subject is too sacred but let me say the dominant trend
of our age." 22 His only reply to the dry arguments for purifying the
racial stock by prohibition of liquor was a plea for happiness, which
involved the claim that men could not be happy without alcohol.
Even the more determined counterattacks of other writers, subsidized
by the brewers, were curiously ineffective. They merely maintained
that the drys were materialists and often ate too much, which was
equally bad for their health. As for wet degeneracy,
. . . people should understand that, far from indicating a superior
moral status, the aversion to alcohol is a symptom of physical, moral
or mental defectiveness, or inferior, sub-normal nature, not so far out
of the normal as to be classed as decidedly diseased, or degenerate,
but nevertheless far enough out of the road of health to be called
morbid. 23
Until the coming of national prohibition, the whole history of dry
and wet medical propaganda was a history of misrepresentation un-
worthy of the declared aims of its writers.
THE EXPLOITED TERROR / 43
THE TEXTBOOK CRUSADE
ANOTHER DIFFERENCE in the dry campaign after 1870 was its emphasis
on education. The minds of children had been influenced in churches
and Sunday schools. But they were taught little about the evils of
liquor in the public schools, except by the ubiquitous McGuffey
Readers. Dr. McGuffey was a friend of John B. Gough and an advo-
cate of temperance. His textbooks and readers, of which 122,000,000
copies were sold between 1836 and 1920, formed the minds of country
Protestant America. Many farmhouses, such as Ed Howe's childhood
home in Missouri, possessed a library only of religious books, the
Christian Advocate, and McGuffey Readers. 24 The texts taught the
virtues of thrift, labor, obedience, duty to God, and temperance. They
helped to create the climate of decency and informed prejudice which
made the passing of prohibition legislation possible.
Temperance teaching was incidental, however, to McGuffey's pur-
pose. It was only one method among others to produce the restrained
and dutiful child who was admired in nineteenth-century America. A
lesson such as "The Whisky Boy," which traced the decline of John
from early drinking of whisky to death in the poorhouse, was more
concerned with showing liquor as the enemy of industry than as sinful
in itself. Another lesson, "Don't Take Strong Drink," did make the
point that "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of heaven," but its
main emphasis was on the evil which liquor brought to this life.
"Whisky makes the happy miserable and it causes the rich to be
poor." 25
McGuffey was more interested in stressing the social rewards of
temperance than in frightening his readers into virtue. He wanted to
bring some form of civilization to the frontier through the school-
house. His attacks on drunkenness and gambling were more the at-
tacks on specific evils than on the trade in alcohol. In fact, the extreme
prohibitionists thought that too little was being done to win the
children to the dry banner. They decided to increase the amount of
temperance teaching in the public schools.
Six years after its founding in 1873, the Woman's Christian Temper-
ance Union adopted Mrs. Mary Hannah Hunt's plan for introducing
compulsory temperance education. Mrs. Hunt was put in charge of a
Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, which cajoled and
bullied Congress and the state legislatures into passing laws requiring
temperance teaching in the public schools. By 1902, every state and
territory except Arizona had such a law. That day seemed near which
Mrs. Hunt had predicted was "surely coming when from the school
44 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
houses all over the land will come trained haters of alcohol to pour
a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon."
But laws were not enough. The temperance textbooks had to be
rewritten to include the selected medical knowledge approved by the
dry leaders. There can be no indoctrination without misrepresentation.
Mrs. Hunt set about changing the teaching of a nation. In 1887, she
circulated to all publishers of textbooks on hygiene and physiology a
petition signed by two hundred leading prohibitionists. This petition
requested that all textbooks should teach that ''alcohol is a dangerous
and seductive poison"; that fermentation turns beer and wine and
cider from a food into poison; that a little liquor creates by its nature
the appetite for more; and that degradation and crime result from
alcohol. The textbooks on hygiene should contain at least one-quarter
of temperance teaching and should be suited to the minds of the chil-
dren in each grade. If these conditions were observed, a board of
professors, clergymen, reformers, and doctors picked by the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union would endorse tie books. 26 As the pro-
hibitionists were influential on most of the school boards in the country
and had the power to buy textbooks, the publishers soon fell into line.
Before her death in 1906, Mrs. Hunt could point to more than forty
endorsed texts in use all over the country in public schools, of which the
numbers doubled between the turn of the century and the Great War.
Mrs. Hunt saw the struggle for the children's minds as more than a
matter of pressure politics or economics. Her obituary said that "the
fundamental and motivating power of her intense and fruitful activity
was the belief in the divine plan for mankind which alcohol must not
be allowed to mar, coupled with the conviction that through the chil-
dren the race would be saved.** 27 Her belief in destiny and her con-
cern for the Anglo-Saxon race was sufficient to make her rate her job
as a revolutionary crusade. "Childhood saved today from the saloon,
and the nation thus saved tomorrow, is the stake played for in this
desperate game," she wrote in 1887. "All that is holiest in mother-love,
all that is purest in the patriotism that would save the country from
the saloon, for God and humanity, enters into our opposition, or our
support of these books/' 28 In her terms, there was no room for any
scientific defense of the moderate use of alcohol. The only medical
evidence deemed ''scientific'' was that which supported the prohibition
of liquor.
The moderates and the wets realized too late that the drys had
spread the idea of their infallibility on the subject of alcohol. After
nearly a century of rarely disputed teaching, backed by a majority
of the Protestant churches and by Congress, the prohibitionists seemed
to have authority and tradition behind their statements. Alcohol re-
THE EXPLOITED TERROR / 45
search was their preserve. Until the passing of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment, the only strong challenge to the dry dogmas came from the
findings of the Committee of Fifty, a group of scholars and business-
men interested in temperance, who sponsored research studies at the
turn of the century. Their physiological subcommittee examined the
dry misuse of methods of education. The subcommittee deplored the
rewriting of the textbooks on hygiene by Mrs. Hunt and her helpers.
It noted the false statements in the endorsed textbooks and the careful
flattery paid to their obscure authors, who were introduced as "the
greatest living authority" or "the foremost scientist" or "an eminent
scholar."
The members of the subcommittee examined carefully twenty-three
of the endorsed textbooks from seven publishers. They noted that pub-
lishers found it difficult at times to sell textbooks which were not
endorsed. They found many misleading statements and deliberate
attempts to frighten young children in the dry texts. Some of the more
horrific statements read:
A cat or dog may be killed by causing it to drink a small quantity of
alcohol. A boy once drank whisky from a flask he had found, and died
in a few hours. . . .
Alcohol sometimes causes the coats of the blood vessels to grow
thin. They are then liable at any time to cause death by bursting. . . .
It often happens that the children of those who drink have weak
minds or become crazy as they grow older. . . .
Worse than all, when alcohol is constantly used, it may slowly
change the muscles of the heart into fat. Such a heart cannot be so
strong as if it were all muscle. It is sometimes so soft that a finger
could easily be pushed through its walls. You can think what would
happen if it is made to work a litde harder than usual. It is liable to
stretch and stop beating and this would cause sudden death. 29
In their final summary, the subcommittee called for a "prolonged
struggle ... to free our public school system from the incubus which
rests upon it/' 30 Mary Hunt immediately retaliated by having a resolu-
tion passed by the United States Senate. The Committee of Fifty was
wrong in its allegations that the textbooks were unscientific and
imposed on the public schools. It was ridiculous to suppose that an
unaided woman could have caused all the states to pass laws for the
teaching of temperance without wide popular support and much
rational discussion. "The American public," the resolution stated, "is
too intelligent, too patriotic, and too conscientious to have adopted
this movement hastily or to retire from it in the face of the good it is
doing." 81 That the good was questionable was shown by the answers
of Massachusetts schoolchildren to questions on alcohol, after they had
46 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
been taught from dry texts. One answer stated that alcohol would
"pickel the inside of the body," while another affirmed that the stomach
of a drinker became "black and covered with cancers." 32
In the eighty years before the passing of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment, the drys had a near monopoly of the means by which the results
of research on alcohol reached the voters. The minds of a whole
generation had been conditioned to feel guilty every time that they
took a drink of liquor. They had been told time and time again, in
school and at church and on the science pages of the newspapers, that
alcohol harmed them and their children. However much a man wanted
liquor, he might vote to deprive himself of the temptation, as did
Thomas Wolfe's drunken Oliver Gant, pressured by his wife until he
"piously contributed his vote for purity." 83 A secret shame made many
a drinker support the drys. He had been taught to fear his own weak-
ness and the bad opinion of his teetotal betters. Like Babbitt, the
respectable voter disliked being known as a Drinker even more than
he liked a drink.
THE SPOILED SEED
THE DRYS used other potent weapons in the second wave of prohibition.
What appeared to be their greatest threat, the Prohibition party,
founded in 1869, was the least. Party political action helped their
cause far less than psychological conditioning. Until a large enough
group of people had been guided toward their policies, the Prohibi-
tionists would lose at the polls. And so, partly consciously and partly
subconsciously, the temperance forces worked on those hidden urges
in America and Americans which might help them. The emotion which
they exploited was fear: the fear of sin and God; the fear of race
against race and skin against skin; the fear of venereal diseases; the
fear of idiot children; the fear of violence suppressed by conscience
and loosed by liquor; and the dark sexual fears of civilization. Francis
Bacon may have found nothing terrible except fear itself. But the fear
of others was the hope of the drys.
The prohibitionists claimed that the drinking of alcohol was more
than a crime against God. It was a crime against society, self, and
race. According to them, the findings of medicine and science proved
absolutely that alcohol turned even the moderate drinker into the
bad citizen, who infected his innocent children with the diseases of
liquor. Wise men from the time of Plato had warned parents against
drinking before procreation. Degenerate offspring was the result of
abuse of the bottle. "The history of heredity conducts us to alcoholism,
and these two should be considered the principal causes of degenera-
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 47
tion." 84 As the consumption of alcohol rose, so the quality of the racial
stock declined. There was only one way to give "posterity a square
dear: that was to keep a father from "faulty habits" and to prevent
him from passing on to his child a feeble constitution. 85 The drys
echoed the words of Dr. J. W. Ballantyne, of Edinburgh, "Alcohol is a
danger from one conception, from one procreation, to another; there
is no time under the sun when it is suitable or safe to court intoxica-
tion/' 86
Evolution, heredity, and eugenics were the chief scientific concerns
of the laymen between the Civil War and the Great Depression. 87 The
ideas of the survival of the fittest and of the danger posed to American
ideals by the inferior immigrant masses were popular everywhere.
This widespread concern was the most powerful ideological club of
the drys. They trumpeted abroad that prohibition would strengthen
the American stock, already degenerating fast under immigration and
the attacks of the Siamese twins, alcohol and venereal disease. As
late as 1927, a Frenchman in the United States was still warning
visitors from Europe to take a treatise on eugenics with them as well
as a Bible. Armed with these two talismans,, he assured them that they
would never get beyond their depth. 88
The drys set out to prove that alcohol was a race poison. They were
helped by the early scientific experiments with alcohol on animals, by
the belief of most of the eugenic experts, and by the current folklore
that a taste for liquor could even be inherited through the nipple of a
drunken nurse.* According to such influential British eugenicists as
Caleb W. Saleeby, all theories of heredity, those of Lamarck and
Weismann and Mendel and Darwin's pangenesis, made out that the
drunkard must not have children. Alcohol, as well as destroying de-
generates, made degenerates. Alcoholism was both a cause and a symp-
tom of degeneracy. The main source of the supply of drunkards was
the drunkard himself. Parents might ignore the fact that spirits were
a racial poison, but their selfishness ruined the unborn. There was an
urgent need to save first women and children from alcohol, then
fathers and possible fathers. Otherwise, the noblest races in the world,
the English and the Scotch and the French, would be conquered by
alcoholic imperialism. Those who defended the alcoholic poisoning of
the race were easily classified. Some few stood honestly for liberty.
They would rather see their country free than sober, not asking in what
sense a drunken country could be called free. Some were merely
* In Uunsey's, September, 1917, Professor Reginald Daly, of Harvard, accused
the Germans of giving their children a brutal streak by introducing them to
alcohol too young. "If the [German] baby has not been already prenatally dam-
aged because of beer drunk by his mother, he still runs the risk of poisoning from
the alcohol-bearing milk of a drinking mother or wet nurse."
48 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
irritated by the temperance fanatic. Many feared that their personal
comfort might be interfered with.
But probably the overwhelming majority are concerned with their
pockets. They live by this cannibal trade; by selling death and the
slaughter of babies, feeble-mindedness and insanity, consumption and
worse diseases, crime and pauperism, degradation of body and mind
in a thousand forms, to the present generation and therefore to the
future, the unconsulted party to the bargain. Their motto is "your
money and your life." 39
Professor Saleeby was mild in his denunciation of alcohol as a racial
poison compared with his American contemporaries. One Kentucky
horse breeder demanded in 1917 the right of all Americans to be well-
born. Anyone who had studied eugenics could "discover if a child
comes from a parent or parents addicted to drink, just as well as from
parents that have syphilis. .... Every drink taken by young people is
a menace to the nation. Children conceived of parents, who, at the
moment of conception, are under the effect of liquor, often are stupid
or brainless and inherit the taste for liquor/' Drinking by young mar-
ried people was a conspiracy to destroy half of their children. "It
would be less cruel to dispose of children at birth than to allow the
indiscriminate use of liquor by men and women who are to become
parents." 40
But the most popular of all the writers or speakers on the subject
of race degeneracy through alcohol was the great orator Richmond
Pearson Hobson. The hero of the sinking of the Mernmac in Santiago
harbor in the war in Cuba, Captain Hobson was held by George Jean
Nathan to be the most dashing figure of romance for American women
until the coming of Valentino. He turned his talents to lecturing and
representing Alabama in Congress. In December, 1914, he introduced
in the House of Representatives an early version of the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution. During the following nine years, he
lectured for forty or fifty weeks a year for the Anti-Saloon League,
earning the incredible total of $171,250 in that time. 41
One of his speeches was endlessly repeated before audiences on
the Chautauqua circuit and in Congress. It was called "The Great
Destroyer." Hobson saw the history of the world as the history of
alcohol. Civilizations rose with prohibition and temperance, only to
decline with luxury and liquor. In the past 2300 years of civilized his-
tory, war had killed off five times fewer people among the white races
than alcohol killed each year in modem times. Furthermore, 125,000,-
000 living people with white skins were presently harmed by liquor.
Alcohol destroyed yearly over half of America's wealth and tainted
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 49
half her people. A man had to be selfish to oppose prohibition. "A man
may take chances with himself, but if he has a spark of nobility in his
soul, he will take care how he tampers with a deadly poison that will
cause the helpless little children that he brings into the world to be
deformed, idiotic, epileptic, insane/' Moreover, the decay of civiliza-
tions showed that a nation only survived while the good country life
ruled over the evil cities.
As young as our Nation is, the deadly work of alcohol has already
blighted liberty in our greatest cities. At the present rate of the growth
of cities over country life, if no check is put upon the spread of alco-
holic degeneracy, the day cannot be far distant when liberty in great
States must go under. It will then be but a question of time when the
average standard of character of the Nation's electorate will fall below
that inexorable minimum, and liberty will take her flight from America,
as she did from Greece and Rome.
The death grapple of the races was already imminent. If the United
States became degenerate under the influence of the great destroyer,
alcohol, the yellow man would take over the world.
In America the star of empire moving westward finishes the circle
of the world. In America we are making the last stand of the great
white race, and substantially of the human race. If this destroyer can
not be conquered in young America, it can not in any of the old and
more degenerate nations. If America fails, the world will be undone
and the human race will be doomed to go down from degeneracy into
degeneracy till the Almighty in wrath wipes the accursed thing out. 42
This complex of racism and nationalism based on sexual fears of
disease was repeated over and over again by the advocates of pro-
hibition. The Census figures of 1910 which showed that the wicked
city-dwellers and the foreign-born and their children were nearly half
of the population of the United States drove the drys wild with the
sense of urgency. National prohibition had to come. It would save
the inferior hordes of Eastern Europe from themselves and preserve the
strength of the Anglo-Saxon stock. In 1913, the same year that the
Anti-Saloon League adopted its policy of seeking national prohibition,
an extreme dry was writing, "By continuing the alcoholization of the
immigrant we are bringing ourselves dangerously near to the time
when the question will not be what America will do for the immigrant
but what the immigrant will do for America." 48 The old America of
the country was being threatened; the ideals of the Republic were
being attacked. Something had to be done.
50 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
THE FEAR OF THE UNMENTIONABLE
THERE is an important and unwritten history of the Western world.
Its subject is the influence of venereal diseases on the culture and
morals of societies. The records of such a history would be hard to
discover. And it would be harder to calculate the exact influence of
the fear of the diseases. How much repression, how much unhappiness,
how much moral legislation has been caused by dread of the pox? No
one can tell; because few, except the prohibitionists, have declared
their real motives and terrors. It has been said with some truth that
the brothel is the bricks of the church. It is more certain that syphilis
was the cement of the drys.
In the nineteenth century, the words "syphilis" and "gonorrhea"
were taboo, except among doctors or among ministers attending meet-
ings of The National Christian League for the Promotion of Purity.
The use of the precise words describing these widespread diseases
was as difficult as the use now of the legal term "buggery." Although
everyone knew of the two diseases by some sort of whispering grape-
vine, no one called them by their true names. The consequences of
sleeping with infected prostitutes were referred to as "the dread
disease," "the fruits of sin," "the infant's blight," "the social horror,"
and "the awful harvest." Venereal diseases were usually lumped to-
gether with the concept of alcohol as a racial poison. For instance,
the National Temperance Almanac, in its Second Declaration of In-
dependence in 1876, attacked King Alcohol in general for his rule:
He has occasioned more than three-fourths of the pauperism, three-
fourths of the crime, and more than one-half of the insanity in the
community, and thereby filled our prisons, our alms-houses and luna-
tic asylums, and erected the gibbet before our eyes.
He has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens
annually in the most merciless manner.
He has turned aside hundreds of thousands more of our free and
independent citizens to idleness and vice, infused into them the spirit
of demons, and degraded them below the level of brutes.
He has made thousands of widows and orphans, and destroyed the
fondest hopes and blasted the brightest prospects.
He has introduced among us hereditary diseases, both physical and
mental, thereby tending to deteriorate the human race. 44
This indictment of liquor did not, however, state the actual diseases
which alcohol was supposed to cause. The shocking detail of these
plagues was left to hearsay and the imagination.
By the turn of the century, social reformers were more ready tc
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 51
call venereal disease "venereal." The first reliable statistics were too
horrifying to ignore. The secretary of the Illinois Vigilance Committee
estimated that there were eighty thousand known cases of venereal
disease in Chicago in 1910. In Syracuse, New York, the known cases
were over three people in every hundred. 45 And these were only the
known cases. Estimates of the unknown were huge. In 1913, a leading
dry claimed to show "three-fifths of the rising generation mentally and
physically diseased." 46 Richmond Pearson Hobson supported this
claim, saying, "Probably, certainly, more than fifty per cent of adult
males are tainted with some form of terrible vice disease, the whelp
of liquor/* The solution was simple: "If we make the world sober, we
solve the vice disease, the vice problem. If we win our great reform,
we eliminate racial poison." 47 In actual fact, it is unlikely that many
more than one in ten Americans suffered from venereal diseases at that
time. The reasonable estimate of the dry Josephus Daniels made out
that 8 per cent of the American population suffered from syphilis,
while more fell victim to gonorrhea. 48
The prohibitionists used venereal disease as they used other medical
facts, as a weapon of distortion and terror. They wanted to scare peo-
ple into chastity and purity and temperance. To point out the ad-
vantages of these states was not enough. One of the posters issued by
the press of the Anti-Saloon League in 1913 advertised THE EFFECT
OF ALCOHOL ON SEX LIFE. It declared in bold black type that
sex life was dominated by a compelling instinct as natural as eating
and drinking. The laws of custom and modern civilization demanded
that sex life be under the control of reason, judgment, and will.
Alcohol made all natural instincts stronger, and weakened judgment
and will, through which control acted. Alcohol and all drinks of which
alcohol formed even a small part were harmful and dangerous to sex
life for four reasons:
I. ALCOHOL INFLAMES THE PASSIONS, thus making the temptation to
sex-sin unusually strong.
II. ALCOHOL DECREASES THE POWER OF CONTROL, thus making the
resisting of temptation especially difficult.
III. ALCOHOL DECREASES THE RESISTANCE OF THE BODY TO DISEASE,
thus causing the person who is under the influence of alcohol more
likely to catch disease.
IV. ALCOHOL DECREASES THE POWER OF THE BODY TO RECOVER
FROM DISEASE, thus making the result of disease more serious.
The influence of alcohol upon sex-life could hardly be worse.
AVOID ALL ALCOHOLIC DRINK ABSOLUTELY.
The control of sex impulses will then be easy and disease, dishonor,
disgrace and degradation will be avoided. 49
52 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Again medical science was on the side of the drys. Various studies
at the beginning of the century claimed to show that up to four out of
five men and two out of three women caught syphilis when they were
in a drunken condition. According to these results, too much liquor
would make men and women more likely to catch venereal diseases,
by lowering their self-restraint and their resistance to infection. Actu-
ally, alcohol does not make a man more susceptible to disease, although
it does increase his sexual desire and weaken his self-control. It is also
a convenient excuse for yielding to temptation. An article in the Lancet
of 1922 found that many people who confessed that they had caught
a venereal infection because of liquor were merely applying a con-
venient drug to their consciences.
But alcohol does delay the curing of syphilis through certain types of
treatment. Some of the new arsenical remedies against syphilis proved
dangerous in the case of alcoholics. 50 Therefore, the prohibitionists
could and did claim that alcohol increased the incidence of syphilis
SPEAKING OF VICE-
DRY TERROR, 1911
and gonorrhea and prevented their cure. If only prohibition could be
enforced, fewer people would contract venereal disease.
Dr. Howard A. Kelley put forward to the delegates of the Anti-
Saloon League the vital connection between medicine and morals.
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 53
He said that doctors as a group were interested in prohibition more
than any other because they met the effects of alcohol wherever they
went. They were interested in moral questions because many dis-
eases were wholly due to the infringement of moral laws. To say
that a man was interested in the causes and cure of diseases, and then
to say that moral questions did not concern him, was to blow hot and
cold in the same breath. Three diseases above all others were due "to
violations of God's moral code/' They were syphilis, gonorrhea, and
alcoholism. The Christian minister was interested in these diseases
because "they corrupt character, and are associated with a break-
down of the whole moral nature, and absolutely preclude a Christian
life/' The statesman was interested because "they disrupt the family
unit, or poison the fountains of paternity, without which no nation
can long exist." And the doctor as a citizen took both of these views,
although he was also interested in "the degenerative changes wrought
in the brain and the other organs of the body." The alcoholic strained
his heart and was prone to arteriosclerosis, chronic gastritis, fibrous
liver, and tuberculosis; pneumonia was particularly fatal to beer
drinkers. The alcohol habit led easily to other drug habits. Alcohol
caused poverty, diminished patriotism, and killed people on the roads.
And time and time again, the doctor heard the cry of the wretched
victims of syphilis, "Why, doctor, I would never have entered such
a house if I had not been drinking/' 51
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
THE METHODS of terror of the drys worked particularly well on women
and children. Men might be expected to be scofflaws, but women were
presumed to be the moral guardians of the nation. Female education
in the nineteenth century, both in school and through popular maga-
zines and almanacs, emphasized the importance of purity, health,
hygiene, and the rigid control of sexual desire. Walter Lippmann
pointed out in 1929 that until quite recently the conventions of
respectable society had demanded that a woman must not appear
amorous unless her suitor promised marriage and must submit to
his embraces only because the Lord had somehow failed to contrive
a less vile method of perpetuating the species. Even in marriage,
procreation was woman's only sanction for sexual intercourse. 52
According to the conventions of the Victorian middle classes, adul-
tery was possible inside marriage. The sexual instinct should not be
gratified too often. Desire was a male preserve. A wife should yield to
her husband not more than once or twice a month in case over-
indulgence might weaken his seed. During pregnancy and nursing and
54 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
menstruation, a husband should keep away from his wife. The gener-
ative powers of the male were thought to be "much greater and better
if the organs never had more than a monthly use." 53 The Mormon men
had become degenerate and heretical because of too much inter-
course. Women must use reason and gentleness to control the lusts of
the male. Anything that made a man forget his consideration for his
wife was evil. And alcohol was the chief enemy of self-restraint and
conscience. If sex was to be kept within the woman's control, liquor
must be banned.
This middle-class concept of the differing sexual roles of men and
women led to the rise of the "double standard/' which held that
women represented the good and men the base. Although some women
were held to be lewd, they were only the small minority of the sex.
"Let us save that greater per cent/' urged a Southern Congressman,
"the unwilling deflowered/' 54 Alcohol was the means by which women
were persuaded to give way to their own hidden lusts. It was the very
instrument of sin. Although these beliefs were middle-class in origin
and practice, they were the dominant beliefs and affected the be-
havior of working-class women through the popular literature of the
time. There was, indeed, another "double standard" between the be-
havior of the middle classes and that of the rural and urban prole-
tariat. For the hired hands on the farms, a girl "was the most desired
thing in the world, a prize to be worked for, sought for and enjoyed
without remorse. She had no soul. The maid who yielded to temptation
deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid. Her sufferings were amus-
ing, her diseases a joke, her future of no account." 55 But the fact that
the reform movements were usually middle-class movements, and that
the sexual taboos of the middle classes were often adopted by women
lower down the social scale, made the bourgeois concept of sexual
repression and reserve a potent drive behind the dry cause.
Carry A. Nation, who broke up rumshops in Kansas with a hatchet
at the turn of the century, wrote a revealing autobiography. Uncon-
sciously and clearly, she showed how sin and frustrated desire turned
her into a dragon of temperance. Born in 1846 in Kentucky, she was
brought up in the idealized position of a Southern maiden. Her father
was a zealous churchgoer and gave her a fear of going to the "Bad
Place." Her family later moved to Missouri. She was converted to the
Christian, or Disciples', Church, after total immersion in an icy stream.
She then suffered from "consumption of the bowels" for five years.
During the Civil War, she nursed the wounded. After the war, she
became a teacher and hoped for a husband.
Her own comments on her amatory nature show up her times. "I
was a great lover," she wrote, yet "my native modesty prevented me
THE EXPLOITED TERROR / 55
from ever dancing a round dance with a gentleman. I cannot think
this hugging school compatible with a true woman/' In 1865, a young
physician who was boarding with her family kissed her for the first
time in her life. "I had never had a gentleman to take such a privilege
and felt shocked, threw up my hands to my face, saying several times;
*I am ruined/ " Two years later, Carry married the young doctor. He
immediately took to the bottle and tobacco, and neglected his wife's
loving care. She became jealous, accusing the Masons of making her
husband into a drunkard. A daughter Charlien was born. Of this
event, Carry wrote, "Oh, the curse that comes through heredity, and
this liquor evil, a disease that entails more depravity on children un-
born, than all else, unless it be tobacco/' Her mother made her leave
her husband to protect the child, although he begged her to stay.
"I did not know then that drinking men were drugged men, diseased
men/' Six months later, her husband was dead, as he had forecast
when she left him.
Soon Carry married again; her new husband was the Reverend
David Nation, a Union Army veteran, a lawyer, a newspaper editor,
and minister. The marriage was not a happy one. Carry thought her
husband deceitful. Her combative nature was developed by living
with him, for she had to fight for everything she kept. After a while,
they separated. Carry ran a boarding house and looked after her
daughter Charlien. The child developed typhoid fever; her right cheek
rotted away; she was unable to open her teeth for eight years. Carry
knew that her sin in marrying her first husband and in conceiving a
child had brought its retribution.
This my only child was peculiar. She was the result of a drunken
father and a distracted mother. The curse of heredity is one of the
most heart-breaking results of the saloon. Poor little children are
brought into the world with the curse of drink and disease entailed
upon them. ... If girls were taught that a drunkard's curse will in
the nature of things include his children and also that if either parents
allowed bad thoughts or actions to come into their lives, that their
offspring will be a reproduction of their own sins, they would avoid
these men, and men will give up their vice before they will give up
women.
Luckily, Carry's daughter recovered and eventually married. Carry
moved to Kansas, which was then under state-wide prohibition.
Pushed by her sense of guilt and religion, she naturally joined the
local Woman's Christian Temperance Union and became a Jail Evan-
gelist. She stood outside the shops of the illegal "druggists" who sold
liquor, singing with other women:
56 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Who hath sorrow? Who hath woe?
They who dare not answer no;
They whose feet to sin incline,
While they tarry at the wine.
At last she found her vocation in life, after many years of unhappiness
and drudgery. Her explanations of this new happiness are particularly
revealing:
The man I loved and married brought to me bitter grief. The child
I loved so well became afflicted and never seemed to want my love.
The man I married, hoping to serve God, I found to be opposed to
all I did, as a Christian. I used to wonder why this was. I saw others
with their loving children and husbands and I would wish their condi-
tion was mine. I now see why God saw in me a great lover, and in
order to have me use that love for Him, and others, He did not let me
have those that would have narrowed my life down to my own selfish
wishes. Oh! the grief He has sent mel Oh! the fiery trials! Oh! the
shattered hopes! How I love Him for this! "Whom the Lord loveth
He chastenetfi and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth."
From this time on, Carry became a little mad. She saw demons who
threatened to tear her up. She seemed to suffer from a sort of delirium
tremens of virtue. Her fellow temperance workers became so fright-
ened by her aggressiveness that they tried to disown her. She made
plans to wreck saloons with rocks and a hatchet. Again the drive be-
hind her crusade against alcohol seems to have been sexual. On De-
cember 27, 1900, she strode into the Carey Hotel in Wichita.
The first thing that struck me was the life-size picture of a naked
woman, opposite the mirror. This was an oil painting with a glass over
it, and was a very fine painting hired from the artist who painted it,
to be put in that place for a vile purpose. I called to the bartender;
told him he was insulting his own mother by having her form stripped
naked and hung up in a place where it was not even decent for a
woman to be in when she had her clothes on. ... It is very significant
that the pictures of naked women are in saloons. Women are stripped
of everything by them. Her husband is torn from her, she is robbed of
her sons, her home, her food and her virtue, and then they strip her
clothes off and hang her up bare in these dens of robbery and murder.
Truly does a saloon make a woman bare of all things! The motive for
doing this is to suggest vice, animating the animal in man and de-
grading the respect he should have for the sex to whom he owes his
being, yes, his Savior also!
During her raid, Carry was attacked by saloonkeepers' wives, mis-
tresses, and prostitutes. She spent some time in jail. She then capital-
ized on her national renown, and went on Chautauqua tours and on
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 57
the vaudeville circuits, selling little souvenir hatchets wherever she
went Her second husband divorced her after twenty-four years of
marriage on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. Carry took this ac-
tion as another of God's decisions to confirm her in her cause. When he
died in 1907, she had a headstone and f ootstone put on his grave and de-
clared that she was glad God was the judge between them. "God never
used or blessed any man or woman that was not a prohibitionist/' She
warned Yale and Harvard that only teetotalers ever reached heaven.
Whenever she met a young man alone with a young woman, she told
them of the terrible consequences of sin and sent them fleeing in terror.
She died of paresis in June, 1911, after doing much to publicize both
the evils of the saloon and the excesses of the drys. 56
Carry Nation is worth examining at length because she embodied in
an extreme form nearly all the sexual fears and contradictions which
dry propaganda exploited. She was brought up among the "downright
gyneolatry" of the South in a nation where women were widely flat-
tered in words, only to be exploited in work. 57 She was taught an acute
sense of sin and a belief in sexual restraint, although her nature was
passionate and ready to love; her frustration was easily turned to moral
crusading. She was indoctrinated with the myth that the Devil and
disease lurked in strong drink; thus any illness which afflicted her child
was attributed to the known evils of liquor rather than to the attacks
of an unknown virus. Once her child had left her and her second hus-
band was estranged, she could find no outlet for her urge to do politi-
cal work except in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Above
all, her suppressed sexual desire was perverted into an itching curiosity
about vice, an aggressive prurience which found its outlet in violence,
exhibitionism, and self-imposed martyrdom. Significantly, the first two
rocks she threw at the Carey Hotel in Wichita were at the painting of
the naked woman; the third stone demolished the mirror behind the
bar. Only then did Carry destroy the contents of the sideboard with an
iron rod.
Respectable women of this time not only feared that their husbands
would pick up venereal diseases from prostitutes in the saloons or taint
their children with the poison of alcohol. They were also afraid that
they could not control the lusts of drinking men. A dry social worker
wrote that, even if prostitution were to be eliminated, an evil hardly
less "was the sex abuses committed within the bonds of wedlock by
men returning home after an evening of alcoholism accented by sex
suggestion. This, to the discerning, has been one of the final arguments
against the saloon as an intolerable canker on the body politic.*' 58
Purity before marriage and decency afterwards were not possible
58 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
GOING INTO CAPTIVITY
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 59
when liquor might turn the subservient Negro into the drink-crazed
raper or the docile husband into the insistent Casanova.
Since not all women were demonstrably either pure or virtuous, alco-
hol was made the scapegoat for their fall. In dry literature the conse-
quence of a boy's first beer was always death by delirium tremens,
while a girl who drank liquor inevitably met with seduction, prostitution,
or worse. The inevitable horror-monger, Richmond Pearson Hobson,
accused alcohol of more than destroying the race; it was unquestionably
"the primary cause of the condition of feeble-minded, unbalanced
female sex-perverts, and of those women and girls who, though of
sound mind, were taken advantage of through the temporary suspen-
sion of their higher faculties as the result of drink." 39 The Anti-
Saloon League widely publicized Jane Addams's conclusion that alco-
hol was the indispensable tool of the white-slave traders. 60 In areas of
the country where Jews were not accused of buying up the virtue of
Gentile virgins or Roman Catholic priests of seducing Protestant girls
in nunneries, the denunciation of alcohol and vice provided a desired
titillation for church audiences.
But the drys appealed to women's rights as well as to their phobias.
Their appeal was called an appeal to freedom. How could drinkers
claim that their personal liberty was being attacked when their wives
were slaves? Did not freedom to drink for men mean mere freedom for
women to drudge, to scrape, and to starve? Could any woman be
called free who did not have a decent income and husband? Did not
women have the right to ensure the health of their children? Was not
the real slave the drink slave? Jack London was so persuaded by this
propaganda that he voted for female suffrage in California in 1911 so
that the women in turn could vote to deprive him of liquor. "The mo-
ment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they pro-
ceed to do, or try to do, is to close the saloons. In a thousand genera-
tions to come men of themselves will not close the saloons. As well as
expect the morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of
existence/' 61 True freedom for men lay in allowing their womenfolk to
purify the race by depriving weak male nature of all opportunities for
sin in the saloons.
THE DOCTORS AND THE PROFITS
THE AMERICAN Medical Association is a formidable organization. As
far back as 1907, it was called the "most powerful trained lobby in the
country." 62 It had an agent in each of the 2830 counties of the United
States. Its list of approachable political leaders numbered sixteen thou-
sand. It was backed by the life insurance companies and Standard Oil.
60 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Only the influence of the Anti-Saloon League and the veterans com-
pared with its power among lobbies which were not obviously dedi-
cated to big-business interests.
Doctors in America have continually fought the tradition of folk
medicine. Their fight has sometimes been difficult, since folk medicine
is much cheaper than a physician. At the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, patent medicines heavily laced with alcohol were enjoying a great
vogue in dry areas, as well as such home remedies as cider vinegar
and honey. Medical practitioners often found that patients relied on
quack nostrums bought at county fairs, or on remedies advertised in
farmers' almanacs, such as Heale/s Bitters and Allen's Cherry Pectoral
"to purify the blood." The rise of Christian Science, faith healers, oste-
opaths, chiropractors, and dietitians made further inroads into the in-
comes of physicians licensed by the Medical Association. Official phar-
macists also found themselves menaced by unqualified druggists, who
dealt in powders and herbs and dilute alcohol. Before the passage of
the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, an annual business worth seventy-
five million dollars a year was done by makers of patent medicines,
which "eradicated" asthma with sugar and water, "soothed" babies
with deadly opiates, "relieved" headaches with dangerous coal-tar
drugs, "dispelled" catarrh with cocaine, and "cured" tuberculosis, can-
cer, and Bright's disease with disguised alcohol. 63 * Even after the Act,
the patent-medicine trade continued to flourish.
A new menace to the profits of the doctors arose at the beginning of
the century. Chemotherapy was developed to compete with serum
therapy. The doctors had a monopoly of treatment by serums; but
when research seemed to make possible in the near future direct treat-
ment by tonics and pills, physicians became frightened for their liveli-
hood. The discovery by Ehrlich in 1909 of Salvarsan, the first nontoxic
germicide, appeared to be an attack on doctors' fees; an improved
germicide was on the market by 1916. Those who suffered from vene-
real and other diseases could now be cured quicker and much more
simply. Other chemical preparations would be discovered to take the
place of prolonged and expensive courses of medical treatment. Drug
manufacturers would thrive, while doctors and pharmacists grew poor.
This fear for the future of their professions is an explanation for the
strange behavior of the pharmacists and the American Medical Asso-
* R. and H. Lynd, in their seminal Middletoion, found that advertisements for
patent medecines filled up a great deal of the advertising space in newspapers
as late as 1925. Most of these advertisements offered some form of quick and
suspicious treatment for disease. Among these were Musterole ("Usually gives
prompt relief from [nineteen ailments] it may prevent pneumonia"); Lydia E.
Pinkham's Vegetable Compound ("An operation avoided"); and Baume Bengue
("When in pain").
THE EXPLOITED TERROR/ 61
elation. In 1916, The Pharmacopoeia of the United States dropped
whisky and brandy from its list of standard drugs. On June 6, 1917, the
President of the American Medical Association delivered a speech in
favor of prohibition. The House of Delegates then passed one resolu-
tion, which asked the United States Senate to control the spread of
syphilis by ending the German patents on the manufacture of Salvarsan,
and another resolution condemning the use of alcohol. This second
resolution stated:
WHEREAS, We believe that the use of alcohol as a beverage is detri-
mental to the human economy, and
WHEREAS, Its use in therapeutics, as a tonic or a stimulant or as a
food has no scientific basis, therefore be it
Resolved, That the American Medical Association opposes the use
of alcohol as a beverage; and be it further
Resolved, That the use of alcohol as a therapeutic agent should be
discouraged. 64
This resolution was extremely useful to the drys in their campaign
for national prohibition. Senator Sterling, of South Dakota, referred to
it in the debate on the Eighteenth Amendment as "one of the most
valuable pieces of evidence we can find in support of the submission of
this amendment to the several States of the Union." 65 Wayne B. Wheeler
quoted it as definitive evidence, while defending the dry definition of
"intoxicating" in the courts. The resolution was also very profitable to
the doctors. After the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the
Volstead Act, they were the only people who could legally issue to
their patients whisky, brandy, and other strong drinks. Moreover, no
patent medicine containing alcohol could be officially sold without a
doctor's prescription. By constitutional amendment, the doctors con-
trolled all supplies of beverage alcohol in the United States, except for
the hard cider of the farmers and the sacramental wine of the priests.
If the American Medical Association had really believed that alcohol
was detrimental to the human economy, its condemnation would have
been just. But alcohol was still being widely prescribed as a medicine
in 1917. It was recommended by many doctors in cases of fainting,
shock, heart failure, exposure, and exhaustion. It was believed to be
an antidote to snake bite, pneumonia, influenza, diphtheria, and ane-
mia. It was used as a method of feeding carbohydrates to sufferers
from diabetes. It was given to cheer and build up the aged. Insufficient
research had been done to state definitely that alcoholic drinks pos-
sessed no food value. Nothing was said in the resolution about the fact
that small quantities of alcohol taken with meals might aid the diges-
tion and relax the mind. The wording of the resolution did not mention
62 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
the use of alcohol as a narcotic and depressant, nor as a necessary sol-
vent in many chemical preparations. The American Medical Association
had laid itself open to the charge that it was trying to control the com-
petition of patent medicines and chemotherapy through its alcohol mo-
nopoly.
The prohibitionists exploited the medical and sexual terrors of the
people of America in order to further their cause. In the course of this
indoctrination, they were helped by the findings of research and the
dicta of doctors. They used every means of propaganda to abolish the
saloons. For the conflict between the Protestant evangelical churches of
the United States and the saloons was unceasing and bitter. The saloons
were held to be the enemies both of God and of the Protestant faith.
They were embroiled in a religious quarrel between rival churches, and
a social quarrel between clericals and anticlericals. They also competed
with the pulpits in their attraction to all and sundry. The conflict of
country and city and the aggressive psychology of the drys demanded
that the struggle between the churches and the saloons be fought to a
finish.
CHAPTER
The Churches against the Saloons
The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no
religion. It would close every church in the land. It would
hang its beer signs on the abandoned altars. It would close
every public school. It respects the thief and it esteems the
blasphemer; it fills the prisons and the penitentiaries.
It cocks the highwayman's pistol. It puts the rope in the
hands of the mob. It is the anarchist of the world, and its
red flag is dyed with the blood of women and children;
it sent the bullet through the body of Lincoln; it nerved
the arm that sent the bullets through Garfield and William
McKinley. Yes, it is a murderer.
I tell you that the curse of God Almighty is on the saloon.
BELLY SUNDAY
Undoubtedly the church and the saloon originated in pre-
historic times probably simultaneously. And they have
been rivals ever since. Man first began to pray to his idols.
The priest gathered around him under his sacred tree or in
his sanctified cave those whom he could induce to believe
in the "gods" while the preparer of the real joys of life
required no argument to induce people to trade with him.
So the saloon man had the advantage from the start.
BREWER'S JOURNAL, 1910
Somehow or another, Hinnissy, it don't seem just right
that there shud be a union iv church an' saloon. These two
gr-reat institutions ar-re best kept apart. They kind iv
offset each other, like th' Supreem Coort an' Congress.
Dhrink is a nicissry evil, nicissry to th" clargy. If they iver
admit it's nicissry to th' consumers they might as well close
up th' churches.
FINLEY PETER DUNNE
,My objection to the saloon-keeper is the same that I have
to the louse he makes his living off the head of a family.
SAM P. JONES
63
64 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
THE CHURCHES AT CANA
GREAT CITIES were the enemies of the evangelical Protestant
churches of America. They fostered liberals and agnostics, saloons
and Roman Catholics. Nothing seemed more dangerous to the funda-
mental beliefs of primitive American Protestantism than the urban mil-
lions.
The Roman Catholic Church in America, except for the areas which
were once under Spanish rule and the border districts settled by French
Canadians, was based on the large cities. Immigration to America from
the middle of the nineteenth century until the Great War favored the
Roman Catholic faith. The immigrants tended to remain as cheap la-
bor in the large cities, displacing the old population which moved out
West. From being a small minority group, communicants of the Church
of Rome grew to a total of more than one-third of all church members
between 1890 and 1916.
In the latter year, the Roman Catholic Church had over half the
church members of fifteen states, and was first in number in thirty-
three states. Its main strength lay in the East, with pockets on the Pa-
cific and in Louisiana and Texas. Over one-half of the Catholics were
concentrated in five great states with large votes in the electoral col-
lege: New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Ohio. Over
5,000,000 Catholics lived in cities with a population of 300,000 or more;
they constituted two out of three church members in those cities.
Nearly 4,000,000 Catholics lived in cities with a population of between
25,000 and 300,000; they made up one out of two church members in
those smaller cities. Although over 6,500,000 Catholics lived outside
these urban districts, they lived among more than 26,000,000 Protes-
tants. In rural areas, only one out of five church members were Catho-
lics. Yet, by 1916, over four-fifths of the land of America was nominally
dry, although less than half of the population lived in these counties.
The saloons were concentrated in the large cities. The Protestant charge
that the cities were the home of rum and Rome was true.*
The main supporters of prohibition were the Methodist, the Baptist,
the Presbyterian, and the Congregational churches, aided by the smaller
Disciples of Christ, Christian Science, and Mormon religious groups. 1
Four out of five of the members of these churches lived in small towns
or in the countryside, for their converts had been made chiefly by mis-
*This has remained true. The election of President Kennedy in 1960 was
largely due to the heavy Roman Catholic vote for him in the Eastern cities. The
ratio of Catholics to Protestants in America has remained roughly one to two ever
since 1890, although the proportion of nominal church members has grown from
40 to 60 per cent of the whole population.
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 65
sionary circuit riders. The Methodist churches were the most militant
of the seven. In 1914, the secretary of the Liquor Dealers' Association
said that it was necessary only to read the list of those preachers who
were active in the propaganda for prohibition to realize that the Meth-
odist Church was obsessed with the ambition to gain control of the
government. 2 Although the statement was exaggerated, there was truth
in it. The Methodist churches were the largest Protestant body in the
country, and they worked closely with the Anti-Saloon League.
The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, claimed to be the political
machine of the Protestant churches in the matter of prohibition. 8 It
called itself "the Protestant church in action" and relied on the variotis
churches for its recruits and finances, although it was careful not to
employ those clergymen unwanted by their own churches, "ministerial
misfits and clerical flotsam and jetsam." 4 Spokesmen of the League
would approach individual pastors and ask their permission to speak
at a Sunday service to the congregation. After the sermon, a collection
of cash and signed pledges for monthly subscriptions to the League
would be collected. The League made it a policy never to send out its
speakers unless a collection for the League was taken afterwards.
Moreover, each League spokesman had to be an expert fund-raiser. As
one League leader put the matter, "If he does not know how, or cannot
learn how to present the work in such a way as to secure a hearty re-
sponse financially, he may as well hand in his resignation/' 5
The League's use of the churches as a milch cow for campaign funds
led to much unpleasantness. In the early days of the League, many pas-
tors would refuse the League the opportunity of speaking to their con-
gregations. There was little enough money in the pockets of the faithful
for other causes. Moreover, national church councils would not order
their ministers to give the League free run of their facilities. They
would endorse the League, but fail to help it by particular recommen-
dations. Finally, many churches, jealous of the large harvests reaped
from congregations by the League speakers, put their income on a
budget basis, allocating a percentage of the yearly take to the League.
This system crippled the finances of the League, although it provided
more money for other good causes.
The League was officially only a political and educational organiza-
tion, and thus did not break overtly the American tradition of separa-
tion between church and state. Between 1911 and 1925, the average
number of churches affiliated to the League was some 30,000, rising to
a maximum of 60,000 at the zenith of the League's influence. Through
these churches, the League collected up to two million dollars a year in
revenue and called out dry votes against wet candidates in political
elections. In 1908, Superintendent Nicholson, of Pennsylvania, stated
THE ATTITUDES
THE THIRD PROHIBITION WAVE, 1907 to 1919
States without a state-wlde prohibition law until the
Eighteenth Amendment
RURAL AND URBAN POPULATION, 1910
(The figures refer to the percentage of urban population)
H States with less than 60 per cent urban population
EJN] States with less than 30 per cent urban population
OF GEOGRAPHY
States with less than half native white
with native-born parents
PROHIBITION CHURCHES VERSUS
TEMPERANCE CHURCHES, 1916
(The Protestant Episcopal and Lutheran churches
are excluded from this map, sine* they ware
Internally split between prohibition and temperance)
68 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
that through the co-operation of 4500 churches he had the names and
addresses of some 75,000 voters, with the party of their choice. His
spokesman from Philadelphia boasted that he could dictate twenty let-
ters to twenty men in twenty parts of the city and thereby set 50,000
men in action. With such a political weapon, the Protestant crusade
against strong drink had a good chance of conquering even the corrupt
city machines, backed by the liquor trade. The first League lobbyist in
Washington spoke the truth when he said, "The graves of many state
legislators and members of Congress can be seen along our line of
march, and there are other graves waiting/' He was unconsciously
paraphrasing the words of a church politician who had opposed Abra-
ham Lincoln sixty years before: Tf there is any thing dear to the hearts
of the Know Nothings, it is to write the epitaphs of certain noted politi-
cal leaders." 6
But not all of the churches co-operated with the Anti-Saloon League.
The Protestant Episcopal and the Lutheran churches never gave the
League more than tepid support, while the Jewish and Catholic churches
on the whole opposed prohibition and supported temperance. Together,
these four churches numbered more in their congregations than the
seven main evangelical Protestant churches.* Moreover, in no state ex-
cept Utah were the evangelical Protestants a majority of the whole popu-
lation; only two out of five Americans belonged to any church. Of the six
states which counted more than half of their people as church mem-
bers in 1916, five were predominantly Catholic and one Mormon, five
wet and one dry. Except for Utah, none of the twenty-six states which
were nominally dry before the patriotic and repressive hysteria of the
Great War could call their church members a majority of their whole
population. The twelve large states of New York, New Jersey, Massa-
chusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri,
Louisiana, Texas, and California had no state prohibition law, and con-
tained more than half the church members of America. They also pos-
sessed a larger population, more electoral votes, wealth, factories, and
schools than all the other thirty-six states.
Thus, national prohibition appeared to be persecution of the large
states by the small ones, of the city churches by the country churches.
The claim of the Anti-Saloon League that it represented the churches
and the majority of Americans was false. The seven major religious
bodies which supported prohibition could not muster more than one
American out of five behind their banners. Also, for every church mem-
* Significantly, three of these four churches had some two-thirds of their
members in the cities. Only the Lutheran churches were based primarily on the
countryside. The reason that the two most numerous of the Lutheran synods did
not support prohibition was because of the traditional drinking habits of their
German immigrant believers.
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 69
ber who was a dry, there was another church member who was a wet.
Yet the fact is that national prohibition did become the law of the
land. This was partly due to the brilliant political methods of the drys.
But it was above all due to their conquerors' air. They had said so re-
peatedly and so insistently that prohibition would come to the nation
that few were surprised when it did, and fewer would speak out openly
against it. No one wanted to seem to oppose the inevitable success of
"The Prohibition Band-Wagon ':
O, it wont be long, is the burden of our song,
Till we get our wagon started on the way,
And our friends who vote for gin will all scramble to jump in,
When we get our big band-wagon, some sweet day.
Indeed, the drys pushed the problem of liquor so much into the fore-
front of political affairs that it overshadowed more important matters.
The Jesuit weekly America acknowledged this in an editorial:
The decalogue is no longer up to date. "Thou shalt not kill," in cer-
tain contingencies, is of less moment than "Thou shalt not drink wine";
"Thou shalt not commit adultery" is on a par with "Thou shalt not use
tobacco"; whereas, "Thou shalt not steal," appears to be of less conse-
quence to a class of reformers than "Thou shalt not play Sunday base-
ball." 7
The fantastic disproportion which the question of alcohol and the
Puritan reformers assumed in the minds of clergy and laity was the
measure of the success and of the shame of the drys. When a moral
movement hailed a Great War because of the huge wave of prohibi-
tion legislation passed by the combatants, it ran the risk of being ac-
cused of supporting mass murder to gain the doubtful benefits of uni-
versal pure water.
The drys, who relied heavily on the authority of the Bible and the
bad examples of the drunken Noah and Belshazzar, had one great
problem. Clarence Darrow put the matter nastily when he wrote:
The orthodox Christian cannot consistently be a prohibitionist or a
total abstainer. If God, or the Son of God, put alcohol into his system,
then alcohol cannot be a poison that has no place in that system. God,
or the Son of God, would hardly set so vicious and criminal an example
to the race he is supposed to have come to save. 8
Moreover, there was the more unpleasant fact that Jesus Christ Himself
turned water into wine at Cana and drank that wine. He also recom-
mended that His followers should drink wine in memory of Him. Both
biology and the Bible seemed to make the position of the religious pro-
hibitionist untenable. He could not answer John Erskine's question to
70 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
his dry friend: Was the Eighteenth Amendment an amendment to the
Constitution or to the New Testament? 9
There was a classical argument between church scholars on this
point. To the drys, the Bible sanctioned the total prohibition of liquor.
The process of distillation had not been invented until seven centuries
after Christ, nor was there any proof that the Jews knew how to make
beer. Therefore, prohibition of spirits and ale was perfectly in accord-
ance with the Bible. Although wine was mentioned in the Bible over
two hundred times and approved by God Himself, it was only a slightly
fermented substance mixed with honey. The wine of the Hebrews was
not adulterated, nor did the local liquor traders have an organized
power for evil. The Jewish race was never as much addicted to intem-
perance as the Anglo-Saxon because of the mild climate of Palestine
and of the easygoing way of life there. Moreover, the Jewish peasant
was too poor to buy much liquor. Therefore, the drink problem was
insignificant among the Hebrews compared with the Anglo-Saxon com-
munities. Wine was indeed a staple article of food in the ancient world
like grain, oil, and milk; but it was so only because of the plenteous
vineyards, the impossibility of storing grapes, and the illusion that wine
was a tonic or medicine. Although the Bible could be quoted by the
Pharisees of the drink trade to prove that God had blessed wine, there
was no doubt that a reborn Christ would blast the saloon and back
total abstinence. 10
To wet clergymen, the dry cause and the fanaticism of fundamental-
ist reformers denied the liberal principles of Christianity. Alcohol was
expressly sanctioned by the Bible. The Hebrew word yayin and the
Greek word oinos both referred to fermented grape juice. Jehovah and
Jesus Christ blessed its use in moderation. 'Yayin was certainly used at
the Passover feast, and Jesus definitely made wine of the finest quality
at the feast of Cana. It was to save the world from the harsh doctrines of
John the Baptist and his immersion of the faithful in cold water that
Christ instituted a wine feast in His memory. The very bondage from
which mankind was saved by Christ's death was being imposed again
by the prohibitionists. Legalism had crucified Jesus. The new legalists
would crucify Him afresh and put Him to open shame by blaspheming
the liberty He won for men. According to one Episcopalian, the Christ-
spirit only tended one way. It freed men from the Sabbatarianism and
teetotalism which the prohibitionists were trying to impose anew. The
typical and symbolic miracle of modern Pharisees would be the turning
of wine into water. 11
Freud says that judgments of value are attempts to prop up illusions
by arguments. 12 Whatever the truth of this judgment of value, the mat-
ter of sacramental wine did seem to split the churches more on the lines
of their attitudes toward prohibition than toward biblical research.
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS / 71
The seven major evangelical Protestant churches served only unfer-
mented grape juice at religious ceremonies. Their brothers, the Ro-
man Catholic and the Jewish and the Episcopalian churches, continued
to use altar wine with an alcoholic content throughout prohibition. Re-
ligious conviction, ill health, and a taste for fermented apple juice were
the three conditions of body and soul allowed legal liquor throughout
the twenties.
During the whole of its career, the Anti-Saloon League depended on
the evangelical churches. When the League was attacked, those
churches were also attacked. Before the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment, proposals were made that since the churches had engaged
in politics through the medium of the League, their property should
be taxed. In 1876, President Grant had recommended a constitutional
amendment to this effect, which had passed the House and had only
failed in the Senate by two votes. Should not his proposal be revived?
A bill was actually introduced in the New York state legislature for this
purpose. The answer to clerical interference in politics was to be politi-
cal interference in the church. But the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment changed the direction of the wet counterattack to the
repeal of existing constitutional errors, not to the addition of more.
During the years after 1913, Congress became increasingly bitter
about the political influence of the church reformers and the Anti-
Saloon League. Representative Barchfeld, of Pennsylvania, in the de-
bate on the Hobson resolution, voiced this discontent when he said
that prohibition had been an instrument of despotism since the world
began, the first and the last resource of those who would compel where
they could not lead. He then accused the Anti-Saloon League of adopt-
ing the methods of the Caesars by proscribing Senators, of being the
heir of the old Know-Nothings, and of setting itself up falsely as "the
real representative of the moral, sober, industrious, and God-fearing
people of the land to dictate to the Congress and employ weapons that
belong to the old age of absolutism." 13 Louis Seibold stated in a group
of articles in the New York World of May, 1919, that the average mem-
ber of Congress was more afraid of the League than he was of the
President of the United States. On all temperance matters, this state-
ment was true.
The entry of the Protestant evangelical churches into politics was
a dangerous precedent. Although the church congregations could form
the basis of an effective political machine, the traditional separation
between church and state in America opened an avenue for a counter-
attack by politicians on the privileges of religious bodies. And the
churches, too, by engaging in political actions, could offend their own
members. The church militant can lose as much support as the church
dormant.
72 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
From Outfoofc and Independent
DRIVEN Our OF THE CHURCH
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 73
THE SALOONS AT SODOM
THE SALOON was the church of the poor. While the churches supplied a
meeting place for the respectable, the saloons were the rendezvous of
the workers. If religious services provided many of the consolations of
the well-to-do, the brass rail provided an equal footing with the rest
of humanity for the down-at-heel. While the minister advised and
aided his flock, the bartender performed the same service for his tegu-
lar patrons. Both took in money and dispensed comfort. Both provided
an escape from the world. But the virtue of the churchgoers put them
at odds with the assumed vice of the refugees of the swinging doors.
For the sin of the saloon was that it sold alcohol. And alcohol was dan-
gerous, once it escaped from the control of the virtuous. It is a fact
that the only three groups who were allowed by law to make, pre-
scribe, or sell beverage alcohol after the passing of the Volstead Act
were the three groups who had been the most active in condemning it:
the ministers, the farmers, and the doctors and druggists.
The paternalism and uplift of the reformers were psychologically
opposed to the saloon. When the members of the Committee of Fifty
at the turn of the century looked for substitutes for the saloon, they
recognized the needs which it filled:
The saloon is the most democratic of institutions. It appeals at once
to the common humanity of a man. There is nothing to repel. No ques-
tions are asked. Respectability is not a countersign. The doors swing
open before any man who chooses to enter. Once within he finds the
atmosphere one in which he can allow his social nature freely to ex-
pand. The welcome from the keeper is a personal one. The environ-
ment is congenial. It may be that the appeal is to what is base in
him. He may find his satisfaction because he can give vent to those
lower desires which seek expression. The place may be attractive just
because it is so little elevating. Man is taken as he is, and is given what
he wants, be that want good or bad. The only standard is the demand.
The members of .the committee recognized that the saloon was the
competitor of the home; but they maintained that the answer was not
to close the saloons but to make the homes more welcoming. Once
slums were turned into garden suburbs, then a man would drink at his
own fireside. "When a man sees outside of the saloon what is more at-
tractive than what he finds in it, he will cease to be its patron/' 14
One reformer thought the church could learn many things from the
saloon. There was human fellowship and equality in the saloon, little in
the charity home. The saloon had no doorstep; the church hall had.
The saloon had glitter; the chapel was drab. The saloon was easy to
enter; the religious hall was locked. The saloon was active one hundred
Brown Brothers Photographers
THE OLD-TJME CITY SALOON
and forty hours a week, the church four. No one bothered about a
man s business' at the saloon. No one asked about his worries or his
home troubles. Ragged clothes were not a mark of shame. Free lunches
were given for a five-cent glass of beer; if the saloons of New York
were closed, twenty-five thousand men would declare that the food
had been taken out of their mouths. The saloon provided newspapers,
billiards, card tables, bowling alleys, toilets, and washing facilities.
And, above all, the saloon provided information and company. The
bartender could direct and advise salesmen, pass the time of day with
hucksters, enlighten strangers about the habits of the town. "For many
the saloon is the most precious thing in life - why destroy it?" 15
Exclusive of its psychological benefits, the saloon did great service,
as well as great harm, to workingmen. It was, in particular, the friend
of the immigrant, his only contact with the outer world. It is easy to
forget how small and friendless the world of the immigrant was. In
Henry Roth's brilliant novel about Jewish immigrant culture in New
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 75
York City, Call It Sleep, a Jewish mother is made to describe the con-
striction of her life, after several years spent in America:
But here I am. I know there is a church on a certain street to my
left, the vegetable market is to my right, behind me are the railroad
tracks and the broken rocks, and before me, a few blocks away is a
certain store window that has a kind of white-wash on it and faces
in the white-wash, the kind children draw. Within this pale is my
America, and if I ventured further I should be lost. 16
For many new Americans, the local saloon was the arbiter of their small
world.
The saloon provided immigrant votes to the city boss and corrupt
politics to America; but it could only do so by providing jobs and help
to the immigrants in return. The ward heelers and barkeepers were the
first welfare workers of the slums. The saloons were the first labor ex-
changes and union halls. They had names such as the "Poor Man's Re-
treat/' "Everybody' s Exchange," "The Milkman's Exchange," "The So-
cial," "The Fred," and "The Italian Headquarters." The saloonkeepers
had a near monopoly on small halls which could be used for labor
meetings and lodges. They would charge no rent for these places in
return for the privilege of selling liquor at the meetings. A dry labor
leader confessed that he felt a "sensation akin to shame" when he did
not buy a glass of beer in the free hall provided by a saloon. 17 In one
sense, the attack on the saloons was the attack of capital on the haunts
of labor.
The East Side of New York, which produced Al Smith, showed the
huge influence of the saloon on the lives and careers of the city com-
munities. Happy memories of Smith's early days were set among lager
beer drinkers in the Atlantic Garden; for, in the words of an East Side
reformer, the New York drinking places had "the monopoly up to date
of all the cheer in the tenements." 18 Even the prohibition clergyman
from the Bowery, Charles Stelzle, praised certain features of the old-
time saloon, pointing out that most drys had no conception of what it
meant to workingmen.
It was in the saloon that the working men in those days held their
christening parties, their weddings, their dances, their rehearsals for
their singing societies, and all other social functions. . . . Undoubt-
edly the chief element of attraction was the saloon-keeper himself.
... He was a social force in the community. His greeting was cordial,
his appearance neat, and his acquaintance large. He had access to
sources of information which were decidedly beneficial to the men
who patronized his saloon. Often he secured work for both the work-
ing man and his children. 19
76 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
In industrial cities, the saloon was often what the church was in a
village. It was a center of faith and tradition, political rather than reli-
gious. It was a place of recreation and joy. Membership in the right
saloon brought social prestige and good jobs, as did membership in the
right church. Al Smith's political career began in Tom Foley's saloon,
which Smith was careful to call a "cafe" in his memoirs. 20 The saloon-
keeper had in his gift jobs in the police force, the fire department, and
City Hall for those who would vote the right ticket. Tammany chow-
ders on the scale of Tim Sullivan's outshone in warmth and charity any
of the monotonous overfeeding that took place at Methodist country
picnics. Al Smith loved both his saloon and his church, allowing both a
place in his life. His Protestant enemies forgave him neither.
Yet there were saloons and saloons. For every decent saloon that
filled a need in the community, there were five that increased poverty
and crime among working people. Immigration, artificial refrigeration
to preserve beer indefinitely, and the incursion of the English liquor
syndicate into the American market led to the phenomenon of too
many saloons chasing too few drinkers. By 1909, there was one saloon
for every three hundred people in the cities. 21 Where the saloonkeeper's
job depended on his sales, he was forced to go out on the streets,
blandish customers into his bar, and deprive the wives of workingmen
of their husband's pay envelopes. If sales were unsatisfactory, he was
evicted by the breweries, which owned seven out of ten saloons in
America. A description of Beer Town, the home of Hamm, where "the
very beery breath of God" filled the air, spoke of the saloonkeeper
Tony waylaying the brewery workers on their way home:
"Glazabeer, boys?" Tony would say, blocking their way on the road,
in his hale way suggesting that good fellowship was as good as good
beer. "Begates, Glazabeer, boys?" Begates, slap on the shoulder, warm
meeting, the bar glistening within, no shrewish women, no brats, no
trouble, glistening warmly of forgetfulness and pleasure. "A schnit of
beer, boys?" 22
Two of the most effective propaganda weapons used by the drys were
a wet appeal to the Liquor Dealers' Association of Ohio to "create the
appetite for liquor in the growing boys," and an offer by the Kentucky
Distillers Company to supply the Keeley Institutes for inebriates with
a mailing list of their regular customers at the cost of four hundred
dollars for every fifty thousand names. 23
Moreover, the free lunch was vastly overrated as a means of feeding
the poor. The saloonkeeper was in business to make money. No free
lunches were provided in Southern saloons, since Negroes ate too
much and even poor whites would not eat out of the same dish as
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS / 77
Negroes. In large cities, bouncers threw out of saloons any man who
ate more than his money's worth of drink. Moreover, the barkeepers
provided only dry or salty food. Rye bread, crackers, cheese, sausage,
Wienerwurst, sauerkraut, salt meat, potato salad, dill pickles, pretzels,
salt fish, dried herring, and baked beans provided the staple dishes.
The object of the free lunch was not to provide nourishment but
merely to excite an undying thirst. Only in the Far West, where food
was abundant and cheap, were the free lunches enough to put all the
expensive restaurants out of business so much so, that a lady tem-
perance leader complained that her sons could only afford to eat in the
saloons of San Francisco. The free lunch was, however, both the cause
and effect of an American custom. The frontier habit of bolting snacks
while standing at a bar or counter traveled from the saloon through
the drugstore to the quick-lunch dispensaries of modern times.
Competition among themselves drove the brewers and distillers into
folly. Although many of the saloons were vile in the nineteenth cen-
tury, the poor quarters of the cities and the rural slums were viler.
The filthy bar seemed a paradise of cleanliness to the tenement
dweller. But, at the moment when the progressive wave of reform was
pressing for better conditions of life, the old city saloon was becoming
worse.
Very often it stood on a corner so as to have two street entrances
and wave a gilded beer sign at pedestrians drifting along from any
point of the compass. The entrance was through swinging doors which
were shuttered so that any one standing on the outside could not see
what was happening on the inside. The windows were masked by
grille work, potted ferns, one-sheet posters and a fly-specked array of
fancy-shaped bottles which were merely symbols and not merchandise.
The bar counter ran lengthwise at one side of the dim interior and
always had a brass foot-rail in front of it. Saw-dust on the floor was
supposed to absorb the drippings. Behind the bar was a mirror and
below the mirror a tasteful medley of lemons, assorted glasses and con-
tainers brightly labeled to advertise champagne, muscatel, port, sweet
Catawba, sauterne and that sovereign remedy for bad colds, Rock and
Rye. Most of these ornamental trimmings were aging in glass and
there was no demand for them whatsoever. 24
Such proliferating drinking places in industrial cities occupied most
street corners and some of the block in between. In 1908, there were
some 3000 breweries and distilleries in the United States, and more
than 100,000 legal saloons. 25 There were, in addition, some 50,000 blind
pigs and tigers. Over half of the population of Boston and Chicago
paid a daily visit to the saloon. Chicago under Capone was a paradise
compared with Chicago at this time. 'When a drink parlor was opened
anywhere in the r *** Br0thew n ** n *
A au Of tfl
X S 00 ^ H saloons and the' 1 "" 1 " Me Wrst ^ <* Chi'
.-JSsS-HSSSS'
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 79
matic decrease in crime and poverty and evil if only the breeding
places of these ills, the saloons and the brothels, could be eliminated. 27
A muckraker in 1908 wrote in approval of the wave of dry legislation
in the South:
Everywhere the saloons have disobeyed in the most flagrant fashion
all rules made for their government and regulation; and when put
under pressure to reform they have fought back through their char-
acteristic American alliance with bad politics. So insolent has been the
attitude not only of the saloon-keepers but also of the brewers, distil-
lers, and wholesale liquor men, that many communities have gone dry
simply because of the disgust which this attitude has bred in good
citizens. Men who do not object to the moderate use of liquor, men
who use it themselves, have held the balance of power in these pro-
hibition elections; the result shows how they have voted. 28
It was the failure of the liquor trade to reform itself that brought the
wrath of the moderates and progressives on its head. The smelly crew
of old soaks and regulars was taken out of the bar to the polling booth
once too often. "They had never been told they stood for liberty; they
stood rubily, stubbornly, with the strong brown smell of shame in their
nostrils, for the bloodshot, malt-mouthed, red-nosed, loose-pursed De-
mon Rum." 29
In England, prohibition was unsuccessful because the brewers put
their own public houses in order. In the United States, the brewers and
distillers would not clean up the saloons, despite the repeated warn-
ings of their own spokesmen, Hugh Fox and Percy Andreae. For in-
stance, Andreae advised the International Brewers' Congress of 1911
to support temperance reformers. If the brewers would only license
respectable saloonkeepers, close the saloons in red-light districts, and
agree to the suppression of saloons in dry areas with proper compensa-
tion, then they would defeat the drys. For the decent saloon was the
most powerful enemy of the prohibitionists. The brewers applauded
Andreae but followed their nose for quick profits rather than his sug-
gestions. In the cut-throat struggle against each other to survive at all,
profits were more important to liquor traders than public relations. Al-
though the area of their operation grew smaller each year, 177,790 le-
gal saloons were still open on the eve of national prohibition. 80
There is truth in the wet excuse that the increasing efforts of the
drys to suppress the saloons increased the degeneracy of the saloons.
No sensible businessman was going to invest money in properties that
might be closed up without compensation within a year. The fact that
the prohibitionists were winning made the drinkers drink more franti-
cally and the saloonkeepers try to gouge out a maximum profit while
they could. Despite dry .successes in winning state and county prohibi-
80 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
tion measures between 1906 and 1917, the consumption of liquor in
gallons reached an all-time high in those years, while the very year
that the Eighteenth Amendment was passed saw the consumption of
spirits reach the highest total for thirty-seven years. The threat and the
passage of prohibition put its opponents on as long a spree as they
could afford. Although it may be salutary for a man to live each day as
if it were his last, it is not advisable for him to drink each drink as if it
were so.
Once the countryside of America had largely rid itself of its saloons,
it might have been expected to leave the city saloons in peace. But the
drys claimed that the city saloons forced the country back into the
drink evils from which it was trying to escape. The saloons at the city's
edge helped to nullify country prohibition and to put up the costs of
law enforcement in dry districts. The city saloon sent back country
immigrants as penniless drunks to their villages and threw them onto
local support; these drunks were the very people whom rural voters
had aimed to protect against the saloon. Moreover, the city was con-
stantly renewing its vital strength from the sons and daughters of the
country, and their parents had the right to protect their children
against the temptations of their new environment. Finally, according
to the Census of 1910, a majority of the population of America still
lived in the country, and that majority was entitled to protect itself
against the vice and corruption of the minority which patronized the
city saloon. 31 For these reasons, the drys could never accept a Dry
Curtain situation, a partition in which the sober country left the city
saloons in peace.
Yet the drys, in seeking to close all saloons, did not admit the need
to provide compensations for the facilities which the saloons had pro-
vided. Their point of view was that until the saloons had been closed
nothing should be done to replace them. The competition of cinema
and music hall, of public parks and libraries, of church halls and tem-
perance bars, had not lessened the quantity of drinking before the
Great War. While the saloons still existed, the drinker could not begin
his redemption. The drys made the added mistake of believing that
those who supported the prohibition of the saloons also supported the
prohibition of the liquor trade. While the drys used the word "pro-
hibition" loosely to attract both the foes of the saloon and the foes of
all liquor to their banner, their gloss over their own extreme definition
of prohibition made many of their early supporters feel later that they
had been tricked into the banning of the whole liquor trade. Moreover,
even the drys fell victim to their own lack of clarity. They tended to
believe that the saloon and the drink habit were one and the same
thing. Remove the first and the second would also disappear.
THE CHURCHES AGAINST THE SALOONS/ 81
This confusion of dry thought was expressed by one of their writers
on the eve of national prohibition. According to him, the saloon had
been proved by 1919 to be in no sense a social necessity. Men went to
the saloon primarily for a drink. The drink habit itself was abnormal
and artificial. Therefore, the saloon had created an abnormal demand
for its services. The great success of the teetotal canteens in Army
camps during the Great War proved that young men did not really
want liquor. It was only the false lure of the saloon that gave them the
habit. Once prohibition was established, the home and the church
would soon fill all the wants once filled by the cancer of the saloon, and
the artificial taste for liquor would perish utterly. 32
The drys could not logically provide substitutes for the saloon. They
were the victims of their own propaganda. They had condemned the
saloon for so long as the ultimate vice that they could not admit its
small virtues. Moreover, they wanted to spend all their funds on the
campaign against the liquor trade rather than on refuges for displaced
drinkers. The future must look after itself. Only those small sections of
the dry movement which were more concerned with saving men than
shutting down their drinking haunts tried to find alternative meeting
places for drinkers. General Evangeline Booth declared that the Salva-
tion Army would take over a string of saloons, coast to coast, and serve
soft drinks over the old bars. For it was important to preserve "the
psychology of the brass rail. There is something about the shining bar
which brings all men to a common footing. The easy and relaxed atti-
tude of those who lean against the mahogany or cherry suggests solid
comfort. Because wine and beer are to go, shall not a man take his ease
in his own inn?" 88
The refusal of most of the drys to provide substitutes for the saloon
created a vacuum. And drinking abhors a vacuum. If there were no
saloon, another drinking place would be found. The drys, by failing
to compensate for the needs of those who drank in the saloons, drove
them to drink in worse haunts. The prohibition of an abuse too often
denies the preservation of a good.
The struggle between the Protestant evangelical churches and the
saloons was based on different views of the role of God and man in
society. It was also bound up with nativist fears of the Roman Catholic
Church and of the corruption which the liquor trade had brought to
politics and life in the large cities. The problem of the drys was to
translate this struggle into political terms. If the drys wanted a law
against the saloons, they would have to obtain it through the demo-
cratic process. The first temperance wave had used political pressure
to secure dry laws; but it was not opposed by an organized liquor
Brown Brothers Photographers
WORKERS' SALOON
trade. The entry of the liquor trade into politics after the Civil War
made the drys follow them there. The huge influence of the brewers
and distillers within both the Republican and Democratic parties made
the prohibitionists set up a party of their own. Its failure led the drys
to find other methods of political pressure. By the manipulation of
electorates and legislators, the drys sought the legal victory of the
churches over the saloons. As a leader of the Anti-Saloon League
wrote in 1908, "It was already recognized that if the church was right,
the saloon was wrong, and that the church must overcome the saloon
or eventually be overcome by it." 84
CHAPTER
The Politics of Reform
The typical American man had his hand on a lever and
his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on
keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tend-
ing always to become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he
could not admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious dis-
tractions, more than he could admit whisky or drugs, with-
out breaking his neck.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams, 1919
Jay Gould once said that in Republican districts he was
a Republican, in Democratic districts a Democrat, but first,
last, and all die time he was for the Erie Railroad. That is
precisely our policy.
REVEREND HOWARD HYDE RUSSELL
Founder of the Anti-Saloon League
PROHIBITION was the joker in major party politics. It straddled
the tenuous line between the Republicans and Democrats, and it
made blatant the secret conflicts which hid under party unity. In 1884,
the issue of prohibition helped to take the White House from the Re-
publicans, although it helped to restore the presidency to the Grand
Old Party later by setting the Democrats at each other's throats. In
nation and in state, in county and in town, in election and in conversa-
tion, prohibition took over from wine as the mocker and causer of dis-
sension.
The Prohibition party was formed in 1869. With chattel slavery
abolished through Civil War and presidential action, certain reformers
wanted to abolish rum slavery by similar means. As Gerrit Smith, twice
radical Abolitionist candidate for President and associate of John
Brown, put the matter:
Our involuntary slaves are set free, but our millions of voluntary
slaves still clang their chains. The lot of the literal slave, of him whom
others have enslaved, is indeed a hard one; nevertheless it is a paradise
83
84 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
compared with the lot of him who has enslaved himself especially
of him who has enslaved himself to alcohol. 1
Since neither the Republican nor the Democratic party would take a
stand against the saloon, those who believed in prohibition had to find
another party. And this they did. In 1872, a Prohibition party ran its
candidates in the presidential election on a platform of universal suf-
frage, business regulation, public education, encouragement of immi-
gration, and constitutional prohibition. The ticket received a little
more than five thousand votes out of a total of more than six million.
The major political parties could afford to ignore a puny and ineffec-
tive competitor, until the second prohibition wave and the election of
1884 gave them pause. In that election, the ^Republican presidential
candidate, James C. Elaine, lost narrowly to the Democrat, Grover
Cleveland. The Republicans lost New York state by 1047 votes as well
as the election; the Prohibition party candidate, the dry Governor of
Kansas, John P. St. John, polled 24,999 dry votes in that state. Most of
these votes would have been Republican. The unfortunate remark of
Dr. Burchard that the Democrats were the party of Rum, Romanism,
and Rebellion had given the wet, immigrant vote to Cleveland, even if
it had rallied the drys to Elaine. Thus, for the first time, the Prohibition
party and the dry issue had tipped the balance in a national election
by taking important votes from a major party candidate. Prohibition
had played its first trick on American national politics.
The Republican party paid the drys the compliment of mentioning
their cause in their platform of 1888. For the Prohibition party prom-
ised to become a dangerous third party in those rural areas where the
Grand Old Party was strong. At the Republican convention, the Bou-
telle resolution was adopted as an annex to the party platform. It ran,
"The first concern of all good government is the virtue and sobriety of
the people and the purity of the home. The Republican party cordially
sympathizes with all wise and well-directed efforts for the promotion
of Temperance and morality/' The wet Republican Commercial Ga-
zette of Cincinnati commented nastily that if the plank had meant
anything it would not have been passed. And Bonfort's Wine and Spirit
Circular went so far as to praise the resolution, stating on behalf of the
wine and spirit trade that they accorded the declaration their unre-
served approval. 2
At the election, the Republican presidential candidate, Benjamin
Harrison, barely defeated Cleveland; he secured only a minority of the
popular vote. Had the greater part of the quarter of a million Prohibi-
tion party votes gone to Harrison, he would have won a popular ma-
jority. Again the Prohibition party seemed to hold the balance of
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 85
power in national elections. The rise of the Populists as the most ag-
gressive third party in 1892 and the increasing majorities of successful
presidential candidates after four successive narrow elections, how-
ever, made the Prohibition party lose all the precarious power which it
had once exercised. The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, polled
more votes than the Prohibitionist candidate after the turn of the
century, while the Progressive party attracted those voters who were in-
terested in general reform outside the major parties, not in the particu-
lar reform of constitutional prohibition. It was useless for the Prohibi-
tionists to say of the Republicans and Democrats, "like Herod and
Pilate, they make common cause to crucify the Christ in politics in
every election." 3 Few voters heeded the accusation.
Yet the chief contender of the Prohibition party rose from the dry
ranks. In 1893, the Anti-Saloon League was founded. It gradually took
over the leadership of the dry cause. Indeed, the reason for its founda-
tion was the very failure of the Prohibition party. Oberlin, Ohio, where
the League began, had been a center of the abolition movement and
was a staunchly Republican town in honor of the party which had
overcome slavery. Prohibition party speakers were refused the use of
the pulpits there. Although the Oberlin Anti-Saloon League was
founded to work with drys in both parties, it amalgamated with such
groups &s the Anti-Saloon Republicans and helped to choose as the
first president of the National Anti-Saloon League, Hiram Price, who
had been five times a Republican Congressman from Ohio and who
had tried to block the nomination of a Prohibition party ticket in 1884
in the interests of the Grand Old Party. 4 The Prohibition party leaders
were justified in thinking that the League was hostile to them, al-
though they were less justified in accusing it of being an annex of the
Republican party. Although many of the League leaders were person-
ally Republicans, they never supported a wet Republican candidate for
office against a dry Democrat who had a better chance of election. It
is, however, true that when the League was dominant in Midwestern
politics during the congressional elections of 1916, the number of dry
Republican Midwesterners in the House of Representatives rose from
a total of twenty-six to sixty-five, while the number of dry Democrats
declined. Outside the South the League preferred to work for dry can-
didates within the Republican party, especially when the Republicans
became the majority party in charge of law enforcement after 1920.
As a result of this policy of infiltration within and pressure upon the
major parties, the Anti-Saloon League fell out with the Prohibition
party. The Prohibition party found the League policy of supporting
"good men" in both major parties immoral. Its spokesmen said that it
was useless to elect "the angel Gabriel himself, if his party relied on
86 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
the support and funds of the liquor trade." 5 The Prohibitionists had
spent forty years in the wilderness, stirring up sentiment for prohibi-
tion, and now another organization threatened to reap the fruits of its
labors. As Eugene Chafin, Prohibition party candidate for President in
1908, declared, "We have got to kill the Anti-Saloon League and then
lick the Republican and Democratic parties." 6 To those who cared for
good government and political morality as well as prohibition, some of
the League's methods smacked of the devil. The League was prepared
to support men of questionable morality and habits who would vote
dry against men of honesty and integrity whose election was im-
probable. One statement in the League's CatecKism admitted this
concern with success rather than morality. To the question, "May the
League properly favor the election of candidates who are not wholly in
faith and practice acceptable to friends of temperance reform?" the
answer ran, "While it is desirable that candidates for office should be in
all respects acceptable, it may be necessary at times, in order to secure
some desired end, to vote for candidates committed to the object,
though not wholly committed to the plan and purpose of the League." 7
Such Jesuitical reasoning in support of drunken Republican and Demo-
cratic hacks who could be scared into voting dry brought down the
wrath of moral Prohibitionists on the heads of the League.
Yet, whatever the virtues of the League's political methods, its legis-
lative success was undoubted. The policy of the League worked in
terms of passing dry laws through state legislatures and Congress. But
it did not work at getting those laws enforced. As the Prohibition party
rightly pointed out, there was "just as much sense in voting for a horse-
thief to enforce the law against stealing horses" as in voting for the
major parties to enforce the law against the liquor traffic. 8 Professional
politicians were quick to discover that lax enforcement would not
make the drys bolt their party, while firm enforcement would offend
the wets. Thus the formula of dry law and little enforcement gave the
Republicans and Democrats the excuse to obey the League with re-
spect to means and disappoint it with respect to ends. The devious
methods of the League made for devious returns. And the uncompro-
mising Prohibition party, although it could never have taken over the
White House, could play Cassandra on the edge of the battle and
prophesy the ills which the League would and did bring upon the dry
cause through its success.
Perhaps the fairest estimate of the role played by the Prohibition
party and the Anti-Saloon League in the dry victories was made by a
man who defected from the first to the second. John G. Woolley, a re-
formed drunkard, became Prohibition party candidate for President in
1900. He was a great orator with a "God-given power to stir the hearts,
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 87
awaken the consciences, and compel conviction in the minds of his
hearers." 9 It was he who, with his keynote speech at the national con-
vention of the Anti-Saloon League in 1913, brought the audience of
four thousand to their feet, "yelling like a regiment of Louisiana tigers
making a charge" for the new cause of nationwide prohibition. His
text was "Make a chain; for the land is full of bloody crimes and the
city is full of violence/' 10 He wanted to reconcile all drys together in
the struggle. And if he could not bring about this reconciliation and
preferred to work with the successful League, he did not forget the
Prohibition party. In his words, "The Prohibition Party was like a fire
bell. It awoke the people. They are up and doing. In such a case there
are two things to do, ring the bell more or put out the fire. I am for
putting out the fire, whatever becomes of the bell." 11
The decline of the Prohibition party from a progressive organization
into one which sought support from the racist and fundamentalist cru-
sades of the twenties parallels the decline of the rural radical move-
ments from the Populists to the Ku Klux Klan. For the first time in
1924, the party had a plank on the Bible and a plank on the American-
ization of aliens. The first plank stated that the Bible was "the Magna
Carta of human liberty and national safety" and should have a large
place in the public schools. The second stated that large numbers of
unassimilated aliens were a present menace to American institutions
and should be Americanized by a constructive program. These planks
were a far cry from planks in the first platform of the Prohibition
party planks which supported "the imperishable principles of civil
and religious liberty" in the Constitution and "a liberal and just policy"
to promote foreign immigration to the United States.
THE LEAGUE IN OHIO
THE ACTIVITIES of the Anti-Saloon League in its home state of Ohio
give a fair microcosm of its activities throughout the nation. Ohio
was a state precariously split between allegiance to the Democrats
and loyalty to the Republicans, between industrial towns and country
villages and farms. In such urban centers as Cleveland and Cincin-
nati, the large "foreign element" of the state population, estimated at
one-third of the whole in the Wickersham report, was clustered behind
the wet machines. 12 In the dry rural areas, the voters were directed
by the pulpits and the Anti-Saloon League to cast their ballots in
support of the dry cause. Through this conflict between factory and
farm, prohibition and liquor, Ohio became a litmus paper to party
politics. Indeed, since the founding of the Republic, Democrats and
Republicans have considered Ohio so pivotal that they have selected
88 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
more Presidents from that state than from any other. In 1920, both
major parties went so far as to nominate an Ohioan to be their leader
and sway the state to their side.
Ohio was a hotbed of the abolitionists, the prohibitionists, and the
suffragettes. These three reform groups seemed to flourish in a state
whose hinterlands were studded with the pulpits of the Methodist and
Baptist churches. Prohibition sentiment was strong in the state before
the Anti-Saloon League was ever founded. In 1851, an antilicense
clause was put in the state constitution, although this clause was by-
passed through a law providing for a liquor tax rather than a liquor
fee. In 1883, a prohibition amendment to the state constitution was
passed by a majority of those voting on the issue, although it failed
because a majority of all the votes cast in the election were not cast for
the amendment.
But industry came to Ohio along with the Anti-Saloon League, and
the German brewers of Cincinnati began to organize the new wet city
masses against the pressure of the dry congregations in the country.
The League had to adopt a policy of conquering the state step by step.
First by local option elections, then by county option elections after
1908, the state was dried up. 18 Meanwhile, pressure was put on the
state legislature to help the drys in every way. Within ten years of its
first victory in defeating State Senator Locke in 1894, the League
defeated over seventy wet candidates who were entitled by party
custom to renomination. 14 Its triumphs culminated in the election of a
Democrat, J. M. Pattison, as Governor of Ohio against the incumbent
Republican Governor, Myron T. Herrick, in 1905. The League had
vainly asked the Republican party in Ohio to nominate a dry candi-
date; instead, the Republican boss of Cincinnati, George B. Cox, had
seen to the second nomination of the wet Herrick. In a campaign of
unprecedented vigor, the League workers turned their pulpits "into
a battery of Krupp guns, from which to hurl the bursting shells and
solid shot against the saloon and its defenders." 15 Pattison was elected
by a majority of some 42,000 votes. The influence of the League was
dramatically shown by the fact that the entire Republican ticket was
elected in the rest of the state.
The major parties heeded their lesson in Ohio. They trod warily with
the drys. And the "Ohio Idea" of political action by the churches and
the drys through the Anti-Saloon League spread. The "Ohio Idea"
consisted of the use of paid professional officials and workers who gave
their entire time to League activity, a financial system based upon
monthly subscriptions, political agitation directed toward the defeat
of wet candidates and the election of dry candidates, and concentra-
tion upon the liquor question to the exclusion of all other issues. 16 The
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 89
League's methods of agitation, legislation, and enforcement were also
broadcast. The materials for dry agitation could be secured from the
Westerville printing plant of the League, which was producing forty
tons of temperance literature each month by 1912. Advice on methods
of legislative pressure were contained in Anti-Saloon League Year-
books or were available in the flesh by experts sent from the national
headquarters in Ohio. As for enforcement, detectives were supplied
to dry communities to denounce liquor law violators. By their success
in Ohio, the Anti-Saloon League became the model of reform pressure
groups throughout the nation.
The industrialism of Ohio itself, however, made total victory there
very difficult. It was easier for the Anti-Saloon League to win battles
in rural Southern and Western states. Although the drys controlled
the Ohio legislature where the countryside was overrepresented, the
large wet votes of Cincinnati and Cleveland kept Ohio wet in the
state-wide referendums of 1914, 1915, and 1917. In 1918, a week before
Armistice Day, a state prohibition amendment which allowed the
manufacture and importation of liquor for home use did finally pass
by a small majority. Nevertheless, by another referendum in 1919, the
people of Ohio narrowly disapproved of the ratification of the Eight-
eenth Amendment by their state legislature, which duly ignored this
slap in the face. The following passage of the Nineteenth Amendment
and the extension of the suffrage to women in Ohio did something
to ease the dry situation in the state. For the first time in 1920, the
League could guarantee a popular majority for dry measures in Ohio,
after twenty-seven years of agitation.
The care which politicians took of the League and of the brewers
in Ohio was exquisite. Both major parties did their best to alienate
neither wet nor dry. There was a real fear in both parties that the
nomination of a politician honestly committed to either side of the
prohibition issue would throw the election to the opposing party. The
Ohio dry Republicans even put out a pamphlet in 1917 which quoted
General Critchfield's statement that "the Republican party never lost
an election in Ohio except as a result of passing some measure looking
to the regulation or curtailment of the evils of the liquor traffic." The
pamphlet went on to declare that, as a consequence, the Republicans
in Ohio had compromised too much with the wets. The Democrats,
seeing the growing dry sentiment, were preparing to lead it. With their
control of an efficient political machine, this would give them control
of the state for many years. Therefore, the saloon should be eliminated
from Republican and state politics by prohibition of the liquor trade.
Only then would the Republicans enjoy their natural hold on all
offices in Ohio. 17
90 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Prohibition in Ohio complicated an already complicated situation.
The League's fanaticism changed the natural position of an Ohio
politician from a slap on the back to a straddle. Yet, in the all-impor-
tant years of the Great War, when the Eighteenth Amendment was
passed in Congress and ratified by the states, the state politicians
were sufficiently weathercock to swing with the dry wind. A letter
from Senator Warren Harding's political manager in 1917 clearly
brings out the temporary factors which made politicians in Ohio go
dry. He wrote, "If conventions were to be held in Ohio this year, no
political party would dare to refuse to endorse prohibition. There is
only one side to the moral, economic, political or patriot phase of the
question/' 18 It was in answer to this temper of the times, as read by
canny politicians, that Harding switched from wet to dry and took
Ohio with him. His action wrung a doubtful compliment from the
leader of the Anti-Saloon League, Purley A. Baker. He said, "Senator
Harding, you can talk wetter and vote dryer than any man I have
ever known." 19
The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the success of
Harding in the presidential election of 1920 gave the Republican and
Anti-Saloon League leaders of Ohio great power. At last, the League's
dream of a national prohibition law and a sympathetic administration
seemed to have come true. Ohio had bred great men in politics and
in prohibition. Now they would co-operate to realize the leader of the
League's intention, "the making air tight, water tight, beer tight, wine
tight, whisky tight, for all time, firmly imbedded and buttressed in the
constitution of the United States, the eighteenth amendment." 20 This
was the "Ohio Idea" writ large.
A further idea of the havoc which prohibition wrought in state
politics can be gleaned from a survey of the states in 1913, the year
that prohibition began to play a part through the Anti-Saloon League
in national elections. In California, Nevada, Illinois, New Hampshire,
New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, both parties
opposed prohibition; in the states of the Deep South, however, both
parties supported prohibition. In Colorado, the Republicans were dry
and the Democrats wet, while in Oklahoma, the Democrats were dry
and the Republicans wet. In Indiana, the Republicans supported
county option, while the Democrats supported local option; in Penn-
sylvania, both parties supported license.
Indeed, sense can be made of party attitudes towards the prohibi-
tion issue only in terms of the split between city and country, for the
states were divided in themselves. In Missouri, Republican St. Louis
was more friendly with Democratic Kansas City over prohibition than
either was with the rural Democratic majority; the part of Kansas
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 91
City in Kansas itself was opposed likewise to the dominant Republican
majority upstate. The refusal of Congress after the Census of 1910
to give the cities more seats in the House of Representatives was a
frank confession by the country members that they wished to con-
tinue ruling the cities. Reapportionment of seats in the House was
postponed until after the Census of 1930, in defiance of the Constitu-
tion. The oversight was partially due to the pressure of the dry lobby,
which otherwise made so much of the need to obey the Constitution
and its Eighteenth Amendment.
TRINITY OF REFORM
THREE MOVEMENTS helped each other to assault certain American laws
and customs at the beginning of the twentieth century. These move-
ments were the progressive crusade, the dry crusade, and the crusade
for female suffrage. After growing from similar roots and seeking
similar goals, they realized their differences and abandoned each other.
Each movement would not have succeeded so well without the sup-
port of the others; but, in success, each found itself alone.
The progressive movement was the heir of a long line of reforms and
reactions. American reform movements have usually combined within
their creeds a love of certain remedies for social ills, allied with a
hatred of the presumed makers of those ills. The search for the good
of society usually fed off a loathing of the chosen scapegoats of the
reformists. Moreover, the nativist movements, such as the Know-Noth-
ing party, the American Protective Association, and the Ku Klux Klan
appealed to those who wished to fight for God by a call for an im-
mediate attack on a named devil. This militant persecution of the bad
for the sake of the good was also an element of other rural reform
movements: the Grange, the Populists, the country progressives, and
the Non-Partisan League. The very ideology of crusade was sympa-
thetic to the rural mind.
The same ideology suited the temperance reformers and the woman-
suffrage party. The temperance supporters hated the saloon and the
liquor trade; "they did not pray to God so much as at the saloon-
keeper" 21 The feminists hated the unequal position of women and
those legislators who kept it so. To these scapegoats, the Know-Noth-
ing party added immigrants and Roman Catholics, while the Grange
and the Populists damned the trusts and the money power of the East.
In general, the evil and corruption of Washington and the great cities
was a common grievance to all these reformers. And the most obvious
symbol of that evil and corruption was the urban saloon, where immi-
grants and Roman Catholics drank and provided the bought votes
92 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
that supported the unholy Congresses in Washington. Since all major
reform movements believed that they would gain the votes of the
majority of the God-fearing American people if only elections were
direct and clean, the assault on the saloon and the restoration of
democracy to American politics seemed to Know-Nothing and dry
and suffragette to be the first step towards their ultimate victory.
Early elections in America were bloody and drunken affairs. William
Dean Howells described the elections of 1840 and 1844 in Hamilton,
Ohio, in lurid terms: "The fighting must have come from the drinking,
which began as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day
and night with a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen." 22
The drunken mobs in the urban and village saloons were the dupes
of any political shyster who could pay for their support. An election
by such means offended the democratic morality of all reformers,
particularly those of old American stock, who had been brought up to
believe in democratic practice, as well as in the virtues of temperance
and the Anglo-Saxon race. Thus, the drys tended to support political
reformers, and political reformers tended to support the drys. For the
success of one against corrupt practices or saloons seemed to help the
success of all, especially as the supporters of the Know-Nothings and
of the early temperance reformers and the feminists were found prin-
cipally among the same Protestant Americans in rural areas. Thus the
Know-Nothing party convention in 1855 in California passed a resolu-
tion approving of the temperance reforms in the state and promising
to nominate "none for office but men of high character and known
habits of temperance/* The Know-Nothing domination of the state
legislature also resulted in the passage of a prohibition referendum
bill. 23 The supporters of one crusade could frequently be induced to
support another.
Similarly, the early feminists bid for dry support. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Abby Kelly all spoke
out for temperance as well as for women's rights. Since the dry move-
ment was led by clergymen and religious work was "the only activity
outside the home in which married women might take part without
violating the proprieties," the femininists pressed to be included among
the dry ranks in higher positions than those of the kneeling women,
who closed down many Midwestern saloons in the 1870's by the
humility of their example. 24 As Mrs. Stanton confessed:
Whenever we saw an annual convention of men, quietly meeting
year after year, filled with brotherly love, we bethought ourselves
how we could throw a bombshell into their midst, in the form of a
resolution to open the doors to the sisters outside. . . . In this way, we
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 93
assailed in turn, the temperance, educational, and church conventions,
agricultural fairs, and halls of legislation. 25
But although the first temperance wave of the 1850's aided and was
aided by the Know-Nothings and the feminists, the fourth reform
movement of the time, the abolition movement, worked against the
dry cause. For the Northern drys supported the abolition of slavery,
while the Southern drys did not. Equally, the feminists, by equating
their own condition with those of the Negro slaves, lost support in the
South. Only the Know-Nothings knew enough to keep silent over
abolition, as over most other affairs. But the combination of temper-
ance, slavery, and f emale-suffrage agitation split the reformers among
themselves. By concentrating on many reforms, the reformers tended
to lose that one reform which they desired above all others. In the
future, they would have to adopt a policy of selfish co-operation,
making use of other reform organizations only to further their own
separate cause. As Susan B. Anthony later wrote to a friend, after an
unfortunate attempt to popularize "bloomers": "To be successful a
program must attempt but one reform." 26 She ended by refusing the
support of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for fear of
alienating those wets who supported women's rights.
The Civil War put reform at a discount. Although the victory of the
North ended the divisions of the reformers over the question of aboli-
tion, the Know-Nothing movement had subsided even more quickly
than it had grown, while the temperance movement and the feminists
lost support in the lassitude of postwar times. The 1870's, however,
saw the beginning of a second temperance and general reform wave,
for the evil saloons had multiplied until there was one for every two
hundred Americans. The Prohibition party offered many progressive
measures in its platform and endorsed female suffrage. The Woman's
Christian Temperance Union also joined the dry cause to further
female emancipation; in the words of its leader, Frances Willard, the
white ribbon aimed to promote "prohibition, purity, philanthropy,
prosperity, and peace." 27 Both organizations sponsored broad programs
of social reform to attract supporters to their fight against the saloon.
And they did attract additional support. The Grangers and the Popu-
lists inspired new victories for temperance in their bids for power.
In California, the Granger triumph of 1873 and the Populist success in
1894 both coincided with peaks of temperance agitation and legislation
in the state. 28 The labor movement of the time, the Knights of Labor,
under its leader Terence V. Powderly, brought more help to the dry
cause, although this help was less in gratitude for Frances Willard's
backing of labor legislation than in fear of the immigrant menace,
94 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
marshaled by the corrupt city bosses through the saloons. "Every
reformatory movement of the day/' declared the Journal of the Knights
of Labor in 1890, "finds here its most persistent and indefatigable
foe/' 29
Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, those reformers
who wished to end certain evils of government and of the liquor trade
and of discrimination against women could agree on many of their
objectives. Corrupt politics and the saloon vote was the enemy of all
reform; clean politics and a sober vote was the friend of all reform.
Female suffrage was thought to mean more votes for the dry cause
and the cause of good government. The "superior moral force of
women" would save America from the saloon and from the plutocrats,
who were ruining American institutions. 30 The staid North American
Review gave progressive reasons for endorsing female suffrage in 1906
as a "paramount necessity"; the rise of both socialism and the trusts
had made the voting of women necessary, as a means "of purifying the
ballot, of establishing and maintaining lofty standards as to qualifica-
tions required of candidates for public office, of effecting an evener
distribution of earnings, of providing a heavier balance of disinterest-
edness and conservatism against greed and radicalism." 81 Dry clergy-
men also bid for progressive support of prohibition measures. "The
bartender poses as the dictator of American destiny. . . . His royal
scepter is a beer faucet." 32 Since the liquor trade had corrupted Amer-
ican politics to such a great extent, it was the job of all good progres-
sives to give the women the vote so that they could help the drys to
abolish the cursed trade that corrupted all government. The question
was simple.
Whisky spiders, great and greedy,
Weave their webs from sea to sea;
They grow fat and men grow needy;
Shall our robbers rulers 6e? 33
. The feminists had special reasons for helping the drys. The Prohibi-
tion party was the first major party to endorse female suffrage. In
return, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had endorsed the
Prohibition party in 1884, after supporting female suffrage four years
earlier.* It was due to the Union that those women with a political
bent first learned to organize the members of their sex and apply
pressure upon politicians. The Union had both invented and perfected
many of the dry lobbying techniques while pushing through its tem-
. * After the death of Frances Willard, the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union adopted the nonpartisan policy of the Anti-Saloon League and refused
to endorse the Prohibition party, except in the election of 1916 when both major
party candidates were thought unsatisfactory.
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 95
perance education bills. Moreover, the eleven states which adopted
female suffrage before 1917 were all in the West; seven of these
were prohibition states, and the other four had large areas under local
option. The liquor trade was held to be the particular foe of woman-
kind; as the Wisconsin Vice Committee declared, "the chief direct
cause of the downfall of women and girls is the close connection be-
tween alcoholic drink and commercialized vice/' 34 A woman's vote
was thought to be a dry vote, and for that reason, the liquor trade was
condemned for opposing the suffragettes; a feminist pamphlet, The
Secret Enemy, reprinted a circular sent out by the Brewers' and
Wholesale Liquor Dealers' Association of Oregon to every retail liquor
dealer in the state, asking him to get out twenty-five votes against the
state woman-suffrage amendment. The German-American Alliance, the
chief foe of the drys, also opposed the feminists. And finally, woman
suffrage was intended to bring about many of the same benefits as
prohibition. It would rid the cities of vice and crime by supporting
reform governments and would herald an era of peace and prosperity.
Even if Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt thought that women would have
been enfranchised two generations earlier had there been no prohibi-
tion movement, the success of the suffragettes increasingly became
dependent on the help and fortunes of the drys.
Many progressives were also supporters of prohibition. The rural
progressives were the heirs of the Populists and their forerunners; to
them, the whisky trust was even more devilish than the railroad, the
steel, and the oil trusts. And the novelty of the progressive movement,
its appeal to the urban middle classes as well as to the rural middle
classes, gave the crusade against the saloon an immediate meaning to
city dwellers, who had suffered too much from the corrupt saloon vote.
Moreover, the strengthening of the federal government through the
promise of national prohibition pleased those supporters of Theodore
Roosevelt and the Progressive party who demanded a more highly cen-
tralized power in the United States. The dry arguments for increased
efficiency of administration and business through prohibition were
equally seductive to progressives. Although the Prohibition party justly
claimed its members were the "original Progressives," its eclipse by
the nonpartisan Anti-Saloon League made the Progressive party in-
creasingly bid for dry support after its good showing in the presidential
election of 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt, coming in second to Wood-
row Wilson, pushed Taft and the Republican party into third place.
In 1914, thirteen state Progressive party conventions backed state pro-
hibition, and seventeen Progressives out of the twenty in Congress
voted for the Hobson resolution for national prohibition. 35 Both the
96 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
general sentiment of progressivism and the Progressive party itself
were sympathetic to the dry cause.
Yet the one factor which distinguished the progressives and the
Progressive party from other American reform and third-party move-
ments was the alliance between city and country within their ranks.
The prohibition movement, however, was held to be the assault of the
country upon the city. For this reason, the Progressive party conven-
tion of 1916 did not endorse national prohibition, although it had
endorsed female suffrage four years before. The split among the pro-
gressives on the question of prohibition was already evident in rural
and urban areas. For instance, in California, Hiram Johnson and the
Progressive party rose to power in the state with the help of the Anti-
Saloon League and the vote of dry Los Angeles; but although the
progressives could combine to fight the power of the Southern Pacific
Railroad, they split along urban-rural lines over the vote in 1911 on a
county option measure. It was also significant that the thirteen state
conventions of the Progressive party which endorsed state prohibition
in 1914 were all in rural or semirural states; not one Progressive party
convention in an industrial state came out for prohibition. In the last
resort, the Progressive party would only support the closing of the
saloons when it helped their fight for clean government, but not when
it threatened the uneasy alliance within the party between city and
country. The Northeastern urban progressives would never support
total prohibition of the liquor trade, even if they might support certain
measures against the saloons.
Similarly, the South presented problems to the combination of pro-
gressivism, prohibition, and women's rights. White Southerners were
enthusiastic over prohibition for economic and racial and moral rea-
sons. Progressivism, too, appealed to them as a method of ending the
chronic Southern economic depression through increased efficiency.
But Southern progressives also equated clean government with the
abolition of the Negro franchise as well as the saloons. In addition,
their veneration for Southern womanhood made them deny the female
sex any political rights. The Negro's place in the South was thought to
be outside the polling booth and the woman's inside the home. Thus,
although prohibition and a form of progressivism was prevalent below
the Potomac, it excluded all hopes of increasing the franchise.
In the election of 1916, however, the Progressive party returned to
the Republican fold, and many progressives voted for Woodrow Wil-
son in disgust. The majority of the drys supported the nonpartisan
policy of the Anti-Saloon League, voting for those major party candi-
dates who had the backing of the League. The Woman's party, under
the leadership of Alice Paul, refused to back the Prohibition party,
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 97
although it had declared for female suffrage. Alice Paul tried to organ-
ize a protest vote against President Wilson and the Democrats in those
Western states where women had the suffrage. For the Woman's
party was held to be "not pro-Republican, pro-Socialist, pro-Prohibi-
tion," but "simply pro-woman/' 36 But the Western campaign against
the Democrats failed. Wilson swept the Western progressive states.
As William Allen White pointed out, the Republican candidate for
President, Charles Evans Hughes, by refusing to take a bold pro-
gressive stand on woman suffrage, prohibition, the initiative and
referendum and recall, seemed to the right of Wilson and lost the votes
of the reformers. 37 Wilson also held out the promise of peace, which
attracted Western reformers with their isolationist tendencies and
domestic preoccupations.
One reform movement illustrated particularly well the common
goals of the reform trinity of progressives and drys and feminists. This
was the sterilization movement, which was backed by the eugenic and
nativist and paternalist cast of mind that belonged to all three groups.
The confluence of these attitudes was expressed by Frances Willard in
England. "I am first a Christian, then I am a Saxon, then I am an
American, and when I get home to heaven I expect to register from
Evanston." 38 * To her and to other reformers, the reasons for all reform
were the duties owed to God and race and nation in that order, while
the place of the reformer's activity gave him his particular opportu-
nities. The Anglo-Saxon race was held to have a divine and national
mission to preserve the purity of the old American stock, which would
support progressive reforms and abolish the racial degeneracy caused
by alcohol. "We are going to have purer blood as the poison of alcohol
becomes eliminated/' said William Jennings Bryan. "We are going to
have a stronger race because of prohibition." 39 This concern with the
future of their children was a strong incentive for the Woman's party
to give support to the drys. The legend on the banner of a suffragette
procession in Chicago put the matter clearly:
For the safety of the nation, let the women have the vote,
For the hand that rocks the cradle will never rock the boat*
Eugenics and the sterilization of the defective and the degenerate
provided a good common ground for reformers for additional reasons.
Sterilization promised to abolish the criminal type in society before
he was corrupted further by urban slums or saloons. It also offered a
method of controlled breeding which would favor the reproduction
of the Anglo-Saxon race and prevent the reproduction of its rivals. The
*The home of Frances Willard in Evanston, Illinois, is the present head-
quarters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
98 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
biological laws of necessity, upon which the position of the eugenic
reformers rested, also justified the position of the rich and the middle
classes of America; for, by their very position in society, they had
proved that they were the fittest to survive. Moreover, eugenic steri-
lization promised to reduce taxation on the wealthy by diminishing
the number of hereditary criminals in the prisons and poorhouses of
the United States, It was not surprising that sterilization, along with
progressivism and prohibition and feminism, was supported by those
whom a Wisconsin clergyman called "our best people/' 41
By 1922, fifteen states in America had sterilization laws. Of these
states, ten had passed state prohibition laws before the ratification
of the Eighteenth Amendment, and eight had allowed woman suffrage
before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Twelve of these
states were Western or Midwestern, and three were Northeastern; none
were Southern. This geographical proportion of support for steriliza-
tion gives a fair idea of the geographical support for the Progressive
party and the Woman's party, even if the Southern support of prohibi-
tion excluded support of its allied causes. Although the motives for
passing sterilization laws varied from a "purely punitive" motive in
Nevada to a "purely eugenic" motive in Washington, the reasons for
the eugenic crusade appealed to the vast majority of American-born
Protestants, whatever their geographical location. The rural pro-
gressive, the prohibitionist, and the feminist seemed to hear their
own voices in the accusation of Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the
Chicago Municipal Court. European governments had made of the
United States "an asylum and dumping ground for their own vaga-
bond, drunken, degenerate, feebleminded, dementia praecox, epileptic,
and criminalistic classes." 42 By sterilization and prohibition and politi-
cal reform and women's rights, a beginning might be made in preserv-
ing the old virtues of the American race from the corrupt immigrant
flood that deluged the cities of the United States. Indeed, the Eight-
eenth Amendment seemed the final legacy of twenty years of struggle,
the last testament of such reformers as Harry Carey Goodhue, of
Spoon River.
Do you remember when I fought
The bank and the courthouse ring,
For pocketing the interest on public funds?
And when I fought our leading citizens
For making the poor the pack-horses of the taxes?
And when I fought the water works
For stealing streets and raising rates?
And when I fought the business men
Who fought me in these fights?
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 99
Then do you remember:
That staggering up from the wreck of defeat,
And the wreck of a ruined career,
I slipped from my cloak my last ideal
Hidden from all eyes until then t
Like the cherished jawbone of an ass,
And smote the bank and the water works,
And the business men with prohibition,
And made Spoon River pay the cost
Of the fights that I had lost?**
DRY GOODS
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, in his famous essay on the American
frontier, saw his society as a democracy of expectant capitalists. The
American dream was liberty for all to live as they would and get what
they could. He did not foresee that the getting of billions of dollars
by the few might prevent the getting of hundreds of dollars by the
many, and that the living in luxury by the few could ensure the living
in poverty of the many. The great industrial fortunes of America were
built on die sweated labor of the men and women and children of the
immigrant masses in the cities. The twelve-hour day, seven days a
week, which was usual in the American steel industry until the
twenties, built vast corporations on the early deaths of many men.
It also drove the laborers to drink and to the saloons, for the shortest
way out of Pittsburgh or Birmingham was a bottle of booze.
Much of the heavy drinking in the industrial slums was caused by
the long hours and foul conditions of mills and factories. Yet, in turn,
the heavy drinking increased the foulness of the conditions of existence
for workingmen. It led to more industrial accidents and less output
from the factories. Therefore, the employers and manufacturers, after
creating a slum hell from which alcohol was the only release, tried to
block up the sole means of escape in the interests of efficiency and
output. Only they did not talk of efficiency and output except among
themselves. To the workingmen, they talked of morality and concern
for the welfare of the poor.
The saloons threatened the manufacturers of America in many ways.
Drunkards at work and inefficient labor on Blue Mondays cut down
production. As one employer testified before a committee of the North
Carolina legislature, "Gentlemen, there is a liquor shop, a dispensary,
two miles from Selma, and you must shut up that place or I must $hut
up my cotton mill. It is for you to say which you will encourage in
North Carolina, liquor mills or cotton mills the two cannot go to-
gether." 44 Another industrialist, Lewis Edwin Theiss, wrote, "Until
100 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
booze is banished we can never have really efficient workmen. We are
not much interested in the moral side of the matter as such. It is purely
a question of dollars and cents.'' 45 It was also the concern of the
manufacturers to eliminate the saloon in order to secure more of the
workers' pay for the purchase of their manufactured goods. As a
Californian businessman wrote, "Leaving aside any moral or social
aspect, the question of commercial benefits . . . makes it mighty good
business to put the saloons on the toboggan." 46 Prohibition would
replace the demand for liquor with a demand for dry goods. "Canny,
shrewd, business-like America knew that it would be a good financial
bargain." 47
There was also hostility to the labor movement in the employers'
support of prohibition. The suppression of the saloons would hurt the
labor unions, which often used the saloons to organize workingmen.
Moreover, if the liquor bill of the worker were eliminated, then he
would have a greater spending power without a rise in wages. As
Frances Willard said in 1886, the aim of labor should not be to get
higher wages, but to turn present wages to better account. 48 In addi-
tion, there was a real fear on the part of respectable people in the
nineteenth century that they would be insulted and injured by drunken
individuals or mobs. Liquor encouraged crimes of violence in those
who had criminal tendencies. There was even the possibility of a so-
cial revolution, if demogogues or radicals exploited the "drink-sodden,
muddled and fuddled proletariat." 49
The new technology further helped the drys. The excitement of
invention and machinery created its own rationale. The industrial leap
forward demanded the continuous sobriety and concentration of the
workers. Many industries, particularly the railroad and steel com-
panies, forbade their workers to drink. A typical poster in a plant
read, THE LAST MAN HIRED, THE FIRST MAN FIRED -THE
MAN WHO DRINKS. The powerful railroad brotherhoods supported
the employers in the matter of prohibition. One observer exulted,
"John Barleycorn has been caught in the fast revolving machinery of
American industry. There is no hope for him!" 50 Prohibition had be-
come a necessity for the life of the nation. "This dry thing which has
overtaken the United States is by no means suddener than the steam-
boat, the telegraph, and the automobile. Because they are, it is; it is
their logical and essential consequence and condition." 51
There was the further matter of taxes. Dry propaganda stressed over
and over again that the middle classes of America were paying high
rates and taxes for the upkeep of the jails, almshouses, asylums, and
charity organizations, where the victims of drink ended their unhappy
lives. If the liquor evil were to be prohibited, there would be no need
THE POLITICS OF REFORM / 101
for any more penal institutions. The result would be a lowering of
taxes. America would be a land of silk and money for all. The drys
did not mention, however, the sore point of the federal and state
liquor tax, which provided a large part of the income of the govern-
ment. The tax was, in a leading prohibitionist's words,
. . . perhaps the most far-reaching and calamitous in its ultimate ef-
fect of any action ever taken by Congress. It made the Government
financially interested in the perpetuation of the liquor traffic. It stimu-
lated the organization and growth of the traffic and thereafter made it
impossible to deal with the liquor question upon its merits, disas-
sociated from the question of revenue. It served to entrench the liquor
traffic in politics and government from which it proved impossible to
dislodge it for over half a century. 52
The tax was first levied in the Civil War; but its duties were lowered
after the war, owing to the pressure of the liquor trade. The rates
were soon raised, however, and raised again and again, to pay for the
war in Cuba and the First World War. Between 1870 and 1915, the
liquor tax provided between one-half and two-thirds of the whole
internal revenue of the United States, providing some two hundred
million dollars annually after the turn of the century. But with the
introduction of the federal income tax by the Sixteenth Amendment,
the Eighteenth Amendment became possible. Income and excess-prof-
its taxes provided the vast bulk of the federal revenue in the five
years before 1920, two-thirds of a total swollen by the demands of war
to eight times the total needed in the previous five years. The new
size of the federal budget had made the liquor tax less important to
the government, although the wealthy people of America began to
realize for the first time that the loss of the liquor tax would be made
up by higher taxes on themselves.
Yet the question of the liquor tax seemed trifling when the drys
promised such huge economic gains to industry and incomes with the
coming of national prohibition. To the drys, the economics of the matter
were simple. The consumers of drink and the liquor trade were a dead
loss. "It would be a saving to the Nation/' wrote one prohibitionist in
1908, "if we could kill off all its hard drinkers tomorrow. There are
two and one-half millions of these, and their first cost, at twenty-one
years of age, was at least FIVE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS as much as the
estimated value of all the slaves in this country before the war."
According to this dry, it was a "natural law" in the human world that
every man should pay his way through life. He should put back into
society by steady toil the amount of money invested in his upbring-
ing. 53 Liquor was a stumbling block in the way of honoring this debt
102 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
of existence. Each drink taken by each man was another fetter on the
feet of the progress of all. Both the making of liquor and its consump-
tion chalked up deficits in the national economy. The great liberal
economist Adam Smith had himself written:
All the labour expended producing strong drink is utterly unpro-
ductive; it adds nothing to the wealth of the community. A wise man
works and earns wages, and spends his wages so that he may work
again. Employers, taken all around, do not pay more wages to total
abstainers, but the latter contribute more to their own and fellow
workers' wages fund than do the drinkers. 54
This traditional view of economics, which equated the service trades
and pleasures of society with waste, and which thought in terms of a
limited "wages fund" only benefited by "productive" labor, could see
only virtue in prohibition. If the laboring poor were prevented from
buying liquor, they would purchase more dry goods. The Committee
of Fifty quoted the statistics of charity organizations to show that one
in four cases of destitution was directly or indirectly due to liquor. 55
Although, as the Buffalo Charity Organization pointed out, "Innocent
poverty with a long working day and insufficient food leads to drink
just as much as drink causes poverty," prohibition was one way of
breaking out of this "vicious circle." 56 The increased consumer market
in a dry America would lead to increased production, which would
lead in turn to higher wages and more jobs. The whole concept was
one of an ascending spiral to perfection on earth, with poverty, jails,
~ dmshouses, pauper hospitals and taxes on the middle classes abolished
forever. Moreover, for the first time, prohibition would bring real
liberty to all Americans by bringing them prosperity. For, as a dry
apologist stressed, real liberty lay in the creation and distribution of
wealth. "A poor man never can be free. And hence that which may be
labeled liberty is not worth anything if it makes for poverty." 57
There was much truth in the claims of the drys. Judged in terms of
pure economics, the efficient prohibition of liquor would bring bene-
fits to a society. Unfortunately, liquor cannot be efficiently prohibited
in a democracy, and man, whatever the liberal economists may have
believed, is not an economic animal. Thus, the theory of economics
favored the dry position, while the facts of enforcement and of the
nature of mankind favored the wets. Yet neither side would concede
victory to the other on any ground.
These economic reasons for prohibition made many of the manu-
facturers of the United States support the drys, who wanted prohibition
for moral reasons. The Villager commented, 'It was the industrial
movement which made use of the moral movement, and so achieved
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 103
the Eighteenth Amendment/' 58 The employers had two advantages to
gain from their alliance with the drys. The first was the diversion of
the reform element in society into an attack on the saloons rather than
the trusts. The era of the muckrakers, which had attacked political
bosses and corporations and stock manipulation and capitalism itself,
was superseded by the prohibition era, in which the energies of re-
formers were devoted to remedies for the liquor evil rather than for
economic evils. Prohibition became a sort of moral mask for big busi-
ness.
The support of the drys was helpful to big business in a second way.
In 1909, Purley A. Baker called the labor movement "fundamentally a
Holy crusade ... a struggle toward light and justice and a square
deal/' It sought to "correct a great wrong/' 59 This possible coalition
between the prohibition and the labor movements might be dangerous
to capital. But once the drys saw clearly that they had the widespread
support of business and the widespread opposition of labor over light
wines and beer, then they were quick to sing the virtues of their
backers. The business ethic of the virtues of work and efficiency and
wealth was, anyway, similar to the dry ethic; it stemmed from the
same Puritan roots. Indeed, before national prohibition became the
law of the land, many drys supported the manufacturers in keeping
down the wages of their workers, for they thought that higher wages
would only be spent on more drink. As the National Temperance
Almanac declared, "If this body and soul destroying malady is not
arrested in its progress, it is but a small thing to say that the in-
creased wages and increased leisure of the working-classes would be a
curse and not a blessing." 60
There was an additional moral reason for the support of the drys by
the large industrialists. Prohibition was a partial salve to the con-
science of the rich. The wealthy people of the United States could
never justify themselves by European pleas of good birth or the
divine right of inheritance. The American Dives had to find a better
excuse. Thus he usually claimed that his riches had been acquired
through the will of God, whose methods of distribution were in-
scrutable. But with these riches God had also conferred on him the
duty of looking after the poor. Although the fittest rightly ruled by the
sanction of Darwin and the Almighty, they should be conscious of
their obligations towards the less fortunate.
Prohibition was a marvelous cause in its appeal to the paternalism
of the rich and the powerful. While the suppression of the saloon made
little difference to the recreations of the rulers, it did seem to them to
remove temptation from the poor and needy. The governors of society
knew enough to work and drink; the governed only knew enough to
104 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
work. This attitude offended the workers, for "the laboring man, like
other men, objects to being treated like a child or a machine/' 81 It also
seemed paradoxical that the government should apply laissez-faire
principles to business and paternalism to individual habits. The para-
dox would be more acceptable if reversed, so that there was "a little
more regulation of business and a little less regulation of personal
habits." 62
The labor movement itself was divided in its attitude toward pro-
hibition. Traditionally, workingmen were drinkers. In the nineteenth
century, up to one-third of their wages had been paid in whisky,
while their dinner pails were more often full of beer than soup. But the
increasing demands of the industrial revolution on labor, coupled with
the urgent need to organize strong unions and improve working condi-
tions, made many of the labor leaders openly or secretly support the
prohibition of liquor. The Seamen's Journal stated bluntly: "Whisky
is a most valuable friend of capitalism/* Those who drank it were
enemies of their class. 68 But this was only whisky. For the workers
themselves demanded their beer and wine as a right, and thus their
leaders had to support their demand. Therefore, while a majority of
the labor leaders opposed the saloon, they also backed the sale of beer
and light wines. It was in the failure of the drys to differentiate be-
tween these two attitudes, and the failure of the labor leaders them-
selves to make their position clear, that the misunderstanding about
the backing of labor for prohibition arose.
In the days before the Eighteenth Amendment, the union leaders
were swayed by many of the eugenic arguments that also swayed the
middle-class reformers. They listened to the savage speeches of such
men as Father Cassidy, who maintained that "the saloon lusteth
against Labor and Labor lusteth against the saloon 'and these are
contrary one to the other/ " Father Cassidy denounced the wet votes
of the workers as a deliberate attack on the future hopes of their
young ones by making them victims to "this cursed thing which has
stunted more growing intellects, robbed more children of their birth-
right, sent stupid through the world, tied to the warper, the spooler
and the spinning-frame more half -grown, half -developed little ones
than unionism can ever count/' 64 A poll of more than five hundred
labor leaders taken by the Literary Digest in 1920 discovered that two
out of three privately thought that prohibition was a benefit to the
workingman, whether he liked it or not.
There was also a genuine co-operation between the moderate drys,
who were interested in social reform in general, and the leaders of
labor. Such reformers as Frances Willard and Jane Addams recognized
that poverty caused alcoholism as much as alcoholism caused poverty.
THE POLITICS OF REFORM/ 105
The answer to the saloon was to shorten hours of work and raise
wages, for, as Charles Stelzle pointed out, the best-paid workers with
the most leisure time spent least in the saloons. 65 The leader of the
social gospel movement, Walter Rauschenbusch, thought that liquor
was an instrument of the Mammon of Big Business and urged the
labor unions to break away from the liquor trade if they wanted
strength and higher wages. 66 Drink and low wages were inseparably
connected. As one dry social worker said, 'low wages played directly
into the hands of the saloon-keeper. The lower the wage the hungrier
the man or girl, and more certainly the saloon with its stimulants
called." 67 Her view was confirmed by another convinced prohibitionist.
"Terrible heat, inhumanly long hours and night work gave controlling
power to the craving for stimulants." 68 Industrial drinking among the
workers was the direct consequence of their beastly living conditions.
The misery caused by drinking in the urban slums was a blatant
fact. The prohibition of the saloon seemed one way to combat this evil.
The manufacturers and the middle classes had many selfish financial
and social reasons for supporting the campaign against the saloons.
The labor movement itself had reason to dislike the influence of the
liquor trade, although it stressed the fact that bad conditions forced
the workmen of America to drink. The reformers of the time pressed
both for better conditions and for the abolition of the saloons. If the
supporters of the dry movement were more concerned with attacking
King Alcohol than Mammon, it was because their energies could only
be turned in one direction, and because Mammon backed their cause.
Although the Anti-Saloon League had powerful backing among re-
form and economic, groups in the United States at the beginning of the
century, it had to translate this support into blocks of votes for its
political friends on election day. Without an organized voting group
behind it, the League would not have been able to apply political
pressure on the legislatures of the states and on Congress. With the
menace of thousands of votes cast at the next election against any
legislator who dared to vote against a dry measure, the League could
make the representatives of the people vote against their personal wet
convictions. The job of the organized drys was to perfect their means
of persuasion. To this end, they invented new political techniques and
also used the methods of the brewers and distillers but "deodorized
and disinfected them and turned them back on the liquor traffic." 60
CHAPTER
Creeping Barrage
The mind has shown itself at times
Too much the baked and labeled dough
Divided by accepted multitudes.
HART CRANE
Many a bum show is saved by the American flag.
Impresario GEORGE M. COHAN
PROPAGANDA IS concerned with belief rather than truth, with dis-
tortion rather than presentation, with influence rather than argu-
ment. The matter of propaganda is less important than its methods
and its foes. If a group is alone in its field and presents its objectives
with persuasion and without contradiction, it will usually gain those
objectives. But if its propaganda is denied by a hostile group with
opposite goals, its success will largely depend on its control of the
available means of communication. The drys, at the beginning of
prohibition, had the better of the struggle for the communications
system of the United States. A world war briefly gave them absolute
power over likely methods of influencing others; but an economic and
technological and moral revolution, allied with a boom followed by a
depression, put the mass media in the hands of their enemies. The
birth of prohibition was in the days of local news and self-contained
areas; the flowering of prohibition took place when a national war
effort put a centralized control over America for the first time; the
dying of prohibition lay in the new machines which carried the pre-
sumed manners of the urban rich into every backwater and share-
cropper's shack. Propaganda was the Frankenstein of the drys. At first,
it was their power and glory; but, at the last, it murdered its maker.
The drys held a monopoly of the good side in the fields of science,
education, medicine, evangelical religion, progressivism, and eco-
nomics. But they made further claims for prohibition in terms of
history, tradition, and patriotism. While their claims were little dis-
puted in the beginning, a growing body of wet protests and counter-
106
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 107
claims, equally biased and injudicious, grew up and eventually
swamped the prohibitionists under a deluge of answers. The myth of
dry virtues was countered by the myth of wet rights, and only the
believers in temperance suffered. As Mencken moaned, "To one side,
the professional gladiators of Prohibition; to the other side, the agents
of the brewers and distillers." He then asked himself why all neutral
and clear-headed men avoided the liquor question, and came to the
conclusion that "no genuinely intelligent man believes the thing is
soluble at all." 1 He was right. Once the liquor question was seen in
terms of a choice between the prohibitionists and the liquor trade, few
reasonable men wished to choose at all.
LOBBY FOR THE LORD
BIG BUSINESS began the practice of lobbying in America, but the Anti-
Saloon League perfected the techniques. While the corporations used
the greed of legislators, the League used their fear of losing elections.
Bribery may have been an effective instrument for controlling some
representatives of the people, but loss of a majority of the popular
vote was a sufficient threat to control all. It is a flaw in democracy that
it can allow those pressures which, by influencing the democratic
process unduly, pervert democracy. 2
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union developed most of the
methods of legislative pressure later used by the Anti-Saloon League.
The methods were discovered by the formidable lobbyist of temper-
ance teaching, Mrs. Mary H. Hunt. In an address in 1897, she outlined
the means which she had used in the preceding years:
The people are the real source of power. They must be the lobby.
There the first step for compulsory temperance education should be
taken before the primary meetings are held for the nomination of
legislators, by agitating through pulpit, platform, press and prayer-
meeting for the choice of temperance men as legislators. After these
are elected, before the legislature convenes, appeal to their constitu-
ents in like manner to instruct these law-makers to vote for temperance
education in public schools. This should be so universally and system-
atically done that every legislator will feel this pressure before he
leaves his constituents. 3
An example of Mrs. Hunt's practice has been preserved in an ac-
count of the passing of a temperance education bill through the
Pennsylvania legislature in 1885. For the previous eighteen months,
Mrs. Hunt had been preparing the way by buttonholing representa-
tives, addressing meetings, preparing material for newspapers, and
organizing petitions. At the opening of the legislative session, the
108 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
galleries were packed with members of the Woman's Christian Tem-
perance Union.
Almost before the amen to the opening prayer had been uttered, a
dozen members were on their feet offering the petitions sent in from
their various districts, on behalf of the bill for scientific temperance
education. The dozen swelled to scores, and the scores multiplied all
in a moment until so many boy messengers were flying down the aisles
with the papers, and so many arms were waving in the air, that from
every seat there seemed suddenly to have sprung a great fluttering
white blossom of petition.
And the women did not stop with petitions, "but they bombarded the
hearts and heads of their representatives with letters; letters admoni-
tory and beseeching, letters solemn and warning, letters proper and
patronizing, letters of all sorts, shapes, sizes and degrees of eloquence,
but all pregnant with one mighty purpose, the ultimate passage of
the bill." 4
The dry women also made use of another great weapon, the chil-
dren. Newborn infants had a white ribbon tied around their wrists
and a prayer said over them; they were then official members of the
dry Cradle Roll. Loyal Temperance and Lincoln-Lee Legions of chil-
dren, more powerful than the massed youth of the Children's Crusade,
were set to march and sing about the polling booths when local or
county option elections were held. As the known wets approached the
polling booths,
. . . the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the
straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday
schools. Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands
the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only chil-
dren can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and
crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their
Gulliver.
"There he is, children. Go get him."
Swirling around the marked man in a wild elves' dance, they sang
with piping empty violence:
We are some fond mother's treasure
Men and women of tomorrow,
For a moment's empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?
Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but others,
Vote against the Demon Rum. 5
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 109
William Jennings Bryan noticed the effectiveness o this form of
pressure during his own speaking tours.
At county seats all the children in the county would be in line, thou-
sands of them, the girls in white with gay sashes, each child carrying
a flag, and marching proudly with their banners. "When we can vote,
the saloon will go." "Aren't we worth protecting?" etc. A most impres-
sive sight and the work of women. Women are largely responsible for
national prohibition, which was secured without equal suffrage. 6
Moreover, the women knew that the children would exert a more
devastating pressure in the future than in the present. In 1920, Anna
Gordon, who became President of the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union after the death of Frances Willard, claimed that the Union's
work among the children should bear much of the credit for the pas-
sage of the Eighteenth Amendment.
"Tremble, King Alcohol, we shall grow up," shouted the children,
and in spirited fashion they sang, "We'll purify the ballot box, we'll
consecrate the ballot box, well elevate the ballot box when we are
twenty-one." In State and National Prohibition campaigns, as Young
Campaigners for Prohibition, in patriotic regalia, with pennants flying
and appealing, significant banners held aloft, the boys and girls proph-
esied the downfall of the trade that with its cruel heel dared "stifle
down the beating of a child's heart." The cry of the children has been
heeded by this great nation. Educated by the facts of science, by the
precepts of the Bible, and by the joy of temperance service, the chil-
dren have grown to manhood and womanhood and have helped vote
out of existence the traffic in alcoholic beverages. 7
The Anti-Saloon League quickly learned the political methods of
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 8 And it added certain
refinements and techniques of its own. In reaching the lobby of the
people, the real source of power, it used the existing organization of
the evangelical churches. Ernest Cherrington, the head of the League's
educational and propaganda work, admitted this when he wrote, "The
church voters' lists . . . constituted the real key to the situation."
Although it took "many years of difficult and persistent endeavor" to
line up the churches on the side of the League, in the end many of
the churches co-operated. Then, "the information as to men and meas-
ures sent to the Christian voters was bound to receive attention and
secure results." To disseminate still further this information about
the friends and foes of prohibition, the League arranged for two-way
contacts between the League lobbyist in Washington and those at each
state legislature, who in turn passed their information on to the church
voters. As Dinwiddie, the first League lobbyist at the national capital,
110 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
put the matter, if those drys in Congress knew who their friends were
in the states and those drys in the states knew who their friends were
in Congress, "between the upper and nether millstones" something
would happen. 9
As well as keeping the drys informed about the voting habits of their
representatives, the League arranged for those representatives to be
swamped with appeals and with threats of defection at the polls be-
fore they voted on each important measure. The invention of the
telephone led to the addition of the telegram to the great fluttering
white blossom of petition. The founder of the League, Howard Hyde
Russell, played an interesting part in the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment itself. He testified that, with the aid of the financial angel
of the League, S. S. Kresge, he had compiled a list of thirteen thousand
businessmen favorable to national prohibition. They were told what
to do. Russell's testimony continued:
We blocked the telegraph wires in Washington for three days. One
of our friends sent seventy-five telegrams, each signed differently with
the name of one of his subordinates. The campaign was successful.
Congress surrendered. The first to bear the white flag was Senator
Warren Harding of Ohio. He told us frankly he was opposed to the
amendment, but since it was apparent from the telegrams that the
business world was demanding it he would submerge his own opinion
and vote for submission. 10
Fear of the power of the League was so great and blatant among
Congressmen that, according to the Washington Times, the Eighteenth
Amendment would not have passed if a secret ballot had made it
impossible for the League to punish the disobedient at the next elec-
tion. 11
Wayne B. Wheeler, in a series of articles in the New York Times
in 1926, gave more details of the League's methods of pressure. He
said that the Washington headquarters of the League corresponded
with every possible friend in Congress and went to see each personally.
All fifty thousand field workers of the League in the states were kept
advised of the attitude of their members in Congress. They were also
advised on methods of winning over new converts in the states. 12 It
was in this excellent contact between Washington and the states, and
in the channeling of information from the Capitol through the church
leaders to the church voters that the League had its influence. Even
when the "decent vote'* was in a minority in a state, the Democrats
and Republicans were usually so evenly divided that a switch of that
vote from one side to the other would decide the election. The League
held the balance of power in many areas and thus exerted pressure out
of proportion to its following. Moreover, it consciously tried to attract
CREEPING BARRAGE / 111
those people who were influential in their communities. Mrs. Eliza-
beth Tilton made this clear at the National League convention of 1919.
She said that prohibition was put through by getting the 500,000
"opinion-makers" on the dry side, for the other 99,000,000 people of
America were apathetic and unimportant. She continued, "As we hold
these 500,000 so we shall hold the law; as we let them become apa-
thetic we shall lose the law/' 13 She was correct.
Against such efficient dry pressure politics, the brewers and distillers
did both too little and too much, but invariably too late. Again and
again, their paid publicists warned the liquor traders that they would
be doomed unless they cleaned up their business and organized against
the drys. Percy Andreae pointed out to the Brewers' Association in
1913, the year that the League decided upon its national drive, that
the greatest irony about the liquor trade was to be accused of med-
dling in politics when it did little or nothing of the sort. In all of the 435
congressional districts of the United States, the League had an organ-
ization. The brewers had none. Their only hope was to organize the
"millions and millions of falsely described foreign citizens" to hold
the drys at bay. By a quick subsidy of the foreign-language press and
use of the saloonkeepers and their friends, the wets might save the
day. Otherwise, they would be destroyed. 14
The trouble with the wet movement in its inception was that it was
directed by those who were financially interested in the liquor busi-
ness. These men relied on the traditional practices of bribery and
corruption, which had served the trusts well in the nineteenth century.
Only the times had changed. When a contagion of progressive reform
was sweeping the country, the brewers and distillers were among the
few who did not catch the disease. Thus they died of it, refusing to
pay for the few inoculations of house cleaning which would have split
the temperance reformers from the extreme prohibitionists.
Moreover, the dry lobbies were angels of agreement compared with
the disharmonious wet interests. Although in the nineteenth century
the grape growers and brewers and distillers had clung together to
fight prohibition by "skulking behind the grape" and preaching the
virtues of light wines and beer to hide the horrors of ardent spirits,
they soon split apart as the drys grew more successful. In California
particularly, where the wine industry had great local support, the
grape growers would support the drys in their attacks on the saloons,
which chiefly sold beer and spirits. The brewers, in their turn, tried to
save themselves by referring to beer as the temperance drink and sup-
porting the prohibition of spirits. They ran large advertisements in
1917, claiming that the true relationship of beer was "with light wines
and soft drinks not with hard liquor" Meanwhile, the distillers
112 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
accused the brewers of debauching America in the saloons, which
were chiefly owned and controlled by the breweries. The brewers even
fought among themselves. "Domestic" brewers supported the Anti-
Saloon League against "shipping'' brewers when the League wanted to
prohibit or tax heavily the shipment of beer across state borders.
"Shipping" brewers would then support the drys in neighboring states,
for a dry state meant greater profits for the liquor traders in the wet
states nearby. Indeed, in the economic war between the various liquor
groups, each saw the dry cause as a possible ally in the suppression of
its competitors. Only when the dry cause became too strong and the
hour was already too late did the winegrowers and brewers and dis-
tillers make common cause. Even so, in the same year that Congress
passed the Eighteenth Amendment, the drys in California were de-
lighted by the sight of large posters, bought by wet organizations,
which read, "There is no place in America for the saloon. This not an
economic question, but it is a moral one." 15
Of course, the brewers were further unlucky in that they were
strongly pro-German by birth and preferred to use as propaganda
units such groups as the "unpatriotic" German-American Alliance.
Their known sympathies made them appear to be tainted by the
militarism and alleged atrocities of their country of origin. But if they
were unfortunate to be branded as traitors by the Great War, they
were stupid to be caught in 1917 in the act of buying up newspapers
and elections. The revelations of the last-minute efforts of the liquor
trade to bribe itself out of trouble seemed to confirm all the allegations
of the drys. If the brewers were proved to be disloyal and corrupt,
so was the substance which they made. Perhaps it really was the beer
which tainted both the maker and the drinker. If it was abolished,
then America could become truly patriotic and democratic at last.
The actual methods of disseminating their propaganda differed from
drys to wets. The Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union poured out a volume of pamphlets, clipsheets, and
posters to church voters and the unregenerate. By 1912, the eight
Westerville presses of the League were turning out approximately
250,000,000 book pages of literature a month. These included thirty-
one state editions of the American Issue, the American Patriot, the
New Republic, and the Scientific Temperance Journal. Two more
papers, the Worker and the National Daily were begun in 1915. By
1920, although some of the smaller papers of the League had been
discontinued, the printing of the American Issue rose to a yearly total
of eighteen million copies. 16 The Woman's Christian Temperance
Union was hardly outdone. Its presses at Evanston, Illinois, produced
CREEPING BARRAGE / 113
in the year of crisis, 1928, ten million copies of a pamphlet listing the
wet record of Al Smith. 17
But even more numerous were the pamphlets printed by the
League. In the fourteen years after 1909, the League printed over one
hundred million pamphlets and leaflets. These were distributed
through churches, corporations, and labor unions. Propaganda fell
thicker than hailstones on the heads of the people. Few escaped the
ubiquitous slogans of the drys, which filled the billboards and hoard-
ings and newspapers of the time.
YOU CANT DRINK LIQUOR AND HAVE STRONG BABIES
CAN YOU IMAGINE A COCKTAIL PARTY IN HEAVEN?
SOW ALCOHOL IN THE BODY, REAP
Disease
isgrace
efeai
eath
FOR own l WIL** BE
A TOTAL ABSTAINER
HOW IS ALCOHOL RELATED TO *loul WORKS OF
THE FLESH?
INDULGENCE IN ALCOHOL LEADS TO
Folly
Meanness
Sin
Disgrace
Misery
Disease
Insanity.
The drys also used another method of propaganda, which had once
been credited with bringing about the Reformation. That was the
hymn, or religious marching song. The melodies were often familiar
evangelical tunes with new words set to them. The most popular of
all the songs was, perhaps, "The Saloon Must Go":
I stand for prohibition
The utter demolition
Of all this curse of misery and woe;
Complete extermination
Entire annihilation
The Saloon must go.
In a more patriotic vein, the tune of the "Marseillaise" was given
new words:
Arise, arise, ye brave
The world, the world to save
O, break, O, break Rum's mighty pow'r,
The world, the world to save. . . .
He Can't Put It Out
The democratic method of bringing down the saloon was also urged
musically at dry song fests. All that was necessary for victory was
"Only a Ballot, Brother":
Then slight not the ballot, my brother,
Be mindful to vote as you pray;
For God is as just as gracious,
Then choose for the right today.
Another propaganda device of the prohibitionists was the use of
authorities, lifted out of context, to justify their cause. Amen-em-an,
an Egyptian priest from 2000 B.C. was credited with the first temper-
ance statements; and after him came a motley collection of patriarchs,
prophets, politicians, and poets, including such notorious drys as
Solomon and Homer. To prove the prohibitionist sympathies of Homer,
Hector's retort to his mother was quoted:
"Far hence be Bacchus 9 gifts!" Hector rejoined.
"Inflaming wine, pernicious to mankind,
Unnerves the limbs and dulls the noble mind."
The frequent drinking feats of the Greek heroes went unmentioned.
They were forgotten, while the warnings of Isaiah, Habakkuk, An-
acharsis the Scythian, Buddha, the anonymous author of the Chinese
CREEPING BARRAGE/ US
classic She-King, St. Paul, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, St. Augustine,
Mohammed, the author of the Eddas, Luther, and even Shakespeare
were brought into line behind the drys. Shakespeare's real sympathies
were held to lie in the line from Othello, "Oh, thou invisible spirit of
wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.** The
roll of the dry forerunners continued through Bacon, writing under
his own name, and Milton.
Some by violent stroke shall die
By fire, flood, famine; by intemperance more. . . .
The list of the prophets approached modern times with Prior, Kant,
Young, Chesterfield, Rowland Hill, Fielding, Wesley, John Adams,
Goldsmith, Cowper, Goethe, Moltke, Bismarck, and, until the Great
War, Kaiser Wilhelm. 18
The propaganda reply of the wets was initially in the hands of the
brewers and distillers. They employed some of the methods of the
drys, but, instead of the organization of the churches, they used the
organization of the saloons and of the foreign-language associations
and newspapers. After the beginning of this century, the brewers were
spending some seventy thousand dollars a year on advertising in for-
eign-language newspapers. By 1915, they estimated that their distribu-
tion of wet literature was about 450,000,000 pieces a year, including a
magazine and a weekly newsletter to some 5300 small-town news-
papers. 19 This propaganda, however, so blatantly displayed self-inter-
est that it was ineffective. Moreover, the fact that the brewers were
largely responsible for the immense expansion of the German-Ameri-
can Alliance as their chief pressure group involved them in its down-
fall.
Against the songs of the drys, the wets had a tradition of drinking
songs which reached back into the feasts of antiquity. But somehow
these songs seemed to express pathos and roister rather than sincere
feeling. A wet apologist conceded:
The representative of the Anti-Saloon League could play on a thou-
sand chords of memory and of sentiment that touched the emotions.
The Liquor Dealers' Association had no such unfailing resource; they
could have offered nothing more moving in the sentimental line than
the memory of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean/' bawled at midnight
with beery emotion by a casual quartette, dwelling long and lovingly
on the chord of the diminished fifth. 20
Even the most sentimental of all the saloon songs, 'The Face on the
Barroom Floor," ended with the awful warning of the drunkard's
death:
116 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Another drink, and with a chalk in hand,
the vagabond began
To sketch a face that might well buy
the soul of any man.
Then, as he placed another lock
upon the shapely head,
With a fearful shriek, he leaped and fell
across the picture dead. 21
As for the authorities of history, the wets had an endless source of
politicians to justify the running over of the flowing bowl. These wet
champions included Oliver Cromwell, George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Jefferson Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and
Samuel Gompers. The wets also claimed the sympathies of the most
popular hero of the time, Abraham Lincoln. It was a proved fact that
Lincoln had run a grocery store which sold liquor, and that he was
President of the United States when the federal government had put
a tax on liquor for the first time. On the other hand, he had praised
the cause of temperance; and, according to the unsubstantiated word
of a contemporary United States commissioner, had said to him, "Don't
drink, my boy; great armies of men are killed each year by alcohol." 22
But Lincoln's real position seems to have been one of moderation, in
which he chided the dramsellers for the wrongs they did and defended
them against the "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation" of
the militant drys. 23 The Anti-Saloon League, however, was less inter-
ested in his true feelings than his myth. It called its Total Abstinence
Union the Lincoln-Lee Legion, thus making one at last the two heroes
whom the Civil War had separated.
THE DRYS WIN THE WAR
EVEN IF patriotism is not always the last refuge of a scoundrel, it was
certainly the final barrage of the prohibitionists. It was the ideal which
put the Eighteenth Amendment "over the top." Prohibition was pre-
sented as "first and foremost a patriotic program of 'win the war/ " 24
An incessant volley of dry propaganda preached that all patriots
must be prohibitionists to save food for the starving Allies; that Ger-
man-Americans were guilty of spying and treason and drinking beer;
that the German armies had committed their atrocities under the
influence of alcohol; that the worst Kaiser of all was the liquor Kaiser;
and that peace without victory and a land fit for heroes were only
possible in an earth free from the jack boots of Hun brewers. Indeed,
not only would the war bring about national and international pro-
hibition, but lack of the ideology of prohibition had brought about
the world war. Purley A. Baker made this quite clear.
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 117
The junker, the Kaiser, the murderer of the Arch-Duke Ferdinand
and his wife, in fact the very house of the Hohenzollern, are but the
merest incidents in bringing on this world holocaust. The primary and
secondary and all-compelling cause is that a race of people have arisen
who eat like gluttons and drink like swine a race whose "God is their
belly," and whose inevitable end is destruction. Their sodden habits of
life have driven them constantly toward brutality and cruelty until
they were prepared to strike for universal conquest, though millions
of lives and oceans of blood was to be the price of reaching that un-
holy ambition. Beer will do for a nation exactly what it will do for an
individual. . . . We seek a saloonless and drunkless world. 25
The interest of the Anti-Saloon League and of the drys in military
and naval preparedness was nothing new. In both the American Revo-
lution and the Civil War, Congress had passed ineffective measures
designed to keep troops from hard liquor. But what lawgivers could
not do, reform groups did. Their first point of attack was the sale of
liquor to troops through Army canteens. This had been forbidden in
1832 and again in 1882, but the canteens were still flourishing at the
end of the nineteenth century, although they were restricted to selling
light wines and beer to the troops. In 1901, Congress, under dry
pressure, passed a law forbidding the sale of alcohol from Army
canteens. Although military efficiency was the plea of the drys for
this measure, they were perhaps more interested in protecting the
morals of the defenders of the nation. For, to them, "prostitution,
alcohol, and venereal diseases have been, and are, an inseparable trio,
and to successfully combat one, means a concerted attack on all
three." 26
Woodrow Wilson gave the drys both a supporter as Secretary of
the Navy, Josephus Daniels, and the exploitable condition of war.
Daniels had been brought up on a farm and was the editor of a small
Southern newspaper; his upbringing and convictions had made him a
confirmed prohibitionist. On April 5, 1914, he issued an order for-
bidding the use of alcoholic liquor in the Navy. This caused a burst
of protest; no event in the first half of that year was so lampooned or
cartooned. 27 As the New York World protested, America was sending
splendid fleets to sea with their officers tutored like schoolboys and
chaperoned like schoolgirls. 28
War hysteria made Daniels's later measures more acceptable, how-
ever, for efficiency rather than liberty had become the symbol of the
nation. The American Medical Association passed a resolution in 1917
which came to the startling conclusion that "sexual continence is com-
patible with health and is the best prevention of venereal inf ections"
and that one of the methods for controlling syphilis was the control of
118 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
alcohol As a result, Daniels stopped the practice of the distribution
of contraceptives to sailors bound on shore leave, and Congress passed
laws setting up dry and decent zones around military camps * The ob-
ject was to give America "the soberest, cleanest, and healthiest fighting
men the world has known.* 30 But the prohibitionists also used the
five-mile dry area around military bases as a weapon to close the
saloons of large cities. In California, the drys even tried for a fifteen-
mile limit around camps, which would have closed all the saloons in
San Francisco. 31 In wet Hoboken, the brewers lost a battle with the
military authorities to keep the swinging saloon doors open after ten
o'clock at night. 32 Many barkeepers were fined for selling liquor to men
in uniform. Only at Coney Island could soldiers and sailors change
into the grateful anonymity of bathing suits and drink without molesta-
tion from a patriotic passer-by. 33
The prohibitionists were not, however, content with protecting the
soldiers in the United States. They also demanded that the Army
should be protected overseas. An order of General Pershing that Amer-
ican troops in France should be allowed light wines and beer was
bitterly attacked in Congress by the sole Prohibition party Congress-
man, Randall, of California, who asked the President to rebuke Persh-
ing for disobeying Army regulations. Pershing replied that he was
merely bringing the American Army into line with French regulations.
Moreover, it was a standard practice to issue liquor to front-line troops
in the British and French armies. 34 Pershing did not tell the real truth
of conditions in Europe behind the lines. These were noted by an
American intelligence officer who was keeping up his diary in a French
city in September, 1918, "Place full of newcomers, trying to dry up
France in one evening. Also full of tarts, with Yanks falling en
masse?**
The people of America were not protected from the drys as was the
Anny overseas. They were subject to all the rumors and fears of
civilians at war. And these rumors and fears were exploited and di-
rected by the activity of the propaganda experts of the time, George
Creel, his notorious Committee on Public Information, and the pro-
hibitionists. For, in time of war, "all the specific means of conquering
the Evil One are, and should be, glorified. The cult of battle requires
that every form of common exertion (enlistment, food-saving, muni-
tion making, killing the enemy) should have the blessing of all the holy
sentiments.* 38 As the Secretary of War said, the government aimed at
* The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was jubilant over this measure
by Daniels. It thought that the armed forces would be forced into continence,
thus ending die "double standard," and beginning, for both the man and the
woman, "the white life for two/'
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 119
"the whole business of mobilizing the mind of the world/' 37 This was
also the whole business of the drys. A huge majority of Americans
were swept up in the fervor of patriotism, and this same fervor could
be used for the dry cause if only the people were convinced that
"prohibition spells patriotism/' 38 Even such a bitter foe of prohibition
as Mencken admitted that prohibition did have substantial popular
support during the war.
Homo boobiens was scientifically roweled and run amok with the
news that all the German brewers of the country were against the
[eighteenth] amendment; he observed himself that all German sympa-
thizers, whether actual Germans or not, were bitter opponents of it.
His nights made dreadful by dreams of German spies, he was willing
to do anything to put them down, and one of the things he was will-
ing to do was to swallow Prohibition. 39
The extent of war hysteria between 1917 and 1919 is difficult to
imagine. Never have so many behaved so stupidly at the manipulation
of so few. George Creel, whose genius at misrepresentation and
exaggeration was hardly exceeded by that of Gargantua, could call
on the propaganda services of most of the artists and intellectuals of
the nation, whose peacetime sanity was deranged by the excesses
perpetrated in the name of country. Spies were thought to be every-
where, lurking in each foreign accent and behind each puff of smoke
without fire. Voluntary societies of a quarter of a million zealous in-
formers channeled gossip to the Department of Justice. "There was no
community in the country so small that it did not produce a com-
plaint because of failure to intern or execute at least one alleged
German spy/' Terror gave every suspicious occurrence the color of
conspiracy.
A phantom ship sailed into our harbors with gold from the Bol-
sheviki with which to corrupt the country; another phantom ship was
found carrying ammunition from one of our harbors to Germany;
submarine captains landed on our coasts, went to the theater and
spread influenza germs; a new species of pigeon, thought to be Ger-
man, was shot in Michigan; mysterious aeroplanes floated over Kansas
at night. . . . 40
There were not policemen enough to track down every denunciation,
and the volunteer committees of citizens merely added to the general
terror. An invisible enemy plotted an unseen conspiracy throughout
the land, and fear and the drys profited.
But the brewers played into the hands of the Anti-Saloon League.
They had decided that their only hope of survival was to organize
support among the largest and most respectable group of beer drink-
120 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
ers in the nation, the German-Americans. In 1901, a Dr. Charles John
Hexamer had organized a National German-American Alliance, whose
object was ostensibly the teaching of German culture and, in reality,
the formation of an antiprohibition organization. In 1914, the Alliance
claimed a membership of two million and was certainly the most
formidable foe of the drys. In the areas of its' greatest strength
Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa
state-wide prohibition could not be passed. The Alliance considered
that prohibition was directed primarily against "German manners and
customs, and the joviality of the German people," in the same way as
the drys considered that the saloon was primarily an attack on the old
American virtues. 41 As an article in the Alliance monthly magazine
said, "In order to gain for the Germans of America that place in the
sun which has hitherto always been denied them, it is absolutely
necessary that they enjoy personal liberty, and that this shall not be
whittled away by the attacks of the prohibitionists and the persecutors
of the foreign-born." In fact, the Alliance was quite correct in con-
sidering prohibition as an attack on the more recent immigrants to
America, although it was foolish to place the main emphasis of its
defense of the saloons on its Germanism rather than on the promise of
America to all immigrants.
After 1913, through the medium of the brewers' publicist, Percy
Andreae, the Alliance received heavy subsidies from the beer com-
panies. A "lobbying committee" of the Alliance was set up in Washing-
ton to combat the influence of the Anti-Saloon League. After the out-
break of the war in 1914, this lobby was also concerned with trying to
keep the United States strictly neutral. Indeed, as the Anti-Saloon
League linked patriotism with prohibition and preparedness against
Germany, so the German-American Alliance linked prohibition with
the enmity of German-Americans against England and with loyalty
to the fatherland. John Schwaab, of the Ohio Alliance, made this clear
in 1915. "The drink question is forced upon us by the same hypocritical
Puritans as over there are endeavoring to exterminate the German
nation."
In 1918, the German-American Alliance was investigated by the
Senate and made to disband. It was discovered that the leaders of the
Alliance had said some arrogant and stupid things which could be
construed as disloyalty to the United States. The Alliance had dis-
played the German flag and sung "Deutschland xiber Alles." Moreover,
it had become associated with political deals of questionable honesty
with the brewers in the fight against prohibition. 42 This concatenation
of evidence was enough, in the zealous mood of war, to damn both
the Alliance and the brewers. And the material was perfect for ex-
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 121
ploitation by the speakers and pamphleteers of the Anti-Saloon
League. One League pamphlet, reviewing the findings, said of Hex-
amer's statement that the only correct form of government was a
constitutional monarchy:
No loyal citizen would compare his country in this way with Ger-
many. Who would trade freedom for slavery, or democracy for
autocracy? Lives there a man in America with soul so dead, that he has
never said with pride, this is my native or chosen land, the best coun-
try in the world? If there be such let him ask for a passport at once,
America is good enough for Americans.
The time had come, the pamphlet went on, for a division between
those who were for German beer drinkers and those were for the
loyal drys, for a split between "unquestioned and undiluted American
patriots, and slackers and enemy sympathizers." Since this was the
year of the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, the most pa-
triotic act of any legislature or citizen was "to abolish the un-American,
pro-German, crime-producing, food-wasting, youth-corrupting, home-
wrecking, treasonable liquor traffic." 43
Their connection with the German-American Alliance was not the
end of the folly of the American brewers. Later on in the same year,
they were proved to have interfered with elections and bought news-
papers, including the Washington Times for a sum of half a million
dollars. In the indictment brought against them by the spy-hunting
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, they were accused of conduct
worthy of a corporate Benedict Arnold. 'The organized liquor traffic
of the country is a vicious interest because it has been unpatriotic,
because it has been pro-German in its sympathies and its conduct"
According to Palmer, the breweries were owned by rich men of Ger-
man sympathies, and they deliberately founded organizations "to keep
young German immigrants from becoming real American citizens." It
was "around the sangerfests and sangerbunds and organizations of that
kind, generally financed by the rich brewers, that the young Germans
who come to America are taught to remember, first, the fatherland, and
second, America." 44 In the atmosphere of the day, such a jumbled
accusation was tantamount to proof, and the contention of the drys
seemed evident, that beer corrupts and powerful brewers corrupt
powerfully.
Two more tendencies in the state of war worked for the dry cause.
The first was the tendency towards centralization. With the federal
government taking over railroads and shipping, putting through con-
scription and the requisition of factories, the friends of states* rights
and personal liberty were powerless. The current argument was one of
122 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
human efficiency, whether in the production of munitions or in the
killing of Huns. Obviously, alcohol was helpful neither to men who
worked long hours at machines nor to those who aimed at the enemy
through rifle sights. As a popular dry stereopticon slide said, above
a reproduction of American soldiers shooting at Germans, beer drink-
ers showed three times as many "errors of precision," and "good shoot-
ing demands good eyesight." Moreover, the rise in federal power
through wartime prohibition seemed trifling compared with the huge
new powers of the government over the lives and goods of Americans.
Yet no other war measures of the Wilson government were written
into the Constitution. They were repealed immediately upon the close
of demobilization. Only national prohibition was preserved in the Con-
stitution like "an unpleasant fly in imperishable amber." 45
The second passing trend that the prohibitionists utilized was the
pressure towards food conservation. Herbert Hoover had dramatized
the need of the Belgians for food. The submarine blockade of England
and France emphasized this need. One dry economist claimed that the
grain used in liquor manufacture would produce eleven million loaves
of bread a day for the starving Allies. Another said that these food-
stuffs would meet the energy requirements of seven million men for a
year. According to Maud Radford Warren, "Every man who works on
the land to produce drink instead of bread is a loss in winning the
war; and worse, he may mean a dead soldier." 46 Moreover, it was
claimed that the liquor trade was "the Kaiser's mightiest ally" in using
up space in the American communications system.
Brewery products fill refrigerator cars, while potatoes rot for lack
of transportation, bankrupting fanners and starving cities. The coal
that they consume would keep the railroads open and the factories
running. Pro-Germanism is only the froth from the German beer-
saloon. Our German Socialist party and the German-American Al-
liance are the spawn of the saloon. Kaiser kultur was raised on beer.
Prohibition is the infallible submarine chaser we must launch by
thousands. The water-wagon is the tank that can level every Prus-
sian trench. Total abstinence is the impassable curtain barrage which
we must ky before every trench. Sobriety is the bomb that will blow
kaiserism to kingdom come. We must all become munition-makers. 47
Such irrational and emotional slogans were effective, where all was
appeal and slogan and glory and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The
wets, indeed, retaliated less effectively, but in kind. They threw back
the charges of treason in the faces of the drys. Sergeant Arthur Guy
Empey, war hero and author of the best-selling Over the Top, declared
that front-line troops needed a rum ration to put them in fighting trim.
"Many of the extremists, on the dry side, think they are patriotic. All
THE FOE IN THE REAR
they are doing is playing into the hands of the Hohenzollern gang/' 48
Accusations were made that the dry effort to prohibit the manufacture
of alcohol was a German plot to stop supplies of the vital alcohol
used for making smokeless gunpowder. Another line of wet attack was
that the loss of revenue from the liquor tax would cripple America's
war effort. The National Bulletin of ,the brewers and distillers went so
124 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
far as to say that the antidraft uprisings in the prohibition states of
Arizona, Oklahoma, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon showed the
"great lack of patriotism" in dry areas. Even worse, there were "many
close students of conditions and events who believe that the Anti-
Saloon League did all it could to encourage war with Germany, in the
hope that the upheaval incident to strife would enable them to push
their special propaganda." The Bulletin rightly pointed out that the
League's effort to tack wartime prohibition onto the Food Control Bill
was holding up Wilson's program for victory, but came to the unfair
conclusion that the drys were "Anti-Saloon Leaguers and Prohibition-
ists first and American citizens afterwards." This statement, the Bul-
letin righteously observed, did not surprise anyone who had intimate
knowledge of the personal and mental traits of the drys. "The Kaiser
has no better friends." 49
Yet if the condition of war was necessary for the drys to secure the
passage of the Eighteenth Amendment through Congress and the state
legislatures, the fact that the amendment was passed in time of war
left a bitter taste in the mouth of the wets, which was not solely their
disappointed thirst. The North American Review accused the drys of
"taking advantage of the Nation's peril/' The Eighteenth Amendment
was the work of "the incorrigible bigots, the hired lobbyists and the
pusillanimous Congressmen who place Prohibition above Patriotism/' 50
Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., expressed a similar feel-
ing when he said, "Over in France and in the occupied parts of Ger-
many the doughboys feel very much peeved that prohibition should
have been enacted in their absence. They feel that something has been
put over on them/' 51 This resentment, whether true or false in theory,
was real enough in its psychological effects. And, on demobilization,
this feeling of disillusion and of being cheated by their country per-
sisted within that highly influential group of Americans, the veterans,
so strongly that their organization was among the first supporters of
modification and repeal. William Faulkner gave a brilliant description
of a bunch of demobilized soldiers sitting about a dance floor in a
small Southern town, feeling that the postwar world of 1919 had taken
advantage of their absence to exclude them. They were "the hang-over
of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled and lost, poor devils.
Once Society drank war, brought them into manhood with a cultivated
taste for war; but now Society seemed to have found something else
for a beverage, while they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-
five per cent" 52 *
The drys denied that the Eighteenth Amendment was put over on
the American people while the Army was away in France. They
* Faulkner is referring to the weak beer legalized under wartime prohibition.
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 125
pointed out that Congress and the legislatures which passed the amend-
ment were elected in 1916, before America entered the war. 53 This is
correct, and it is true that the drys gained many victories in the elec-
tions of 1916. But they could not have secured the two-thirds majority
which they needed in both houses of Congress without the switched
votes of such people as Senator Harding, who were ready to change
sides because of the changed feeling of America at war. A reading of
the House debate on the Eighteenth Amendment confirms this conclu-
sion. Patriotism was the bugle call sounded by the drys to switch the
wavering over to their camp. Congressman Cooper, of Ohio, quoted
Lloyd George's words that the liquor traffic was a greater enemy to
England than Germany and Austria were. According to him, the sacri-
fice by American mothers of their sons to the Army gave the govern-
ment the plain duty of returning each soldier boy "as pure and morally
clean" as on the day he left home. Lunn, of New York, resented the wet
slur on American workingmen, that they could only uphold the Presi-
dent with their right hand if they were allowed a bottle of whisky in
their left. Campbell, of Kansas, said that munitions workers should not
be permitted liquor, since they might send defective armaments to the
soldiers in France. Kelly, of Pennsylvania, said that everything which
helped Prussian might was hurtful to America, and liquor was the chief
ally of the Kaiser. He continued darkly:
There is coming a new political alignment in this country, with
Americans on one side and anti-Americans on the other. All those who
fight under the black banner of corruption and the yellow flag of trea-
son must be lined up so that Americans may know their enemies. That
division will be made. That battle will come. The elimination of the
liquor traffic in American will mean assured victory to the forces of
Americanism.
There were still more appeals to the war psychology of the House.
Congressman Smith, of Idaho, accused Busch, the brewer, of trying to
introduce the German saloon system into America, by his proposal to
serve in his saloons only light wines, beer, and temperance drinks.
Good Americans would no more take his advice than the Kaiser s on
how to run the war. Tollman, of Arkansas, found that "the most arro-
gant, the least polite, the coldest mannered, the most disdainful citizen,
is that haughty plutocrat, the American brewer, usually tainted with
Teuton sympathies and damned by a German conscience." Tillman
thought Tiome" was the dearest word in the language save the word
"mother," and both had to be protected. This could be done by abol-
ishing the "tainted O.K." of the government tax on liquor. Americans
must be mobilized in the dry cause as the Scots clans had been rallied
to war, with all carrying "the burning cross of this crusade to every
126 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
home in our great Republic/' 54 In such a charged atmosphere of cries
to the heart and the flag, it was hardly surprising that more than two-
thirds of Congress voted dry.
Another reason for supposing that the Anti-Saloon League waited
for the war to launch its campaign for the Eighteenth Amendment is
its timing. If the League had been sure of a majority before war was
declared, it would have pressed for the amendment at the beginning
of 1917 rather than at the close of the year. Indeed, the drys made
many damaging admissions that they had cleverly exploited the war to
bring about prohibition. And whether national prohibition would have
come without the war or not, the fact that the drys praised their own
smartness in using the war damned them out of their own mouths as
guilty of employing abnormal times to secure their own ends. In the
words of the American Issue of May 14, 1919, "The spirit of service and
self-sacrifice exemplified in an efficient and loyal staff made it possible
to take advantage of the war situation, and of the confusion which He
whom we serve has wrought among our enemies." 65 A sense of destiny,
rarely absent from the minds of revolutionaries, touched the League
leaders with the conviction that the League had been created to save
America from a pacifist, German conspiracy by aiding it to plunge into
the militant Christianity of a just war. Purley A. Baker thought there
was no doubt that, without the Anti-Saloon League, "America would
have been sufficiently Germanized to have kept her out of the war."
Baker continued, "The hand of a good Providence may be as distinctly
seen in. the origin of the Anti-Saloon League a quarter of a century
ago, as it was in the delivery of the children of Israel from their forty
years of wandering/' 56
The hysteria of war cast its false and persecuting simplicity across
the land until the Red Scare of 1919 died from lack of evidence and
from ridicule. In this period, the Volstead Act was passed. Again, the
drys made use of the militant spirit of the times to accuse their oppo-
nents of treason. An Anti-Saloon League official declared that the man
who sent a bomb to Palmer's home "was inspired by Germans with wet
tendencies." 57 Senator Arthur Capper, of Kansas, attributed his home
state's decency and progress to prohibition, which had kept anarchists,
the Bolsheviki, and strikers out of the state. 58 * Congressman Alben
* A current folk song ridiculed the eternal claims of Kansas to arid virtue:
Oh they say that drink's a sin
In Kansas
Oh they say that drink's a sin
In Kansas
Oh they say that drink's a sin
So they gwzde all they kin
And they throw it up agin
In Kansas.
CREEPING BARRAGE/ 127
Barkley, of Kentucky, knew of nothing else in the country which con-
tributed so much to Bolshevism as the pernicious doctrine of the
wets. 59 Indeed, the pending "industrial war" in the United States was
given as a reason in the Senate for hurrying through the Volstead
Act. 60 Over and over again, the drys took the stand that law and obe-
dience to the Eighteenth Amendment was the only way to preserve
American liberties from the new scapegoat of the nation, the Bolshe-
viki, whose ideology had, in William Howard Taft's opinion, a "curious
affinity" to autocratic German mentality. 61
But the mood of national militancy declined when the Palmer raids
proved that the seven thousand most dangerous radicals in America
were guilty of nothing at all, and that the police power of the federal
government could be more subversive of personal liberty than any
chimera of Red revolution. The Anti-Saloon League tried to preserve
its belligerent spirit and its concept of itself as the shock troop of the
Lord, but the appeals which brought out dry voters in wartime were
answered by catcalls in time of peace. The drys were left with a sense
of nostalgia for the years when their voice seemed to be the voice of all
true Americans and patriots. The national feeling then had not been
"manufactured sentiment"; all the Anti-Saloon League had done "was
simply to direct it where and in the manner in which it would do the
most good." 62
The drys thought that, even if prohibition had been passed because
of the psychology of war, this was a good state of mind.
The truth is that the tension of war lifted the general American
mind to a rare elevation of unselfishness and moral courage; the
thought of a society organized for everybody's welfare and for no-
body's anti-social profit cast over the people's imagination a spell that
promised a far better post-war than pre-war America.
And if, in the twenties, many of the high colors of that promise had
faded, "the sensible reaction for sensible men" was "not a sneer at dis-
appointed hopes but an honest resolve to recover and retain the aims
that then stirred the national heart." 63 But what the drys forgot is that,
although war breeds its own sacrifice, it is a sacrifice of lives as well as
personal habits; and, although peace breeds its own laxity of morals, it
also allows the voice of reason and tolerance to be heard. Such a con-
vinced wet as G. K. Chesterton could admit in 1922 that prohibition
had been passed "in a sort of fervour or fever of self-sacrifice, which
was a part of the passionate patriotism of America in the war." But he
continued shewdly that men could not remain standing stiffly in such
symbolic attitudes; nor could a permanent policy be founded on "some-
thing analogous to flinging a gauntlet or uttering a battle cry." 64
128 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
The dry mastery of the techniques of pressure and propaganda ex-
erted influence on Americans from the cradle to the grave. The politi-
cians of America were particularly susceptible to this influence. Those
who had political ambitions were forced to take up a stand on the
prohibition issue. Yet if they announced their support of either wets or
drys, they would alienate powerful groups of voters, and that would
be the end of their political ambitions. Thus the nature of the prohibi-
tion problem forced the trimmers of mankind, the politicians, to trim
still more. They could not declare themselves on the issue; yet if they
did not declare themselves, they might still be defeated at the polls.
They sought a middle road, but that road was hard to find. Thus they
progressed, shifting back and forth, along the delicate path of repre-
sentatives of the people.
Each politician met the prohibition issue in his own particular way.
His attitude was a compound of upbringing and circumstance, geog-
raphy and party line. He demonstrated both his own feelings and the
feelings of those whom he sought to represent His evasions were a
mirror and a reflection of the evasions of a complete country over the
matter of prohibition. If politicians were forced to equivocate over the
dry dilemma, their fault lay originally in the divided feelings of the
people.
Those who were, or sought to be, President of the United States
were particularly troubled by the issue. They had to appeal to a na-
tional majority and could not afford to offend large groups. In their
attempts to reach the White House, they had no relief from the liquor
problem. Their personal histories provide examples of the choices and
pressures which prohibition forced upon all politicians and upon all
men who were dependent for their jobs on the will of the people. In
the story of these individuals, who sought to represent a whole nation,
lies a microcosm of the tragedy which overtook the whole nation. All
these men tried to avoid the prohibition issue, or to be moderate in
their solutions. But the extremism of the dry reform, the urging of po-
litical ambition, or the exigency of office drove them to the same excess
that they deplored in the friends and foes of prohibition. He who
would be President is the least able to avoid the problems of his time.
CHAPTER f
Trimming for the White House
I am not a politician, and my other habits are good.
ARTEMUS WARD
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN: APOSTLE OF PROHIBITION
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN was frequently called the Great
Commoner. Much of his greatness lay in his mastery of the great
commonplace. For rural America, he was the apostle of the average,
the evangel of everyman, the doyen of the drys. He thought that he be-
lieved in what his father had believed, and his father's father: in the
virtue of the female country virtues and the value of the male country
values. Those were good who had a white skin, a farm, or a small busi-
ness; who went to a Protestant church and believed that the Bible was
wholly true; and who preached peace and prohibition. 1 Those were
bad who were not Anglo-Saxon, had large businesses, and lived in
large cities; who went to mass or even worse did not believe in the
Bible at all; and who preached war and wetness. If Bryan talked isola-
tionism and practiced imperialism as Secretary of State, talked poverty
and died with an estate worth over a million dollars, and talked peace
only to be buried at his own request with full military honors in Ar-
lington Cemetery, he was defeated by the same vices that were to de-
feat his village America. For he embodied the prejudices of the old
Middle West and the South. He spoke with a silver tongue of the
things that his countrymen already knew and could not say. He went
down with them before mass communications and the masses in the
cities. Loved and jeered at, he died, after outliving his time. The savior
of one day is the snigger of the next.
Bryan's parents were dry and quickly made him a total abstainer. He
once said that he did not know the day he first signed the pledge, but
that he guessed it was the day he first signed his name. He signed the
pledge many times afterwards, not because he had broken it, but to
encourage college students to do the same; his wife called the students
he thus improved "stars in his diadem." 2 When he was a student him-
self at Illinois College, he defended in debate the resolution that in-
129
130 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
temperance was more destructive than war; indeed, his own death was
partially the result of his gluttony. Leaving college, he became an un-
successful lawyer. He earned his first money by collecting the debts of
a saloonkeeper; he satisfied his conscience on the point by stating that,
although those who drank alcohol were sinners, those who drank and
did not pay for it were worse ones. 8
But Bryan, for the first eighteen years of his political career, did not
allow his private habits to obtrude upon his public life. In 1890, he
was elected to a seat in Congress with the help of the business and
liquor interests in Omaha. As he became more and more powerful in
the Democratic party, he became less and less outspoken on the liquor
question. The Democrats depended for some of their money and much
of their vote on the brewers and the drinking cities.
When Bryan, then the leader of the Nebraska Democrats, came to
the party convention of 1896 as a young man of thirty-six, he came, in
the opinion of Clarence Darrow, expecting to be nominated for the
presidency, although no one else thought of him as such a possibility.
Darrow, later to turn the aged Bryan s eloquence to ridicule at the
Scopes trial, went on to explain why Bryan's well-rehearsed cross-of-
gold speech had the fantastic effect of making him the presidential
candidate that year, after men and women had cheered and laughed
and cried to listen to him.
Platforms are not the proper forums for spreading doubts. The
miscellaneous audience wants to listen to a man who knows. How he
knows is of no concern to them. Such an audience wishes to be told,
and especially wants to be told what it already believes. Mr. Bryan
told the Democratic convention of 1896 in Chicago what he believed.
Not only did he tell them that, but he told them what they believed,
and what they wanted to believe, and wished to have come true. 4
Biyan had the gift of expressing uncommonly well the common yearn-
ings of the rural mind.
Bryan ran for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908; he lost each time
by an increasing number of votes. On the 1896 campaign train, he
used to rub himself with gin to remove his sweat so that he frequently
appeared, smelling like a wrecked distillery; but the reporters never
accused him of drinking his rub, since he spent the long journeys try-
ing to convert them to abstinence. He campaigned for free silver and
various progressive measures; but he never mentioned prohibition. As
his wife rather naively stated in his memoirs, he was slow to take up
the cause of national prohibition, since Tie did not want to confuse the
mind of the voter with too many issues and was unwilling to approve
this reform until it was ripe for action." 5
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 131
Prohibition was the bugaboo of would-be Presidents; it lost wet
votes without gaining enough compensatory dry ones. William Jen-
nings Bryan did not adopt the cause of national prohibition until he
was fairly certain he would never be able to run for President again,
and until he needed a victorious new crusade to restore his political
power and reputation. In 1920, he was to have an unpleasant row with
William H. Anderson, the superintendent of the New York Anti-Saloon
League, who accused him of jumping on the dry wagon only when it
was sure to roll home.
Bryan's wife wrote that he started his campaign for county option in
a hired hall in Omaha in 1908. He had reason to be annoyed with the
liquor interests. Missouri, which had voted for him in 1896 and 1900,
voted for Taft in 1908. Bryan explained the switch and his losses in the
large cities by blaming the influence of the brewers, who opposed all
potential Presidents who were personal teetotalers. Moreover, although
Bryan had supported the progressive reforms of the initiative and the
referendum in Nebraska, they had been blocked by Democratic Sena-
tors in the pay of the wets, who feared that the drys would force
through measures to close the saloons by means of a referendum.
Bryan brought up the matter at a state party convention in 1910 and
split the Democrats over the issue. He was heavily defeated in the vot-
ing by the wets and lost control of the Democratic state machine. He
had his revenge by turning against the Democratic and wet nominee
for Governor, and by securing his defeat. Bryan's reasons for disloyalty
to his party were moral:
The liquor business is on the defensive; its representatives are for
the most part lawless themselves and in league with lawlessness. They
are in partnership with the gambling heD and the brothel. They are the
most corrupt and corrupting influence in politics, and I shall not by
voice or vote aid them in establishing a Reign of Terror in this state. 6
Despite the bitter opposition of the Nebraska wets, Bryan was
elected as a delegate to the Democratic convention of 1912. Because of
his help in Woodrow Wilson's nomination and because of his party
services in the campaigns of sixteen years, Bryan was appointed Secre-
tary of State by Wilson. His only aid to the dry cause was to ban liquor
from his official dinners. American policy in the Caribbean remained
as aggressive as ever, provoking in Theodore Roosevelt the remark,
"Well! grape juice diplomacy under Wilson does not bid fair to be
much better than dollar diplomacy under Taft." 7
The adoption of the policy of national prohibition by the Anti-Saloon
League in 1913 put pressure on all politicians to declare themselves on
the issue. The pressure was particularly hard on Bryan. He was the
132 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
leading teetotaler among politicians, and he depended for his political
power on the dry Middle West. Yet his behavior shows that he put his
party before his personal convictions until his personal convictions
could become a weapon to keep his power within his party. In the
elections of 1914, he was careful to equivocate on the prohibition issue,
since Wilson wanted no wet votes lost in the election of a Democratic
majority in Congress. It was only at the safe end of the campaign that
Bryan's magazine, the Commoner, announced that he would in future
support state-wide prohibition, although he would not support na-
tional prohibition.
Bryan was unhappy in Washington. His home was on the Chautau-
qua circuits, delivering his golden platitudes on the subject of "The
Prince of Peace" or "The Price of a Soul/' Moreover, his political power
lay in the West. After failing in three presidential campaigns, his only
hope of retaining his influence in his party was to lead a new crusade,
which would capture both party and country. That crusade was pro-
hibition. In 1915, Bryan looked at the increasing victories of the drys
in the country areas which loved him, and found them good. While he
was still Secretary of State, in defiance of the policy of his party and
his President, Bryan began campaigning for state prohibition. In 1915,
he made sixty speeches in forty counties to some quarter of a million
people. He accepted payment for some of these speeches, although his
wife declared that he made a dozen free prohibition speeches for each
hired one. Bryan declared shockingly that he could not live within his
income as Secretary of State, and justified his dry lectures as a means
of keeping in touch with the American people as well as making a
living. 8
Indeed, Bryan was right. His last hope of leading the Democrats was
to capture the party for the dry cause. After his resignation from his
cabinet post in 1915, this became even more true. Bryan resigned as a
protest again Wilson's policy towards Germany, which he thought was
leading towards war. By his resignation, Bryan put himself at the head
of what he knew to be a majority of his countrymen, those who wanted
to preserve the peace and to abolish the saloon. Although, out of de-
ference to Wilson in the elections of 1916, he spoke softly on the topic
of national prohibition, he declared for it less than one month after
the elections were over. His reasons for doing so were curiously out-
spoken for a moral leader. He said that he had not expected to see
prohibition become an "acute national question" until 1920. But "owing
to causes which no one could foresee," the issue had been precipitated
upon the nation. "The Democratic Party, having won without the aid
of the wet cities, and having received the support of nearly all the Pro-
hibition States and the States where women vote, is released from any
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 133
obligation to the liquor traffic/' 9 Therefore, he implied, for the best
political reasons, he must now lead the Democrats publicly in the way
in which his own private morality had always led him.
Yet, once war was declared against Germany, Bryan's behavior mir-
rored that curious aggressive nationalism at the basis of American paci-
fism, that strange violence at the core of the Christian drys. Bryan vol-
unteered to serve in the Army as he had done in the war in Cuba, as
colonel of his own Nebraska volunteers. He wrote to Wilson that he
would fill in his time before he was called to the colors by assisting the
Young Men's Christian Association in safeguarding the morals of the
soldiers in their camps. He would preserve the Army from liquor and
loose women so that the soldiers could die pure and sober. He was not
called to the colors, nor was that other famous veteran from Cuba,
Theodore Roosevelt. Bryan's mission in winning the war was confined
to propaganda. He traveled widely in the West and South, speaking in
Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Louisiana,
at "mostly peace and prohibition meetings." 10 * But this time, his
message was of the virtues of peace with victory, and of prohibition
as patriotism.
As Bryan lost his political influence, he tried to increase his moral
influence. His example and practice taught clergymen how to lobby
for peace, prohibition, and the Bible. 11 He had the happiness of seeing
his old. state, Nebraska, ratify the Eighteenth Amendment; suitably, it
was the thirty-sixth state to ratify, making the amendment legal. He
also received a touching message from the leaders of the Anti-Saloon
. League, thanking him for his propagandist and political support of the
Eighteenth Amendment. He had done "so much to put the cause of
temperance and prohibition 'over the top.' " 12 And he was in the select
company that met at Washington to herald the first day of regenerated
America under the Volstead Act on January 16, 1920. The audience
greeted the great change with the doxology. At one minute to mid-
night, Bryan preached a sermon on the text, "They are dead that
sought the young child's life." He explained that the text was peculiarly
appropriate, as King Alcohol had slain a million times as many chil-
dren as Herod.
Bryan's lectures on temperance were enormously effective. He made
abstinence the supreme self-sacrifice and liquor the ultimate sin. He
linked prohibition with every virtue and with the cause of peace. He
was the very voice and soul of that great American movement for self-
education, the Chautauqua. In fact, Bryan's rise paralleled the rise of
the Chautauqua in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and his
* Mis. Bryan significantly recorded in her diary, "I had some glimpses of what
a national campaign on the subject would be a veritable religious crusade."
134 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
death in 1925 was also reflected in the decline of Chautauqua, after its
apogee in the previous year, when thirty million Americans had heard
its message.
Historians of the Chautauqua movement have brought out its huge
influence on country and small-town life. 13 They point out that Bryan's
virtues -his sweetness of temper, his magnificent appearance, his
teetotalism, his simplicity, and his bell-like voice - were exactly what
the Chautauquas demanded. His power in rural America was very real.
His tragedy was that the clear-cut values of the village could not be
translated into the complex political action demanded by national af-
fairs.
Bryan was, in fact, most at home in front of that tented audience,
which adored him, delivering "passages of serious beauty and haunting
logic" on the good things of life, such as peace and prohibition, love
and water. His encomium of water is worth quoting, as an example of
that style which impressed the rural crowds as the revealed truth.
Water, the daily need of every living thing. It ascends from the
seas, obedient to the summons of the sun, and, descending, showers
blessing upon the earth; it gives of its sparkling beauty to the fragrant
flower; its alchemy transmutes base clay into golden grain; it is the
canvas upon which the finger of the Infinite traces the radiant bow of
promise. It is the drink that refreshes and adds no sorrow with it
Jehovah looked upon it at creation's dawn and said "It is good." 14
Bryan embodied and voiced rural faith and rural prejudice. He ran
for President when this creed could put up a fair fight for victory. In
his closing years, he was jeered by the urban masses, which would
overthrow these beliefs. Although he successfully kept wet planks out
of the Democratic party platforms in the conventions of 1920 and 1924,
he was hooted and booed at the second convention by galleries of New
Yorkers for his defense of the Ku EHux Klan. 15 Still more tragic was the
international ridicule of the aging Bryan defending his holy Bible at
the Scopes trial against the sniping of die city lawyer, Clarence Darrow.
Truly, the urban intellectuals made a monkey out of the pathetic old
man.
Bryan's death seventeen days after the Scopes trial was merciful. He
did not live to see the destruction by depression of the country Amer-
ica in which he believed. He did not live to find his chief method of
influence, his hold over the rural Chautauqua audiences, destroyed
with the financial failure of the circuits. For Bryan's power and weak-
ness lay in his voice. It was his tongue which persuaded others of the
virtues of prohibition and himself. He expressed exactly what country
America wished to hear, but only what country America wished to
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 135
hear. His success with a minority of the people meant his failure with
the majority. Moreover, the competing voices of civilization, of radio
and movies, of entertainers and advertisers, diminished the attraction
of the golden tones of the Great Commoner. When technology could
make a fireside chat audible throughout a nation, of what value was a
single voice which could be heard without artificial aid from a distance
of a quarter of a mile?
The phenomenon that was Bryan was a danger as well as a tragedy.
This aspect of him was well brought out in the vicious epitaph on him
printed in the New York World.
He professed himself a Democrat and a Christian, but at bottom
he was always a man looking for a point of conflict where his talent
for factionalism could find free play. Thus as a Democrat he spent
his chief energies quarreling with Democrats, and as a Christian he
ended his life quarreling angrily with other Christians. ... It was
his conviction that you could solve great questions cheaply, on hunches
and by a phrase, that made his influence and his example a dangerous
one. The harm he did to his party by committing it against its own
tradition to the centralized coercion of prohibition, the harm he did
to pacifism by associating it with empty phrases, the harm he did to
Protestantism by associating it with ignorance and legalized intoler-
anceabove all, the great and unforgivable harm he did to his
country by introducing a religious feud into politics were all part
and parcel of a life lived without respect for or loyalty to the laborious
search for truth. 16
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: KAISER OF DEMOCRACY
WHILE BRYAN was popular only in the country, Theodore Roosevelt
was popular everywhere. Scholar and boxer, historian and Western
sheriff, intellectual and cavalry leader, his appeal cut across lines of
party and geography. Yet, moral and forthright though his statements
were, his attitude toward prohibition declared the calculating and pa-
ternalist streak at the back of all his political doings. He was not con-
cerned with the rights and wrongs of the dry cause any more than he
was concerned with the rights and wrongs of the trusts. His arguments
against both were the same, that they made the body politic corrupt.
Thus he believed in their strict regulation according to the law. As
George Bernard Shaw said, Roosevelt was the nearest thing to a Ho-,
henzollern that the American Constitution would allow him to be. He
did not mind about the effect of spirits on the soul, but he was anxious
about their effect on the health of the people. He was brought up too
graciously to think that beer drinking was a sin except for soldiers and
sailors when they were fighting for their country. Liquor was a mere
136 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
police and economic problem, only a menace when it was unlicensed
and uncontrolled. In reality, the liquor seller was often far less of a
problem in politics than the dedicated prohibitionist
Roosevelt first expressed his views on prohibition in public to the
state legislature of New York in 1884. He opposed a resolution asking
for a referendum on a state prohibition amendment. He pointed out
that it was idle to hope to enforce a law when nineteen-twentieths of
the people did not believe in its justice. The resolution was lost. But
later Roosevelt found himself ironically in the opposite position. He
was made one of the New York Police Commissioners in 1895, with
orders to close down all New York saloons on Sundays. His urge for
efficiency and authority as usual got the better of his sympathies for
the freedom of the Sunday drinker. He persecuted violators of the Sab-
bath law with vim and vigor. As he told the Catholic Total Abstinence
Union, the people of America, although they were united in striving to
do away with the evils of the liquor traffic, did not have morals as their
primary concern. "We recognize as the first and most vital element in
Americanism the orderly love of liberty. I put two words together, 'Or-
derly-Liberty'; and we recognize that we feel that absolutely without
regard to race, or origin, or different creeds/' 17 In Theodore Roosevelt's
version of Americanism, orderliness came before liberty.
Roosevelt's views on prohibition are shown most clearly in a manu-
script which he was too cautious to publish. It is called On the Needs
of Commonplace Virtues and was written in 1897, after his unfortunate
experiences as a policeman. It is an interesting document, in view of
his later prohibitionist statements. It shows that, above all, he was a
politician and a pragmatic prophet, concerned with the possible rather
than the good. To him, reformers who were extremists become "at best
useless members of the world's surface, and at worst, able allies of the
vicious and disorderly classes." The temperance people were a good
example. "Few things would more benefit the community as a whole
than the widespread growth of a healthy temperance movement. Among
poorer people especially there is probably no other one evil which is
such a curse as excessive drinking." But, Roosevelt continued, while he
grew more and more to realize the damage done by intemperance, he
also grew more and more to realize the damage done by "the intem-
perate friends of temperance. When temperance people were willing
to act wisely, and with appreciation of the limitations of human nature,
and therefore of human effort, they could do much good. When they
were not willing to act wisely they merely did harm; sometimes only a
little harm, and sometimes very much."
Roosevelt particularly objected to the dry habit of running prohibi-
tion candidates in an election between a reform and a machine politi-
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 137
cian; this stupidity often split the progressive vote and led to the vic-
tory of corruption. Politics was more than the art of the possible; it was
the need for the possible.
The effort to get the impossible is always bound to be feeble. . . .
No liquor law at all, or the worst liquor law which the wit of a Tam-
many alderman could devise, would work better in New York than
absolute prohibition, for the very excellent reason that nobody would
pay the slightest heed to such absolute prohibition, and so, in addition
to having free liquor, we should have the demoralizing spectacle of
open and contemptuous disregard of the law of the land. 18
Vote splitting was the chief nuisance of prohibition for all politi-
cians. It cut across the usual party loyalties. Moreover, when the pro-
hibitionists had not got what they wanted in state or nation, they
tended to blame the party in power. The minority party was obviously
innocent since it had no legislative means of suppressing the saloons.
Therefore it could afford to make vague promises to the drys in return
for electoral support. Only the dominant party could be damned by the
drys, until it enacted prohibition. Then the drys switched to its sup-
port. For now they wanted executive law enforcement, not law change.
They wanted conservation, not revolution. They wanted a strong fed-
eral and state power, not freedom for small communities. And here
Roosevelt agreed with them.
If Roosevelt disliked the attack on personal liberty which was the
ideology of prohibition, he also liked the order of a land free of sa-
loons especially in time of war. He made the same equation of pro-
hibition and patriotism as did the drys. A measure of Roosevelt's
change of attitude is shown by a letter written to William Allen White,
the Kansas editor, in 1914 in time of peace. White had asked Roose-
velt to support national prohibition and government-controlled rail-
ways. Roosevelt replied:
As for prohibition nationally, it would merely mean free rum and
utter lawlessness in our big cities. Worthy people sometimes say that
liquor is responsible for nine tenths of all crime. As a matter of fact
foreigners of the races that furnish most crime in New York at the
present time do not drink at all. ... I do not believe that the Ameri-
can people can be dragooned into being good by any outside influence,
whether it is a king or the majority in some other locality. 19
Yet, with the declaration of war in 1917, Roosevelt supported both
the federal control of the railroads and the forcible conservation of
food through prohibition. National efficiency and preparedness, irre-
spective of morality, demanded prohibition. Patriotism in time of war
meant the dragooning of people into being sober, if not into being
138 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
good. He wrote a much-misused letter to Clarence True Wilson, the
author of Dry or Die: the Anglo-Saxon Dilemma. The letter stated that
one of Roosevelt's sons had become a permanent prohibitionist after
seeing the effect of alcohol on the soldiers in Pershing's Army, and that
Roosevelt himself wished the drys every success in their effort to stop
the waste of food, men, labor, and brainpower during these days. 20
Roosevelt died a public supporter of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Yet there was more than patriotism to the ex-President's change of
front. There was a shrewd political calculation. Roosevelt was a past
master at swimming the way the tide was running, and speaking as if
he were swimming the only way that his morality and his God could
let him swim. A study of his letters to his political associates on the
liquor problem shows the careful expediency at the back of his moral
protestations.
In the presidential campaign of 1908, he was continually sending the
Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, letters of advice. On July
16, he wrote that he approved of Taft's stand on prohibition; it was the
same as Roosevelt's own. The matter was not a national issue; it was a
state or local issue. Indeed, the fanatical drys had a wicked attitude,
but they must be dealt with carefully.
As a mere matter of precaution I would be careful to put in your
hearty sympathy with every effort to do away with the drink evil.
You will hardly suspect me of being a prohibitionist crank. . . . My
experience with prohibitionists, however, is that the best way to deal
with them is to ignore them. I would not get drawn into any dis-
cussion with them under any circumstances. 21
Roosevelt's arguments on prohibition are clear at this point: to avoid
the subject if one can, and to straddle if one must. He himself was so
discreet in public on the subject that both sides claimed him as a sup-
porter in 1914. The drys said that he had declared for state-wide pro-
hibition and the dry vote in Ohio, the wets that he was against state-
wide prohibition on principle. Roosevelt tried to get the best of both
worlds, writing on October 2 that he only spoke on the matter when he
knew about the local conditions involved. 22 If he failed to be convinc-
ing it was because it was difficult to seem a friend of temperance in
intemperate times.
By 1915, however, every politician could see that the prohibitionists
were gaining dry ground. National prohibition, especially if war was
declared, seemed likely to win. And Roosevelt liked to be on the win-
ning side, even if there was hardly an enemy to defeat, as at San Juan
Hill. Thus he wrote to Raymond Robbins on June 3 in a far more sober
mood. Robbins had made out that no President could be elected in
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 139
1916 who was not sound on the issues of Rum and Romanism. Roose-
velt took exception to the imputation that an attack on Romanism
should be an issue in a presidential campaign; he was dead by the time
Al Smith ran in 1928. But he was very wary over the question of alco-
hol and forecast a dry victory.
I do not believe that Prohibition at the moment would prohibit in
the United States; but I am heartily in favor of the vigorous control
and ultimate suppression of the open saloon for private profit; and I
would make the Federal Government at once take active action in
support of the local authorities of every district in which Prohibition
has been voted by the people themselves. I do not want to go in
advance of the people on this issue, for I do not believe you can do
any good on an issue of this kind by getting too far in advance of
them; but I believe they will ultimately come to the national sup-
pression of the liquor traffic and I am heartily with them when they
do so come to it. 2 *
Patriotism and political expertise made Theodore Roosevelt a pro-
hibitionist He became so confirmed a dry that he brought a libel ac-
tion against a small-town editor who claimed that Roosevelt was a
heavy drinker. He was careful to explain that if he had ever said that
he was a heavy drinker he had said it as a joke, and that listening fools
had taken the jest too seriously. 24 He was even ready to refuse the
chance of running for Governor of New York State in 1918, on the
grounds that he supported the drys. This actually did him no political
harm, since Boss Barnes, when he was told, said with much force: "I
don't care a damn whether he is for prohibition or against prohibition.
The people will vote for him because he is Theodore Roosevelt!" 25
This was the truth. "Teddys" views on prohibition did not matter,
because he was "Teddy." He was dear to the heart of every urban
American who dreamed of an outdoor life spent in the massacre of the
larger animals, and of every country American who liked the paradox
of the clean-living politician. He was rough, tough, and efficient, the
friend of the cowboy and the boxer and the nation. His speeches about
liquor did not matter too much; he had drunk sufficient in his time.
Whatever his devious political utterances might be, it was more or less
understood that he really wanted every virile, manly American to have
his small amount of beer and war. But war before beer. If his beloved
Germany was the enemy, then the German brewers must go.
President Wilson continued to deny Roosevelt his two dearest wishes,
the Congressional Medal of Honor for his Cuban charge and command
of his own division in the war of France, despite pleas in the House to
recruit this "kaiser of democracy." 26 In return, Roosevelt was plotting
with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge how best to wreck Wilson's peace
140 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
when he died. He had remained true to his prejudices concerning the
necessity for power politics and war among competing nations, even if
the sentiment of the majority may well have supported the League of
Nations in 1919. He was false, however, to his beliefs about temper-
ance, in order to accommodate himself with the apparent majority. He
might have died more honestly if he had held to his opinions of 1907
on both peace and prohibition:
With the sole exception of temperance, I think that more nonsense
is talked about peace than about any other really good cause with
which I am acquainted. Everybody ought to believe in peace and
everybody ought to believe in temperance; but the professional ad-
vocates of both tend towards a peculiarly annoying form of egoistic
lunacy. 27
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT AND CHARLES EVANS HUGHES:
FROM TEMPERANCE TO JUSTICE
IF POLITICS pushed William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt
into declaring themselves for prohibition, the administration of justice
did the same service for William Howard Taft and Charles Evans
Hughes. There were, indeed, many other similarities between these
two physically dissimilar men. Both had fathers who objected to the use
of strong liquor and tobacco; both reacted from these early prohibi-
tions of their youth. Both became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
after running unsuccessfully for President. Taft had been President for
four years from 1908 owing to his nomination within the Republican
party by Theodore Roosevelt; he lost the office to Woodrow Wilson
when Roosevelt came forward as a Progressive in 1912 and split the
Republican vote. Had Hughes avoided a split between the Progressives
and Republicans in 1916 by shaking Hiram Johnson's hand in Califor-
nia, he might have been President in 1916; but California voted for
Wilson, and he returned to the White House. Both Taft and Hughes
opposed national prohibition and found themselves in the position of
heading the Supreme Court, which upheld the Eighteenth Amend-
ment But, while Taft's experience as Chief Justice made him change
his opinion from wet to dry, Hughes remained a wet in all but inter-
pretation of the law, and became one of the greatest champions of civil
rights ever to sit on the Supreme Court.
In the presidential campaign of 1908, Taft took Theodore Roosevelt's
political advice and followed his own inclinations. He was a temperate
man himself; in his own opinion, he was "as temperate a man as there
is anywhere." 28 He applied his personal wariness of liquor to his politi-
cal opinions and declared that he supported the moderate position of
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 141
local option. Even the visit of the amazon Mrs. Carry Nation did not
shake his position. Taft would not say to her that he supported the
temperance crusade. Luckily, she had left her hatchet at home, and
could only denounce him vocally as a wet and an infidel, since he was
Unitarian by faith and thus believed Christ to be a bastard.
Taft was President before the Anti-Saloon League decided on their
campaign for national prohibition. Thus he was not unduly bothered
by the dry problem while he was in the White House. He had all the
lawyer's veneration for the holiness of the Constitution and did not
want the sacred document altered. After runing third in the presiden-
tial campaign of 1912, behind Wilson and Roosevelt, he continued his
opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment from private life. He con-
ceded that a great deal of evil resulted from the drinking of too much
alcohol; but his impression was that there was less drinking among the
intelligentsia than ever before, and that the failure of state prohibition
had provided a warning against national prohibition. 29 He was glad of
the failure of the Hobson resolution in 1914, since he was too much of
an individualist and a Republican to welcome the vast increase in the
number of federal officials needed to enforce such a law. He forecast
correctly that prohibition would make politics in the big cities even
more corrupt than the saloons did. 80
Indeed, by 1919, The Yearbook of the United States Brewers 9 Asso-
ciation was gleefully reprinting the ex-President's denunciation of the
Eighteenth Amendment. Taft stated bluntly:
I am opposed to national prohibition. I am opposed to it because
I think it is a mixing of the national government in a matter that
should be one of local settlement. I think sumptuary laws are matters
for parochial adjustment. I think it will vest in the national govern-
ment, and those who administer it, so great a power as to be dangerous
in political matters. I would be in favor of state prohibition if I
thought prohibition prohibited, but I think in the long run, except in
local communities where the majority of the citizens are in favor of
the law, it will be violated. I am opposed to the presence of laws on
the statute book that cannot be enforced and as such demoralize the
enforcement of all laws. ... I think it is most unwise to fasten upon
the United States a prohibitory system under the excitement of the
war, which I do not hesitate to say, every sensible supporter of pro-
hibition in the end will regret. ... I don't drink myself at all, and I
don't oppose prohibition on the ground that it limits the liberties of
the people.
Taft's views were similar to those of Theodore Roosevelt; he op-
posed national prohibition on practical grounds, not in support of any
nonsense about the sacred liberty of the subject. As he declared later:
142 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
A national prohibition amendment to the federal Constitution will
be adopted against the views and practices of a majority of the people
in many of the large cities, and in one-fourth or less of the states. The
business of manufacturing alcohol liquor and beer will go out of the
hands of law-abiding members of the community, and will be trans-
ferred to the quasi-criminal class. In the communities where the major-
ity will not sympathize with a federal law's restrictions, large numbers
of federal officers will be needed for its enforcement. The central
government now has very wide war powers. When peace comes, these
must end, if the republic is to be preserved.
Taft continued to say that, although wartime prohibition might be
temporarily desirable, the nation must "summer and winter'* such a
measure for years. People must learn to adjust themselves to soft
drinks in time of peace. The Eighteenth Amendment would be a strain
on the bonds of the Union. It would produce variety in the enforce-
ment of the law. The matter of light or heavy enforcement would
corrupt and confuse elections. Individual self-restraint, improved so-
cial standards, and strong employers were better ways of bringing
about temperance. Taft opposed both the corrupt saloons and the
moral crusade of the "minority" drys. He deplored the fact that the
Anti-Saloon League backed dry candidates for political office, however
useless their public service was, and that weak politicians knuckled
under to the prohibitionists for fear of losing the dry vote. 81
TafYs opinions at this time are worth quoting at length because
they set out admirably the conservative's and lawyer's objections to
national prohibition. Extension of the power of the federal govern-
ment, fear of increased opportunities for graft and crime, dislike of
moral legislation, knowledge of the impossibility of effective enforce-
ment, anger at the methods of the drys and their use of war psychology
to get their business through, stress on the need for prolonged testing
of such a vast reform, belief in individualism and education these
were the reasons Taft gave for opposing the Eighteenth Amendment.
They were the same reasons that were given by the conservative
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, which pressed for
repeal throughout the twenties.
But politics made Taft deny himself in the interests of justice. Presi-
dent Harding appointed him to head the Supreme Court in June, 1921.
His new job was to make the Constitution work, with all its amend-
ments and additions. Taft venerated the document as the basis of
American law and liberty. He believed in it whole and indivisible,
as he believed in his Unitarian God. So he changed his mind and his
convictions over prohibition and became the most arid of the drys,
even quarreling with his wife in the only running row they had in all
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 143
their long marriage. Later he wonderingly said, in the naiVe belief
that his old world, not himself, had changed its mind: "It used to be
that all the nuts were drys. But now it seems all the nuts are wets." 82
Charles Evans Hughes was already an Associate Justice on the
Supreme Court when he decided to accept the Republican nomination
for President in 1916. It was the first time a major party had taken its
candidate from the Supreme Court; but the Republicans were hard
pressed to find someone of like mental and moral stature to President
Wilson, running for office for a second time on a peace policy. Both
Hughes and Wilson were progressive intellectuals, sons of clergymen,
internationalists, sometime university professors, and reform state
Governors. In fact, Theodore Roosevelt once said Hughes was merely
Wilson with whiskers.
Prohibition was not a major issue in the campaign of 1916. Peace
or preparedness was the battleground. Theodore Roosevelt's belliger-
ent bellowings effectively branded the Republicans as the war party,
despite Hughes's protestations. The known Anglophile Wilson even
received the majority of the German votes, only to declare war on
the Kaiser, soon after winning the election. The Anti-Saloon League
continued its policy of endorsing dry candidates of both parties; but
the drys do not seem to have backed war and the Republican presi-
dential candidate overmuch, even though lining up with the Allies
might have given national prohibition its best chance of enactment. Yet
care for the dry vote made both candidates cautious of their public
relations. Mrs. Hughes served only grape juice to the thirsty pressmen
on board the Republican campaign train, the Constitution**
Hughes was a moderate drinker himself, but his record as Associate
Justice on the matter of prohibition was unexceptionable. In Decem-
ber, 1912, he had upheld the right of the state of Mississippi to ban
the manufacture of all malt liquors, whether intoxicating or not. There
was a widespread opinion that the sale of nonintoxicating malt liquors
led to surprising intoxication in those who drank them; therefore, it
was certainly reasonable for states to legislate on such matters. 84
When Hughes later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on
Taft's resignation in February, 1930, he was to continue to enforce the
existing laws fairly; but he did not change his personal beliefs or
habits in the matter of the propriety of an occasional drink.
Yet Hughes, who had returned to private law practice after his
defeat in 1916, refused a brief worth an enormous sum to argue on the
side of the wets in the famous National Prohibition Cases. Rhode
Island had challenged the validity of the Eighteenth Amendment and
had refused to ratify it. The state's case was that Congress had no
right to put "basic changes" or "alterations" into the Constitution;
144 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
moreover, the state legislatures, not the people, had accepted the
amendment. The case was too absurd for Hughes to defend, even
though he thought national prohibition was unwise and impracti-
cable. 35 In fact, Hughes filed a brief, on behalf of twenty-one attorneys
general, supporting the legality of the Eighteenth Amendment. Article
5 of the Constitution expressly provided for further changes, which
experience might make necessary. The Constitution was a flexible,
not a rigid, document; this prevented it from becoming the instrument
of reaction or revolution. Even if the Eighteenth Amendment was
an unwise addition to the Constitution, it was more important to
preserve Article 5 than to oppose any amendment. The Supreme Court
agreed with Hughes. 36
Taft, as Chief Justice throughout the twenties, argued the case for
the letter of the Constitution even more than Hughes did. He saw
himself as the last ditch where all inroads into the American laws
should end. Although he was at first discouraged about the liquor
situation, he decided that the remedy for bootlegging and evasion of
the Volstead Act was more and better enforcement, not repeal. By
the end of 1923, he had fallen into the extreme dry error of saying that
even moderate drinkers were wrong and that the use of alcohol for
pleasure at parties was wicked. Those who wanted modification of the
Volstead Act and the sale of light wines and beer really wanted to
deny the Eighteenth Amendment altogether. "They say they are
opposed to saloons, but that they want a moderate limitation. What
they really want is an opportunity to drink and to entertain others with
drink, and all these suggestions are their conscious or unconscious
outgrowth of that desire/' 37
No other issue during his nine years in the Supreme Court caused
Taft as much worry as prohibition. His wife and members of his
family were convinced wets. There were wets among the Supreme
Court judges. Twice he had to cast his vote to break a deadlock over
an unpleasant issue dealing with prohibition. He consistently voted
on the dry side, even voting to uphold such reactionary decisions as
those in favor of double jeopardy and wire tapping by prohibition
agents. His zeal in opposing national prohibition before it was enacted
was matched by his zeal in supporting the Volstead Act after he joined
the Supreme Court. His death in March, 1930, was timely. He did not
live to read the report of the Wickersham Commission, which proved
that the laws he had once thought unenforceable were truly un-
enforceable.
Hughes also accepted office from President Harding. He became
Secretary of State and was likewise embarrassed by prohibition. It
caused stupid international problems. Great Britain strongly objected
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 145
to any attempt to push back the bootlegging fleet of Rum Row by
extending territorial waters beyond the three-mile limit. London also
objected to prohibition agents searching and seizing rumrunners which
flew the British flag more than three miles off the American coast. In
addition, all the fleets in the world objected to the clause in the
Volstead Act forbidding foreign ships to carry intoxicating drinks into
American ports. But by bullying and by persuading the drys and Lord
Curzon, Harry Daugherty and the Supreme Court, Hughes eventually
worked out a compromise. Foreign ships would be allowed to bring
liquor under seal into American ports, if the United States Coast
Guard was allowed to seize rumrunners within an hour's steaming
distance from the shore. Treaties with seven countries, including Great
Britain, were signed to this effect. 38 To do so, Hughes made the en-
forcement agents restore five seized bootlegging craft to their British
owners, banged the table and shouted in front of reporters on the
subject of the pigheaded Lord Curzon, spoke sharply to the easy-
riding Daugherty in Cabinet meetings, and called the Supreme Court
"unnecessarily rigid" over its interpretation of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment. Thus he achieved a sensible compromise. He always opposed all
extremes and tried to find a working solution. Hughes was a clever
and upright politician and a temperate man.
Hughes eventually became a respected judge on the World Court
at the Hague. President Herbert Hoover failed to persuade him in 1929
to head the proposed National Commission on Law Observance and
Enforcement. Although Hoover wrote to him on March 25, saying that
only he and Justice Stone could head the commission and Stone was
not available, Hughes refused the thankless job. So did Owen J.
Roberts, although Hoover, in tempting Hughes with the job, had
referred to the commission as "the oustanding necessity of the next
four years/' 39 Thus the task landed on Hoover's fourth choice, George
W. Wickersham, who had been Attorney General in Taft's Cabinet
Hughes, however, did accept the vacant chief justiceship in 1930,
after Taft had resigned just before his death. The insurgent fury in the
Senate at his nomination was directed more against the depression
President who appointed him than against his own liberal character.
Yet, as Chief Justice, he found himself in the position of upholding
the most savage of the prohibition statutes, the Jones Law. For three
years, until repeal took the bitter duty from him, Hughes had to inter-
pret the law of the land in favor of the strict enforcement of prohi-
bition. Only after 1933 could he become a great defender of the
liberty of the individual and of civil rights. The Supreme Court, which,
under Taft and prohibition, had tended towards the defense of social
146 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
privileges and reactions, under Hughes and repeal tended towards the
defense of personal liberties and opportunities.
Taft, a liberal by temperament, was unlucky to be Chief Justice dur-
ing the period of prohibition. He was compelled by the political situa-
tion to administer the dry law with reactionary severity. The political
situation was kinder to Hughes. Repeal and depression made it easier
for him to judge with justice and mercy.
WOODROW WILSON: THE TEMPERATE MESSIAH
THE DRY extremism, which political ambition or the duty of the law
forced on Bryan and Roosevelt and Taft and Hughes, came finally to
Woodrow Wilson through political disappointment. The coercion of
prohibition appealed to frustrated minds. Moreover, Wilson was condi-
tioned in favor of the diys by his heredity, if not by his intellect. His
father and maternal grandfather were Presbyterian ministers; he came
of Scotch-Irish stock and was born in Virginia. He remained a lover
of tradition and paternalism until he died. Even his progressive re-
forms were conservative, intended to restore the good of the past by
tidying up the present. Like many Southerners and Presidents, he
tended to speak in public as his Messiah did, but to compromise some-
times in private as his world did. When he did not compromise on the
question of America joining the League of Nations, he fell and his
policy with him. His disappointment made him turn from support of
wine and beer to support of total national prohibition.
Woodrow Wilson himself was free from a bone-dry upbringing. He
had seen in his boyhood his beloved grandfather smoking and drinking
toddy in the Presbyterian manse. 40 He agreed with the more liberal
Southern aristocrats that drinking and smoking were no sins, so long
as alcohol and cigarettes were kept in the righteous white hands of
the right sex. The later Mrs. Woodrow Wilson herself disapproved
of women smoking; she was rather embarrassed when mistaken for
a divorcee, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, who advocated this feminine sin
in a magazine article. 41 Wilson himself thought that drinking and
smoking habits should be settled by the democratic decision of the
small communities he had known when he was young.
When Boss Smith, of New Jersey, was looking for a "progressive"
state Governor as a front in 1910, he sent an attorney for the State
Liquor Dealers' Association to sound out the President of Princeton s
views on prohibition. He warned his messenger, "Unless we can get the
liquor interests behind the Doctor, we can't elect him." For the Demo-
cratic machine in New Jersey was openly supported by the brewers,
and they expected Democratic candidates to support them with
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE / 147
equally openness. But Woodrow Wilson replied to Smith's envoy, "I
am not a prohibitionist. I believe that the question is outside of politics.
I believe in home rule, and that the issue should be settled by local
option in each community." When it was pointed out that the brewers
had been fighting local option in New Jersey for years and that it was
the Democratic party's b&e noire, Wilson merely said, 'Well, that is
my attitude and my conviction. I cannot change it." 42
Wilson's stubbornness on the issue was far more astute than Boss
Smith thought when he threatened to "smoke out" Wilson later in the
campaign. By removing the loaded question of prohibition from state
politics to the sphere of local politics, as he tried to do with the other
dangerous question of woman suffrage, Wilson could hold Democratic
support together behind him, without introducing any divisive issues.
If possible, he would have liked to remove the liquor question from
politics altogether.
Later he tried to act in the same way on a national scale in the
presidential election of 1912, but with less success. He had carefully
stated his position in a letter to the head of the Anti-Saloon League
of New Jersey in the previous year.
I am in favor of local option. I am a thorough believer in local self-
government and believe that every self-governing community which
constitutes a social unit should have the right to control the matter
of the regulation or of the withholding of licenses. But the questions
involved are social and moral and are not susceptible of being made
parts of a party program. Whenever they have been made the subject
matter of party contests, they have cut the lines of party organization
and party action athwart to the utter confusion of political action
in every other field. They have thrown every other question, however
important, into the background and have made constructive party
action impossible for long years together. So far as I am myself con-
cerned, therefore, I can never consent to have the question of local
option made an issue between political parties in this State. 48
But Wilson did not leave the matter there. He played a dangerous
game in trying to make political capital in a state where the Democrats
were predominantly dry. The same year, he wrote to a prohibitionist
in Texas, denying that he was always a supporter of local option.
I believe that for some states, state wide prohibition is possible and
desirable, because of their relative homogeneity, while for others, I
think that state wide prohibition is not practicable. I have no reason
to doubt from what I know of the circumstances, that state wide pro-
hibition is both practicable and desirable in Texas. 44
Unfortunately, this letter was used against him by wet Republican
newspapers in the North. His first political manager, William F. Me-
148 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
Combs, had to try to disown the letter as a trick of Wall Street. He was
unsuccessful. The wets claimed loudly that Wilson supported local
option, the diys that he was for state-wide prohibition. The contro-
versy became so unpleasant that Wilson s second political manager,
Joseph E. Tumulty, had to set up a special interview in 1915 with a
wet reporter from the Louisville Times. In this interview, Wilson
wearily said to Tumulty that he did not know how he came to write
the Texan letter. Tumulty assured the reporter that Wilson would be
able to explain it away somehow; there was very little he could not
do with the English language.
And explain it away Wilson did, in an open letter to the Louisville
Times. Wilson wrote that the first letter represented his real convic-
tions. He had only meant by the second letter that he was not self-
confident or self-opinionated enough to say what the proper course
of action was, either in Texas or in any other state where he did not
know the conditions. 45 Wilson's gloss had the opposite meaning to his
original text; but the truth of the matter was that Wilson had returned
to his original convictions. No additional dry votes were worth the
fact that the President and minister's son seemed to be ready to fit his
convictions to his political advantage.
During Wilson's first term as President, the prohibition issue was
little bother to him. In 1914, the Hobson constitutional amendment
failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote in the House of Representa-
tives. The issue was then ingeniously linked with that of a woman-
suffirage amendment in the House Judiciary Committee. This tactic
of the wets hamstrung the Southern drys, who opposed votes for
women as fanatically as they supported national prohibition. Wilson
remained neutral during this time and did not use his influence to
separate the two amendments. The separation was not effected until
1916.
During Wilson's second term as President, the Webb-Kenyon Act,
which restricted the import of liquor into dry states, was strengthened
by the passage of the Reed Bone-dry Amendment. But this legislation
represented the limit of prohibition legislation tolerable to Wilson's
mentality. Indeed, after war was declared on the Central European
Powers, Wilson opposed any further concessions to the drys, since he
believed that they were using the war emergency to dry up the country
through Congress. In his opinion, wartime prohibition was not in-
tended to save for men's bodies the boasted eleven million loaves of
bread a day wasted in beer production; 46 it was intended to save their
souls, which were not the concern of the federal government.
Under pressure from the Anti-Saloon League and the dry majority
in Congress, Wilson approved the assorted wartime prohibition meas-
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 149
ures. But he was put in a quandary by the growth of agitation against
wartime prohibition after the Armistice, particularly on the part of the
American Federation of Labor. On May 20, 1919, Wilson cabled a
message back from Paris to Congress, recommending that the ban on
the making of beer and light wines be lifted until the Volstead Act
came into force in January, 1920. He was disobeyed. Tumulty later
warned the President that if the ban was not lifted, the wets might not
only drink up all the bonded whisky in the United States but also turn
against him. Pennsylvania had already voted to legalize weak beer
and light wines. In Tumulty's opinion, Wilson should legalize light
wines and beer by presidential proclamation.
But Wilson could not do this. If he did, he would finally brand the
Democrats as the party of the wets. They would suffer for this at the
polls in 1920, and a Democratic defeat would bring down all Wilson's
plans for peace. Thus he took refuge in the legally sound position that
wartime prohibition must remain in force until the Army was de-
mobilized. Once again, Tumulty claims, Wilson thought of devolving
his responsibility by asking Congress to legalize light wines and beer,
but he gave up the idea since Congress was hostile and dry. 47 Tumulty
also states that Wilson gave an unnamed and trusted friend a copy of
a proposed wet plank, favoring the repeal of the Volstead Act, to be
presented at the Democratic convention in 1920; but again the dry
temper of the delegates caused the dropping of the plan. 48 The dry
Senator Carter Glass, chairman of the Committee on Resolutions, had
already told Wilson that it would be impossible to present the plank.
And Wilson was always too politic to press any controversy beyond
the bounds of compromise, except for the matter of the League of
Nations. When reporter Seibold, of the New York World, tried to
pump him on the three explosive topics of prohibition, women, and
William Jennings Bryan, Wilson said the same words about each, that
he had great confidence in the sober judgment of the leaders of the
Democratic party at San Francisco.
James M. Cox was nominated by the Democrats as presidential
timber. He fought the campaign of 1920 as the heir of Woodrow
Wilson. Out of admiration for Wilson's courage, Cox supported the
League of Nations. It was an act of admirable loyalty, but of stupid
politics. Cox's only hope was to disassociate himself from the President,
who was unfairly blamed with driving America into war and national
prohibition. Cox was badly beaten by the charming and affable War-
ren Harding, whose "big, bow-wow style of oratory" was well des-
cribed by the dry Democrat McAdoo as "an army of pompous phrases
moving over the landscape in search of an idea.'* 49
Wilson settled down to die; his League of Nations was dying too.
150 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
He became more autocratic, more conscious that he was alone and
right. For the 1924 Democratic convention, he hardened his position
on prohibition, circulating a plank among his friends which stated
categorically, "The Eighteenth Amendment should remain unchanged.
And the Volstead Act should remain unchanged/' 50 He wanted the
federal government, however, to be merely responsible for preventing
interstate commerce in liquor. This had been the limit of their respon-
sibility in 1917, and could be justified by reference to the Constitution.
What had been given to the federal government under his own rule
was well given. More was evil. Moreover, he had been brought up in
the South, where states' rights were jealously guarded in domestic
affairs. Of course, Wilson's solution left the main burden of enforce-
ment on the state governments, and would have meant practical
nullification in wet states. But, at least, under this plan the evils of
prohibition enforcement would have been restricted. The plank was,
however, considered dangerous and was never presented.
Wilson, a temperate man, miscalculated badly on the one thing
which he wanted above all. He might have compromised with Senator
Lodge and preached the United States into the League of Nations if
he had given his enemies a few concessions. But, against the advice
of Colonel House and other friends of the League, he categorically
refused to accept the Senate's fourteen reservations concerning the
Versailles Treaty, even though he had allowed his Fourteen Points
to be whittled away at Versailles itself. He had become as die-hard as
a professed prohibitionist. On the question of the League of Nations,
Wilson was more inflexible than the most dedicated leader of the
Anti-Saloon League.
Wilson became the victim of that moral rigidity which he deplored
in the dry extremists and which he increasingly came to share with
them over the matter of prohibition. 51 Like Plato, he became more
authoritarian as he aged. Like Plato, he ended by approving of severe
moral legislation enacted in the laws of states. Like Plato, he died
disappointed, with his scheme for the ordered government of society
defeated, and his visionary Republic only a vision.
Whatever the temperament and background of prominent politi-
cians in the opening years of this century, they were forced into an
extreme position by the extreme measure of the national prohibition
of the liquor trade. There was no escape for the wary political animal.
Silence on the issue was taken to be antagonism to the views of the
questioner, whether he was wet or dry. Bryan's country background
or Taft's city background might put them on opposite sides of the dry
question in their personal sympathies. But they were political beings
TRIMMING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE/ 151
first and reformers second. Their political ambition and office dictated
their parallel silence, equivocation, moderate support, and eventual
wholehearted backing of the prohibitionists.
The Anti-Saloon League relied on the necessary malleability of the
politician to push its measures through both houses of Congress and
through the legislatures of forty-six states. The weathercock tendencies
which the Presidents and presidential aspirants had shown individually
were shown collectively by the legislative representatives of the people.
Indeed, the people themselves shifted back and forth on the issue,
under the propaganda and prodding of the drys. But it is in their pres-
sure on the lawmakers of America that the drys showed their full genius
for political manipulation. For only from the lawmakers of America
could they secure national prohibition by the Eighteenth Amendment
to the Constitution and by the Volstead Act.
CHAPTER
8
The Turncoat Congress
No caterpillar ever crawled into its cocoon and came out
so changed as came this drink question out of Congress. It
went in temperance and came out prohibition. It went in
license and came out enforcement. It went in personal
choice and came out a national mandate. It went in an
individual right and came out a social responsibility. It
went in a brewer and barkeeper and came out a bootlegger
and a kitchen still. It went in local option and came out the
Eighteenth Amendment.
DALLAS LORE SHARP
Booze an' iloquence has both passed out iv our public
life. ... A statesman wud no more be seen goin' into a
saloon thin he wud into a meetin' iv th' Anti-Semitic
league. Th' imprissyon he thries to give is that th' sight iv
a bock beer sign makes him faint with horror, an' that he's
stopped atin* bread because there's a certain amount iv
alcohol concealed in it. He wishes to brand as a calumny
th' statement that his wife uses an alcohol lamp to heat her
curlin' irns. Ivry statesman in this broad land is in danger
iv gettin' wather-logged because whiniver he sees a possible
vote in sight he yells f'r a pitcher iv ice wather an' dumps
into himsilf a basin iv that noble flooid that in th' more
rugged days iv th' republic was on'y used to put out fires
an* sprinkle th' lawn.
FINLEY PETER DUNNE
LIQUOR WAS a power in Congress before prohibition was. The
fondness of Washington legislators for the bottle was supplemented
by the lobby of the liquor trade. The Internal Revenue Act of 1862
put a license fee of twenty dollars on retail liquor dealers and a tax
of one dollar a barrel on beer and twenty cents a gallon on spirits. The
drys always accused this act, signed by Abraham Lincoln himself, of
making an evil traffic legitimate and of corrupting politics for half a
century. However true this accusation, it is undeniable that the United
States Brewers' Association was formed in the same year. The object
152
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS/ 153
of the association was to prosecute its interests "vigorously and ener-
getically*' before the legislative and executive branches of the nation
and to defeat the maneuvers of the temperance party. 1 After less than
a year of pressure, the Association managed to secure a cut in the beer
tax to sixty cents a barrel. By 1866, a permanent committee had been
set up at Washington, on such cordial terms with the Commissioner
of Internal Revenue that it helped to revise the Federal Excise Tax
Law of that year.
Other organizations were also set up to exert pressure at Washing-
ton on behalf of the liquor trade. There was the National Wholesale
Liquor Dealers' Association, the National Retail Liquor Dealers* Asso-
ciation, the National Association of Wine and Spirit Representatives,
the United States Manufacturers' and Merchants' Association, and
various other pressure groups, often misnamed civic or liberty leagues.
These associations, although they were mainly concerned with influ-
encing Congress, also aimed to secure the elections of sympathetic
Congressmen. A resolution of the National Brewers' and Distillers'
Association stated in 1882 that it was pledged to work harmoniously
and assiduously at the ballot box against any party which favored a
prohibition amendment to the Constitution. 2 In New York the follow-
ing year, the local brewers employed a technique which would have
defeated the drys in perpetuity, if it had been properly exploited; they
asked all political candidates where they stood on temperance matters
and fought the silent along with the drys at the polls. 3
The scandals caused by the connection of the liquor trade and the
politicians were nasty and frequent. As Mr. Dooley knew, the friend-
ship of the great was worse than their enmity. 4 The exposure of the
Whisky Ring under President Grant, of the Whisky Trust in 1887, and
of the conspiracies of the brewers in Texas elections showed the politi-
cal skulduggery of the liquor trade. The aim of the trade to control
Congress, even if it lost the support of the majority of Americans, was
manifest. A final damning indictment of the brewers was reported to
the Senate in 1919. The report disclosed that the brewers had bought
large sections of the press, had influenced campaigns, had exacted
pledges from candidates prior to election, had boycotted the goods of
their enemies, had formed their own secret political organization, had
subsidized the banned German-American Alliance, "many of the mem-
bership of which were disloyal and unpatriotic," had formed a secret
agreement with the distillers to split political expenses, and had done
their utmost to subvert the processes of democracy. 5 This disclosure
coincided with the passage of the Volstead Act through the Senate,
and was the final nail in the coffin of the liquor trade.
With such powerful opponents behind the scenes in Washington,
154 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
the diys had to organize a strong lobby of their own. Although the first
Congressional Temperance Society was begun by the Reverend Justin
Edwards in 1833, and eight abortive attempts to pass a national pro-
hibition amendment were made by Senators Blair and Plumb be-
tween 1876 and 1885, no strong political pressure was exerted by the
drys in the national capital until 1899. In that year, the first legislative
superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League, Edwin C. Dinwiddie, ar-
rived in Washington. After a period of trial and error, the political
power and expertise of the League grew, and Congress leaped to do
its bidding. 6 For twenty years after 1913, the League lobby under
Dinwiddie and his successor, Wayne B. Wheeler, was the most power-
ful and successful reform lobby in Washington.
The first major triumph of the Anti-Saloon League was the passage
of the Webb-Kenyon Law in 1913. The law used the federal power in
interstate commerce to prevent liquor dealers from sending liquor in
packages into dry states. Before the passage of the law, a mail-order
liquor business had flourished in dry states, using such advertising
slogans as "Uncle Sam Is Our Partner/' 7 Although the bill was bitterly
denounced in Congress as the work of "a few rabid, misguided, pro-
fessional prohibitionists/' it was passed over Taft's veto by a vote of
63 to 21 in the Senate and 246 to 95 in the House of Representatives. 8
All but two Senators of the dry majority came from the South and
West, where the dry cause was strong. Although the wets hoped that
the Supreme Court would declare the measure unconstitutional, they
were forced to concede that the drys had won a great victory. It was
"the impressive fact that in the face of the united effort of all branches
of the alcoholic liquor trade, the National Congress voted for the bill." 9
Four years later, the Supreme Court upheld the law. 10
The first classic debate on the subject of national prohibition came
with the vote on the Hobson resolution in the House on December 22,
1914. The resolution called for a national prohibition amendment to
the Constitution. Kelly, of Pennsylvania, opened the dry case. He said
that the drys were the real friends of liberty not the false personal
liberty which meant license to do wrong. They would grant every
liberty save that of injuring the rights of others. Congress should pass
the Hobson resolution because of the very forces against it:
... the allied powers that prey, the vultures of vice, the corrupt
combinations of politics, the grafters and gangsters, the parasites that
clothe themselves in the proceeds of woman's shame, the inhuman
ones that bathe themselves in the tears of little children, the wastrels
who wreck and ruin material things while they contaminate childhood,
debauch youth, and crush manhood; the plunder-laden ones who fat-
ten themselves upon the misery and want and woe that their own
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 155
greed has created, the Hessians in the black-bannered troop whose line
of march is over wrecked homes and broken hearts and ruined lives.
Hobson himself followed up by condemning the alcohol poison
which attacked "the tender tissues associated with reproduction both
in male and female/' Hulings, of Pennsylvania, and Tribble, of Geor-
gia, said that the resolution was not an attack on states' rights but a
confirmation of them; for the constitutional amendment would be re-
ferred to the legislatures of the various states. Garrett, of Texas, re-
gretted the inevitable progress of boys from high-class beer gardens
to the doggery. Lindquist, of Michigan, called for the support of
patriots; zeppelins, submarines, bombs, and siege guns were not the
only things that could destroy a nation; the treasonable conspiracy of
the liquor trade had already captured the great cities of America, and
was devastating the land and robbing it of its manhood. And Hobson
concluded with his famous speech on "Alcohol, the Great Destroyer."
Cantrill, of Kentucky, began the defense of the wets. He denied the
capacity of national prohibition to prohibit. The Hobson resolution
should really be called "a resolution legalizing the unlimited manu-
facture of intoxicating liquor without taxation." Underwood, of Ala-
bama, spoke up for the fundamental beliefs of the Republic, for indi-
vidual liberty, states* rights, and the rights of property. He denied that
the drys represented the forces of temperance, because all men be-
lieved in temperance; they were a mere faction "that would tear down
the very fabric of the Government itself and destroy the foundation
stones on which it rests." Kahn, of California, also pointed out that
temperance applied to all things in life, not only to liquor. Prohibition
generally resulted in making men liars, sneaks, and hypocrites. If men
wanted liquor, they could invariably get it. "We are trying to regulate
all human conduct by laws, laws, laws. Efforts of that character are as
old as the world. And they have invariably resulted in failure."
Vollmer, of Iowa, scoffed at the great American superstition, "belief
in the miraculous potency of the magical formulae: Be it resolved,
and Be it enacted." He stood beside George Washington, the brewer;
Thomas Jefferson, the distiller; Abraham Lincoln, die saloonkeeper;
and Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who had turned water into wine. For
him, the policeman's club was not a moral agent; morality which was
not self-imposed was not morality. Vicious propensities that could not
find an outlet in liquor would find another; they would not be pro-
hibited. Johnson, of Kentucky, said that he was not concerned with
the merits of prohibition, but with its economic effects. The measure
would destroy property worth billions of dollars, while the wets would
have to pay increased taxes to make up the lost revenue. Moreover, the
156 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
sacred American principle of home rule would be attacked. Finally,
Morrison, of Indiana, objected that the House was being stampeded
by the Anti-Saloon League and was being forced to reform under fire.
Prohibition, even if put into the Constitution, could never be enforced,
when Sears, Roebuck catalogues were advertising home distilling kits
for less than five dollars an outfit. 11
At the close of the debate, the vote was taken. The Hobson resolu-
tion was passed by 197 votes to 190. Since a two-thirds majority was
necessary for the passage of a constitutional amendment, the resolu-
tion failed. The drys, however, had given a further demonstration of
their growing power. And, significantly, the word "saloon" was never
mentioned in the debate except in a derogatory sense. Indeed, Colonel
Gilmore admitted in Bonfort's Wine and Spirit Circular that the saloon
was now doomed. 12
The widespread prohibition legislation of the powers engaged in the
Great War and the certainty that America would enter that war gave
the drys a strong lever. When Europe was starving, how could America
in God's name turn its grain into sinful drink? In 1917, under the
pressure of patriotism, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to
the Constitution. It also passed other laws giving prohibition to Alaska
and Puerto Rico, setting up dry zones around Army camps and Naval
bases, and banning soldiers and sailors from all liquor. 18 In addition,
three further laws were passed, which showed the political trafficking
of both wets and drys at their worst
The first of these three laws was the Reed Bone-dry Amendment to
a bill to exclude liquor advertisements from the mails. Senator Reed,
of Missouri, was a dripping wet; but he decided to confound the
cautious Anti-Saloon League lobby by making it an offense to use im-
ported liquor in dry territory, as well as to transport or sell it. The use
of imported liquor had not been forbidden by the Webb-Kenyon Law.
The League was caught napping. Its chief lobbyist, Dinwiddie, ad-
vised against voting for Reed's amendment; but Congress, voting freely
for the first time for some years, passed the amendment, as much to
show their independence of the League as to demonstrate their belief
in the tricks of Senator Reed. The League then claimed credit for the
measure. Indeed, the position of Reed and the wets was worsened by
such a stringent law, especially as its provisions caused no revulsion of
moderate support away from the dry cause.
The second law was the District of Columbia Prohibition Law,
which banned the legal liquor trade in the capital. The drys refused
to hold a referendum on this matter for fear of the popular vote going
against them. Moreover, despite the Reed Bone-dry Amendment, the
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS/ 157
law only prohibited the traffic in liquor, not its use by members of
Congress and others. 14
The third law passed in 1917 was a prohibition clause in the Food
Control Bill. The drys were holding up this vital war measure in Con-
gress by threatening to tack onto it various clauses forbidding food to
be made into alcohol for drinking purposes. In fact, the drys were so
insistent that prohibition was necessary to win the war that Woodrow
Wilson was forced to write a letter to Bishop James Cannon, Jr., who
was head of the legislative committee of the Anti-Saloon League. He
appealed to the Bishop's patriotism: "I regard the immediate passage
of the [Food] bill as of vital consequence to the safety and defense of
the nation. Time is of the essence." Cannon replied the next day that
the League would compromise. If the manufacture of distilled spirits
should be forbidden, the President could stop the supply of food to
the brewers and winemakers at his own discretion. Wilson replied that
he appreciated the Anti-Saloon League's attitude, which was "a very
admirable proof of their patriotic motives.* 15
Wilson, however, failed to use his discretionary powers, and re-
ceived a rebuke from the Anti-Saloon League. Its legislative committee
wrote to him on April 1, 1918, pointing out that:
. . . the people have been requested to have headess days, meatless
days, wheatless days and to eliminate waste in every possible way, and
yet the breweries and saloons of the country continue to waste food-
stuffs, fuel and man-power and to impair the efficiency of labor in the
mines, factories and even in munition plants near which saloons are
located."
After hearing nothing from Wilson and getting nowhere with him
in a conference at the White House, the League used the same device
and tacked total wartime prohibition onto the Agricultural Appropri-
ation Bill. All use of foods in the making of spirits, beer, and wine was
banned. One report said that Wilson felt so strongly about the matter
that he would have vetoed the prohibition measure, if he could have
got the rest of the bill through in any other way. 17 But he could not.
Wartime prohibition was passed by Congress. The manufacture of
liquor in the United States was legally prohibited after June 30, 1919,
unless demobilization were to be completed before that date.
A majority in Congress seemed to be inspired by the same false
logic that made Senator Myers, of Montana, declare, "There is nothing
to understand except one thing, and that is that bread will help us win
this war more than whisky. ITiat is the only thing that it is necessary
to understand." 18 In face of such implacable reasoning, Wilson had to
act. Dry pressure was too great. On Colonel House's advice, he did not
158 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
veto the Agricultural Appropriation Bill. On September 16, he issued a
proclamation that forbade the use of food in making beer. But he did
not exercise the authority given him by the Agricultural Appropriation
Bill to declare "dry zones" at once in strategical mining and industrial
areas. He still supported the flow of such strong drink as could be got
for the factory workers. Like any good democrat, he was conscious of
the need not to offend too much or too many. This meant the simul-
taneous gift of sops to the wets and sponges to the drys.
THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT
THE WILSON administration was often blamed for the passage through
Congress of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. Actu-
ally, Wilson had nothing to do with these measures. They were put
through, despite the urgency of the war, by the power of the dry lobby
in Congress. At the same time that the Anti-Saloon League was helping
to defeat the Kaiser by sobering up America, it was also preparing to
win the peace by making a land fit for heroes to live in. Its remedy
for demobilization and the future was national prohibition.
Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale, a notable dry apologist and statis-
tician, revealed that the Anti-Saloon League knew some of the wet
Senators were psychologically prepared to accept national prohibition
after the preliminary failure of the war prohibition measure in the
Food Control Bill. It is even possible that the League made a deal with
them. 19 However that was, Fisher wrote that the League "very astutely
took advantage of the situation to propose the act submitting the
Eighteenth Amendment ... It was easy even for wet Senators to let
this act pass, on the theory that it did not really enact Prohibition, but
merely submitted it to the States." Then, once the Eighteenth Amend-
ment was safely through Congress, wartime prohibition was reintro-
duced and passed, "as a means of filling in the gap between the adop-
tion of Constitutional Prohibition and its taking effect. This was pretty
hard on the brewers." 20 In other words, by playing on the urge of
Congress to escape responsibility for national prohibition, and by
yielding ground on wartime prohibition only to revive it again once
peacetime prohibition had passed Congress, the dry lobby showed
itself guilty of political genius and bad faith.
During the debate on the Eighteenth Amendment in the Senate
and the House, various deals were made between the wets and the
drys. As Wheeler put it, "we traded jackknives with them." 21 The will-
ing and mindless Senator Harding, of Ohio, was the go-between. In
return for a year's grace for the liquor trade to wind up its affairs
after possible ratification of the amendment by the states, the wets
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 159
agreed to put a time limit of six, and then seven, years on ratification.
With this limit, the wets in Congress were lulled into a sense of false
security. Thirty-six states had to ratify the amendment for it to become
part of the Constitution. The wets counted on holding at least thirteen
state legislatures. Only twenty-seven states had passed state prohibi-
tion laws. The drys would have to gain nine more for their side, as
well as convincing the legislatures of the twenty-seven that national
prohibition was necessary. The Eighteenth Amendment appeared as a
heaven-sent opportunity for wet Senators to wash their hands of the
whole affair and to be left in peace at the polls by the Anti-Saloon
League.
In the debate on the amendment in the Senate, Harding summed
up in his heartfelt and confused way the sentiments of many middle-
of-the-road Senators. He said that he was not a prohibitionist and had
never pretended to be, although he did claim to be a temperance man.
He did not see prohibition as a great moral question, but he did see
its ethical and economic side. The need for concord in wartime and
the fact prohibition would never be effective made him think that the
timing of the proposed Eighteenth Amendment was 'unwise, im-
prudent, and inconsiderate"; but he would vote for it, since he was fed
up with seeing every politician measured by the wet and dry yard-
stick. It was high time for the question to be settled. In this way, the
people, through their state legislatures, would settle the issue. Al-
though he preferred that compensation be paid to the breweries, he
would not insist on this clause. 22 And yet Harding, after declaring
himself for the drys, was one of only four Senators who voted for
Hardwick's attempt to wreck the passage of the amendment by making
it illegal to purchase and use liquor, as well as to manufacture, sell,
or transport it
The Anti-Saloon League lobby, which did much to write the Eight-
eenth Amendment, was careful to pussyfoot on the question of the
use of liquor, as they had done with the Webb-Kenyon Law and with
the District of Columbia Prohibition Act. They wanted to punish mak-
ers and sellers of liquor, not respectable drinkers. Moreover, they could
not afford to alienate the majority of the Senators, who were drinkers.
They had to represent the measure as an economic and patriotic neces-
sity. It was no reflection on the personal habits of the legislators of the
nation. It was the liquor trade that did evil, not those decent people
who supported the trade. In this way, the League could and did gain
moderate support in both Senate and House, especially as the black-
mail of the open ballot threatened retribution at the polls for the foes
of the Eighteenth Amendment.
The extreme drys in the Senate ignored the careful approach of the
160 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
League and the objections of moderates such as Norris to "this ill-
adviled attempt" 28 Sheppard, of Texas, set the tone of the Senate
debate on the amendment with a full-blooded denunciation of alcohol
as the cause of venereal disease, blighted babies, fallen women, and
waste to the toiling millions. Kenyon, of Iowa, shook blood out of the
flag with his unanswered queries, "If liquor is a bad thing for the boys
in the trenches, why is it a good thing for those at home? When they
are willing to die for us, should we not be willing to go dry for them?"
Jones, of Washington, denied the brewers' charges that prohibition
would produce anger, resentment, and disaffection among millions as
"a base libel on American workers," who were "as loyal and patriotic
a class as we have." Intelligent labor knew that prohibition was being
passed for its benefit. Moreover, those opposed to prohibition would
live to bless prohibition. Ashurst, of Arizona, saw the amendment as
a great referendum to the states. Sherman, of Illinois, remembered
his many liberal friends of thirty years past who had been killed off by
the saloons and had died "with strange complaints, seeing strange
things in the air and hearing strange voices/' Kirby, of Arkansas, did
not doubt that through the ages one increasing purpose ran. And
Myers, of Montana, rounded off the dry case with his declaration that
the world was steadily becoming better. He suggested that the mo-
mentous day when the Senate passed the amendment should be ob-
served as another Fourth of July, a second Declaration of Independ-
ence.
The drys could afford rhetoric, for they were certain that their cause
was won. But the wets were forced to appeal to reason, for they knew
that they had lost. Underwood, of Alabama, warned the Senate that
the tyranny of corruption could be replaced by the subtler, less
tangible, more enduring tyranny of reform. Moreover, the propaganda
of the drys that Congress should pass its responsibility on to the states
was subversive of die spirit of republican government. Lodge, of
Massachusetts, gave a prophetic denunciation of the impossibility of
enforcing national prohibition. Without a prepared public sentiment,
all prohibition could hope to effect was the destruction of every con-
trol on the liquor traffic. People would resent the dry law as a gross
and tyrannical interference with personal liberty. Respect for justice
would vanish. "Where large masses of the people would consider it
even meritorious at least quite venial to evade and break the law,
the law would inevitably be broken constantly and in a large and
effective way." Lodge doubted that there could be an army large
enough to enforce absolute prohibition. The measure was "the worst
thing that could be done to advance temperance and total abstinence
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 161
among the people/* But the wet protests were unavailing. The amend-
ment passed the Senate by a vote of 65 to 20. 24
One new idea came out of the House debate on the Eighteenth
Amendment, and a legion of old ideas. While the Senate's version of
the amendment had provided for the prohibition of the manufacture,
sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, Congressman Webb
introduced the phrase, "the Congress and the several States shall have
concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
By his term "concurrent power," Webb meant to protect states' rights,
for "nobody desires that the Federal Congress shall take away from
the various States the right to enforce the prohibition laws of those
States." He also intended that the states should take much of the
burden off the federal government in law enforcement. "We do not
want 10,000 Federal officers, with all the expense of salaries, going
over the country enforcing these laws when the States have their own
officers to do so and are willing to do so." In answer to questions,
Webb denied that there would be a conflict of jurisdiction between
state and federal courts. A man ought not to be tried twice for the
same offense. "One punishment ought to be sufficient." He said that
he was not afraid to trust the states to enforce the amendment. "I never
saw one that went counter to the United States Constitution, or whose
law officers failed to enforce the law." Yet, whatever Webb's reasons,
the inclusion of the term "concurrent power" in the amendment led to
a myriad of later legal complications.
Webb also referred to the letter which Samuel Gonipers, head of the
American Federation of Labor, had written to the newspapers that
morning, December 17, 1917. Gompers had complained that prohibi-
tion would throw two million people out of work; it was also a class
law against the beer of the workingman. Webb replied that the jobs
of only about sixty thousand people directly connected with the liquor
trade would be affected. He quoted William Jennings Biyan, that it
was a slander to intimate that the great laboring classes of America
measured their patriotism by the quart or by the schooner.
After many other loyal dry appeals, Robbins, of Pennsylvania, re-
minded the House that there were three constitutional amendments
pending, those of prohibition and woman suffrage and writing the
name of God into the Constitution. All three should be referred to
the states, for vox populi vox Dei. Little, of Kansas, raised laughter
when he referred to a gentleman from "some semi-civilized foreign
colony in New York City" who damned prohibition as a mere reform
from "the outlying settlements." According to Little, the outlying
settlements provided all the reforms that New York City would ever
get. Norton, of North Dakota, would have gone so far as to send all
162 / THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
the wet spokesmen to the front, for their arguments showed them to
be "marvelously great camouflage artists."
In face of these patriotic and rural appeals, the wets in the House
countered with some reason and some wit. Card, of Ohio, said that the
Eighteenth Amendment would substitute "controversy for sure settle-
ment/' The President had it in his power to forbid the use of food in
making liquor by proclamation. Congress should not waste time de-
bating the amendment, but should help the President in winning the
war. Magee, of New York, made the good point that the question was
"not temperance versus intemperance, but whether we are willing to
use the condition of war as the chief instrument in attempting to bring
about Nation-wide prohibition at this particular time' 9 In fact, no grain
would be conserved by the passage of the amendment, since it prob-
ably would not go into effect until the war was over. As for himself,
he had no brief for wets or drys, but a brief for "his country first, last,
and all the time/'
Walsh, of Massachusetts, observed that temperance in thought and
speech was sometimes as wise as temperance in the use of food and
drink. Small, of North Carolina, said that the dry effort to get the
House to pass responsibility for the measure on to the states was
pernicious, for "we are not mere automatons to register the will of
the Anti-Saloon League or any other organization of reformers/' Slay-
den, of Texas, warned that a constitutional amendment would perpetu-
ate the tyranny of a temporary majority in the country. McArthur, of
Oregon, said that the League would be better off spending its money
on educating people against liquor, while Gordon, of Ohio, resented
the attack of rural morality on the large cities. The vote on the amend-
ment would, anyway, not be an honest one, as Gallagher, of New York,
pointed out. A secret ballot would show the drys that their majorities
came from fear. 25
When the vote was taken, the Eighteenth Amendment passed the
House by 282 votes to 128. It was then referred to the states for
ratification. Lengthy extracts from the speeches in Congress on the
issue have been included to demonstrate the charged atmosphere in
which the measure was passed, and the arguments which were re-
peated ad nauseam by both wets and drys in the years preceding and
following the amendment. The extracts also show that boredom played
some part in the passage of the amendment. 26 The members of Con-
gress were sick of being badgered by the Anti-Saloon League and
their dry constituents. They ignored Heflin, of Alabama, who said that
no member of the House could dispose of the question simply by say-
ing he was tired of being bothered with it. 27 It was unfortunate for
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 163
Congress that the Eighteenth Amendment was only the beginning of
dry fuss about the liquor issue.
A comparative analysis of the vote on the Hobson resolution and the
Eighteenth Amendment in the House shows how and where the drys
gained support between 1914 and 1917, and how the speeches of
Congressmen were motivated less by party consideration than by
geography. The drys gained 85 votes in this period. Their largest gain
was a block of 39 Republican votes from Midwestern states, where
the Anti-Saloon League had its most powerful political organization
and where the Democratic party was associated with the liquor inter-
ests. During these three years, with the help of the League, the Repub-
lican party in the Midwest doubled its strength, while the Democrats,
despite Woodrow Wilson's victory of 1916 against Hughes, lost 37
seats in the House of Representatives.
Yet the League was a nonpartisan organization. It supported drys
in both parties. The votes on the Hobson resolution and the Eighteenth
Amendment were not party matters. In the first case, 120 Democrats
and 73 Republicans voted for the measure, 141 Democrats and 47
Republicans against. In the second case, 140 Democrats and 138
Republicans voted for the measure, 64 Democrats and 62 Republicans
against. The vote proved correct both the Anti-Saloon League's asser-
tion that the only way to obtain national prohibition was to support
drys in both of the major parties, and also the Prohibition party's ob-
jection that both of the major parties were too divided on the issue to
enforce national prohibition wholeheartedly. Prohibition was a party
matter only on a sectional basis. Northern Democrats, whose support
was based on the wet cities, were opposed by the Anti-Saloon League
and the Republican party, while Southern Democrats in the dry and
one-party South were helped by the League. The nonpartisan ap-
proach of that powerful dry organization helped to build the irrepa-
rable split in the Democratic party on the prohibition issue. Meanwhile,
the Republican party, freed of the garrulous conscience of the South,
was able to straddle the issue more circumspectly during conventions
and elections.
The vote on the Hobson resolution shows clearly on what a rock the
dry congressional group was founded. Of the 197 members of the
House who voted for the Hobson resolution, 129 were from cities of
less than 10,000 people, while 64 of them were from country villages
of less than 2500 people. Only 13 were from cities containing a popu-
lation of more than 100,000. Of the 190 opponents to the resolution,
109 were from cities of more than 25,000 people, and only 25 from
villages with less than 2500 inhabitants. In fact, national prohibition
was a measure passed by village America against urban America. This
164 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
conclusion is confirmed by the fact that San Francisco, St. Louis, St.
Paul, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston all rejected
prohibitory laws during the period when the Eighteenth Amendment
was being considered by Congress and the states. 28
An analysis of the Senate vote on the amendment also proves the
rural support of the measure. Of course, both in the United States
Senate and in the various state senates the country was overrepre-
sented at the expense of the cities, as Senator Calder pointed out. 29
This was the reason why the drys wanted prohibition to be passed by
the legislatures as an amendment to the Constitution, rather than by
state referendum. For the populous cities often upset dry majorities in
country areas during state referendums. Ohio itself, the headquarters
and home state of the Anti-Saloon League leaders, did not pass state-
wide prohibition until 1918, owing to the opppsition of Cincinnati and
other wet cities. But if the League could only cow the lower houses
of the various states into passing a constitutional amendment, they
could rely on the country majorities in the senates to support them.
While the vote in the House of Representatives on the Eighteenth
Amendment gave the measure a bare two-thirds majority, in the Senate
the measure passed by a majority of more than three to one. Of the
twenty Senators who opposed the measure, nine came from the popu-
lous Atlantic states, seven from the South, ever eager to protect the
doctrine of states' rights, and the remaining four from states whose
beer or wine interests would suffer from the amendment. A similar
disproportion is shown when the votes of the senates and lower houses
of the ratifying states are compared. While the combined senates of
the forty-six ratifying states voted 1310 to 237 to carry the amendment,
the combined lower houses voted 3782 to 1035. 80 Where the country
was more heavily represented than the cities, the drys could count on
more support for dry measures.
The drys reversed their tactics to secure the ratification of the
Eighteenth Amendment by the states. While they had told Congress
that the amendment was a democratic measure because the question of
national prohibition had to be referred to the states, they told the
state legislatures that their duty was to ratify the Eighteenth Amend-
ment, since it had been approved by a two-thirds majority of both
houses of Congress. Moreover, it was easier for the drys to get the
states to ratify, for they needed only a straight majority in each house
of three-quarters of the states. The necessary thirty-six states ratified
within fourteen months, forty-five within sixteen months. New Jersey
ratified in 1922, but Connecticut and Rhode Island never ratified.
The terms of the Eighteenth Amendment show the great care of the
dry lobby not to push legislators too far too fast The amendment read:
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 165
SECTION 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the
manufacture, 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.
SECTION 2. The Congress and the several States shall have con-
current power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
SECTION 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been
ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the
several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years
from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
If the prohibitionists had insisted on total prohibition of liquor in
America, they would not have allowed the Eighteenth Amendment to
be presented in this form. But the Anti-Saloon League was more con-
cerned with enshrining the practice of prohibition in the Constitution
than with enacting a stringent and unequivocal measure. The first step
was to pass the amendment in any form; the second was to pass a
severe law to enforce it. The League was always occupied with the
possible in politics, although it favored the eternal in propaganda.
There were many flaws in the wording of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment. As in the Webb-Kenyon Law, the amendment did not forbid the
purchase or use of liquor only four Senators could be found to
support Hardwick's motion to this effect. Therefore, any man who
could afford to fill his cellars before the amendment became legal
could serve liquor to his guests perfectly legitimately until his stocks
were exhausted. Also, the fact that the amendment gave the liquor
trade a year to wind up its business destroyed the dry argument that
the liquor trade was criminal. No criminal organization would be
guaranteed by Congress a year to put its affairs in order. Moreover,
instruments for manufacturing liquor in the home were not banned,
and the bootlegger was given ample time to prepare for his future
profession. Again, the amendment served to increase class hatred, for
it was only the poor who could not afford to stock up liquor. In
Samuel Gompers's words, "The workers who have no cellars and have
not the opportunity of gratifying a normal even though temporary
rational desire learn to hate their more fortunate fellow citizens more
bitterly and uncompromisingly/' 31
The failure of the Eighteenth Amendment to include a purchase
clause was a further weakness. Since there was no penalty attached
to buying liquor, people were prepared to buy. The threat of putting
bootleggers in jail hardly deterred their respectable patrons, who ran
no risk at all. Thus the amendment allowed a safe demand for liquor
to exist, and only persecuted the suppliers of that demand. The con-
166 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
sciences of many good citizens was salved by the consideration that
they were not legally breaking the letter of the Constitution them-
selves, nor even aiding and abetting others to break it. When only
the trade in liquor was criminal and liquor itself not so, legal reasons
for abstaining did not exist.
There were additional flaws in the amendment. The words "con-
current power" were ambiguous and set the stage for a long legal
battle between the states and the federal government. Furthermore,
the omission of the word "alcoholic" from the amendment in favor of
the word "intoxicating," despite the protests of the Prohibition party,
allowed many cases in the law courts to be dismissed. Proof that
liquor was "intoxicating" was harder to demonstrate than proof that
liquor was "alcoholic" and had been sold. Although the Volstead Act
later defined "intoxicating" as one-half of 1 per cent of alcohol by vol-
ume, an amendment to the Volstead Act, such as the Cullen Bill of
1933, could allow the sale of beer before the Eighteenth Amendment
had been repealed.
In the debate on the Eighteenth Amendment in the House, Con-
gressman Graham, of Pennsylvania, had said that the wet argument
of the unconstitutionality of the amendment was a bugaboo. The
Supreme Court later upheld his wisdom in the National Prohibition
Cases. 82 But Graham was even wiser in his succeeding remarks, when
he detailed his reasons for voting against the measure. For him, the
Eighteenth Amendment destroyed the purpose of the Constitution.
That fundamental law was only a declaration of principles, never of
policy. 33
THE VOLSTEAD ACT
IN 1930, a journalist unkindly suggested that the whole history of the
United States could be told in eleven words: Columbus, Washington,
Lincoln, Volstead, Two flights up and ask for Gus. 34 In a sense, his
cheap wit was truer than he knew. For if the speak-easy and the boot-
legger were aided by the loopholes of the Volstead Act, those loop-
holes were only in the act because of the whole tradition of American
history.
Although the prohibitionists had written prohibition into the funda-
mental law of America, that fundamental law prevented them from
enforcing it. The Constitution guaranteed Americans certain rights.
The Volstead Act and other means of enforcing the Eighteenth Amend-
ment seemed to deny Americans their heritage. The Fourth Amend-
ment gave people the right to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS/ 167
Fifth Amendment prevented people from being forced to be witnesses
against themselves or from being tried twice for the same offense.
The Sixth Amendment guaranteed "a speedy and public trial by an
impartial jury." Yet these individual rights were attacked by the
Volstead Act and its successors. Moreover, those states that by tradi-
tion or conviction opposed the increasing power of the federal govern-
ment, were never persuaded that the Eighteenth Amendment did not
violate the Tenth, which reserved all powers not delegated to the
United States by the Constitution to the states or to the people.
Yet Congress, once the Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified
by the states, had to provide for its token enforcement. The amend-
ment could not be properly enforced without a bill, which would
invade American liberties intolerably. The American people and Con-
gress were not prepared for this. Thus the drys had to put through a
measure which would deter without terrifying too much, and com-
promise without excusing everything. The principal author of this
unhappy mish-mash of the possible and the desirable was the Anti-
Saloon League Washington attorney, Wayne B. Wheeler. Despite the
jealous opposition of Bishop Cannon, he drafted such a complex meas-
ure that he gave himself great power for the nine years before his
death. 85 He was the only man who could understand and interpret
the code of enforcement. Like Moses, he interpreted the command-
ments of his law to the faithful. The sponsor of his law was Repre-
sentative Andrew Volstead, of Minnesota. Volstead lost his seat in
Congress four years later for his pains. 36
The original Volstead Bill was considerably more severe than the
amended act of sixty-seven sections, later supplemented by another six
sections, which evolved out of the debates on the measure in Congress.
First, the House Judiciary Committee weakened the clauses of the bill
that dealt with search and seizure, with the soliciting of orders for
liquor, and with the report of arrests for drunkenness by local officers.
House amendments, although partially restoring the search and seizure
clauses, provided for severe penalties against the wrongful issue of
search warrants, and allowed die possession of liquor in private homes
and the sale of sacramental wine. The amended bill was passed in the
House by a vote of 287 to 100, a loss to the wets of 28 votes since the
division in the Eighteenth Amendment owing to dry and Republican
victories in the elections of 1918.
The bill was then referred to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and
the Senate Judiciary Committee. Further amendments were passed.
Dwellings where people could possess liquor without fear of reprisals
were defined as including residences, apartments, hotels, or similar
places of abode. Individuals were still allowed to store and consume
168 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
liquor and, in addition, to manufacture light wine and cider at home.
Although the provision defining "intoxicating" at such a trivial volume
of alcohol was upheld, the Senate insisted that the government must
bear "the burden of proof in the prosecution of liquor violations. The
Senate then passed the bill without roll call and returned it to the
House, which refused to accept the Senate's amendments. A confer-
ence was set up between the houses to reach an agreement. At the
conference, the Senate won virtually every one of its liberal provisions,
even in minor matters, such as striking out the clause penalizing
drunkards on public vehicles, allowing alcoholics to be given liquor
while under hospital treatment, and legalizing the manufacture of
beer before it was made into near-beer.
The Volstead Act, as passed by Congress, was a curious document.
Although the Armistice had been signed for eight months, the Act
provided for the enforcement of wartime prohibition. The drys main-
tained that the period of demobilization was so difficult that it should
be considered as part of the war; the wets said that the clause was a
dishonest attempt by the drys to go back on their promise to give the
liquor trade a year to wind up its business. For, by the device of
prolonging wartime prohibition, the Volstead Act closed up the gap
between its passage in 1919 and the start of national prohibition under
the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16, 1920. However this was,
Woodrow Wilson used the anomaly of the clauses relating to wartime
prohibition to veto the Volstead Act on October 27, 1919. In his mes-
sage to Congress, he added the cryptic warning that in all matters
having to do with the personal habits and customs of large numbers
of people, the established processes of legal change had to be fol-
lowed. 87 But he did not express specifically in his veto message either
approval or disapproval of the Eighteenth Amendment or of the
main body of the Volstead Act. The House and the Senate immediately
reacted by passing the act over Wilson's veto.
In brief, the amended Volstead Act provided for the manufacture
of industrial alcohol by permits, and its denaturing to render it unfit
for human consumption. The use of beverage alcohol was restricted to
the patients of doctors, communicants at religious services, and makers
of vinegar and cider. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue was
charged with administering the enforcement of the act. The Com-
missioner and his assistants were given powers to investigate offenders
and report them to United States attorneys, who would prosecute them
before the federal courts. Penalties for bootleggers were set at a
maximum fine of $1000 and six months in jail for first offenders, and
$10,000 and five years in jail for second offenders. Places selling liquor
THE TURNCOAT CONGRESS / 169
illegally could be padlocked by court injunction for one year. Personal
property used for the transportation of liquor, such as automobiles,
boats, and airplanes, could be seized and sold by public auction to
help defray the costs of enforcement. The purchase of liquor, how-
ever, did not make the purchaser liable for prosecution under the law
of conspiracy. 38
The Volstead Act was full of flaws. It was the result of compromises
in the House and the Senate between the determined dry lobbyists and
a majority of the members of Congress who did not desire that the
Eighteenth Amendment should be rigidly enforced. Even the drys in
Congress did not want to jeopardize the amendment by making the
Volstead Act too severe and by causing a public revulsion against
national prohibition. Only three members of the House voted for an
amendment to the Volstead Act on July 21 to make the home posses-
sion of liquor unlawful; both drys and wets opposed such a stringent
provision. The aim of the act was to secure as much enforcement as
the country would endure, not total enforcement.
The faults in the framing of the Volstead Act were quickly revealed,
once national prohibition was put into effect. Yet these shortcomings
were no reflection on the sincerity of the drys. TKey wanted prohibition
to be enforced as efficiently as possible; but they knew that Congress
and the wet cities would not allow them to get all they wanted. Even
so, by the compromise of the Volstead Act, they did the dry cause
great damage. They did not secure the blessings of good law enforce-
ment for their supporters, and they gave great cause for resentment
to their opponents. The provision that allowed the making of home
"cider and light wines seemed a monstrous discrimination in favor of
the farm against the town. As Congressman Barldey pointed out, if
fermented apple juice and grape juice were legal, "how about corn
juice?" Congressman McKiniry further saw in the legislation the "mali-
cious joy" of the rural districts of America in "inflicting this sumptuary
prohibition legislation upon the great cities. It preserves their cider
and destroys the city workers' beer." 39
But perhaps Congressman Crago, of Pennsylvania, best put the
j>bje.ctions of those old-fashioned Americans whom the Volstead Act
was designed to protect He feared that the law would breed "a dis-
content jtnd disrespect for law in thjk country beyond anything we
h^ve ever witnessed before." The act refused trial by jury in some
casfesr-flrc6nfiscated personal property; it extended the power of the
judiciary beyond anything since the shameful days of Judge Jeffreys
in England; it invaded the sanctity of the home; and it made "crimes
of the ordinary harmless housekeeping acts of nearly every family in
our country." 40
170 /THE ROOTS OF PROHIBITION
In this way, the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act be-
came the law of the land. Through the many roots of prohibition
rural mythology, the psychology of excess, the exploited fears of the
mass of the people, the findings of science and medicine, the temper
of reform, the efficiency of the dry pressure groups, their mastery of
propaganda, the stupidity and self-interest of the brewers and dis-
tillers, the necessary trimming of politicians, and the weakness of the
elected representatives of the people - through all these channels the
sap of the dry tree rose until the legal prohibition of the liquor trade
burst out new and green in the first month of 1920. The roots had been
separate; yet they were all part of a common American seed. They
combined and contributed to the strength of the whole. The Anti-
Saloon League, bent on its particular reform, was the heir and bene-
ficiary of many interactions in American life. As the diys stood on the
threshold of victory at the opening of the twenties, they could see
manifest destiny in the success of their cause. They seemed to be the
darling army of the Lord. Behind them appeared to lie one mighty
pattern and purpose. Before them hung the sweet fruits of victory.
PART
2
The Dry Tree
CHAPTER
Prelude to Deluge
Oh, fatal Friday!
Monumental Dry Day!
Ah, dreadful Sixteenth Day of January
That expurgates the Nation's commissary,
For all the years to come,
Of whisky, brandy, gin and beer and rum,
The sparkling flow of Veuve Cliquot and Mumm
And all the wines I cannot speak the worst;
Drought leaves me glum and dumb,
O Day accurst
Of Thirst!
ARTHUR GUTTERMAN
the season 'tis, my lovely lambs,
of Sumner Volstead Christ and Co.
the epoch of Mann's righteousness
the age of dollars and no sense. *
e. e. cummings
NATIONAL PROHIBITION began silently, and with little resist-
ance. The creeping campaign of the drys and wartime restrictions
had inured all travelers in the United States to the sanctions of the
liquor laws. Moreover, the end of alcoholic drink had already been
celebrated or mourned three times before the actual sixteenth of
January, 1920. The first funeral orgy had taken place with the opening
of wartime prohibition on July 1, 1919. From that date onwards, the
people of America were reduced to drinking up the remaining stocks
of liquor, for its manufacture was now forbidden. Most of these stocks
were bought up by the wealthy and by institutions, in order to make
the approaching desert years more tolerable with a well-stocked cellar.
The Yale Club, with prophetic insight, laid down enough bottles to
last out fourteen years; other moneyed groups did the same. The re-
* From Poems 1923-1954, copyright, 1954, by E. E. Cummings. Reprinted by
permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
173
174 / THE DRY TREE
maining stocks of matured liquor were drunk up in October, when all
drinkers held a wake at the passing of the Volstead Act, The final
spree took place over Christmas. Liquor was already scarce enough
by this time to cause the deaths of more than one hundred people who
celebrated the New Year by drinking adulterated whisky made from
wood alcohol. Sixteen suspected bootleggers were charged with mur-
der in Massachusetts for selling this poison. 1 It was not a happy augury
for the Eighteenth Amendment.
Only the rich and the farsighted laid away enough bottles to stand
the siege of the dry decade. A curious fatalism seemed to grip the rest
of the drinkers of the land. This was compounded partly of a false
hope that something would happen which would stop prohibition; it
was impossible to conceive of such a monstrous reality. "Like Noah's
neighbors/' the Outlook said, "the wets up to the last apparently did not
believe that the flood was coming." 2 There was also a guilty conviction
among many drinkers that perhaps the drys were right; prohibition
might well be an excellent thing for the nation. This conviction was
allied with a spirit of defeatism, because of the continued victories of
the drys. As a citizen of Charlotte, North Carolina, acknowledged,
"When the women, the churches, and business are united in any fight,
as they are in this one, nothing can stand against them/' 8 Moreover,
there was a real indifference to the matter. The country was in the grip
of the Red Scare, demobilization, and the quarrel over the League of
Nations. Articles on Starving Austria, the triumphs of the Red Armies,
Bolshevism in America, the need for "debusing" the United States
by getting rid of all undesirables "regardless of race, color, creed,
money, position and whether citizens or aliens" these urgent topics
pushed prohibition to the back pages of newspapers and magazines. 4
The long wait for the dry law had made men believe that it would
never come, and yet accept it when it did.
In contrast to the previous and later cascades of talk about prohibi-
tion, a strange moratorium of controversy was widespread in 1919.
One observer wrote on the dry law:
Few people really want it. But nobody cares to say so. Politicians
wait in vain for the sign that is not given. Judges on the bench hand
out reluctant sentences, wondering what they will do when the stock
of wine in their own cellars is exhausted. Lawyers, doctors, professors
and merchants sit tamely by awaiting the extinction of their private
comfort. The working man watches the vanishing of his glass of beer
and wishes that he was a man of influence with power to protest. The
man of influence wishes that he were but a plain working man and
might utter a protest without fear of injury of his interests. 5
PRELUDE TO DELUGE/ 175
Only the drys were content with this situation, although they mistook
this expectant apathy for popular sympathy.
Much of the lack of resistance was due to the success of dry propa-
ganda. People believed the Anti-Saloon League spokesmen when they
said that they would enforce the law quickly and cheaply. The Com-
missioner of Internal Revenue in Wilson's administration sent out a
circular letter to all the clergymen of America, asking them to set up
local committees on law enforcement. These committees were to re-
ceive complaints about the violations of the liquor laws. They were to
channel all relevant evidence to the local police or prohibition authori-
ties. Granted this active support, the Commissioner promised, "We
will have little difficulty in the work of enforcement" 6 An efficient
force of agents, 1500 strong, had been prepared by John F. Kramer,
the first Prohibition Commissioner. With the prospect of such a strong
fist of the law ready to strike, the drinkers were prepared to throw
aside their bottles. After three weeks of enforcement, the wet Nation
was lamenting that never had such an army of officials been gathered
to apply any law or constitutional amendment. "A small army of
Federal officials is busily engaged in searching buildings, trains, ves-
sels, express wagons, and private conveyances, and in spying upon
individuals." 7 With such terror rampant among the wets, the supervis-
ing revenue officer in New York could confidently say, "There will not
be any violations to speak of/' 8
In Orange County, North Carolina, the county which the Treasury
agents at Washington called "the banner county" of the United States
for illegal whisky stills, the traditional distillers themselves lay low for
a while to see whether the government was going to interfere formi-
dably with their living. 9 Although the whole Appalachian mountain
system from West Virginia down to Georgia was "literally honey-
combed with homemade stills for the illicit manufacture of the bever-
age known familiarly as Moonshine, Blue John, and Mountain Dew,"
business was slack in the first weeks of the Volstead Act. 10 For the drys
seemed to be still in the saddle. Newspapers now vied with each other,
priggishly telling their readers how to obey the law with long lists of
bewares. And the Anti-Saloon League had issued a formal warning
that it would "stay in politics" until the wets had given up all attempts
to nullify the law. A campaign for a fighting fund of $25,000,000 to
enforce the law was begun by League leaders in the Southern states. 11
On the day before the Volstead Act came into force, the drys had
won another great victory. A judge in a United States District Court
in New York had ruled that private liquor kept in warehouses, safe-
deposit boxes, or lockers could be seized by prohibition agents. This
disastrous ruling had galvanized the wets out of their lethargy. On
176 / THE DRY TREE
January 16, despite the bitter weather, everything on wheels was com-
mandeered to carry bottles. Nothing was spared, not even perambula-
tors. Never was so much liquor carried by so many in so few hours.
When midnight struck and the land went officially dry, millions of dol-
lars' worth of liquor was lying on the dockside, waiting to be shipped
out of the United States, or was being rushed in automobiles and ex-
press trains to the safety of private homes. Saloonkeepers were shut-
ting up their saloons quietly forever, as they thought, and were look-
ing for buyers, who would convert such desirable corner sites into
drugstores or candy counters. One of the most notorious saloons in
Hell's Kitchen, New York, was serving soup and coffee and quick
lunches within a week, with glass food cases set on top of the cherry-
wood bar. And a brewer, closing down, offered all his stockholders
two barrels of beer instead of a last dividend. 12
The farewell parties to legal liquor were lugubrious affairs. There
were mock funerals at Maxim's and the Golden Glades and the Roman
Gardens in New York; at Reisenweber's, all ladies at the grave of drink
were given compacts in the shape of coffins. But the most joyous fu-
neral was held by the revivalist Billy Sunday, who ceremoniously dealt
with the twenty-foot corpse of John Barleycorn at Norfolk, Virginia.
His example was followed by thousands of church and white-ribbon
meetings all over the land, which celebrated the end of the Demon
Rum. Their rejoicings were premature. Already the first drops of the
deluge had fallen.
In the three months before the Eighteenth Amendment became ef-
fective, liquor worth half a million dollars was stolen from govern-
ment warehouses. Although the guards at the warehouses were aug-
mented, bonded liquor continued to disappear. When a fifth of whisky
was fetching between ten and twenty dollars in large Eastern cities,
and a gallon of corn liquor was selling in the hills for twenty dollars
without allowing for the costs of distribution, many were tempted into
the bootleg trade. Moreover, some states were openly nullifying the
law. The Governor of New Jersey in his campaign for re-election
promised to make the state wetter than the Atlantic Ocean. Lawyers
there were trying to make legal drinks containing up to one-quarter of
pure alcohol, by claiming that they were "nonintoxicating." The Anti-
Saloon League's enforcement fund was abandoned owing to lack of
support. The President, Woodrow Wilson, had had a stroke, and was
setting the pace of inaction over prohibition for his successors. The
appointees of the Prohibition Bureau were of low caliber, and were
anxiously awaiting a change of administration. And the Customs and
Coast Guard agents, try as they might, could only intercept a small
PBELUDE TO DELUGE/ 177
amount of the liquor, which was being smuggled into the country to
meet the huge demand.
In the first six months of prohibition, the later problems of the re-
form show themselves. On February 19, two prohibition agents were
indicted in Baltimore on charges of corruption. 13 By June 17, the fed-
eral courts in Chicago were hopelessly congested with prohibition
cases there were some six hundred liquor trials pending. In western
Pennsylvania, the local police restored liquor to its owners, after it
had been seized by federal officials. Examples of the diversion of in-
dustrial alcohol, of the refusal of state legislatures to appropriate
money for enforcement, of the huge rise in the number of illicit stills,
of the rich and middle classes drinking openly, of the old saloons re-
opening as speak-easies under police protection, and of the flagrant
drunkenness of many of the delegates at both the Republican and the
Democratic nominating conventions these examples showed that the
future dry road of America would be subject to storms. 14
Yet, in 1920, these were mere gusts of the storm. They were not se-
rious. For the bootleggers were not yet organized on a national scale.
Wealthy private citizens were still using up their private stocks of
liquor and were not in the market for more. Many people were willing
to give the law a fair trial. Although there was moonshine available in
the hills, smuggled liquor near the borders and coasts, diverted indus-
trial alcohol in the cities, hard cider in the country, and hair tonics
everywhere, brewing and wine making and gin mixing in the home
were still undiscovered arts. If the drys had been able to push through
a vigorous campaign of deterrence at the outset, they might have had
a longer period of triumph. But instead, the dry leaders, sensing a
cheap victory at home, looked out for a world to conquer. And some
wets encouraged them in the passage "from confidence and power to
arrogance and political coercion/' For they put the drys in the place of
Greek tragic heroes, when "arrogance was the step just before mad-
ness and after madness came destruction. 1 * 15
Meanwhile, the drys only foresaw some minor mopping-up operations
before America turned bone-dry. And the country waited for a change
of Presidents and for proof of the practical wisdom of the Volstead
Act. And a doctor recommended to the International Congress Against
Alcoholism and to the nation, "Of all the blessings in the world, prob-
ably water taken inside and outside is the best/' 16
10
CHAPTER
The Toothless Law
With what chance of success, for example, would a legis-
lator go about to extirpate drunkenness and fornication by
dint of legal punishment? Not all the tortures which inge-
nuity could invent would compass it: and, before he had
made any progress worth regarding, such a mass of evil
would be produced by the punishment, as would exceed, a
thousand-fold, the utmost possible mischief for the offence.
The great difficulty would be in procuring evidence; an ob-
ject which could not be attempted, with any probability of
success, without spreading dismay through every family,
tearing the bonds of sympathy asunder, and rooting out the
influence of all the social motives.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly main-
tained.
AARON BUBR
Now let him enforce it.
ANDREW JACKSON
(of John Marshall, Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court)
MORALITY AND LAW
HMOTHING CAN be more certain/' wrote Oliver Goldsmith, "than
II that numerous written laws are a sign of a degenerate commu-
nity, and are frequently not the consequences of vicious morals in a
state, but the causes." 1 His Puritan contemporaries in America held the
opposite opinion. To them, numerous written laws were a sign of a
godly community and were the curb of vicious morals in a state, not
the causes. The laws of the community should reflect the ideal morality
of the community, not its practice. As in the Ten Commandments, the
ethics of society should be directed by a series of prohibitions of all the
possible sins of mankind. The doing of good was to be a process of
banning the bad. The way of the Lord on earth was to be found in
fear of the law. It was this attitude to legislation which resulted in the
writing of the famous Blue Laws of New England. The Blue Laws
178
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 179
regulated swearing, blasphemy, Sabbath observance, sex, gambling,
and drunkenness. The Laws of the Saints in Massachusetts were, in-
deed, an incentive to Western immigration. For, in the frontier wilder-
nesses, sinners could indulge themselves in peace. Beyond the confines
of civilization, law was largely a rough and ready personal justice. The
way of the free man in the West was to be found in the absence of the
Jaw.
Thus, on the continent of North America, two different traditions of
law and morals developed. The first, which was developed by the
Puritans, regarded morals as a fit branch of legislation. The second,
which was the result of frontier conditions, considered morality as a
private matter, and moral reformers as representatives of the very tyr-
anny of civilization and church from which America had revolted. The
first attitude became the logical argument of the drys, the second of
the wets. To the drys, "the ultimate source of all progress" was "in the
words, law and its penalty.*' 2 To the wets, "no man was ever made
good by force"; it was impossible to take a man "by the scruff of the
neck and lift him up into heaven/' 3 Both arguments could quote tradi-
tion and history as their justification.
A third attitude toward law and morals grew up at the close of the
nineteenth century. This was an attitude compounded of pragmatism,
cynicism, Darwinism, and Marxism. Its argument was that the laws of
society were the laws of the strongest members of that society. This
was also true of the morals of society. Therefore, the connection be-
tween law and morals followed the interests of the ruling group. Henry
Adams wrote of himself that from early childhood his moral principles
had struggled blindly with his interests; but he had become certain of
"one law that ruled all others masses of men invariably follow inter-
ests in deciding morals." 4 This attitude towards law and morality ini-
tially helped the drys, and then worked against them. While eugenics
and progressivism were the dominant intellectual forces, the drys
could and did plead that their opponents were trying to retard the in-
evitable march of history and the majority. Prohibition of liquor should
be enacted because it was the popular will. But when economics super-
seded eugenics as the main interest of the intellectuals, and the revolt
against moral reforms seemed to be the contribution of the twenties to
the progress of human liberty, the drys were the victims of their own
past reasoning. Now the repeal of prohibition was represented as
something which should be enacted because it was the popular will.
An appeal to the right of the majority and of the strongest and of the fit-
test only suits those who feel themselves temporarily to be part of the
fit and the strong and the many.
The drys were misled by their wide backing at the beginning of the
180 / THE DRY TREE
century by the middle-class progressives of America. They were also
deluded into thinking that those who helped them in the attack on the
saloon would also help them in the attack on all liquor. In their eyes,
the aroused millions of the American bourgeoisie, particularly the fe-
male of the species, would inform on any transgressor of the prohibi-
tion laws. Thus the work of enforcement officers would be a mere mat-
ter of arresting the guilty few with the approval of the righteous many.
The passing of the Volstead Act was to prove the opposite, that the
many were guilty and that the arrested few were judged by the many
to be righteous. It was a formidable miscalculation on the part of the
drys, who were more conscious of the desirability of their reform than
it* possibility.
[Moreover, the success of the drys went to their heads. If they had
succeeded in prohibiting liquor, why should they not succeed in ban-
ning other pernicious habits? More and more, the drys forgot the prac-
tical limits of the law and remembered only their view of the good
of society. And in seeking beyond the practical and the possible they
made themselves ridiculouyThe history of the reform crusades against
the cigarette and jazz are examples of the lengths to which the moral
reformers would go in courting failure and jeers. Even when they were
successful, as in the passage of the Mann Act, which used the federal
power in interstate commerce to attack the white-slave trade and for-
nication across state borders, they were open to the sneers of their ene-
mies that, while they pretended to regulate the commerce between the
states, in fact they sought "to regulate commerce between the sexes/' 5
JFhe anticigarette crusade went hand in hand with the fight against
the saloon. As the Century said, "The relation of tobacco, especially in
the form of cigarettes, and alcohol and opium is a very close one. . . .
Morphine is the legitimate consequence of alcohol, and alcohol is the
legitimate consequence of tobacco. Cigarettes, drink, opium, is the
logical and regular series/' 6 In the words of Dr. Frank Gunsaulus,
there was no "energy more destructive of soul, mind and body, or more
subversive of good morals, than the cigarette. The fight against the
cigarette is a fight for civilizatioiy' 7 Medical fears, similar to those ex-
ploited by the drys, were used as deterrents to possible smokers. As late
as November, 1930, the National Advocate printed the opinion of a
doctor that "sixty per cent of all babies born of mothers who are ha-
bitual cigarette smokers die before they are two years old/' The oppo-
nents of the cigarette used a strategy parallel to that of the drys they
were often the same people to secure by 1913 the passage of anti-
cigarette laws in nine states, all in the South or in the West. The tide
in favor of the prohibition of cigarettes, however, receded even faster
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 181
than the dry tide. By 1929, no state forbade the smoking of cigarettes
byadults.
/The crusade against the new styles of dancing and jazz was another
exercise in futility^ In 1914, the General Federation of Women's Clubs
put under a ban the tango and hesitation waltz. 8 A clergyman added to
the proscribed list the bunny hug, turkey trot, Texas Tommy, hug-me-
tight, fox trot, shimmy dance, sea-gull swoop, camel walk, and skunk
waltz. The Methodist Church would not even approve of a decorous
dance step which was hopefully called the Wesleyan waltz. 9 But worse
was to come with the black bottom and the Charleston. The sexual
desires of the young seemed to reign on the dance floor. And as for the
growing influence of jazz on dance music, the superintendent of schools
in Kansas City, Missouri, warned a thousand teachers, "This nation has
been fighting booze for a long time. I am just wondering whether jazz
isn't going to have to be legislated against as well."|For the intoxicating
influence of jazz music was held to be as dangerous as that of alcohoj^
"Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" asked Anne Shaw Faulkner in
the Ladies 9 Home Journal in 1921; she thought it did, and she quoted a
musical supervisor of a large urban high school that only forty out of
two thousand best-selling songs were fit for boys and girls to sing to-
gether. Jazz was held to cause a mental drunkenness or, as Dr. Henry
Van Dyke complained, "a sensual teasing of the strings of physical pas-
sion." 10 It loosed all those moral restraints which the drys held desir-
able, and therefore, like alcohol, it should be prohibited. But the ad-
vent of the radio and talking picture spread the influence of jazz all
over the United States and gave the Negro his first victory in Amenga-
The excesses of the moral reformers in these losing causes did harm
to the drys. For moderates were alienated from all moral reformers.
Moreover, the campaign for the prohibition of liquor seemed to many
to be the thin end of the wedge, the prelude to a reign of terror by
moral zealots over the habits of America. When the Anti-Saloon League
had presented its first petition for national prohibition as far back as
1913, the New York World had voiced this fear: "Tomorrow it is likely
to be the Anti-Cigarette League that is clamoring for a constitutional
amendment to prohibit smoking, or the Anti-Profanity League that in-
sists on a constitutional amendment to prevent swearing, or a Eugenics
Society that advocates a constitutional amendment to stop the birth of
imperfect babies." 11 The .progress of the reform crusades against the
cigarette and the jazzy dance merely seemed to confirm this suspicion.
The field of moral reform seemed to have been taken over by fanatics.
Thus all moral reform suffered. Few people tried to press for a limited
good any more, a temperate betterment of a bad situation, It had to be
all or nothing, either an excess or a nullification of moral legislation.
182 /THE DRY TREE
During the dominance of these concepts of law and morality, which
dated from the views of the Puritans and of the pioneers, moderation
and reason and respect for all law suffered. Those who were terrified
by the selected laws of their chosen God tried to impose their own
holy terror on their fellow citizens through the law of men. It was a
hopeless task and led to scoffing at government and churches. When
Clarence True Wilson advocated that buyers of bootleg liquor should
be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison in order to put "the
fear of God in the minds of those who fear neither God nor man/' he
was shaming his God by representing Him in this light and slandering
his fellow men who thought it no sin to drink. 12 It was the drys who
had originally held liquor to be a sin, and who claimed that the dry
law "brought sin" to all drinkers. 13 If they failed to convince the ma-
jority of their countrymen that this was so, the fault lay in their teach-
ing, not in the unconverted.
.-. THE UNWANTED ENFORCERS
"THE WILLINGNESS to exclude the saloon is largely conditioned by the
opportunity to secure liquor for private use/' 14 This was the basic prin-
ciple of the popular support of prohibition. Indeed, the leaders of the
drys knew that they could never get a majority of the American people
to give up drinking immediately. They hoped that a new generation
of teetotalers would grow up from the ranks of the young, and that the
protected drys would win converts among the shamed wets.
The supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment wanted primarily to
outlaw the liquor trade, not to prevent dedicated wets from drinking. 15
National prohibition was meant to stop the wet cities from swamping
the dry country; only then could there be a counterattack by the rural
moralists on the cities. In fact, even these limited hopes of the drys
were doomed to disappointment. There was never any serious effort to
enforce national prohibition until the early thirties, and by that time it
was too late. After less than four years under the Volstead Act, it was
clear that "three tremendous popular passions" were being satisfied,
"the passion of the prohibitionists for law, the passion of the drinking
classes for drink, and the passion of the largest and best-organized
smuggling trade that has ever existed for money." 16 Once legalism had
turned the possession of alcohol into a popular obsession and the sale
of alcohol into a new Gold Rush, enforcement of the liquor laws had
no chance.
The failure of the enforcement of the Volstead Act was due to ad-
ministrative stupidity, political graft, the federal structure of the United
States, an antiquated legal system, and the flaws in the act itself. These
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 183
interlocking and corrigible causes for failure were overshadowed by
one overriding consideration, that the prohibition law could not be
adequately enforced in the America of that time. Indeed, it is doubtful
that national prohibition can ever be enforced, even under a dictator-
ship. Alcoholic drinks have been made in every civilized society in his-
tory. The Wickersham Commission itself sadly conceded, "Few things
are more easily made than alcohol." 17 The job of the Prohibition Bu-
reau was to enforce the impossible. But it could have made a better
job of this impossible task. The chase of bootleg liquor by prohibition
agents too often resembled the chase of foxes by Oscar Wilde's hunt-
ers, a case of the unspeakable in full pursuit of the undrinkable.
The Prohibition Bureau was always the tool of national and state
politics. In evidence given before the Wickersham Commission, it was
said that the pressure exerted on the Washington headquarters of the
Bureau was "greater at times than any group of men could be expected
wholly to withstand." Congressmen had insisted upon the appointment
or transfer of men within the service. Political organizations had triq$l
to accelerate or retard enforcement in given areas in accord with the
dictates of political expediency. Large and powerful trade associations
had tried to force the Bureau to look after their particular needs. 18
Moreover, the Prohibition Bureau itself was continually kept short of
men, money, and supplies by a cheeseparing Congress. If Americans
got the political representatives they deserved, they also got the pro-
hibition agents they deserved.
While the Volstead Ac' . A pending in Congress, the Commissioner
of Internal Revenue protesteehagainst being given the responsibility for
enforcing such a thankless measure. He said that there could be no
sort of adequate enforcement unless the Prohibition Bureau had the
fullest co-operation from state policemen, churches, civic organizations,
educational societies, charitable and philanthropic societies, and all the
law-abiding citizens of the United States. The Commissioner stressed
hopefully that it was "the right of the Government officers charged
with the enforcement of this law to expect the assistance and moral
support of every citizen, in upholding the law, regardless of personal
conviction/' 19 Unfortunately, the majority of American citizens con-
ceived of other rights the right to patronize the bootlegger or speak-
easy of their choice, and the right to keep mum about the drinking
habits of their neighbors. Where the duty to inform on bootleggers
was widely considered to be a wrong, prohibition agents could expect
little support.
The very organization and methods of the Prohibition Bureau were
hopelessly inadequate. The Bureau was not under Civil Service rules.
The salaries of prohibition agents compared unfavorably with those of
184 / THE DBY TREE
garbage collectors. This low pay made the agents easy victims to cor-
ruption. The total number of agents and investigators employed in
prohibition enforcement varied between 1500 and 2300 men for the
whole of the United States, and the entire staff of the Bureau never
exceeded 4500 men. The normal rate of pay for -agents was between
$1200 and $2000 a year in 1920, and $2300 a year in 1930. 20 For
this inadequate wage, they were expected to work long hours and put
their lives in danger from the attacks of armed bootleggers. When the
bribes offered for a month's co-operation in winking at the actions of
large bootlegging rings might total over one million dollars, prohibi-
tion agents were sorely tempted not to clip the wings of the goose
which laid the golden eggs. 21 In the first eleven years of the Prohibition
Bureau, there were 17,972 appointments to the service, 11,982 separa-
tions from the service without prejudice, and 1604 dismissals for cause.*
The grounds of these dismissals included "bribery, extortion, theft,
violation of the National Prohibition Act, falsification of records, con-
spiracy, forgery, perjury and other causes." And these were not all the
cases of corruption, for, in the words of the Wickersham Commission,
"bribery and similar offenses are from their nature extremely difficult
of discovery and proof." 22
The rapid turnover in the prohibition service, and the notoriety of
some of its agents, gave it a bad name. One disgruntled prohibition
administrator called the Bureau "a training school for bootleggers/* be-
cause of the frequency with which agents left the service to sell their
expert knowledge to their old enemies. 23 The reasons for having such
poorly qualified agents in the Bureau are hardly surprising, since the
Bureau was run for eight years on the spoils system, and since there
was no effort to give even the key men in the Bureau special training
for their jobs until 1927. The bootleggers had more than a hundred
times the appropriation of the Bureau at their disposal, and were far
better organized. The inadequate were forced by their country to pur-
sue the prepared. When drastic attempts were made to reform the Bu-
reau by President Hoover after 1929, it was already too late. Too many
urban Americans had become disgusted with the petty thieveries of the
whole service. They shared the opinion of Stanley Walker, the city edi-
tor of the New York Herald Tribune, that, although there were always
some good prohibition agents such as Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith,
"as a class, however, they made themselves offensive beyond words,
and their multifarious doings made them the pariahs of New York/' 24
An efficient enforcement agency demands three things: continuity of
* Roughly, one in twelve agents was dismissed for cause. The explanation of one
of the dry Senators from Oklahoma was that, after all, "One out of twelve of the
disciples went wrong."
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 185
personnel, large enough salaries to make graft unnecessary, and public
and federal co-operation. The Prohibition Bureau had none of these
three essentials. The first Prohibition Commissioner, an Ohio lawyer,
John F. Kramer, served for a year and a half. His promise that he
would see that liquor was not manufactured, "nor sold, nor given away,
nor hauled in anything on the surface of the earth nor under the sea
nor in the air'* was not put to the test in his short term. 23 His successor,
Roy A. Haynes, was endorsed by dry Congressman Upshaw as a man
of "amazing genius and energy in organization." 26 His four years* ten-
ure of office did not demonstrate these qualities. His personal press re-
leases preached the imminent collapse of bootlegging, while his politi-
cal appointees made the Prohibition Bureau a center of graft and
corruption. All that could be said of his term was that the scandals
which took place in the Prohibition Bureau were nothing, compared
with the scandals which took place in the Department of Justice, under
the benevolent gutting of Harry Daugherty and the Ohio Gang. Dur-
ing the regime of President Harding, the Volstead Act merely provided
a fertile field for the private profit of certain members of the govern-
ment. The Ohio Gang dealt in protection to bootleggers, illegal with-
drawals of bonded liquor, pardons and paroles for ready cash, prosecu-
tions dropped for a price, and even in federal offices for sale. Law
enforcement became open robbery.*
The failure of Haynes to achieve anything more than a confident
manner and a few spectacular raids on New York hotels made Coolidge
appoint a new head of the Prohibition Bureau, a retired General, Lin-
coln C. Andrews. Although Haynes kept his official position, Andrews
was given all real authority. He immediately attempted to reorganize
the Prohibition Bureau on military lines and to drive all political influ-
ence from the service. Senator "Sunny Jim** Watson commented cyni-
cally, "It can't be done," and he was right. General Andrews could not
drive the political spoilsmen out of the Bureau. For, in the words of a
contemporary reporter, "the venerable pie counter is firmly fastened
and the ancient plum tree is indeed deeply rooted." 27 The General's
reorganization was largely a paper job; America was divided up into
twenty-four districts, and some retired officers from the Army and
* The Volstead Act was used by the Ohio Gang as a protection racket. A file
from the Department of Justice listed convicted bootleggers, who could be sold
pardons. Special agent Gaston B. Means testified that he collected some $7,000,000
from bootleggers in a goldfish bowl to square the Department of Justice. George
Remus, the so-called King of the Bootleggers, who was estimated to have made a
gross profit of $40,000,000 from bootlegging, testified that he paid more than $250,-
000 to a member of the Ohio Gang. Even so, he was prosecuted and sent to jail.
He commented sourly, "I tried to corner the graft market, only to find that there
is not enough money in the world to buy up all the public officials who demand a
share in the graft."
186 / THE DRY TREE
Navy joined the prohibition service. General Andrews resigned in
March, 1927, after offending the politicians and the drys by his forth-
right statements, including one admission before a Senate subcommit-
tee in 1926 that his task would be greatly simplified by the modifica-
tion of the Volstead Act to permit the sale of light wines and beer.
Major Chester P. Mills, one of General Andrew's officers in New York,
estimated that three-quarters of the Prohibition Bureau at the time
were "ward heelers and sycophants named by the politicians." 28
The successors of General Andrews were the Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury, Seymour Lowman, and the chief chemist of the Prohibi-
tion Bureau, James M. Doran. The whole service was made to take the
Civil Service examination, for "there were scores of prohibition agents
no more fit to be trusted with a commission to enforce the laws of the
United States and to carry a gun than the notorious bandit Jesse
James/' 29 The result of the examination, which was the standard test,
was shocking. Only two-fifths of those in the Prohibition Bureau could
pass the test after two attempts. Most of the remainder were dismissed
and replaced. Not until 1930 was a beginning made in setting up a
stable body of men prepared to enforce prohibition. When the average
length of tenure in the most difficult of the top administrative posts of
the service was six months, and the prohibition commissioners them-
selves were not continued long in office, there was no hope of enforc-
ing the unpopular dry laws. 80 By 1929, the state of New Jersey had
vanquished fourteen prohibition administrators, and had gained an ac-
colade from a poet in the New York Times:
One by one they interfere
With those Jersey tides of beer;
Manfully they face the flood,
Then, alast their name is mud.
Heroes for a little day,
One by one they pass away.* 1
But if there were replacements and conflicts within the Prohibition
Bureau, there were still more conflicts with other law enforcement
agencies of the federal government. The Customs Service and the
Coast Guard had a long and proud tradition of policing the American
borders, and they were unwilling to share their knowledge with the
upstart Prohibition Bureau. The border patrols of the Bureau of Immi-
gration, formed in 1925, were also unco-operative, except when boot-
leggers also happened to be aliens. Rivalry between the services and
the "wholesome disgust" of the other services for the despised Prohibi-
tion Bureau added to the difficulties of the enforcers of die dry laws. 82
jlgg^ '--'-
^^?.^ -
%^^^*^^~ cwrtesy rf ^ st LQuis po ^ a , ch by Patrick
VOLSTEAD RULES THE WAVES
Certain methods of the Prohibition Bureau gave it still more ^dis-
repute The disguises of Izzy and Moe as undertakers or baseball play-
ping did not make the American people think better of the Bureau. The
188 / THE DRY TREE
fact that the chemists of the Bureau approved of putting poisonous
denaturants in industrial alcohol, which might easily be diverted into
the bootleg market, made them seem accomplices in murder. And the
final folly of the prohibition service was to run a speak-easy of its own
at the taxpayers' expense, the Bridge Whist Club at 14 East Forty-
fourth Street, New York; the club sold liquor to all comers for six
months and trapped a few bootleggers. But the spectacle of the Prohibi-
tion Bureau spreading the bad habits which it was charged to prevent
was too much for the country. The Bridge Whist Club was closed
down, and the expense accounts for the undercover agents* drinking
were lopped.
But worst of all was the direct murder of innocent citizens by pro-
hibition agents. In the opening days of the Volstead Act, there were
shooting affrays between agents and bootleggers. By 1923, thirty pro-
hibition agents had already been killed; Roy Haynes called them "our
little band of martyrs/' 38 Yet the gunplay was confined, more or less, to
the agents and violators of the liquor law. Unfortunately, mistakes of
prohibition agents resulted in the killing of women and children, and
the serious wounding of Senator Greene, of Vermont, in Washington
itself. The innocent deaths of Mrs. Lillian DeKing, whose small son re-
taliated by shooting the responsible dry agent in the leg, of Henry Vir-
kula, shot down while driving his family in Minnesota, and of Mildred
Lee and Sheridan Bradshaw, a girl of eleven years and a boy of eight,
made dry agents loathed everywhere. In a popular pamphlet, the Asso-
ciation Against the Prohibition Amendment claimed that more than a
thousand people in ten years had been killed outright in the prohibi-
tion war between the law enforcers and the violators. Official records
admitted the deaths of 286 federal officers and private citizens during
this period; the officers had killed the civilians at a ratio of one officer
to every three citizens. 84
The government showed its feelings by sending federal attorneys to
defend prohibition agents accused of murder. The officers of the law
were rarely convicted, even in the most flagrant cases of slaughter. The
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment investigated 184 kill-
ings of citizens by prohibition agents; only six of the agents were con-
victed of any crime, and only one of murder in the second degree. The
government seemed to be sanctioning indiscriminate killing by its offi-
cers. Although various directives were sent out ordering agents to be
careful before shooting, the whole service seemed to be too quick on
the draw. "What the prohibition situation needs/' wrote Jane Addams,
"first of all, is disarmament/' 35 Only after the Prohibition Bureau had
been transferred to the Department of Justice, and the reasonable rule
of Dr. A. W. W. Woodcock, was there any cessation in the shooting. 36
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 189
But it was already too late. Too many dry leaders had made imfortu-
njite remarks similar to that of Senator Brookhart, of Iowa, that the
protests against the killings were simply "gush stuff about murders by
men who make mistakes once in a while/' 37 * Cartoons, editorials, and
sneering poems reflected widespread public disgust. Perhaps the wit-
tiest of these protests was "The Patriot's Prayer," written by Arthur
Lippman:
Now I lay me down to sleep
My life and limb may Hoover keep,
And may no coast guard cutter shell
This little home I love so well.
May no dry agent, shooting wild,
Molest mine wife and infant child,
Or, searching out some secret still,
Bombard my home to maim and kill.
When dawn succeeds the gleaming stars,
May we, devoid of wounds and scars,
Give thanks we didn't fall before
The shots in Prohibitions War.
The drys always maintained that national prohibition had never had
a fair trial, because there was no real attempt at enforcement until ten
years of bungled efforts had exhausted the tolerance of the public. To
Senator Neely, of West Virginia, "a thought, a hope, or a dream of
satisfactory enforcement of prohibition" with Andrew Mellon holding
the position of Secretary of the Treasury was "as idle as a painted
ship upon a painted ocean." Since Mellon had had millions of dollars
invested in the liquor trade before prohibition, it was useless to expect
him to enforce the dry law. "Obviously, a thief will never enforce the
law against larcency; a pyromaniac will never enforce the law against
arson; a distiller or brewer will never enforce the Volstead Act." 38
With the wets powerful in every Republican Cabinet, what hope was
there of a zealous prosecution of the dry law?
The drys did not mention, however, the role of the Anti-Saloon
League in exempting the Prohibition Bureau from Civil Service rules,
in backing its inclusion in the Treasury rather than in the Department
of Justice, and in appointing fellow citizens from Ohio to top posts in
the Bureau. The fairest comment on the matter was made in the Wick-
ersham Report, that the Eighteenth Amendment and the National Pro-
hibition Act came into existence "at the time best suited for their adop-
tion and at the worst time for their enforcement" 39 The political tri-
* Mrs. Ella Boole, president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was
reported as the author of an even more unfortunate remark about the murdered
Mrs. DeKing, "Well, she was evading the law, wasn't she?"
190 /THE DRY TREE
umph of the drys was not, and could not be, translated into a social
victory. In fact/if an army of federal agents had been raised to insist
on the observance of the Volstead Act in the wet cities, it is probable
that repeal would have come about even sooner. When Hoover began
to enforce prohibition with some efficiency, he dried up its support as
well as supplies of bootleg liquor.
The statistics of prohibition enforcement show the increasing effi-
ciency of the Prohibition Bureau and the increasing volume of the
bootleg trade. In 1921, a total of 95,933 illicit distilleries, stills, still
worms, and fermenters were seized; this total rose to 172,537 by 1925
and to 282,122 by 1930, In the latter year, some forty million gallons of
distilled spirits, malt liquor, wine, cider, mash, and pomace were also
seized. The number of convictions for liquor offenses in federal courts,
which had averaged about 35,000 a year after 1922, showed a startling
jump under the Hoover administration to a maximum of 61,383 in
1932. Jail sentences, which reached a total of only 11,818 by 1927,
rocketed to 44,678 in 1932, finally demonstrating, as President Hoover
himself wrote, "the futility of the whole business." 40
President Hoover reckoned later that the federal government could
not have come anywhere near enforcing prohibition with a police force
of less than a quarter of a million men. Yet even his small efforts at
enforcement were enough to write the death warrant of the Eighteenth
Amendment. Prohibition had developed from a joke into a threat to all
and sundry. While the situation in large cities was "not enforcement
but a sort of safe regulation of the liquor-selling traffic" through the
co-operation of criminals and policemen against interlopers and price
cutters, the drinkers were not worried. 41 But the moment that efficient
federal agents began to put respectable citizens in jail, the situation
became intolerable. Although bad enforcement disgusted America
with prohibition, it was good enforcement which helped to cause the
revolt of repeal.
THE DEFECTIVE ACT
THE FLAWS in the Volstead Act were quickly revealed by the methods
used by bootleggers to circumvent it. The clause relating to industrial
alcohol allowed fake denaturing plants to divert the alcohol into boot-
leg channels by permitting the establishment of denaturing plants any-
where in the United States, once a bond had been filed and a permit
issued. In 1929, Major Mills testified that the major part of bootleg
liquor in circulation came from diverted industrial alcohol. His testi-
mony is accurate for the middle years of prohibition, although home-
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 191
brew was the major source of supply by the end. And the home-brew-
ing of wine and beer was itself legal under the Volstead Act, although
the regulations of the prohibition unit proscribed the making of "non-
intoxicating cider and fruit-juices" from dried fruits, dandelions, and
rhubarb. Moreover, the legal manufacture of real beer, before its alco-
hol was removed and it was turned into near-beer, allowed the makers
to divert large quantities of genuine ale into the ever-thirsty market.
The clauses dealing with medicinal and sacramental alcohol in the
act provided more illicit liquor in America. In the House debate, Con-
gressmen had voiced their fears of scalawag and jackleg physicians, al-
though no one foresaw the possibility of bootlegging ministers. 42 The
testimony of Dr. Bevan that doctors made roughly $40,000,000 in 1928
by writing medical prescriptions for whisky, the opposition of the Na-
tional Association of Retail Druggists to the vast profits of the speak-
easy drugstores, and proof that even sacramental wine often reached
the dinner table rather than the communion cup provided damning
evidence against these loopholes in the Volstead Act. 43
Moreover, the transfer of the duties of enforcement to the Treasury
Department rather than to the Department of Justice was ill-advised.
Wayne B. Wheeler had originally insisted upon this for various rea-
sons. "The Internal Revenue Commissioner is obviously the choice for
the chief law enforcement official. The reason for this is that this de-
partment has dealt with the liquor traffic through many years. The
machinery is already built." 44 There was a further motive behind
Wheeler's insistence. While the Volstead Act was pending, the Com-
missioner had complained that his department was already overbur-
dened with the fiscal and revenue problems of the government Thus
Wheeler could volunteer unofficially to relieve the Treasury of the
burden of its duties relating to prohibition enforcement. He could,
then, personally organize, check, and staff the Prohibition Bureau. And
this he largely did. During the administration of President Harding (a
fellow citizen from Ohio, who was beholden to the Anti-Saloon League
for many political services) and during the administration of President
Coolidge, Wheeler was the clearinghouse for most appointments to the
Prohibition Bureau through the agency of his contact, Roy A. Haynes,
the Prohibition Commissioner. Unsuccessful petitions were made in
1921 and 1924 to transfer prohibition enforcement to the Department
of Justice. But these recommendations were resisted by Wheeler
through his influence in Congress. He feared he would lose his power
over appointments. Not until the death of Wheeler and the prelimi-
nary report of the Wickersham Commission in 1929 was the Depart-
ment of Justice given the duty of enforcing the Eighteenth Amend-
ment. But it was already the evening of prohibition.
192 /THE DRY TREE
Other deficiencies in the Volstead Act were evident in the prosecu-
tion of offenders. There was bad liaison between the Prohibition Bu-
reau and the United States attorneys, and between the United States
attorneys and the federal judges. The old tradition that indictment in
a federal court was tantamount to conviction and proper punishment
did not apply to prohibition cases. Many cases were dismissed because
the Prohibition Bureau was held to have exceeded its legal powers
while collecting evidence. Other cases were voided on technicalities.
Some federal judges were obviously out of sympathy with the Volstead
Act and used its complex and verbose phrasing to acquit offenders.
The penalties for breaking the law were not sufficient to deter large-
scale bootleggers and first offenders. Not until the passage of the Jones
Act in 1929, which supplemented the Volstead Act by providing for a
maximum penalty of five years in jail and a fine of $10,000 for first
offenders, did the law acquire teetk enough to deter those in search of
easy money from bootlegging.
This was not the end of the catalogue of errors in the Volstead Act.
Although court injunctions to padlock for one year any place dis-
covered selling liquor were the most helpful tool of the Prohibition
Bureau, their use was blunted by the provisions of the act. Judges
were not required to issue injunctions, but recommended to issue
them. Also, the injunctions had to be served on the owners of the
property which was being used as a speak-easy or bootleg factory, and
these owners were often absent. Moreover, the act prevented prohibi-
tion agents from confiscating the cars of bootleggers if the license of
the car was made out in the name of a company which could plead
ignorance of the illegal use of its property. And, above all, enforce-
ment was well-nigh impossible when purchasers of bootleg liquor
could not be held for conspiracy.
The Volstead Act was a hodgepodge of cunning and compromise,
and it produced a hodgepodge of enforcement and evasion of national
prohibition.
THE UNWILLING STATES
THE PROBLEM of law enforcement in the United States also lay in the
divisions between and within the states. The states had many more
police officers than the federal government had a total of some
175,000 officers of the law in 1930. But these officers were badly paid
and overworked, in the interest of low taxes. The states also had differ-
ent opinions, laws, and judicial practices from those of the federal
government. In these discrepancies, evasion of the consequences of the
THE TOOTHLESS LAW/ 193
law, particularly of the prohibition law, flourished. National prohibi-
tion needed central control if there was to be any efficient enforcement.
This central control was impossible when a major part of enforcement
was left to the individual states.
Most of the states passed laws to supplement the Volstead Act, by
making evasion of the dry law a state crime as well as a federal crime.
Sixteen states defined the word "intoxicating" even more stringently
than did the Volstead Act. Other states forbade the possession of liquor.
Some gave the state police greater powers of search and seizure. In
Indiana, jewelers were forbidden to display cocktail shakers or pocket
flasks in their windows. In Michigan, the savage Baumes Law made
violation of the liquor laws for the fourth time punishable by life im-
prisonment; a mother of ten children was so sentenced for possessing
one quart of gin. But, in general, there was an unmistakable hiatus in
the states between the law and its enforcement 43 A drastic law was all
very well; but the fact that the states never appropriated more than a
pittance for enforcement or for policemen or for additional courts of
judgment drew the teeth from these drastic laws.
The Mullan-Gage Law is a good example. The New York legislature
passed this law to supplement the Volstead Act in 1921, and failed to
appropriate any money to enforce its provisions. Within a week, the
courts of the state were clogged up with liquor cases. Nearly 90 per
cent of the accused were dismissed by the courts; 7 per cent pleaded
guilty; only 20 cases out of nearly 7000 resulted in a trial by jury, con-
viction, and jail sentence. 46 When Alfred E. Smith signed the repeal of
the law in 1923, making New York the first state to confess to the utter
failure of state prohibition enforcement, the impossibility of the job
had already been demonstrated. Prohibition could not be enforced in
large urban areas unless vast sums were set aside by the legislatures
for the purpose, and no legislature in the United States would do this.
Not only did the states fail to enforce their own prohibition laws,
but often they prevented the federal prohibition agents from doing
their duty. Over and over again, zealous prohibition officers found
themselves transferred or removed from their jobs because state politi-
cians were annoyed by their efficiency. In Massachusetts, the chief
prohibition officer raided a Republican party banquet where liquor
was being served; his own superior officer in the Prohibition Bureau
was there, and the zealous subordinate was removed for his pains. 47 In
New Jersey, a new dry officer, who pictured himself as the "prohibition
St. Patrick/' found himself in a "whirlpool of disloyalty, intrigue, es-
pionage within and without the service, graft, lack of support from
Washington, lack of sympathy of the public, double-crossing every-
194 / THE DRY TREE
where, and cut-throat tactics"; after months of the most strenuous ef-
fort, the new officer found that he had only accomplished one thing -
he had raised the price of liquor and reduced its quality. 48 In Philadel-
phia, the formidable General Smedley D. Butler made a valiant at-
tempt to dry up the city. But he left his post before his two years were
ended, since he found that the job was impossible. He had arrested
more than 6000 people, but only 212 had been convicted in the courts.
In his opinion, enforcement had not "amounted to a row of pins after
the arrests were made." 49
The federal prosecuting attorney in Philadelphia wrote a sad chroni-
cle of how national prohibition destroyed the morale of the law in city
and state. To him, the law had been respected and moderately efficient
before the Volstead Act. Afterwards it became corrupt and unwork-
able. The ingenious provisions of the dry laws "simply added infinite
variety to the means of crookedness. It wasn't only the law that was
broken, it was every rule of ordinary decency among men." The whole
of the legal system of Philadelphia became demoralized within a year.
Political leaders fought for the office of the state director of prohibi-
tion, who "could control numerous highly desirable appointments,
could afford protection to favored persons and provide permits in pay-
ment of political debts, and, what was still more important, could col-
lect unlimited sums of money for campaign purposes." So many re-
spectable people became involved in the graft of prohibition enforce-
ment in Pennsylvania that it seemed that "the community was in a
vast conspiracy against itself/' 50
With a honeycomb of graft sweetening the integrity of whole states,
with prohibition enforcement allied to the political needs of party ma-
chines, with state policemen demoralized by the billions of dollars in
the bootleg business, it was vain to expect too much from local officers
of the law. If the federal government wanted to enforce prohibition, it
would have to go it alone. Wayne Wheeler might appeal to the states
to co-operate with the Prohibition Bureau in the matter, but the states
were deaf to his appeal. Indeed, the doctrine of states' rights was antag-
onistic to federal interference in any of the affairs of the states. Wheeler
could say with some truth that "only when some hoary and lucrative
evil custom is attacked do the champions of organized vice or crime
arise and call high heaven to witness that the sacred rights of the states
are being violated if the white slave traffic, the drug evil, gambling or
booze are placed outside the pale of the law." 51 But the fact was that
the states would not help federal agents over prohibition, unless they
wanted to do so. There could be no compulsion of an unwilling state,
short of Civil War.
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 195
In the voluminous pages of the Wickersham Report, the efficacy of
law enforcement in the various states is related. Many of the testimo-
nies from the states are disappointing, merely reflecting the wish ful-
fillments of the officers of the law. Other testimonies show the despair
of those set to enforce the Volstead Act. Above all, a picture of the
local nature of prohibition enforcement comes out of the document.
Obedience to the law and the actions of its officers varied from town
to town, from one officer to another. In Florida, for instance, enforce-
ment was very poor in Miami and Tampa, but good wherever the Cus-
toms Service had jurisdiction. In Colorado, twenty-five out of twenty-
six grand jurors of high character admitted that they drank liquor. In
Georgia, the state superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League could
testify that the state was rapidly becoming dry, while speak-easies and
brothels were run openly in Macon. In the dry Senator Borah's home
state of Idaho, enforcement was spotty, with a United States marshal
complaining about the laws that Borah had helped to pass, "The more
laws we have, the easier it is for the bootlegger to escape. We need
simple laws like the Commandments, and then enforce them." In large
wet cities such as St. Louis, the frank admission was that "no officer in
St. Louis could be elected unless he declares he is opposed to the
Volstead Act," while "outside of four or five counties Missouri is dry,
and to be elected to any important State office one must be on the dry
ticket." In North Dakota, dry sentiment was so strong that the state
Supreme Court judged that liquor crimes involved "moral turpitude";
but a pamphlet for compulsory Temperance Day teaching could include
Will Rogers's remark, "If you think this country ain't dry, just watch
'em vote; if you think this country ain't wet, just watch 'em drink. You
see, when they vote, it's counted, but when they drink, it ain't." Yet,
in the depths of dry Texas, conditions were so bad in towns such as
Galveston, with open bawdy and gambling houses and saloons, that a
prominent law officer had to shrug off the town as "outside the United
States." 52
The Volstead Act was enforced in the United States wherever the
population sympathized with it. In the rural areas of the South and
West, there was effective prohibition, as there still is in certain coun-
ties. In the large cities, however, there was little or no attempt at en-
forcement The police merely aimed at regulating the worst excesses
of the speak-easies. In the ports of America, as the president of the In-
ternational Seamen's Union said, there was no such thing as enforce-
ment or prohibition for the seaman. "He can get all the drink that he
can possibly swill or buy, and it is strong drink." 53 Along the main
highways of the land, roadhouses offered hard liquor to passing travel-
196 /THE DRY TREE
ers. In addition, no tourist resort would ever dry up its means of
attracting patrons. Wherever urban conglomerations or modern commu-
nications spread, liquor spread too. The South and West were pro-
tected by their isolation for a long time, but even dry Kansas could not
keep its citizens from catching jake paralysis in the western part of
Kansas City. Enforcement was only effective where it relied on politi-
cal and religious sanctions. Where political and religious tradition
sanctioned liquor, enforcement was a farce.
The quarrel between the drys and the wets about the rights and
wrongs of the state attitude toward law enforcement was a quarrel in
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. When Borah urged the states to pick up their
share of the burden under the "concurrent" clause of the Eighteenth
Amendment, he was heard and ignored. When Governor Ritchie, of
Maryland, insisted that the "concurrent" clause merely reserved the
right of their own police power to the states without imposing a duty
upon them to help the federal government, the wet states applauded
him and the dry ones cursed him. 54 But the argument made no differ-
ence to the facts of enforcement When the state legislatures would
appropriate even less than a niggardly Congress to enforce an unpopu-
lar law, any argument about the rights and wrongs of state enforce-
ment was a mere exercise in legal casuistry.
The states themselves showed increasing opposition to the Volstead
Act. After New York had repealed its prohibition law, it was followed
in the twenties by Nevada, Montana, and Wisconsin. In 1930, Massa-
chusetts, Illinois, and Rhode Island all voted by referendum to repeal
their state prohibition laws. Although the drys had won six out of ten
popular ref erendums before 1928 on the question of keeping the state
enforcement codes in operation, they lost ground steadily after the
election of Herbert Hoover to the White House. 55 * Their margin of
victory in ref erendums had always been narrow, and the growing un-
popularity of prohibition during the depression turned their slight ma-
jorities into minorities. The drys ended by opposing state referendums
as a means of expressing popular opinion, and tried to rally the legisla-
tures alone behind the dry law. But as state after state gave up its en-
forcement law, until even California with its dry stronghold of Los
Angeles went wet in 1932, the drys could no longer hold back the tide
of popular discontent, f
* Out of further referendum^ in nine states before 1928, however, asking for
modification or repeal of the national prohibition laws, the wets won seven and
the drys only two.
t Los Angeles, with its immigrant Midwestern population, was the only major
dry city outside the South in the United States.
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 197
The Wickersham Commission, in looking through the record of the
states on prohibition, could only commend Kansas and Virginia as
truly zealous prohibition states. Even in these two areas of virtue,
there was a failure of enforcement in the cities. And a failure of en-
forcement in the cities meant a "failure in the major part of the land in
population and influence/' 36 In fact, the commission recognized that
the failure of the states to enforce the dry laws was really a reasonable
response to the failure of the people within those states to uphold
those laws. The states were united in the prosecution of other laws,
such as the narcotics law. Perhaps, the fault was more in the Eight-
eenth Amendment itself than in the states which held together in
agreement about most of the Constitution. As Heywood Broun com-
mented on Herbert Hoover's dry messages to Congress, he found it
difficult to see how a man could say in one breath that he loved the
Constitution and also the amendment which had brought it into such
disrepute and peril. "One might as well maintain that he is for both
the heroine and the villain who threatens her, Red Riding Hood and
the wolf, Nancy Sikes and also Bill/' 57
THE BOOTLEG SPRINGS
THERE WERE five main sources of illegal liquor: imported liquor, di-
verted industrial alcohol, moonshine, illicit beer, and illicit wine.* The
first two sources supplied most of the decent liquor available in the
early twenties. If this condition had continued into the late twenties,
there might have been some hope of adequate enforcement of the pro-
hibition laws. But the production of moonshine and beer and wine in
the home decentralized the making of bootleg liquor to such an extent
that enforcement became impossible. Where the springs of bootleg
liquor rose in half the homes of America, there was no stopping of the
flood.
American prohibition was very profitable to its geographical neigh-
bors. The migration of thirsty Americans into Canada sensibly helped
the Canadian economy. Hotels, bars, roads, and steamboats were built
* There were two other minor sources of beverage alcohol. The first was legal:
the supplies of liquor provided through doctors' and druggists' prescriptions, and
through sacramental wine. The small extent of this supply made it relatively unim-
portant. The second source was the mysterious disappearance of spirits held in
government warehouses under bond during prohibition. In 1920, there were 50,-
550,498 gallons of whisky under bond; this amount had shrunk to 18,442,955 gal-
lons by 1933. Even allowing for the legitimate prescription of medical alcohol, at
least 20,000,000 gallons of whisky must have been diverted somewhere or other.
198 /THE DRY TREE
for the new tourist trade. The financial attractions of the new demand
proved too much for the prohibition laws of the Canadian provinces,
and they were mostly repealed. The number of Canadians visiting
America was only half the number of Americans visiting Canada,
while, on the average, each American spent twice as much money as
his Canadian counterpart. Indeed, Canada profited very much from
prohibition in America. 58 The liquor monopolies in the Canadian prov-
inces reaped huge benefits from the sale of liquor and from taxes on
"export houses/* which smuggled liquor into the United States. After
seven years of American prohibition, Canada was exporting officially
more than one million gallons of spirits each year to its neighbor. Not
until 1930 did the Canadian government make a real effort to stop the
flow of whisky into America.
Roy Haynes referred sadly to the remark that it was impossible to
keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line. 59 The Canadian-
American border was some thousands of miles long, and hardly pa-
trolled. The Mexican border was similarly easy to cross, although it
was never a major source of bootleg supply. Through these unde-
fended frontiers, a deluge of liquor descended. Between 1918 and
1922, imports of British liquor into Canada increased six times and into
Mexico eight times. Although it is impossible to calculate how much
liquor was actually smuggled into America, the liquor revenues of the
Canadian government increased four times during prohibition, while
the consumption of spirits by the Canadian population almost halved. 60
In the busiest smuggling area, Detroit, graft averaging two million dol-
lars a week bought immunity for liquor traders. General Andrews cal-
culated that the law enforcement agencies caught only one-twentieth
of the liquor smuggled into America. 61 If his estimate was accurate,
the flow of liquor into America can be calculated at between five and
ten million gallons a year. The Department of Commerce gave the
worth of smuggled liquor at the "low estimate" of $40,000,000 a year. 62
Smuggled liguor was brought into the United States by sea as well
a"15yland. Prohibition saved the economy of many poor islands off
Canada and in the West Indies. Imports of liquor into St. Pierre and ^
Miquelon, the Bahamas, and other islands would have been sufficient
to keep the local population dead-drunk for hundreds of years. 68 The ~;
liquor was exported again, however, to the fleets of rumrunners which
lurked outside American territorial waters and sold their cargo to the
owners of fast speedboats to run in past the Coast Guard cutters. One
contemporary account by a rumrunner brings out the monotony and
dullness of life on the waiting ships of Rum Row. 64 Sensational ac-
counts of Rum Row and Bill McCoy, whose liquor was guaranteed to
'TV. ; "^Y/*'^^
Courtesy of the Evening World, by Clive Weed
KING CANUTE!
be the "real McCoy" and no fake brand, cast a glamorous light on the
sea-smuggling business, which was hardly felt by the smugglers them-
selves. 65 After the first four years of easy profits and quick sales, over-
competition, murders by hijackers, the harrying of the Coast Guard,
and long months at sea with too much liquor on board reduced the ships
on Rum Row to a desolate line of vessels which barely paid their way.
Only the islanders and owners of the goods at the home ports of the
rumrunners made safe profits. Perhaps the real gainer from Rum Row
was the United States Navy, which was training its future sailors in
gunnery and navigation without any government expense, 66
The second spring of bootleg liquor flowed from the business of in-
200 / THE DRY TREE
dustrial alcohol. Little industrial alcohol was used in America until the
beginning of this century. By 1906, however, the demand had become
sufficient to secure its exemption from the excise tax on distilled liquors,
once special denaturants had been added to the alcohol to render it unfit
for human consumption. Between 1920 and 1930, legitimate produc-
tion of industrial alcohol increased nearly four times to just over 180,-
000,000 proof gallons a year, although beverage alcohol was prohibited
at this time. The Volstead Act carefully exempted industrial alcohol
from its provisions, and set up complex rules for its supervision by the
Prohibition Bureau.
The huge increase in the business of industrial alcohol was partly
due to the boom in industry and partly due to bootlegging. In 1926,
General Andrews referred sourly to the special denaturing plants which
manufactured industrial alcohol as "nothing more or less than boot-
legging organizations." 67 He estimated that some 15,000,000 gallons of
alcohol a year were diverted into bootleg channels; the United States
Attorney for the Southern District of New York lifted this figure to
between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 gallons. 68 Since each gallon of in-
dustrial alcohol, when doctored and watered and colored by bootleg-
gers, produced three gallons of so-called whisky or gin, the amount of
booze available from this source was large. But the heyday of the di-
version of industrial alcohol passed in the middle twenties, and, through
better regulation, the total quantity of bootlegged alcohol from this
loophole had sunk to less than 15,000,000 gallons a year by 1930. 69
The Prohibition Bureau tried to make industrial alcohol undrinkable
by insisting on the addition of one of seventy-six denaturants, made up
from different formulas. Some of these denaturants were harmless,
such as lavender and soft soap; others were poisonous, such as iodine,
sulphuric acid, and wood alcohol. The bootleggers, once they had laid
their hands on the denatured alcohol, tried to recover it for drinking
purposes. The Wickersham Commission conceded that a skilled chem-
ist, given adequate resources, could recover drinking alcohol from al-
most any mixture which contained it. 70 But the trouble was that too
many bootleggers in search of quick profits did not bother to set up
and pay for the expensive processes of recovery. With little more than
a token effort at removing the denaturants, the bootleggers mixed in-
dustrial alcohol with glycerine and oil of juniper and called the prod-
uct gin. Scotch whisky was made by adding caramel and prune juice
and creosote to the industrial alcohol. Then forged labels and bottles,
resembling those of high-grade liquor firms in England or Canada,
were used to peddle the mixture into the throats of the unsuspecting. 71
The world was suddenly full of people "putting new gin into old
bottles."
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 201
The number of deaths due to poisonous drink in the United States
gives a fair picture of the height of the influence of doctored industrial
alcohol. The peak of these deaths was during the period 1925-1929,
when some forty people in every million were dying from bad liquor
each year. Most of the slaughter was caused in the New York area by
the sale of bootleg containing wood alcohol, a denaturing substance
which could blind and kill. The wet press accused the Prohibition Bu-
reau of conspiring to poison American citizens, because the Bureau
knew that at least one gallon of industrial alcohol in ten would be
diverted into the human stomach. "A skull and cross-bones becomes
the badge of the enforcement service," screamed the New York World.
The Borgias had poisoned only individuals, while the government of
the United States proposed "collective slaughter." Even the Venetian
prisoners, according to the World, "never could be accused of prepar-
ing venomous doses for purposes of reform." 72 The publicity not only
caused consumers to be more careful about what they drank, but made
the Prohibition Bureau, despite the protests of the drys, research into
the possibility of finding nontoxic, but more revolting, denaturants to
put into industrial alcohol. Wayne Wheeler might say that those who
drank industrial alcohol were deliberate suicides. 73 But it was a nasty
truth that the very same reformers who had supported the Hepburn
Pure Food and Drug Bill twenty years before now wanted to put poi-
sons into alcohol which they knew would be drunk by human beings. 74
The third spring of the bootleg liquor, and its chief source by the
close of the twenties, was moonshine illegal spirits distilled in Amer-
ica for local consumption. Moonshine had been distilled in the Appa-
lachian Mountains since the eighteenth century, and, even before pro-
hibition, up to two thousand illicit stills a year were seized by revenue
officers. But national prohibition developed the moonshining industry
from small business into big business. In 1929, twelve times as many
illicit stills were seized as had been seized in 1913. Methods of making
high-quality liquor by speedy aging processes had made obsolete the
means of both the legitimate and the illegitimate distillers of the days
before the Volstead Act By the early thirties, the huge circulation and
low price of moonshine of moderate quality was a tribute to the scien-
tific ingenuity and legal immunity of its makers. In fact, moonshining
has continued to this day to be a profitable industry, with an output of
up to 100,000,000 gallons of liquor a year.
In the early days of prohibition, too many small operators with too
little knowledge went into the business of operating stills. Poisonous
salts of copper and lead and zinc found their way into the moonshine
from defective worms and coils used in the process of distillation. The
greed of amateur moonshiners made them include the "heads" of the
Brown Brothers Photographers
A MOONSHINE STILL
distillation, high in aldehydes, and the "tails," shot through with fusel
oil, in the final mixture. These should have been thrown away, and
only the "middle run" taken. Moreover, the addition of dead rats and
pieces of rotten meat to the mixture to give it a kick did not make the
drink better for the health of the drinkers. The composition of the origi-
nal mash, from which moonshine was distilled, was described by a
Massachusetts prohibition administrator as a blend of sugar, water,
yeast, and garbage. His dictum was: "The more juicy the garbage, the
better the mash, and the better the 'shine/ " 75 Only when the produc-
tion of moonshine became based on the growing corn-sugar industry
did its basic elements become clean enough to avoid too much con-
tamination of the drinker's stomach. The corn-sugar industry expanded
from a production of 152,000,000 pounds in 1921 to 960,000,000 pounds
in 1929, making the Prohibition Bureau calculate sadly that there were
at least seven or eight gallons of high-proof moonshine alcohol in cir-
culation for every gallon of diverted industrial alcohol. 76 This estimate
put the production of moonshine made from corn sugar alone at a
minimum of 70,000,000 gallons a year, with an absolute alcohol con-
tent of some 23,000,000 gallons. 77
The small moonshiners were gradually taken over or pushed out by
the large criminal distributors of moonshine. These distributors either
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 203
ran large distilleries of their own (more than three thousand distilleries
costing up to $50,000 each were captured in 1929) or else farmed out
their corn sugar to hordes of home "alky cookers" in the tenements of
the large cities. Corn sugar and yeast would be supplied to the alky
cooker in Chicago at a cost of fifty cents a gallon. He would sell his
distilled moonshine to the distributor at two dollars a gallon. The dis-
tributor would bottle it, and retail it to the speak-easy owner at six dol-
lars a gallon.* The speak-easy owner would then charge twenty-five
cents for each drink, making some forty dollars on the original gal-
lon. 78 Local brands of moonshine had names that testified to their kick
Panther and Goat Whisky, Jackass Brandy, White Mule, White and
Jersey Lightning, Yack Yack Bourbon, Soda Pop Moon, Straightsville
Stuff. The extent of the moonshine industry was so great that the
Wickersham Commission had to confess:
. . . the improved methods, the perfection of organization, the ease
of production, the cheapness and easy accessibility of materials, the
abundance of localities where such plants can be operated with a
minimum risk of discovery, the ease with which they may be con-
cealed, and the huge profits involved, have enabled this business to
become established to an extent which makes it very difficult to put to
an end. 79
Ten years of prohibition were calculated to have increased the con-
sumption of spirits from all sources in America by one-tenth, when
compared to the legal drinking days before the Great War. 80
Not all drinkers of moonshine bought the final product directly from
the bootleggers. A sophisticated and economical group of Americans
preferred to "mix their own poison." They bought raw alcohol directly
from the alky cookers or bootleggers or druggists. They then mixed
the alcohol in their own bathtubs with quantities of glycerine and oil of
jumper, according to individual taste. It was this mixture, which was
known as "bathtub gin," that did much to ruin the digestion of the
American middle classes. The mixture was served with quantities of
ginger ale to hide the flavor, although nothing could disguise the
crawling horrors of the aftereffects.
The moment that the Prohibition Bureau admitted that a major
source of supply was homemade moonshine in some form or another, it
* Dr. Bundesen, Public Health Commissioner of Chicago, gave an exciting de-
scription of the alky cooker and his customer. For them, speed was everything.
"Their apparatus is makeshift. Their surroundings are filthy. Their processes are
hurried. Their materials are the cheapest. They themselves are usually novices.
They constantly face the danger of detection and that fact alone would render
them desperate if they were not by nature desperate men."
BATHTUB GIN, CAGNEY STYLE
was an admission that prohibition could never be enforced. Thus the
spokesmen of the drys blinded their eyes to the truth for a decade. In
1923, Roy Haynes wrote, "Home-brew, the last source of supply, is out
of fashion. . . . Synthetic gin is following the same course." 81 By 1929,
Mabel Walker Willebrandt was repeating, 'The still problem is a com-
paratively unimportant phase of lawlessness at the present time." 82
This was not the truth. For the truth was that, if the truth were ad-
mitted, the Prohibition Bureau could do nothing about it. Moonshine
was the source with which the Prohibition Bureau was least equipped
to deal. 88 Indeed, the Bureau did not attempt to deal with it. When a
hundred pounds of corn sugar cost five dollars and a portable one-
gallon still cost seven dollars, when the libraries of America kept a spe-
cial shelf of dog-eared books on how to make liquor in the home, when
the government itself issued Farmers 9 Bulletins on the methods of mak-
ing alcohol, when Senator Reed could circulate in print his own rec-
ipes for making pumpkin gin and applejack, when constitutional
amendments prevented the search of private homes, the attempt to
stop people from making their own liquor and selling it on a small
scale was impossible. The only just comment was a verse by John
Judge,- Jr., in his Noble Experiments:
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 205
There's gold in them there mountains,
There's gold in them there hills;
The natives there are getting it
By operating stills.**
The fourth major spring of booze was beer. The manufacture of
legal near-beer involved the manufacture of real beer, which was then
deprived of most of its alcoholic content. Many breweries were bought
up by gangsters and run openly in defiance of the law. Other brewer-
ies fulfilled the letter of the law in making near-beer, and then sent
supplies of the alcohol removed in the manufacturing process along
with the product, so that the seller could "spike" the liquid back to its
previous condition. Nearly one billion gallons of near-beer were manu-
factured during the first five years of prohibition, although the produc-
tion of near-beer by 1925 was less than one-tenth of the production of
beer in 1914. The problem of the Prohibition Bureau was to see that
this output of near-beer was free from alcohol and was the only ap-
proximation to beer on the market. It failed in both tasks. By 1921, the
first hopeful advertisements of near-beers, such as Kreuger's Special
"brewed and aged and fermented in the famous Kreuger way, to give
it all the old-time tang, snap and incomparable flavor" and Fei-
genspan's Private Seal "mellow and tasty as ever" had given way
to a protest by Anheuser-Busch, called The Penalty of Law Obedience.
The big brewing company pointed out that prohibition had made
valueless a plant worth $40,000,000; the company had spent another
$18,000,000 in converting the plant to make a near-beer called Bevo;
and now they could not sell their near-beer because of the huge and
unchecked competition of bootleggers selling real beer. The pamphlet
complained, "Those who are obeying the law are being ground to
pieces by its very operation, while those who are violating the law are
reaping unheard-of rewards. Every rule of justice has been reversed.
Every tradition and principle of our Government has been over-
turned/' 85 But the protest was of no use. In the main, the production of
legal near-beer from the old breweries reached a maximum of one-
third of its former volume, and a minimum of one-fiftieth. Only two
major breweries managed to equal or increase their production of near-
beer over their past output of beer. 86
As the increased production of corn sugar was evidence of the
amount of moonshining in America, so the increased production of
wort and malt syrup showed up the popular practice of illicit brewing.
Wort is cooled, boiled mash from which beer is made. With the mere
addition of yeast, beer can be manufactured from wort. The process
of making beer from malt syrup is a little more complicated, and in-
206 /THE DRY TREE
volves boiling. Nevertheless, the legal production of both of these non-
alcoholic substances, whose chief use was in the manufacture of beer,
sprang up to unrivaled heights during prohibition, increasing over six
times during the space of seven years. 87 The production of hops in the
United States also continued to flourish; 15,000,000 pounds of hops
were sold in 1928, enough to produce some 20,000,000 barrels of beer,
according to the estimate of the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment. 88 The suggested figures for the manufacture of home-
brew in 1929, given by the Prohibition Bureau, are just under 700,000,-
000 gallons of beer, or about a third of the quantity consumed in
1914. 89 These estimates are confirmed by other reliable figures. 90
The final major spring of bootleg was the making of wine and cider
in the home. In 1920, many owners of vineyards in California had
pulled up their vines, expecting financial ruin; one of them had even
committed suicide. But the first six years of national prohibition brought
unparalleled prosperity to the California grape growers. Shipments of
grapes, wine and table and raisin, to all parts of America more than
doubled. The salvation of the California grape industry was in the
notorious Section 29 of the Volstead Act, which permitted the making
in the home of fermented fruit juices. The section was inserted, origi-
nally, to save the vinegar industry and the hard cider of the American
fanners; it was now used to save the wine of the immigrants. The Cali-
fornia grape growers, who had often supported the drys against the
local brewers and distillers and saloons in a vain effort to enlist dry
support for their native industry, now found themselves saved by the
dry law. They even produced a processed "grape jelly" called Vine-Glo
for those who were too lazy to make their own wine. When water was
added to Vine-Glo, it would make a potent wine within sixty days. It
was remarkable that both Mabel Walker Willebrandt, after she had
given up her job as -Assistant Attorney General, and the Anti-Saloon
League state superintendent supported this product, until the United
States government threatened to prosecute its makers. Mrs. Wille-
brandt even persuaded the government to advance $20,000,000 to the
grape growers who had ruined themselves by planting too many
grapes for the prohibition market And the legal production of Vine
tonics" of high alcoholic content and low medical value continued un-
til repeal. 91 As a wet colonel remarked, "Andrew Volstead should be
regarded as one of the patron saints of the San Joaquin Valley." 92
Most of the California wine-grapes went to the immigrant popula-
tions in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.
The Bureau of Prohibition calculated that, by 1930, more than a hun-
dred million gallons of wine were being made in private homes each
year. 93 The consumption of wine in America probably rose by two-
THE TOOTHLESS LAW/ 207
thirds in the ten years of prohibition. 94 No figure was ever given for
the production of hard cider on the farms, since rural virtue was not
capable of being assessed by statistics, nor even by guesses. But the
home production of wine and cider reached a huge volume and was the
one branch of the bootleg trade which remained in the hands of small
businessmen. Roy Haynes might characterize the big or little boot-
legger as "a man constantly haunted with fear of apprehension and
with a veritable Damoclean sword hanging by a thread over his head**;
but, in fact, small makers of wine were rarely prosecuted. 95 The pro-
duction of wine for friends and neighbors and occasional buyers was
considered a respectable way of adding to the family income.
A typical case of the small bootlegger was Jennie Justo, the "queen
of bootleggers" in Madison, Wisconsin. 96 She paid her way through the
university there by bootlegging wine from the local Italian quarter.
She drifted into the profession casually, after two journalists had asked
her if she could sell them a gallon of wine each week end from her
uncle's drugstore. In the end, she set up a speak-easy herself for the
university students; she now claims that it was as safe and easy to run
as her present tavern in Madison. She did spend six months in the Mil-
waukee House of Correction for bootlegging, but it was a "nice rest
anyways/* To her, the whole episode was a respectable way of making
a living and of fulfilling a community need. The only villains in the
piece were the federal officials, who trapped her by claiming to be
friends of her brother. 97
There were many such cases among the small peddlers of bootleg
and small makers of wine. And there were few means of proceeding
against them. "We never would get anywhere by arresting distribu-
tors/' General Andrews conceded, "because the brother or uncle of the
man that is arrested takes it up and goes right on/' 98 Although the
spectacle of immigrants making and selling and drinking their wine
drove the drys to paroxysms of fury, so that they recommended the
deportation of alien violators of the Volstead Act, nothing much could
be done to stop the practice. 99 Too many people were making too
much liquor at home in a society which resented police invasion of
privacy. The Wickersham Commission conceded as much:
Necessity seems to compel the virtual abandonment of efforts for
effective enforcement at this point, but it must be recognized that this
is done at the price of nullification to that extent. Law here bows to
actualities, and the purpose of the law needs must be accomplished by
less direct means. An enlightened and vigorous, but now long neg-
lected, campaign of education must constitute those means. 100
But it was too late to start the campaign of education. In the opinion
of Senator Reed, brewing and wine making had returned to their place
208 /THE DRY TREE
in the home as domestic arts. "The rathskeller is merged with the
family coal-celler. The secrets of the hofbrau have been handed over
to the hausfrau." 101 Once a wide knowledge of how to make passable
hard liquor and beer and wine was widely disseminated across America,
and once a depression had made all sources of income desirable, noth-
ing could stop the flood of homemade alcohol from swamping the
nation.
Even the virtuous countryside pushed itself onto the side of the
bootleggers, since its income from agricultural products had halved in
the decade. A man who paddled a canoe from the headwaters of the
Mississippi River to its mouth wrote that the scent of mash had as-
sailed his nostrils from Lake Itaska to the dock at New Orleans. 102 The
making of alcohol flourished everywhere because it was easy to make.
As the executive secretary of the Boston Trade Union Club testified,
the process was simple:
You can take ordinary prunes, raisins, or grapes. You do not have to
have hops or malt. You can take ordinary chicken corn, ordinary
wheat, ordinary barley, and simplify that with a certain process of
cooking and fermentation, and within 24 hours you can have a fair
concoction that will give you a kick. That is all there is in alcohol,
is a kick. 103
The making and consumption of alcohol in all its various forms led
to some tragedies. Admissions to hospitals showed that alcoholics drank
corn whisky mixed with Veronal or aspirin, bad home-brew, various
sorts of industrial alcohol including radiator and rubbing alcohol, bay
rum, hair tonics, varnish mixtures, and canned heat or smoke. 104 Some
of these mixtures had been drunk by poor men before prohibition, but
more were drunk afterwards, because the price of good liquor was be-
yond the means of low-paid workers. In 1928, a doctor claimed that
the net dividend of national prohibition was a casuality list in that
year which would "outstrip the toll of the War/' 105 This statement was
an exaggeration; but it was true that the rates of death from alcohol-
ism approached the rates of the days before the First World War, and
that some of the deaths, caused by wood alcohol or Jamaica ginger,
took horrible forms.
A plague of wood alcohol killed off twenty-five men in three days in
October, 1928, in New York City. Even more horrible was the plague
of jakitis, jakefoot, jake paralysis, or ginger-foot that swept the South-
western states in 1930. This disease was caught by drinking Jamaica
ginger with its high alcoholic content. Its victims were easily recog-
nizable. "They lumber along clumsily, because crutches are new to
them; they bend far forwards on their crutches as they walk, because
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 209
they do not dare to trust their weight on paralyzed toes and insteps/' 106
The Prohibition Bureau estimated that there were 8000 cases of jakitis
in Mississippi, 1000 each in Kentucky and Louisiana, 800 in Ten-
nessee, 400 in Georgia, and several hundred more in Kansas, Massa-
chusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In all, Dr. Doran estimated
there were 15,000 cases of jake paralysis in the country, particularly in
the slum areas of dry states, such as Kansas, and in the South, where
efficient law enforcement made rotten liquor the only available source
of alcohol for poor people.
The springs of bootleg could not be dried up while alcohol was so
easy and so profitable to make. The New York World expressed this
point of view in a charming parody of a popular song, which summed
up the situation of millions of seekers after solace and income in the
depression:
Mother makes brandy from cherries;
Pop distills whisky and gin;
Sister sells wine from the grapes on our vine
Good grief, how the money rolls in/ 107
THE LEGAL GAP
BETWEEN THE arrest of the suspected bootlegger and his conviction,
there were many ways of escap; The first loophole was the United
States Commissioner. He issued search warrants and dismissed evi-
dence obtained through improper search and seizure. Arrested boot-
leggers were brought before him for a preliminary hearing, and it was
up to him to decide whether the case warranted a grand jury trial or
not. He could put off trial of a particular case for month after month,
while the bootlegger continued with his operations. He could refuse
to believe the testimony of the prohibition agents, and dismiss the
case. One United States Attorney in New York testified that the Com-
missioner there dismissed nine liquor cases out of ten, or fifty thousand
cases a year, to keep the courts moderately free. 108 Many commis-
sioners were appointees of state political machines and treated their
cases in the interests of their local machine. In the most flagrant in-
stances, the commissioners would warn a small clique of attorneys
when search warrants were issued; these attorneys would, in turn,
warn the bootleggers, so that the prohibition agents would find on
their raids "only soft drinks and church music." 109 Mrs. Willebrandt
wrote that a great part of her time as Assistant Attorney General was
spent in prosecuting prosecutors, rather than the men they should have
prosecuted. 110
The second weak link in the chain of prosecution was the United
210 /THE DRY TREE
States District Attorney. His role was all-important in securing a con-
viction. As the Wickersham Commission was told, "The opportunities
of a district attorney to affect the outcome of criminal cases is so great
that the assumption of that responsibility without sympathy with the
law to be enforced becomes a dangerous and doubtful public service/'
Even where the district attorneys were on the side of the dry law, the
flood of prohibition cases in the federal courts forced them to allow
many bad practices just to clear away the congestion. Often the of-
fenders were persuaded to plead guilty and forego a jury trial in re-
turn for the promise of a small fine or sentence from the judge. Some-
times cases were dismissed outright for this purpose, or because of po-
litical pressure. During the preparation of cases, corrupt attorneys
might make slips, which would result in the quashing of the case by
the judge. Moreover, they could usually find legal grounds for securing
the continuance of a case. The Wickersham Report, although discover-
ing "a substantial number of thoroughly competent and wholly sincere
United States district attorneys/' deplored the fact that some of them
showed "a marked want of a sincere spirit of public service." It re-
gretted that the office was appointive and thus in the hands of politi-
cians. It was also sad that the office carried a low salary. Both of these
facts made the integrity of district attorneys open to temptation. For
these reasons, the commission concluded, 'The typical United States
district attorney, the focal point and keystone of the entire Federal
criminal law-enforcement structure, too often falls short of the de-
mands and opportunities of his office/' 111
The third weak link was the jury. Complaints of the wet sympathies
of juries in liquor cases were legion. Where a prohibition case was of
such importance that it did reach trial by jury, the jury often returned
a verdict of "not guilty," despite overwhelming proofs of guilt. J. J.
Britt, on the legal staff of the Prohibition Bureau, said that it was very
difficult in New York or Pennsylvania "to get a verdict of any great
consequence in either civil or criminal cases relating to prohibition
matters." 112 In one trial in Virginia, a member of the jury dropped a
half pint of liquor in court; no action was taken, and the jury as a
whole found the defendant, a bootlegging Negress, guilty. 113 On an-
other occasion, a jury in San Francisco was itself put on trial for drink-
ing up the evidence in a liquor case. 114 Indeed, the notorious difficulty
of getting dry verdicts from urban juries gave wet defendants a strong
bargaining position with the district attorney; their pleas of "guilty" in
return for the promise of a small fine were as much a favor to him as
to them. The jury trial, instituted to protect justice, ended by becom-
ing a method of bypassing justice.
THE TOOTHLESS LAW/ 211
The fourth door of escape was the judge himself. There were certain
famed judges in America whose sentences on bootleggers were so light
that they approached invisibility. The leniency of some judges to vio-
lators of the dry law provoked a famous outburst from Clarence True
Wilson. According to him, the worst anarchists in America were not
bootleggers they were judges. He even claimed that he could call a
roll of judges, "whose names would look like a criminals' list/' 115 Al-
though he exaggerated, it is true that the American bench beneath the
Supreme Court showed a surprising leniency to offenders against the
Volstead Act, until the Hoover regime. Hoover retired eighteen district
attorneys and two federal judges, and made good appointments. Only
then was a determined and hopeless attempt made to enforce the dry
laws.
The condition of the American judiciary in the twenties was such
that there was no hope of enforcing the Volstead Act. "We do not be-
gin to arrest all that are guilty, Mr. Senator," General Andrews said to
Reed, of Missouri, in 1926; "we can not." 116 The fault was in the courts
and the prisons as much as in the police. Since the beginning of the
century, the number of cases tried in federal courts had been rapidly
increasing. With the passage of the Mann and the National Motor
Vehicle Theft and the Narcotics Acts, bringing increased legal respon-
sibilities to the federal authorities, the number of cases terminated in
the federal courts increased from 15,371 in 1910 to 34,230 in 1920, of
which 5095 were prohibition cases. 117 But then the prohibition cases
increased phenomenally, and with them increased the load on the al-
ready burdened courts. By 1928, there were 58,429 prohibition cases
concluded in the federal courts; two cases out of every three were
terminated there. By 1932, the number of prohibition cases had risen
to a maximum of 70,252. 118 The machinery of justice was inadequate
to cope with this volume of business, especially as insufficient new
judgeships were created to share the load. 119
Faced with an impossible situation, the federal courts fell back on
the expedient of "bargain days." On these days, a vast proportion of
the backlog of prohibition cases was cleared off the records by quick
pleas of "guilt/ from the defendants, in return for low fines or short
jail sentences. Nine out of ten convictions under the Volstead Act
were obtained in bargain days/' Until 1930, not more than one out of
three convictions in federal courts resulted in any form of jail sentence
and the average fine was low, between $100 and $150. 12 This method
of dispensing justice destroyed the high reputation which the federal
courts had enjoyed before prohibition. As the Wickersham Commission
reported:
212 /THE DRY TREE
Formerly these tribunals were of exceptional dignity, and the
efficiency and dispatch of their criminal business commanded whole-
some fear and respect. The professional criminal, who sometimes had
scanty respect for the state tribunals, was careful so to conduct him-
self as not to come within the jurisdiction of the federal courts. The
effect of the huge volume of liquor prosecutions, which has come to
these courts under prohibition, has injured their dignity, impaired
their efficiency, and endangered the wholesome respect for them
which once obtained. Instead of being impressive tribunals of superior
jurisdiction, they have had to do the work of police courts and that
work has been chiefly in the public eye.
The commission continued its indictment of the bad effects of pro-
hibition on the federal courts. Prosecutors, state and federal, had been
appointed and judged for their conduct in prohibition cases alone.
Judges, too, had been considered in this light The civil business of the
courts had been delayed, while even "bargain days" could not clear up
the backlog of all the prosecutions under the dry law. Sometimes,
cases lingered on beyond the three years allowed for their prosecution
under the statute of limitations. Moreover, the Jones Act of 1929 had
allowed "gross inequalities of sentence/' The very cases prosecuted in
the courts included far too many small violators of the dry law, and
far too few large ones. 121 Although the Wickersham Commission dis-
agreed on much, it did agree on one thing, that the effects of prohibi-
tion on the actual workings of the law were deplorable.
But if the Volstead Act placed a severe strain on the courts of Amer-
ica, it nearly burst the federal prisons. In 1916, there were five federal
prisons and penitentiaries; there were still five in 1929, although Presi-
dent Hoover began to build more jails to accommodate the convicted.
In 1920, those prisoners who were serving long-term sentences in fed-
eral prisons numbered just over five thousand; by 1930, they numbered
more than twelve thousand, of whom more than four thousand had
been sentenced for violating the liquor laws. 122 The five prisons and
penitentiaries were desperately overcrowded, since they had been
built to accommodate a maximum of seven thousand prisoners. Indeed,
the federal authorities were forced to board out most of their prisoners
in state and county jails, for they could not accommodate them in their
institutions.
In his Inaugural address, President Herbert Hoover promised the
reform, the reorganization, and the strengthening of the whole judicial
and enforcement system in the United States. For, in his opinion,
"rigid and expeditious justice is the first safeguard of freedom, the
basis of all ordered liberty, the vital force of progress." 128 And Hoover
did what he said he would do. He reformed judicial procedure, the
From New York Evening World
STILL PACKING THEM IN
bankruptcy laws, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the kidnap-
ing laws, and started to build Alcatraz and five other prisons. He re-
organized, consolidated, and increased the efficiency of the Prohibition
Bureau. He appointed the Wickersham Commission, which, despite its
sloth and evasiveness, produced a mass of absorbing information about
law enforcement in America and dealt the deathblow to prohibition. In
fact, in the legal sense, Hoover was probably one of the best Presi-
214 /THE DRY TREE
dents ever to sit in the White House. It was j unfortunate that the
mouths and the pockets of the American people were becoming empty
while Hoover was filling their jails.
The drys insisted on a prohibition law which could not be enforced
by their policemen and prosecutors and judges. The failure of this en-
forcement was, to the wets, a proof of die failure of the law. In fact,
such a revolutionary theory as national prohibition could never have
been enforced without a revolution in criminal procedure. Yet this
second revolution was not supported by the drys, for they saw them-
selves as the defenders of the ancient customs and liberties of America.
Their revolution was to restore the myth of the good old days, with its
emphasis on the American virtues of law and order.
But a law can only be enforced in a democracy when the majority
of the people support that law. And the majority of the people did not
support the Volstead Act. When an attempt at enforcement was made
by Hoover, it was already too late. No general legal reform could sat-
isfy a people angered by a particular law. James J. Forrester, who in-
vestigated the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania for the Wickersham
Commission, found everywhere a "strong and bitter resentment"
against national prohibition among workingmen and their leaders.
Very few of them believe in, or have any respect for, the prohibition
laws and do not hesitate to say so. They consider these laws discrimi-
natory against and unjust to them and therefore have no compunction
in violating them. If their attention is called to the fact that these acts
are the laws of the country and just as binding on the people as any
other laws and that violation of them is criminal, they almost invariably
come back with the assertion that they do not believe in the laws; that
they are harmful to themselves and their families; that they are dis-
criminatory against the working people and the so-called middle
classes, and that they, therefore, resent being classed as criminals. But
they do admit that their violation has a tendency to teach the older
and growing children a disrespect -for other laws and is breeding
conditions of crime. 124
The price that the drys paid for the partial prohibition of liquor was
the cheapening of all the laws of the land, and of all the procedures of
justice.
THE DEFENDERS OF THE LAW
THE EIGHTEENTH Amendment brought new legal problems to the
judges of America. For it made great changes in legal precedent
It withdrew power from the states and from the people. It did not
merely grant power but attempted to fix an implacable policy. It vastly
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 215
increased the hitherto limited police power of Congress. It vastly cur-
tailed the police power of the states. Unlike most other constitutional
prohibitions it was directed not to the national or the state govern-
ments but to individuals. It was a sumptuary fiat quite different from
anything else found in the constitution. 125
It also put judges in the difficult position of trying to dovetail a con-
stitutional amendment with other contradictory and previous amend-
ments. If the Eighteenth Amendment strained the enforcement and
judicial machinery of the United States, it tested to the breaking point
the very interpretation of the law itself.
The Supreme Court was the ultimate judge of the most controversial
prohibition cases. After its famous decisions which upheld the legality
of the Webb-Kenyon Act, the Eighteenth Amendment, and the Vol-
stead Act, it was committed to make workable in law the enforcement
of an unpopular measure. Although the majority of the Supreme
Court Judges were dry in their sympathies, there were ticklish prob-
lems in aligning dry laws with the liberties guaranteed to citizens
under the Constitution. The chief problems arose over search and
seizure, trial by jury, forfeiture of property, double jeopardy, and
methods of enforcement.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protected American
citizens against unreasonable search and seizure of their persons,
papers, houses, and possessions. In the first six months of national
prohibition, more than seven hundred cases involving search and
seizure procedures were reported in the American Law Digest; nearly
six hundred of these cases involved violations of the Volstead Act.
Although several states allowed search and seizure on the merest sus-
picion or sense of smell of officers of the law, there was doubt about
the extent to which the Supreme Court of the United States would
allow questionable practices in collecting evidence. Yet, obviously,
the prohibition agents could not obtain a search warrant to investigate
every car suspected of carrying bootleg liquor. In 1924, the Supreme
Court laid down in the case of Carroll v. United States that vehicles
of transportation might be searched when "the seizing officer shall
have reasonable or probable cause." 126 Although this ruling was diffi-
cult to interpret, it did make the business of enforcement easier. Even
so, dry officers without a search warrant were still excluded from
private homes, though they could see through the windows a distillery
running at full blast. 127
The lengthy process of trial by jury would have made the enforce-
ment of prohibition impossible, for there were too many offenders. On
the other hand, American citizens were assured of trial % by jury for
federal offenses, if they so wished. Although the convinced prohibi-
216 /THE DRY TREE
tionist wanted to see the abolition of trial by jury in liquor cases, he
did not get what he wanted by law, although he was largely successful
by judicial practice. The new institution of "bargain days" in prohibi-
tion cases meant that the accused person was glad to escape the
publicity of a jury trial and the possibility of a jail sentence in return
for a plea of guilty and a small fine. Moreover, the practice of pad-
locking for one year by legal injunction any place where intoxicating
liquor was 'manufactured, sold, kept or bartered" had the effect of
depriving the owners of these places of a jury trial. Although prohibi-
tion agents secured a padlocking injunction in only one out of three
cases, the method proved so speedy and effective that agents pad-
locked 4471 places in 1925, including a California redwood tree which
was concealing a still. 128 Padlocking could result in great financial
loss to property owners, if the padlocked premises were restaurants or
hotels, and could penalize innocent people who did not know that
their tenants were using their property illegally. Although padlocking
was one of the most effective deterrents in the armory of the drys, it
did seem to conflict with the legal rights of American citizens. As one
legal expert wrote, "Like Rome, and Sparta and Carthage, America
in liquor cases is becoming in large measure a 'stranger to the trial
by jury/" 129
Although the claims of the brewers and distillers to compensation
for the effective forfeiture of their property under the National Prohi-
bition Act were not upheld, the owners of the pre-Volstead liquor and
of rumrunning automobiles could claim the restoration of their seized
property. 180 Ownership of liquor bought before 1920 for private con-
sumption was legal throughout prohibition. This liquor could not be
seized under federal law. Moreover, even though an automobile was
discovered by prohibition agents to be carrying bootleg liquor, it
could not be seized under the terms of the Volstead Act if the owner
did not know of its illegal use. Dry agents bypassed this difficulty,
however, by securing forfeiture of seized vehicles under the revenue
law before proceeding against the driver of the car by criminal prose-
cution. In addition, under some state laws, rumrunning automobiles
and pre-Volstead liquor could be seized without benefit of trial by
jury. 181 Prohibition caused many surprising lapses in the habitual re-
spect of Americans for property rights.
Another anomaly in American law publicized by the Eighteenth
Amendment was the decision of the Supreme Court in favor of double
jeopardy. The Fifth Amendment contained a clause, "nor shall any
person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy
of life or limb." Yet, in 1922, the Supreme Court, in the case of United
States v. Lanza, ruled that a man could be tried and convicted twice
Brown Brothers Photographers
DE FACTO ENFORCEMENT
for the same crime once by the state government and once by the
federal government. Since prohibition cases involved two sovereign-
ties, "an act denounced as a crime by both national and state sover-
eignties is an offense against the peace and dignity of both and may
be punished by each." 182 Although this decision was justified in terms
of past decisions of the Supreme Court, occasions for double jeopardy
had been few and were now, under national prohibition, made many.
Even if this new opportunity to prosecute people twice for the same
offense was little used, it was employed in special cases. 188 And these
special cases added to the notoriety of prohibition.
But the most famous of the prohibition cases was, perhaps, OZm-
stead v. United States. Roy Olmstead, a former police lieutenant in
Seattle, Washington, ran a large liquor-smuggling ring, which did
218 / THE DRY TREE
business worth some two million dollars a year. He and his fellow
conspirators were indicted upon evidence obtained by tapping their
telephone wires. Although the Supreme Court upheld the government,
it was by a majority of five to four. In dissenting, Justice Brandeis
wrote a famous decision, saying that "discovery and invention have
made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective
than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is
whispered in the closet." Justice Holmes sadly referred to the whole
thing as "such a dirty business/' Ten years later, the Supreme Court
reversed the decision under the Federal Communications Act of 1934.
It feared the increased control of the government over the lives of
private citizens through the mass media, and honored the eloquent
plea of Brandeis for "the right to be let alone the most compre-
hensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." 184
There were many international cases fought in the courts over the
search and seizure of rumrunners in international waters. The most
celebrated of these was the sinking of the Canadian ship I'm Alone by
an American Coast Guard cutter. The cutter had pursued the Tm
Alone from American territorial waters to a distance of some two hun-
dred miles off the American coast, before it finally sunk the smuggler.
The American case rested on the fact that the cutter had remained
continuously in hot pursuit of the Tm Alone; the Canadian owners
demanded compensation since their vessel was far outside territorial
waters. The whole incident caused bad blood between the United
States and Canada. Eventually, the United States paid compensation,
and the matter was settled to the satisfaction of Canadian pride.
Prohibition caused the judges of the law to strain their interpreta-
tions of that law in an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable. The in-
clusion of the Eighteenth Amendment in the Constitution seemed to
many to put "a hideous wart on its nose." 135 Although the judges of
America were charged with mediating between new laws and old
precedents, there was a limit to their powers of arbitration. The diffi-
culties brought to the courts by prohibition stretched those powers
of arbitration to their limit. And the prohibition law itself made un-
popular those who had to interpret it, the supreme courts of the land.
The organizers, the makers, the policemen, and the judges of the dry
laws lost repute, for the law created a hatred of those whose duty was
its enforcement. As the notable lawyer Elihu Root wrote after the
New York Repeal Convention of 1933, "It will take a long time for our
country to recover from the injury done by that great and stupid error
in government." 136 It did. Many years of tradition are needed to build
up respect for the law, and once the tradition is broken, it is not easily
put together again.
THE TOOTHLESS LAW / 219
The fact of national prohibition presented insoluble problems to the
machinery of the law in the United States. Judges and prisons and
policemen were few; stills and home-brewers and bootleggers were
many. Yet this excess of law and lack of possible enforcement was, as
Walter Lippmann noticed in 1932, endemic to the national scene. The
idea of moral perfection made the American people enshrine in their
Constitution ideals which they could not fulfill, and made them outlaw
habits in which they rather generally indulged. By their moral fervor
as lawmakers, they made a large part of the people the allies and
clients of lawbreakers. And, at the same time, they insisted that the
federal government which executed the laws should remain weak. The
very same voters and lawmakers who made laws which would defeat
the powers of a despotism were jealous to the point of absurdity about
giving their own executive and judiciary any power at all. Thus the
United States had "the strongest laws and the weakest government of
any highly civilized people/' 137 It also had the strongest criminal classes
and weakest public sentiment against them of any highly civilized
people.
CHAPTER
11
The Respectable Crime
I make my money by supplying a public demand. If I
break the law, my customers, who number hundreds of the
best people in Chicago, are as guilty as I am. The only dif-
ference between us is that I sell and they buy. Everybody
calls me a racketeer. I call myself a business man. When I
sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a
silver tray on Lake Shbre Drive, it's hospitality.
AL CAPONE
O, to hell with them Sicilians.
DEAN O'BANION
Once you're in with us you're in for life.
HYMEE WEISS
The country club people will probably go on boozing un-
til the end of time. The best prohibition can hope to accom-
plish is to save the poor man. It saves him by making drink
too expensive for him.
COLONEL PATRICK H. CALLAHAN
THE PROHIBITIONISTS thought that the sale of liquor was a social
I crime, that the drinking of liquor was a racial crime, and that the
results of liquor were criminal actions. They quoted Havelock Ellis
for their hereditary and environmental ammunition. "Alcoholism in
either of the parents is one of the most fruitful causes of crime in the
child." 1 They quoted Lombroso and nineteenth-century criminologists
to prove that liquor was responsible for most criminal acts. The exten-
sive researches of the Committee of Fifty on the case histories of more
than thirteen thousand convicts found that liquor was a cause in 50
per cent of all crimes, the first cause in 31 per cent, and the sole cause
in 16 per cent. Although these figures were exaggerated, they were
the only ones available until the close of national prohibition. The
reason for that exaggeration was the fact that criminals usually put
the blame for their actions on liquor rather than themselves, hoping
220
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 221
that the judge would treat them more leniently. Prohibition made such
an excuse unfashionable, and a Freudian or social plea for mitigation
took its place. Criminals pleaded that they had been deprived in some
way by nature or by society. And the crimes once charged against
liquor were now charged against the prohibitionists, who were accused
of causing the rise of the national syndicates of crooks and murder
gangs by making over to them all the profits of the illegal liquor trade.
In the judgment of the famous criminologist, John Landesco, prohibi-
tion had enormously increased the personnel and power of organized
crime. It had "opened up a new criminal occupation, with less risk of
punishment, with more certainty of gain, and with less social stigma
than the usual forms of crime like robbery, burglary, and larceny." 2
Gangs and crime syndicates did not begin with prohibition. They
rose to power through the saloons, gambling houses, and brothels of
the nineteenth century, and through the murderous wars of labor and
capital in the days of the robber barons. Al Capone inherited his em-
pire on the South Side of Chicago as the heir of a line of vice bosses,
such as Big Jim Colosimo and John Torrio. If this criminal estate was
and is bequeathed frequently because of jail or sudden death or loss
of nerve, it has endured longer than many American bequests.
The simultaneous coming of automobiles, Thompson machine guns,
and telephones allowed successful local gangsters to extend their con-
trol over whole cities and states. To do this, they needed a steady in-
come. This income was provided by national prohibition. In the early
days of the Volstead Act, gangsters were merely the "fronts" of ordi-
nary businessmen who owned the breweries and distilleries. They
provided protection and ensured delivery of the liquor, while the busi-
nessmen had the necessary political influence to prevent interference.
In the first four years of prohibition in Chicago, under the corrupt
administration of William Hale Thompson, John Torrio was in partner-
ship with a well-known brewer, Joseph Stenson, who put the stamp of
Gold Coast respectability on the Torrio gang. As the Chicago Tribune
said, Stenson was "the silk hat for the crowd/* He had contacts in the
federal building. He raised the money, bought the discontinued brew-
eries, and made "the connections necessary to undisturbed brewing."
He then installed a board of directors in the brewery, who would
"take the fair when there was trouble; they would even go to jail
while Stenson escaped scot-free. In 1924, the profits of the Torrio-
Stenson combine were estimated at fifty million dollars in four years,
of which Stenson's share was twelve million dollars. 8
. A reform mayor, William Dever, however, succeeded Thompson.
His policy was to prosecute the large bootleggers, not their stooges.
His new chief of police raided the Sieben brewery on May 19, 1924,
222 / THE DRY TREE
and found enough evidence to indict most of the leading gangsters
and pre- Volstead brewers of Chicago. The brewers, however, had
enough influence to vanish from the indictment. Torrio and two of his
aides were convicted. He lost prestige as a result, was shot down by
rival gangsters, recovered, and emigrated to Italy, leaving his empire
in the hands of Al Capone. The old-time brewers were also scared
and left the beer business to their previous employees, the hoodlums
and killers. Only the public suffered from ^paying enough to satisfy
both businessmen and criminals for their liquor, j
The profits of prohibition were so enormou^ that a pattern devel-
oped for the manufacture and sale of illicit liquor. From 1920 to 1923,
there were a host of small bootleggers and rumrunners competing for
the profits of the trade. Only those criminal gangs which were already
organized in the large cities, such as the Torrio gang in Chicago and
the Unione Siciliano, could keep an enormous slice of the cake for
themselves. The bootleg situation was similar to the American business
situation in the middle of the nineteenth century. The rise of the big
bootleggers paralleled the rise of the robber barons and trusts, with
the elimination, through terror or murder or 'price cutting, of all
rivals. During the five years .after. 19.24,. the- big-city_gang jwarsjlour-
ished, and the remniants'of the respectable brewers and distillers, who
were still in the illegal trade, fled for their lives. In the tiineroflthe
jconsolidation of Capone V power in Chicago, there. were between 350
and 400 murders annually in Cook County, Illinois, and an average
of 100 bombings each year. By 1929, however, a convention of major
racketeers could meet at Atlantic City, New Jersey, each with his"He-
fined territory, in which he held monopolistic power. The condottieri
of New York -Frank Costello, Frankie Yale, Larry Fay, Dutch
Schultz, and Owney Madden knew their place, and relinquished
Philadelphia to Maxie Hoff, Detroit to the Purple Gang, Cincinnati
and St. Louis to the old Remus mob, Kansas City to Solly Weissman,
and the major part of Chicago to Capone. Indeed, a case could be
made for the good results of organized gangdom. The menace of the
unattached hoodlum had almost disappeared, for the police and regu-
lar gangs co-operated to eliminate him. 4 In the suppression of competi-
tion, the big gangs were a positive benefit to society.
But, on the whole, the gangs made more rotten the rotten situation
which had existed in the days of the red-light districts and old-time
saloons. In its practical effects, national prohibition transferred two
billion dollars a year from the hands of brewers, distillers, and share-
holders to the hands of murderers, crooks, and illiterates. However
badly the liquor traders and shareholders misused their wealth, their
middle-class sympathies prevented their money power from spreading
From Outlook and Independent
UNCLE SAM'S HOME-BBEW
a slimy trail of racketeering and corruption everywhere. In politics
and in business, in labor unions and employers' associations, m public
services_ajadLprivate industries, prohibition was the golden pease
tiuFough wl^^^ff^iS^crme insinuated itself into a position of
incre3SBle vfc p6wer in the nation.
224 / THE DRY TREE
The Reed Committee of 1926 divulged some of the influence of
gangsters in politics. Worse evidence was to come. In the primary
elections in Chicago two years later, "pineapple" bombs were exploded
at the polls, and hordes of gangsters openly intimidated voters. Al-
though such an unwise display of force caused a public reaction and
revulsion, it showed the sorry state into which the citizens of Chicago
had allowed themselves to fall. They were caught between the mutual
services rendered to each other by the political bosses and the gang
leaders. The politicians would prevent the police force from proceed-
ing against gamblers, panders, bootleg kings, and racketeers in return
for large campaign contributions and blocks of votes on election day. 5
The Illinois Crime Survey of 1929 discovered that chain voters, colo-
nized voters, and crooked election boards were recruited regularly
"from the ranks of organized crime. 6 Only the mass vote of the aroused
middle classes of Chicago could make occasional forays of reform
against the eternal tie-up between crime and politics and liquor, which
was bad before and after, and at its worst during, prohibition.
"* There were connections between the class struggle in America and
the rise of the gangsters. 7 Employers first used criminals against strik-
ers. Hundreds of gunmen were hired through detective agencies to
protect machines and scabs against armed strikers, and to assault and
murder union organizers among the workers. Later, in the same way
that the drys had copied the tactics of the wets and were in turn copied
by them, the labor unions hired professional gangsters to attack scabs
and foremen, and dynamite mills and factories. This retaliation led to
the hiring of permanent private armies by large industrialists and
fanners, such as the notorious coal and iron police of Pennsylvania
and the thugs of the California grape growers, described in The
Grapes of Wrath*
Perhaps the most flagrant connection of big business and the prohi-
bition gangsters was through Harry Bennett's "Ford Service Depart-
ment," the largest private army in America. The ringleader of Detroit's
underworld, Chester LaMare, whose bootlegging empire was esti-
mated by federal agents to be grossing $215,000,000 a year in 1928, was
a partner in a Ford sales agency and owned the fruit concession at the
Ford plant at River Rouge.* While technically employed by the Ford
Service, LaMare spent his time developing his enormous racketeering
industry until he was shot down by rivals. Joe Adonis, the Brooklyn
bootlegger and racketeer, was also on the Ford payroll as the exclu-
sive trucker of Ford cars to markets on the Eastern seaboard. There
were, in addition, up to eight thousand men with prison sentences in
the Ford factories, whom Harry Bennett claimed, in Ford's name, to
be "rehabilitating." Throughout the twenties and thirties the Ford
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 225
plants remained outside the labor unions, while strikers and organizers
were killed, beaten up, and threatened by Ford Service men and
criminals. 10 This alliance between the biggest of businessmen and the
underworld gave immunity to gangsters from prosecution for their
bootlegging and immunity to businessmen in their defiance of labor
unions. Both were guaranteed the profits which they set for them-
selves, and were insured against assault by each other. Again, only
American democracy and the American people suffered.
Yet if big business was flagrantly guilty of encouraging the entry of
gangsters into the business world and of protecting gangsters against
legal penalties in return for their help against workingmen, the labor
unions were also guilty of calling in gangsters to aid them, and of
losing control of the unions themselves to the gangsters. For instance,
in the war between the garment workers and garment manufacturers
in New York in 1926, the unions employed Augie Orgen's gang of
thugs to use against the hired mercenaries of the employers, Legs
Diamond and his gang. A simultaneous plea to the underworld boss
of the time, Arnold Rothstein, made him call off both gangs, for they
were both under his control. 11 But his price was a cut in the profits of
the industry. Similarly, in other great cities, gangsters were called in
to protect labor from the gorillas hired by capital. The result was that
some labor unions fell into the hands of the gangsters. Indeed, they
were often forced to hire gunmen to proctect their own strikers against
the local police force. The "Strong-Arm Squad" of the New York City
police was particularly brutal towards strikers; in the furriers' strike,
they were paid some $30,000 to beat up strikers and protect strike-
breakers. 12 The president of the Cigarmakers' International Union told
the Wickersham Commission that this sad state of affairs was due to
prohibition.
The police departments tiiroughout the country where we have to
conduct our work have been completely demoralized; the police de-
partments are charging so much to permit a barrel of beer to come
into a speak-easy and so much for a case of whisky. Now, when we
have a strike on in some of the important cities we get the worst of it
unless we pay the police officer; so he has become so accustomed to
closing his eyes to the violation of the law. 18
JThe gangsters, however, as the^grew in numbersan^poxggr on the
-profits of prohibiticmTdH to intervene
JDjcJabor of ~ management. Of ten, they merely "muscled in" on any
trade^wMch would pay them money for protection against themselves.
This method of blackmail was called a "racket," a word which was
used widely after 1927. It was defined as "any scheme by which human
226 /THE DRY TREE
parasites graft themselves upon and live by the industry of others,
maintaining their hold by intimidation, force, and terrorism/' 14 Its
methods were simple. First the gang leader chose his line of exploita-
tion. Then he threatened all traders in his line that if they did not pay
him a monthly bribe he would destroy them and their businesses. In
return, he would protect the traders from any competition by other
traders in the same line who were not paying the bribe. In Chicago, in
the heyday of Capone, there were at least sixty active rackets flourish-
ing in the city. For a long time, every man in Chicago who wanted his
trousers pressed paid fifty cents to the racket, since gangsters con-
trolled the cleaners' and dyers' trade. Crooks also controlled the
Chicago bakers, barbers, electrical workers, garage men, shoe repair-
ers, plumbers, garbage haulers, window cleaners, milk salesmen, con-
fectionary dealers, and undertakers. The cost of these sixty rackets to
the people of Chicago was estimated at $136,000,000 a year, while
gangsters from all their illegal activities were thought to be earning
$6,000,000 weekly. It was a high price to pay to murderers and petty
thieves. 15
The entry of gangsters into legitimate business was made easy by
archaic restraint-of-trade laws against price fixing and labor unions.
Moreover, the actual sentiments of the class struggle supported the
gangster who achieved results by violence. As Landesco found out in
his study of the "42" gang in Chicago, young men in the poor quarters
of Chicago knew that crime, on die whole, did not pay, but "from
experience they have also learned that it is the only avenue available
to them/' 16 The wealthy racketeer arid bootlegger was, in the eyes of
the Italian or the Slavic community, the American dream come true.
The recent immigrants had come to America in pursuit of a golden
mirage, and those among them who made fortunes by violating anti-
pathetic laws were their first heroes and helpers. They were the
"successes of the neighborhood/' 17 The prestige and power of the
Unione Siciliano gave all poverty-stricken Sicilians a hope in the future
and a certain national pride against an America which discriminated
against them. Only those few Sicilians who had respectable jobs in
middle-class professions hated the reputation which the Unione gave
to the Sicilian people. The plea of such priests as Father Louis Giam-
bastiani against the internecine slaughter of the Sicilian gangs was
rare in a community which associated wealth and power with criminal
action.
The chief sources of bootleg liquor in all major cities by the close
of prohibition were to be found in the tenements, in the Little Italys
and Little Bohemias of the slums. There, the tenement dwellers were
organized by the gangsters into an army of alky cookers and booze-
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 227
runners. The accusation of the drys that most of the large bootleggers
were of foreign extraction was correct; but the contention of the wets
that most of the hard-liquor drinkers, who kept the bootleggers in
business, were of old American stock was also correct. Indeed, the
patronage of the new America by the old was one of the first efforts
made by the old America to look after the welfare of the new. Al-
though the prohibition laws only proceeded against the sellers and
manufacturers of bootleg, not the buyers, with the consequence 'that
the foreign-born landed in jail more frequently than their patrons,
Americans of an older vintage were responsible for keeping the boot-
leg trade in such a healthy financial state. And even though a higher
percentage of foreign-born Americans were sentenced for drunkenness
and violation of liquor laws and neglect of their families, the virtue
of the native-born could hardly be maintained on the basis of crime
figures. For a higher percentage of native white Americans violated
narcotic laws, and the laws against fraud, forgery, robbery, adultery,
and rape. 18
If the sympathy of the poor was on the side of the bootlegger and
criminal, for traditional Mediterranean reasons as well as for reasons
of poverty, so was much of the sympathy of the rich. The underside of
the cafe society which grew up in the twenties was simply a service
trade in vice. 19 In the sense that respectable people patronized crimi-
nals, America had the criminals it deserved. 20 Matthew Woll spoke
for a host of law-abiding people before the Wickersham Commission,
when he said of the racketeers:
Today there is not any feeling of resentment against them, because
they are looked upon as being part of a trade to satisfy a social want.
There is not a feeling of prosecution on behalf of the law even for the
most vicious crime committed. It is all a reflection on the social mind.
We seek by law to tell the people you can not do so and so, when the
people are not in that frame of mind. . . . They want their liquor.
They do not care what chances the other fellow takes so long as they
don't take the chance. 21
The concept of the honest bootlegger, making a living out of a trade
just as other people did, was a common rationalization of respectable
men to excuse their patronage of criminals. This attitudej3ven_ex-
tended totiheu ; children, wiwrvotecHnH^
tooklirsF place in communitj^activities. 22
^^n^e^H^^wSiSSg aliving was more sacred to many Americans
than life itself. 28 The whole of American society was too close to the
violence of the frontier and the city jungle to worry unduly over the
vendettas of gangsters. Where the law was inefficient and graft-ridden
228 / THE DRY TREE
Brown Brothers Photographers
AL CAPONE
(no legal punishment was given for even one of the 130 gang murders
in Chicago between 1926 and 1927), respectable people were content
to let criminals slay their own. In the belief in rough justice rather
than the rotten enforcement of the law, in the dislike of informing on
men who were fulfilling a public service in the eyes of most city
dwellers, the prohibition racketeers flourished unchecked, until they
began to be damned by bad publicity.
The criminals themselves were encouraged by the patronage of the
respectable to think that they were equally good members of society.
Al Capone himself asked, "What' s Al Capone done, then? He's sup-
plied a legitimate demand. Some call it bootlegging. Some call it
racketeering. I call it a business. They say I violate the prohibition
law. Who doesn't?" 24 The fact that he ordered murders seemed to him
merely a method of business organization in criminal circles; it was
certainly true that the magnates of early American big business had
also condoned murders by their private police. In fact, Capone suf-
fered under a delusion of conspiracy against him as severe as that of
the drys. He protested:
I don't interfere with big business. None of the big business guys
can say I ever took a dollar from 'em. Why, I done a favor for one of
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 229
the big newspapers in the country when they was up against it. Broke
a strike for 'em. And what do I get for doing 'em a favor? Here they've
been ever since, clamped on my back. I only want to do business, you
understand, with my own class. Why can't they let me alone? I don't
interfere with them any. Get me? I don't interfere with their racket.
They should let my racket be.
In Capone's terms, he dealt as fairly with the poor and the drinkers
as big business dealt with the rich and the consumers. Indeed, Capone
even had the gall to say, "Prohibition has made nothing but trouble
trouble for all of us. Worst thing ever hit the country. Why, I tried
to get into legitimate business two or three times, but they won't stand
for it." 25 At the time of this remark, Capone was making between
$60,000,000 and $100,000,000 a year from the sale of beer alone.
But there was a reaction in Chicago and in the nation against the
excesses of the gangsters, as there was a reaction against the ex-
cesses of the drys. The famous killing of Dean O'Banion in his
flower shop might be forgiven as a feud between rival condottieri.
But the murders of Assistant State Attorney William H. McSwiggin, in
Capone's headquarters at Cicero, and of a crime reporter four years
later aroused public opinion. Groups of citizens and lawyers were
formed to arm themselves against gangsters and secure federal action;
previously, the only vigilante group in Chicago had been a band of
wealthy men who had organized themselves in 1919 to defend their
liquor cellars against thieves. 26 The final killing of seven hoodlums in
a garage on St. Valentine's Day, 1929, was the end of Chicago's easy
acceptance of gang rule. The massacre was, in the famous apocryphal
remark, "lousy public relations." Capone himself was committed to jail
for eleven years in 1931 for income tax evasion. His attorneys offered
the Bureau of Internal Revenue a bribe of $4,000,000, which was
refused. 27 The New Republic noted that Bishop James Cannon, Jr.,
was on trial at the same time. "Justice, in clutching at these two cul-
prits at once, has not shown itself wanting in the sense of the fitness
of things." For "the one makes blue laws; the other arises to undo
them." 28
The prominence of gangsters in American life did nothing to help
the dry cause. The only defense of the drys was that gangsters were
powerful long before prohibition, on the profits of the saloons and
brothels. The wets countered by pointing out that prohibition had
fattened the profits of gangsters to an unparalleled extent. Moreover,
their new money power purchased them immunity from all forms of
legal punishment for any crime which they committed. The Illinois
Crime Survey showed that criminals engaged in bootlegging did not
give up other forms of crime. They continued to practice their pre-
230 /THE DRY TREE
Volstead lines of knavery, but, on account of the new prestige and
power of the gang, members of gangs tended to secure immunity
from punishment not only for bootlegging, but for these other crimes
as well. 20 The immunity of the gangsters from prosecution and the
contemporary killing of certain innocents by employees of the Prohi-
bition Bureau gave the wets a strong propaganda case. In the words
of Senator Edwards, of New Jersey, "It is noticeable that two kinds of
people have been killed by the Prohibition agents: the poor and the
innocent. The Chicago gunmen who not only broke the Eighteenth
Amendment but who have killed right and left have scarcely been
molested. They were guilty and rich/' 80
The history of prohibition and crime shows how the tolerance exer-
cised towards criminals by respectable citizens, labor, and capital
allowed gangsters to take over local governments, as Capone did the
government of the small town of Cicero, and even state governments.
The loot of prohibition was sufficient to buy judges, state attorneys,
and whole police forces. It enabled the gangsters to spread their in-
fluence into new areas of legitimate business. They were allowed to
terrorize citizens so much that no Chicago jury would return a verdict
of murder against a gunman, because of fear. Hymie Weiss, after he
was gunned down by the Capone gang, was found to be carrying the
full lists of the jury and the witnesses for the prosecution in the pro-
posed murder trial of his fellow criminal, Joe Saltis. In the words of
John Stege, deputy commissioner of the Chicago police, a man could
"figure out gangdom's murders and attempted murders with a pencil
and paper, but never with a judge and jury." 31 It was tragic that the
fantastic opportunities for corruption and intimidation in the prohibi-
tion era made a mockery of all the laws of America, which had been
designed to protect the liberty of the individual and were perverted to
license the anarchy of gangsters.
SPEAK-EASY AND WORSE
As FROHiBmoN brought respectability to the criminal, so the speak-
easy brought respectability to the saloon. The heyday of the speak-
easy was during the twenties, when it flourished like the hydra. Chop
off one of its heads, and two grew in its place. It displaced the old
restaurants and cabaret entertainments, and offered in their place
night-club acts, liquor, and indifferent food at huge prices. In 1929,
the police commissioner of New York City estimated that there were
32,000 speak-easies in the metropolis, double the number of saloons
and blind pigs of the old days. 82 The Police Department dropped this
figure to 9000 speak-easies in 1933, the worst year of the depression
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME / 231
Brown Brothers Photographers
WET EXCHANGE
and the last year of national prohibition. 88 A moderate calculation of
the whole number of speak-easies in the United States at this time put
the number at 219,000, a little less than the number of saloons and
blind pigs on the eve of the Eighteenth Amendment. 34 If the speak-
easy was spawned by prohibition and the boom, it was doomed by
repeal and the slump. Texas Guinan, the night-club queen of the
twenties, used to give three cheers for prohibition and demand,
'Where the hell would I be without prohibition?" And the sucker was
right who replied, "Nowhere."
The usual speak-easy was a very different place from the old saloon.
For a corner location, the speak-easy substituted a back room, a base-
ment, or a "first-floor flat." 85 Swinging doors were replaced by locked
doors containing a peephole. Carpets or bare boards took the floor
from sawdust. The mirror behind the bar, the barkeeper's third eye,
remained in place; but there was no free lunch. Drink prices went
up from two to ten times, depending on supplies and law enforce-
ment The quality of spirits in the expensive speak-easies reached the
pre-Volstead level after the first two years of adulterated hell. Beer,
however, declined in quality and wine even more so.
The speak-easy brought sonje benefits, once it had become a na-
tional institution. It discouraged the patronage of down-and-outs, who
might talk to honest policemen but could not pay enough to help
232 /THE DRY TREE
bribe dishonest policemen. It put an end to the saloon custom of treat-
ing to drinks; Jack London, in John Barleycorn, tells of the fatal effects
of this custom on nineteen sailors who were made the drunken victims
of land sharks by treating their friends and being treated in return
before they could in honor leave for their homes. 86 Also, the custom
of allowing drinkers to pour their own whisky out of the traditional
black bottle was superseded by the measured amount served in a glass.
Bootleg liquor was too expensive to allow barflies to administer their
own quantity of poison.
But, equally, the speak-easy brought more evils in its train than the
saloon had. A poll of speak-easy proprietors in New York in 1930 dis-
covered that they opposed prohibition in a ratio of twenty to one.
-This result was contrary to the popular belief that the owners of the
speak-easies and the drys co-operated to keep the Volstead Act in
force for their mutual benefit. The proprietors complained that they
always lived in fear of federal raids, of holdups by gangsters, and of
padlocking and the total loss of their investment. Moreover, landlords
charged double rents for fear of padlocking, while business in the
speak-easy itself was casual and uncertain. Too many policemen and
their friends did not pay and drank up the profits. The proprietors
disliked the social ostracism of the speak-easy owner and his family,
and resented the loss of their high-class patrons to the increasing
competition of large and small bootleggers, who delivered liquor at
the homes of the wealthy without risk to them. All in all, the proprie-
tors thought that the speak-easy was far inferior to the legal saloon. 87
Perhaps the worst effect of the speak-easies was indirect. The vol-
ume of complaints about their open operation resulted in spectacular
raids on all the best restaurants in New York. As the president of the
Anti-Saloon League exulted in 1924:
Ask the big hotels and restaurants which laughed at the law,
whether enforcement is a fizzle. Then hear the doleful chorus. Let
the Paradise restaurant on 58th Street, New York, sing bass; let Shan-
ley's, Murray's, and the Little Club sing tenor; let Cushman's and the
Monte Carlo sing alto; let Delmonico's sing soprano, and the words of
the music are "We have been padlocked, padlocked, padlocked/' The
famous Knickerbocker Grill sings "Amen, padlocked, amen and
amen."**
Although these raids were no more successful in putting down public
drinking in New York than an attempt to dry up the Hudson River
with a sponge, they did serve the purpose of closing most of the
places where good food could be bought. Fine cooking was not
provided in the speak-easies until the last years of the "experiment,
noble in motive/'
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 233
The costs of running a speak-easy in New York were estimated by
one proprietor at $1370 a month. This included $400 of protection
money to law-enforcement agencies, such as the Prohibition Bureau,
the Police Department, and the district attorneys. The "lowly cop"
collected another $40 each time that beer was delivered. A blackmail
system of anonymous complaints might net the police a further in-
come. Occasional raids were made for law-enforcement records al-
though the fines of the courts were remitted by a temporary decrease
in the necessary protection money paid to the police. 39 Altogether,
with the costs involved, the speak-easy could not survive the de-
pression as an economic unit.
The speak-easy did not survive the depression as an economic unit.
It shared the same fate that overtook the saloon. There were too many
sources of drink chasing too few drinkers. Many of the regular speak-
easies closed for lack of middle-class customers. Their place was taken
by degenerate institutions, hole-in-the-corner bars, cordial shops,
hooch stands in the streets which sold spiked fruit juice, and hordes
of desperate amateur bootleggers competing for the remaining trade.
It was cheaper to drink in the house, either home-brew or bootleg
liquor brought to the door. There were myriads of makers and sellers
of liquor among the jobless and hungry, who bypassed the speak-easy
and supplied liquor direct to the customer. Judge commented that
there was not a saloon on every corner now, but there were a couple
of apple sellers. 40 There were also a couple of peddlers of home-brew*-
The speak-easy was primarily for the middle classes. Prohibition
gave the possession and consumption of alcohol in public all the
glamour of social prestige. Scott Fitzgerald brings out in The Beautiful
and Damned how the carrying of liquor was almost a badge of re-
spectability. And even worse, the display of drunkenness became more
than a mark "of the superior status of those who are able to afford
the indulgence." 41 It became the very uniform of valor rather than
folly. Although a drunken Chinaman at any time is thought guilty of
a bad solecism, a drunken American under prohibition was considered
the champion of liberty against tyrannical government A visit to a
cocktail party or a speak-easy became a sign of emancipation, a Purple
Heart of individuality in a cowardly and conforming world. Perhaps
one of the greatest crimes of prohibition against the middle classes was
to make public drunkenness a virtue, signifying manliness, rather than
a vice, signifying stupidity.
Public' drinking became so fashionable that both decent and in-
decent women went to the speak-easy, even though the old-time
saloon had been a male preserve, only spotted by the occasional
prostitute. For women, too, liquor became a flag of their new freedom.
Bzown Brothers Photographers
SEARCHING FOR HIP FLASKS
Although not many women copied the heroines of John O'Hara in
calculating the distances in New York by the taxi fares between speak-
easies, there were enough of them to set a standard of defiance for a
whole sex. Like Michael Arlen's girl with the blind blue eyes, they
were bored with boredom, and sought entertainment in the risky
security of caf& and clubs. Once the old religious restraints against
alcohol were dissolved and the social stigma against liquor was re-
versed to bless it, once laws like the New Orleans law banning females
from saloons had become dead letters, then women took to drink
and speak-easies in large numbers. As Heywood Broun complained,
however bad the old saloons were, at least the male drinker did not
have to fight his way through crowds of schoolgirls to the bar. Women
remained, nevertheless, more sober as a sex than men.*
The drinking places of the poor, on the other hand, were worse than
* In 1946, while only one-quarter of American men were abstainers, nearly one-
half of American women were. Moreover, three times as many men as women were
regular drinkers.
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 235
the vilest saloon had been, and during the depression were even more
numerous. They served liquor which could blind, paralyze, and kill.
Once the saloon was gone, the laborer who wanted a drink was thrown
onto the tender mercies of suspicious home-brew, drugstore concoc-
tions, and alley-joint alcohol that might make him dead before he was
drunk. The testimony of the labor leaders and investigators before the
Wickersham Commission is nearly unanimous on this point. Working-
men switched from beer to hard and bad liquor under prohibition, and
resented the fact that they were forced to do so. "The discussion of
prohibition and its clever and cute violation is the general topic of
conversation among workers/' A workingman "has to buy a drunk to
get a drink ... he buys a half pint of liquor and he is afraid he is
going to lose it, or be arrested or it will leak out of his pocket and he
drinks it all at one drink." 42 One slug of the white mule current in the
slums made a man crazy. And the majority sentiment among the work-
ingmen had shifted. By the time of the Wickersham Report, union
leaders put the number of their men who opposed the Volstead Act
at more than nine out of ten, compared with some six out of ten in
1920. As among the wealthy, the drinker was now praised rather than
condemned. The treasurer of the Plumbers* and Steamfitters* Union
commented that in his social set before prohibition, "if a young man
had a smell on him he was ostracized completely. Today, in the same
social set, if he comes in lit up like a cathedral they want to know if
he has something on his hip/' 43
For the abolition of the saloon created the "peripatetic bar," the
hip flask, along with the illegal bar, the speak-easy. Restaurant pro-
prietors so much expected their guests to bring their alcohol along
with them that highball glasses filled with ice cubes were automatic-
ally put on dining tables. Ginger ale was served with a spoon in the
tumbler even though the label on the bottle stated that the ginger ale
was not to be used with alcoholic beverages. A spokesman of the
American Hotel Association testified that corkscrews and bottle open-
ers had to be left in every room to save the hotel furniture. According
to him, this was the only relief from the disasters of the Eighteenth
Amendment which hotel keepers enjoyed. 44
Moreover, although the saloon was destroyed in order to preserve
the home, the home "turned like a rattle snake an* desthroyed th*
saloon th' home an* th' home brew." According to Mr. Dooley, even
if the old customers of the saloon did stay in their houses during prohi-
bition, their families saw little of them. They were down in the cellars
stewing hops. And if there was less drunkenness under the Volstead
Act, what there was, was "a much more finished product/' 45 The effect
of taking away the serpent from outside the family circle was to loose
236 /THE DRY TREE
him within. Many people who had been abstainers for fear of the
rowdy saloon became drinkers within the sociable and respectable
home. In rich houses, the ubiquitous cocktail shaker, imported with
its contents from the West Indies, set an example of law defiance
which parents could not blame children for using against themselves.
In poor houses, the evils of making liquor were worse. There is a
poignant testimony of a Croatian small merchant in 1927 about condi-
tions in the slum areas of Cleveland:
Now wine and whisky sold in homes. No good for woman to stay
and sell liquor to mens all day. They get drunk and say bad things
before children and she forget husband and children. Saloons was
better; no children could go there and no women. Men who got
drunk before prohibition get drunk now, but it costs them more. We
want to have wine to drink, but dare not buy it for fear of being
raided. Men used to go to a saloon maybe once a week and get a
drink. Now go one or two months without a drink. Then meet a
friend, go to private home, take one drink, then two, then another
because they know it will be long before they can have more, and
end by spending their whole pay and then getting very sick. 46
Prohibition did turn many poor homes into the worst type of blind
pigs, without even the space and exclusion once afforded there. Al-
though the prohibitionists said that only aliens and foreigners made
liquor in their own homes, they were wrong. Many wealthy Americans
mixed their own gin for the hell of it, even when they could afford the
prices of a good bootlegger. The spice of sin had come back into liquor
for those who were too sophisticated to believe in the bogy of the
demon rum, which the drys waved in the faces of the rest of the
country. Also, the license to drink too fast and too much had been
given to those who merely wanted to drink.
Edmund Wilson noted in 1927 how the vocabulary of drinking was
changed by the abolition of the saloon. He remarked upon the dis-
appearance of various terms; people no longer went on "sprees, toots,
tears, jags, brannigans or benders/' But Wilson's possible reason for
the disappearance of these words was the fact that this fierce pro-
tracted drinking had now become universal, "an accepted feature of
social life instead of a disreputable escapade/' He then made a partial
list of 155 words and phrases signifying drunkenness in common use
during prohibition. A selection from Wilson's list rolls out like a hymn
of praise to the virtues of bootleg gin. On such a drink a man might
become blind, blotto, bloated, buried, canned, cock-eyed, crocked,
embalmed, fried, high, lit, loaded, lushed, oiled, organized, ossified,
owled, paralyzed, pickled, piffed, pie-eyed, plastered, potted, polluted,
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 237
scrooched, shicker, sloppy, soused, spifflicated, squiffy, stewed, stiff,
stinko, wapsed down, woozy, or zozzled. 47
Prohibition revived the American frontier addiction to gulping down
spirits, which the German immigrant brewers had threatened to drown
with floods of ale. Heywood Broun called the Volstead Act a bill to
discourage the drinking of good beer in favor of indifferent gin. Al-
though New Jersey through tradition and Illinois through the organ-
izational efficiency of Al Capone remained beer areas, wine and spirits
became the habitual drink of the rest of America. This change was
really a matter of self-help economics and communications. Reason-
able home-brewed beer was harder to make than fermented grape
juice or a passable gin, which could serve as a base for cocktails. Beer
was more expensive to buy from a bootlegger than spirits were, if the
only consideration of the consumer was to obtain the maximum quan-
tity of beverage alcohol. Moreover, beer was too bulky and dangerous
to transport for long distances; thus its addicts were forced to move
to a district such as Hoboken, where the breweries were openly oper-
ating at full flood. A careful estimate of the amount of liquor drunk
during the periods from 1911 to 1914 and from 1927 to 1930 concluded
that, under national prohibition, beer consumption had declined by
seven-tenths, while wine consumption had increased by two-thirds and
spirits by about one-tenth. Three-quarters of the wine was manu-
factured at home, but only half of the beer and one-quarter of the
spirits. 48 Thus the chief function of the bootlegger and the speak-easy
was to supply spirits to the consumer, while the job of the head of the
drinking home was to make wine or beer.
Prohibition popularized a drink that had only been served in the
smartest of the saloons. While a habitu< of the old Waldorf bar might
list some three hundred varieties of cocktail which had been served
there before the Eighteenth Amendment, the average saloon served
only straight drinks, since the swallowing of diluted or mixed liquors
was considered effeminate. Indeed, the usual apology of the gin drinker
in a low saloon was that he was drinking the weak stuff for the health
of his and his wife's kidneys. 49 But prohibition popularized the cock-
tail to an extraordinary degree. Perhaps drinks were mixed and their
taste disguised because the basic alcohol in the cocktail was so foul
upon the palate, somewhat as curry was first used to disguise the
stink of rotten meat. Perhaps the cocktail fulfilled a basic American
need, to get drunk in as short a time as possible. Perhaps it was a test
of skill on the part of the server, a sort of guessing game in which the
subtlety of the blend militated against the identification of the ingredi-
ents. Or perhaps the cocktail was really an eccentric expression of
Puritanism, essentially a mixture of the incongruous and the incompat-
238 / THE DRY TREE
ible, something intended to numb rather than stimulate, to do harm
rather than please the taste. 50
THE DEFIANT DRINKERS
IF TOE closing of the saloons changed the quality and type of liquor
that Americans drank, it also changed the quality and type of the
drinkers. While writing about the New Morality in 1927, George Jean
Nathan noted one revolutionary fact. The American middle class had
become the richest middle class in the world. Thus, they had the
money and leisure to imitate upper-class behavior as soon as the
fashion was set. Although Nathan was referring to the middle classes
of the larger cities, he pointed out that the whole middle class would
follow suit in due time, "as the hinterland, however independent of the
cities it may be politically and alcoholically, is ever a vassal to the
cities' dictate and prejudice in the matter of everything from radio
music and moving pictures to store clothes and the philosophy of
prophylactic sprays/' 61 Although Nathan discounted the influence of
the wet cities on the hinterland, it fell victim also to their bibulous
influence.
It was the rapid spread of the drinking habits of rich Americans to
the leisured middle classes and the young after the Great War that
made prohibition a mockery. Even the class structure of the small
towns was assailed eventually by the identification of the dominant
middle class with the social and free habits of the wealthy. Novels,
films, the radio, magazines, newspapers, all propagated the creed that
drinking was considered to be smart in the best society. A long tradi-
tion of snobbery and conviviality backed this assertion, while a short
tradition of temperance and self-restraint supported the drys. In addi-
tion, the very psychology of prosperity was responsible for a general
relaxation and pursuit of pleasure. The effort of the drys to use the
old American hatred of the rich as a weapon for prohibition was use-
less in a society where the new rich were the new gods. The time had
not yet come when, as Scott Fitzgerald noticed in 1933, the rich could
only be happy alone together. 52 It was a time when nearly everybody
wanted to be in the company of the rich and happy.
Babbitt, when he was served a whisky toddy by the aristocratic
banker, of Zenith, was taken aback. Since prohibition, he had not
known anyone to be casual about drinking. "It was extraordinary
merely to sip his toddy and not cry, 'Oh, maaaaan, this hits me right
where I live/" 58 The diffusion of the insouciant attitude of the rich
first to the young, who were ready for anything that smacked of ele-
gant bravado, and then to their respectable parents sounded the knell
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME / 239
of the drys. For the prohibitionists depended on middle-class support.
Once the middle class began to disobey flagrantly the law which had
been passed for their protection against the drunken worker and
millionaire liquor trader, the drys had little support left. For the
working classes, as a whole, rightly regarded the practice of prohibi-
tion as a piece of class legislation, which deprived them of their beer
while allowing other classes full freedom of the cocktail shaker. A
social worker who asked a chauffeur in California if Santa Barbara
was dry received a true answer: "That depends upon whether you sit
inside or outside the limousine/' 54 The rich rarely supported prohibi-
tion for themselves, although they thought it a good thing for workers
and Negroes. Another social worker commented sourly that he had
been asked time and again to sit on committees to consider the sin of
the Bowery, but that he had yet to be asked to sit on a committee to
consider the sin of Fifth Avenue. "If we must have laws to regulate the
poor, in God's name let us have curbs to restrain the rich!" 55 Senator
Brookhart, of Iowa, sneered that it was the wealthy "Wall Street
gang/' who denounced everybody as a Bolshevik that stood for eco-
nomic equality with labor and the common people. 56
But those who drank during prohibition did so for reasons of tradi-
tion and temperament as much as for reasons of social class. The
regular drinkers of the time came from those groups of people who
considered drinking a necessary part of entertaining, from the drunk-
ards and the Bohemian set, and from the first and second generation
of European immigrants. These people formed sections of the upper,
middle, and lower classes. And there was, in addition, the age group
of the young, which drank out of daredeviltry and imitation. 57 It was
this last group that publicized the shortcomings and inefficiency of
law enforcement and caused many of the scandals of the age.
Reports of drinking among young people during prohibition were
legion and contradictory. But the truth is that children and young
people copy their parents more than they react against them. The
detailed studies recently made of the drinking habits of high-school
students have revealed one common factor, that the children of drink-
ers usually drink and the children of abstainers usually abstain. 58
Habit is the hang-over of succeeding generations. Thus the frequency
of drinking among the young during prohibition was a reflection of
the manners of their parents; and if they drank spirits rather than
beer, it was because spirits were more available. In face of the wide-
spread contempt for the Volstead Act, the young saw no reason why
they alone should obey the law. But the fact that the young did drink
and get drunk was infinitely shocking to a generation of parents who
had never had to deal with the problem of drunk adolescents. The
240 / THE DRY TREE
very failure of law enforcement in the twenties was paralleled by a
simultaneous failure of parental authority. Fathers could no longer
use the whip of economics to keep their children in line when boom
jobs made it easy for young people to leave home. It is depression
which keeps the family together.
Wherever a man rose to say that prohibition was ruining the morals
of the young, a dry spokesman quoted the authority of a hundred
selected schoolteachers to deny the charge. When the report of the
Federal Council of Churches mentioned alarming conditions in col-
leges due to the automobile and the hip flask, Wayne B. Wheeler
immediately countered by saying that even if drinking was prevalent
among youth, it was occasional, not regular, drinking. "The cost and
quality of post-Volsteadian drinks does not create a habit as did the
licensed intoxicants. The American youth problem is less serious than
that in other countries/' 69 This argument of the drys, that matters were
worse elsewhere and would be worse in America if there were no
prohibition, was irrefutable, as was their argument that speak-easies
were better than revived saloons. Until repeal came, no one could tell
whether conditions for all would improve with legal liquor or with-
out. Meanwhile, the drys claimed all the triumphs of the boom as a
proof of the benefits of prohibition to the nation.
The psychology of prosperity was both the strength and weakness
of the drys. A national attitude of laisser-aller made it impossible both
for the drys to enforce the law and for the wets to repeal it. In Ring
Lardner's words, prohibition was one better than no liquor. The rich
and the middle classes had enough clubs and speak-easies to find the
"institutionalized spontaneity'* which they wanted without agitating
for repeal. 6 '* The poor had little power in the matter, and were
occupied in becoming richer. With the whole nation echoing Guizot's
cry, "Enrichtesez-vous," neither reform nor the repeal of reform
seemed important. When the gilded bubble burst and the market
crashed and the bread lines grew and riches were a mark of betrayal
and shame, then was the time to right wrongs. The rich men who
drank in the depression were refugees rather than leaders. For the
young, it was more important to work than to drink. The moral radical-
ism of the young was replaced by an economic radicalism. 61 And pro-
hibition was replaced by repeal.
Drinking is primarily an economic matter. Men drink liquor when
they can afford it. Mr. Dooley put prohibition in perspective. He
* George Jean Nathan noted in 1927 that prohibition could be got rid of with a
hundred mfflion dollars; but he also noted that, unfortunately or otherwise, the
hundred million dollars was in the pants of men who knew of prohibition only by
THE RESPECTABLE CRIME/ 241
noticed that when liquor is "hard to get an' costly th' poor won't have
so much iv it, an' what they'll have will be worse f'r thim. But it's
makin' sad inroads on th' rich." 62 Even after repeal, it was still the rich
and the educated who drank more than the poor and the ignorant. 63
For they had more opportunity to drink. The drys were right when
they said that the abolition of the saloon would remove temptation
from workingmen. But they were wrong in thinking that the rich and
the middle classes would stop drinking out of a sense of fair play and
responsibility. They had lost the 500,000 "opinion-makers" who had
made possible the dry law.
Paternalism is not a popular doctrine in a democracy. The abolition
of the saloon did discriminate against the working classes, for it was
the middle classes that patronized the speak-easy. The drys were put
in the position of appearing to support one law for the rich and an-
other for the poor. Their appeals to the rich to observe the laws which
protected their privileges brought little response. In fact, prohibition
spread the habit of drinking among the Haves while partially depriv-
ing the Have-nots of one of their few pleasures.
If the workingman is considered as an economic unit, prohibition
helped him. But he also demands to be considered as a man. The
saloon thought him so, as did the church for its believers. But when
the church rose up against the saloon and destroyed it in the name of
giving the poor richer lives, it condemned the workingman to an
existence bare of refuges from the consciousness of his inequalities.
Yet the propaganda of the drys continued to trumpet that prohibition
had made for the workingman an existence full of increased wealth
and its possibilities.
CHAPTER
12
Dry Defense
Prohibition is the nation's greatest Santa Glaus.
F. SCOTT McBraDE
I don't believe in Santa Glaus.
ANONYMOUS CHILD, with probable wet tendencies
THE COMING of the Eighteenth Amendment and of the Volstead
Act reversed the positions of wets and drys. The drys were no longer
the attackers, but the defenders. All the crimes which were once
attributed to the saloon were now fastened upon the speak-easy. More-
over, the new tone of business solidity and respectability of the wets
made their propaganda more convincing. The reports of an organiza-
tion such as the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment,
whose 103 directors served on the boards of businesses, with 2,000,000
employees and assets of $40,000,000,000, could not be dismissed as mere
propaganda. 1 These reports had all the weight of sound business be-
hind them. Besides, the new pressure groups of the wets were, for the
first time, not connected with the liquor trade. They were groups of
wealthy private citizens who disliked national prohibition. 2 Thus their
sayings seemed free from the taint of self-interest.
The exchange of propaganda between the drys and the wets during
the twenties was incredible. In 1928, a visitor declared, "If there is less
liquor consumed in the United States than elsewhere, in no country
does liquor fill so large a place in the thought and talk of the average
citizen." 3 The drys had successfully cast their spell over the minds of
everybody. Other social reforms died for lack of interest. The social
legislation of the twenties is a ghastly lacuna between progressive and
New Deal measures. People had little time for improving the distribu-
tion of wealth, pursuing corruption, curbing Big Business, or making
democracy possible in an age of mass voting. They talked only of
prohibition, until the monstrous delusion of the reform hung like a
miasma over the mind of the nation.
242
DRY DEFENSE / 243
The propaganda of wets and drys was extreme and calculated to
deceive. It made the people disgusted with "do-gooders/' The harm of
prohibition was less in its immediate effects on those who wished to
drink, for these effects were small. It lay in the weariness and cynicism
with which the nation began to look at all reforms and reformers. The
excesses of the drys damned all other would-be changers of society
and its habits. As a critic observed in 1930, at the end of a decade of
boom and bonanza and social sloth:
The liquor controversy is a conflict between two hardened and self-
contained dogmatic systems. The official Dry position differs from the
official Wet position on questions of organic chemistry, dietetics, phar-
macy, biology, religion, psychology, jurisprudence and political philos-
ophy, as well as on the interpretation of statistics on economic condi-
tions. The rivalry between these two systems, each of which is seeking
with evangelical zeal to indoctrinate the people, now threatens to
paralyze our most promising political enterprises and to handicap with
the dead weight of popular indifference the most necessary movements
of social reform. 4
Not until the reformers had got rid of the problem of prohibition could
they concentrate on other urgent social problems of the time.
INSOLUBLE CONTROVERSY
THE FIRST argument of the drys was based upon their history. They
pointed to the three prohibition waves which had arisen in the United
States. Although the first two waves had receded, the third wave had
swept onwards, state by state, until there were twenty-seven prohibi-
tion states by the time of the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in
Congress and thirty-three by the time that the Volstead Act came into
force. 5 And, once die Eighteenth Amendment bound the whole nation,
prohibition had reached a final point of no return.
The wets agreed with this argument, except for its last deduction.
They said that if the history of temperance reform in America were
truly cyclical, then the third wave would recede as had the first two.
An interesting article claimed to show that every boom and slump in
American history had changed the popular attitude towards liquor. 6
The wets accused the drys of insisting upon a constitutional amend-
ment for this very reason, as a method of coercing the nation into pro-
hibition indefinitely even when the people might react against their
dry masters.
The drys countered by saying that a constitutional amendment was
necessary to make the criminal elements among the wets respect the
law of prohibition. Moreover, it showed that prohibition had come to
244 / THE DRY TREE
stay. No constitutional amendment had ever been repealed in the
whole history of the United States. What was done was done, and
could not be undone. Those Americans who did not like prohibition
must lump it and obey it, for it was written into the holy document of
the United States which all Americans were sworn to uphold. The wets
answered in their turn that the Eighteenth Amendment differed from
all other parts of the Constitution. It was a piece of sumptuary legisla-
tion which had no right to be there and which conflicted with other
rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Veneration for a document was
no adequate substitute for a physical appetite. 7 And no amount of
propaganda could make it so.
The reply of the drys was to urge obedience to the Constitution,
whole and indivisible. "There is only one Constitution and no part of
that Constitution is less sacred than any other part.'* 8 No other amend-
ment had received so many votes from states or state legislatures. Only
ten out of thirteen states had ratified the first eleven constitutional
amendments; the others had failed to be ratified by at least four and at
most twelve of the states. The Eighteenth Amendment had been rati-
fied by the legislatures of all the states except two, which made it the
most popular amendment in the Constitution. Against this, the wets
declared that the method of ratification, although legal, was not di-
rectly democratic. The legislatures of the nation were packed in favor
of the rural areas. A national referendum would have brought out a
majority against prohibition, especially since women did not yet have
the vote in all states. The Eighteenth Amendment was a modern Blue
Law, foisted on the unwilling American people.
The drys denied this. They pointed out that, of the twenty-seven
states which had adopted some form of state-wide prohibition before
the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, seventeen had done so by
referendum, and in only seven of these referendums had women had
the vote. Moreover, by 1917, more than four-fifths of the area and
nearly two-thirds of the population of the United States lived under
one dry law or another. National prohibition was merely the expres-
sion of the will of the majority. The minority wets should obey the
democratic decision. If they did not, "It spells Bolshevism and Bolshe-
vism spells nationalization of the women of our country and that spells
hell and damnation." 9 Even the judicious William Howard Taft sup-
ported this point of view, saying that those who put their personal
liberty above their duty to the Constitution were guilty of "practical
Bolshevism." 10
The wets said that this view was nonsense. If any people were
Bolsheviks and Socialists, the diys were. National prohibition had
confiscated without compensation property worth billions of dollars,
DRY DEFENSE/ 245
and had put a federal force of secret police over the land. The very
law of prohibition was an attack on individual freedom. "To under-
mine the foundations of Liberty is to open the way to Socialism/' 11 In
addition, although much of the area of the United States was indeed
dry in 1917, it was "little but area" and not as dry as the Volstead Act
wished to make the whole of America. 12 If the total of those who had
voted against state-wide prohibition amendments had been added to
those who lived in the wet cities and to the soldiers away in France, a
large majority would have been produced against the Eighteenth
Amendment.
The truth of the matter lay on both sides. If there was a long tradi-
tion of temperance work in America, there was a longer tradition
of drinking. Although the liquor trade was an evil, the answer to
its evils was not total prohibition but government regulation. The Con-
stitution was certainly no place to write a law such as the Eighteenth
Amendment; but, on the other hand, there was little hope of drinkers
and bootleggers making an effort to obey such a law unless it was in
the Constitution. Moreover, a long series of precedents in the states
had made traditional the placing of such laws in constitutions. And the
very fact that the most rabid wet considered repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment impossible as late as 1931 did, perhaps, make for more
law observance among those who were not prepared "to barter their
Constitution for a cocktail/' 13 There was certainly no question that the
amendment had been legally passed, although it is true that it was
passed in a time of militancy and exaggerated patriotism, under a form
of moral and political blackmail which made cool thought difficult for
legislators. If prohibition was put over on the country, it was done so
with all due formality.
The second line of propaganda of the drys was based on their idea
of civilization. According to them, freedom was a positive concept.
There was no question of a man being free to drink liquor. It was only
when the liquor slave was free from his craving that he was free to act
like a man and fulfill the better part of his nature. "Freedom from the
narcotic force of alcohol permits one to function more, to enjoy more,
to be more than he otherwise could be." 14 It was only with prohibition
that every child and woman could be given the opportunity for the life
of liberty which was the American dream. "For it is wholly impossible
for the drinker, moderate or excessive, to keep the unfortunate conse-
quences of alcohol to himself." 15 The drinker must deny himself for
the sake of his own good and the good of others. "The immorality of
the 'real temperance' drinker lies in the fact that, for the sake of a sen-
sual gratification, he injures his body and imperils his soul." 16 In the
interests of society, citizens must be prepared to give up their vices.
246 / THE DRY THEE
"Personal liberty ends where public injury begins. There is a higher
personal liberty, and that is civil liberty." 17
The wets countered by saying that if personal liberty meant any-
thing, it meant freedom to drink. They said that there was such a man
as the moderate drinker. Many men, after working all day, had the right
to drink their glass or two of beer or wine. Alcohol was a depressant
which aided the digestion and relieved the tensions of the day. It was
a substance used freely in all societies at all times. Moreover, although
men might be better machines if they did not touch alcohol, not all
men wanted to be machines. They wanted to be men, and men wanted
the opportunity to relax in peace. Human efficiency was a great thing;
but there was a greater, human happiness. 18 If, in Huxley's words,
civilization was a conspiracy against nature, then alcohol was the
policeman trailing the conspirator. 19
The technological revolution of the times provided the drys with
both a theory and a seeming proof. Their theory was that increased
industrial and mechanical demands on the worker made drink posi-
tively dangerous for him. The quick tempo of modern life necessarily
meant the elimination of those agents which slowed men down, such as
beverage alcohol. The proof of the efficacy of prohibition lay in the
huge increase in productivity. The destined march of America onwards
and upwards demanded the sacrifice of the selfish few who put their
gullets before their country.
The hoarse cry for license and anarchy, under the guise of so-called
personal liberty, is merely the demand of the modern bureaucrat
against the institutions of democracy. It represents the attitude of the
modern road hog toward others who travel the highway of liberty
protected by government It is the cry of the moral and social savage
against the advance of civilization. 20
The fact that prohibition was a democratic law passed in a free society
damned its opponents as both bureaucrats and savages at the same mo-
ment
The wets denied that prohibition had anything to do with increased
productivity. Technological change had brought about its own im-
provement No causal connection could be proved between prohibition
and economic growth. Moreover, the demands of the machine age
made the relaxation of strong drink still more necessary to the worker.
Indeed, the inefficiency of prohibition enforcement increased the dan-
ger of industrial accidents, for beer was harder to get than bad hard
liquor. Workers who drank light wines and beer before prohibition had
switched to "a much heavier beer and wine and mixtures which they
call homemade whisky, mule, hootch, rattlesnake." 21 And there was
DRY DEFENSE / 247
a widespread feeling, true or false, that national prohibition was not a
democratic law. In the words of an Indianapolis labor leader, "We did
not get prohibition from the people as a whole. We really got it from
a hand-picked jury." 22
The drys, in their turn, said that those who drank bootleg liquor un-
der prohibition were a small minority whose doings were much exag-
gerated by the press. Furthermore, that small minority was composed
of people who had no reason to feel proud of themselves. Those who
drank bootleg liquor to be social or smart were guilty of snobbery and
of setting a bad example. Those who were old soaks and liquor addicts
would die; their number would not be renewed from among the young.
Even those young people who drank did so out of mere bravado,
which maturity would cure. The only other types of drinkers were the
aristocrats, who wrongly thought themselves above the law, the for-
eigners, who should become Americanized, and the members of the
illegal liquor trade, who should be in jail. This "Dreibund of Defiance"
was doomed to failure. 28 However bad things were under prohibition,
they had been worse under the saloons. Bootleg liquor was prevalent
and poisonous before the Volstead Act. Prohibition had made better
the bad, even if it had not eliminated the liquor evil. As General Evan-
geline Booth said in 1930, "The wettest of wet areas is less wet to-day
than it was when the saloon, usually accompanied by the speak-easy,
were wide open." 24
The wets repeated ad nauseam that conditions were worse under
prohibition. And certainly the newspapers made it seem so. According
to their testimony and the testimony of the trade union leaders before
the Wickersham Commission, a greater number of young people and
women drank under prohibition, and the same number of men. Not
only were there more speak-easies by 1930 than there had been sa-
loons, but liquor had come into every workingman's home. An official
of the metal trades reported that "every molder's wife seemed to take
as much pride in the home brew as she formerly did in her cooking."
Other labor officials and observers confirmed his judgment. Strong
drink could be found in nearly all homes and hotels, and people drank
more of it "Almost invariably when a bottle is put on the table nobody
leaves until there is nothing left but the glass." And every year wet
sentiment was growing in face of the universal contempt for the dry
law. "The children are growing up and as they are making more athe-
ists in Russia they are making more antiprohibitionists in the United
States every day." 25
Again, both drys and wets told the half truth, the half truth, and
nothing but the half truth. While it is necessary for civilized men to
accept certain restraints on their behavior, even restraints against
248 /THE DRY TREE
making themselves too drunk too often, it is not necessary for the
progress of civilization that all men should give up drinking alcohol.
Equally, while the efficient prohibition of liquor would bring about
economic benefits and increased productivity, it is true that, in West-
ern democracies, society is thought to be made for man and not man
for society. The insistence of the drys that the drinker must sacrifice
his drink for the sake of the community was as extreme as the wet in-
sistence that the drys must put up with the debauchery and corruption
of the saloons for the sake of liberty. And, as for the prevalence of
drinking under prohibition, no final answer can ever be given. Where a
traffic is illegal, it cannot be regulated or counted. Authorities were
quoted eternally on both sides to prove opposite cases. Statistics were
collected and invented to demonstrate contradictory evidence. But
nothing was finally shown false or true, although certain reasonable
estimates were made just before repeal. As Mr. Dooley said, "Do I
think pro-hybition is makin' pro-gress? Me boy, I'm no stasticyan. I hope
to die without havin' that to do pinance Fr that." 26
The drys also made more lavish claims. Before prohibition was ac-
tually put to the test, its effects were hoped to exceed credulity and
approach paradise. In the hyperboles of Billy Sunday, "The reign of
tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our
prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men
will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh.
Hell will be forever for rent/' 27 Roy Haynes, the Prohibition Commis-
sioner, claimed in 1923 that prohibition was the "most dominating and
determining force" in "waning drunkenness, vice, and crime; emptying
hospitals, asylums, and jails; rapidly accumulating savings, overflowing
schools, sturdier, happier children, better, more prosperous homes,
increasing and more wholesome recreation, healthier social life, and in-
creased fruits of human labor/' And Haynes found even more dry bene-
fits than these in the flaming twenties, including "the sensational re-
ductions in the death rate, the increase in longevity, the elimination of
the brothel, the rapid disappearance of crimes against chastity," and
"the startling decrease in major crimes/' 28 It was unfortunate that
Haynes seemed to see more what he wished to see than things as they
were.
The wets pointed to the true facts of the increased crime and im-
morality of the twenties, and exaggerated them. With the zeal of
muckrakers in a continent of garbage, they raked up and turned over
a steaming mess of corruption and crime in politics and business. They
aped the methods of the drys in attributing the whole rotten, stinking
heap to the sole cause of prohibition. Every drunkard, every racketeer,
and every bribed judge or policeman was the consequence of the un-
DRY DEFENSE / 249
holy Volstead Act. National prohibition became the wet scapegoat for
the sins of the United States, as the saloon had been the whipping
boy of the drys.
But the chief quarrel of the wet and the dry propagandists was over
the great god of boom times, business, and its connection with prohibi-
tion. To tibe drys, the prosperity of the twenties in America was the
living proof of the good of their reform. They held the Eighteenth
Amendment to be the main factor during the decade in the tripling of
building and loan assets, in the doubling of pupils in educational insti-
tutions, in the increase of wages by just under one-half, in the sale of
more than twenty million automobiles, in the rise in consumption of
food and dairy products and fruit, and in the general benefits of the
boom.
A judicious article called 'Things Are in the Saddle" summed up the
dry reasons for the over-all economic virtue of prohibition. "Drink cuts
down general consumptive power. Drink takes from the nation's ability
to use up goods; drink takes from a man's efficiency to consume; drink
lessens the desire for things. Drink, to be sure, limits its own consump-
tion; when it has its man under the table, that is the end; there is a
limit to the amount a man can drink/' But what was intolerable was
that drink made inroads into the consumption of luxuries. The pleasure
of drink took the place of the pleasure in things. The more things men
had, the more they needed; but the more drink men had, the less
things they needed. Therefore, the gain of prohibition was clear. 'There
are more law-breakers in the nation because of prohibition. But be-
cause of prohibition there are both more consumers and better con-
sumers." 29 In all, the dry economists estimated that at least fifteen bil-
lion dollars had been diverted in the twenties from the buying of drink
to the buying of goods, which was "the actual cause" of America's
"wonderful prosperity." 80 This saving represented a net gain, in the
much-quoted estimate of the British economist Sir Josiah Stamp, of
between 8 and 15 per cent of the gross national product of an indus-
trial society, such as the United States or Great Britain. 31
Prohibition, according to the drys, had become necessary for the
very continuance of boom times. Another dry article, "Prohibition as
Seen by a Business Man," pointed out that families were able to pay
their current bills and meet their installments only because the liquor
bill was gone. The huge increase of the installment system in the twen-
ties meant that business would collapse if drink again competed with
goods for the wages of the workers. "Any credit man knows that a
sober man is a better risk than a drinker. A sober man, too, will want
things the drinker will not demand. A nation has to walk very steady to
carry the lofty structure of general credit it has erected. It would not
250 /THE DRY TREE
take much drink to bring that whole structure down in ruins." 32 It was
unfortunate for the drys that the whole structure did come down in
ruins in 1929, while the nation was still enjoying all the theoretical
economic benefits of prohibition. In fact, by 1931, the drys were claim-
ing that prohibition had prevented the depression from being a catas-
trophe. "Our present effort to control John Barleycorn has provided a
cushioning of vast proportions against the impact of current unemploy-
ment/' 88
The wets considered that the claims of the drys were so much hot
air. First, there was no connection between prohibition and prosperity.
The boom of the twenties had taken place in the large cities, where
liquor flowed continually and enforcement of the dry law was a farce.
The country areas, where prohibition was a reality, suffered from de-
clining income throughout the twenties. Moreover, prohibition itself
was the most trivial of all the causes of the boom. The increased pro-
ductivity of America, as the Hoover report on Recent Economic
Changes showed, was due to the increased use of power, improved ma-
chinery, mass production, personnel management, and industrial re-
search 84 Even statistics contradicted the claims of the drys. If the
average income of Americans was adjusted to the cost-of -living index,
the total rose from $480 a year in 1900 to $620 in 1919 during the pe-
riod of the saloons, while the rate of increase remained constant under
prohibition to a total of $681 in 1929. The same was true of savings
deposits; the increase between 1910 and 1919 averaged about 7 per
cent a year, the same rate as in the twenties. In fact, the boom had be-
gun under legal liquor and had continued despite prohibition. The
rising sales of new goods were due to the phenomenal advance in ad-
vertising and in new consumer needs, rather than to the money saved
from liquor sales. Indeed, die wets said that there had been no money
saved on liquor sales, except during the first three years of prohibition.
By 1929, the amount spent on bootleg liquor was equal to the buying
power of the amount spent in 1914 on legal liquor. The only difference
was that slightly less liquor was drunk in 1929 at a greater cost. 85
A fair estimate of the economics of prohibition put the consumption
of beverage alcohol in the period between 1927 and 1930 at two-thirds
of the consumption between 1911 and 1914. The amount of money
spent on bootleg liquor in this period, however, was between four and
five billion dollars a year, exactly equivalent to the amount which
would have been spent if legal liquor had been sold at the volume of
the period between 1911 and 1914 and had been taxed at the wartime
rate of 1917. Although the national liquor bill had been reduced by
about two billion dollars a year during the first three years of prohibi-
tion, it had settled at its old level by the end of the twenties. Prohibi-
DRY DEFENSE / 251
tion had not been a significant factor in the purchase of automobiles,
consumer goods, or homes. Even the rise in the consumption of food
and dairy products was partially due to increased knowledge about
human health. Prohibition was a minor factor in the rise of industrial
productivity, while the decentralized bootleg trade, which employed
more people than the old liquor industry, wasted a great deal of pro-
ductive resources and labor. The only real gainers from prohibition
were the workingmen of America. They did drink half the amount
which they had before, and probably spent a billion dollars a year less
on liquor. On the other hand, the business and salaried classes drank
the same amount as they had before prohibition, and annually spent a
billion dollars more on liquor, as prices were higher. 86 After all the
fuss and bother, prohibition made for small change.
The economic claims and statistics of wets and drys were as multi-
tudinous as they were inaccurate. Their volume was only exceeded by
their lack of worth. They surpassed fantasy and approached divine in-
spiration. Yet, at two important times, these claims and statistics were
believed. The first time was in the few years before the passage of the
Eighteenth Amendment. The second time was in the few years before
repeal. During the first time, the drys were credited; during the sec-
ond, the wets. The despicable exaggerations of the prohibitionists
were imitated by their foes. The excited condition of the American
people during the First World War made them relinquish their com-
mon sense for long enough to heed those dry voices, who promised
them the millennium in terms of numbers and figures and dollars if the
nation would only go dry. Equally, the fearful temper of America in
the depression led most of the nation to believe in the ridiculous reme-
dies of the wet "beer-for-taxes" crusade, which turned the repeal
movement from "fine moral soil to the arid ground of economics, pre-
cisely where the Prohibitionists had planted their ignoble banner." 37
13
CHAPTER
Masters of Inaction
I am not a prohibitionist, Mr. President, and never have
pretended to be. I do claim to be a temperance man. I do
not approach this question from a moral viewpoint, because
I am unable to see it as a great moral question.
WARREN G. HARDING
Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine
cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches
you.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
THE DRYS were not fortunate in the two men who were in the
White House for the first eight years of national prohibition. It was
a period of Republican ascendancy, a time when the nominees of the
Grand Old Party were insignificant men whose inability or inaction
gave free rein to the forces of Big Business. Warren Harding was a
small-town newspaper editor from Ohio, Calvin Coolidge a limited
lawyer from Vermont. Neither had the wish or the capacity to enforce
the dry law by a strong show of federal power. Although the heads
of the Anti-Saloon League acquired much influence in Washington
through their close contact with these men, the lack of leadership from
the White House meant a lack of leadership in the nation. Who would
obey the Eighteenth Amendment under a President who drank whisky
regularly? Who would exert himself to enforce the Volstead Act under
another President, whose idea of good government was economy, and
whose way of dealing with trouble was to ignore it?
WABREN GAMALIEL HABDING: JUST FOLKS
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE called Harding a he-harlot. 1 Alice Roosevelt
Longworth called him just a slob. 2 Mencken, with prophetic sarcasm,
called him a numskull and an oil refinery. 3 Yet they all recognized
that he was a lovable and generous man. When he died suddenly in
252
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 253
1923 as he was returning from Alaska, some three million people
gathered by the railroad tracks to see his body brought back to the
East. He had declared that if he could not be the best President of the
United States, he would like to be the best-loved. His timely death
made him briefly so. He was more mourned immediately than any
save Abraham Lincoln.
If, within five years, his name was only mentioned to be sneered
at and forgotten, if Calvin Coolidge was too embarrassed to deliver a
funeral oration at his memorial and Herbert Hoover had to attack his
old Cabinet colleagues in his eulogy at the final burial, the fault was
not Harding's. For his virtues were his vices. He was too faithful to
his friends, too trusting of the untrustworthy, too easy with the hard.
He shook hands with problems and was surprised that they were still
impolite. He smiled at difficulties and was wounded by their perma-
nent scowl. When he was worried over a tax bill, he complained to his
secretary Jud Welliver that there must be a man who knew the an-
swer, though Harding didn't know his whereabouts, and that there
must be a book which solved the matter, though Harding couldn't
read it if there was. 4 His answer to Charles W. Forbes's peculations in
the Veterans' Bureau was to try personally to choke him; he did not
appoint a commission to investigate him. 5
Harding died from the stabbings of his friends, like a small-town
Julius Caesar. And his ordinary likabilities were sufficient to be an
Anthony and bring the crowds weeping about his corpse. The collec-
tion of 121 obituary editorials called He Was "Just Folks," which came
out in the year of his death, showed the grief felt by small men at the
end of a small man made great. Some of the titles of the editorials
were: "An Ideal American," "The Greatest Commoner Since Lincoln,"
"A Man of the People," "His Opportunity Is Every Boy's," and "He
LivesI He Lives!" 6 The normal never dies.
Harding treated prohibition during the course of his political career
with the same sloppy amiability and smiling lack of moral judgment
with which he treated all his acquaintances. As a boy in Marion, Ohio,
he had drunk and gambled and played pool with the rest of the town
boys, and had "pursued the casual lecheries of the unattached." 7 He
bought a defunct newspaper, the Marion Star, and began to build up
its circulation by putting out the correct and corrupt state Republican
line, which included support of the drink interests and ridicule of the
prohibitionists. He was married to a domineering woman five years his
senior, whose first husband had left her and had died of drink. Flor-
ence Kling Harding believed in her own destiny and forced her hus-
band into a fate that he did not intend. She made Warren Harding a
financial success and a well-known political figure, aided by Harry M.
254 / THE DRY TREE
Daugherty, who had decided that a man who looked like a President
should become one.
Harding was elected to the state senate in 1901, with the blessing
and backing of the notorious George B. Cox machine, from its saloon-
based headquarters in Cincinnati. There he was duly liked and duly
dutiful. The only time he is known to have been against the party line
was over a bill supported by the wets and the Republicans to extend
the area of local option. On this occasion, the public galleries were
full of the cohorts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. They
had threatened to swing the next election against anyone who dared
favor the bill. Warren Harding, never a man to resist the appeal of
women, voted dry. If he drank himself and owned brewery stock, he
had been advised often enough by Harry Daugherty to keep in with
the prohibitionists. The Republican machine might and did overlook
his one act of disobedience, while the Ohio Anti-Saloon League, the
most powerful in the country, was often too militantly Christian to for-
give its enemies.
When Harding ran for the office of Governor in 1910 against the
progressive Democrat Judson Harmon, he emulated his opponent's
straddle on liquor, if not his victory. Both candidates favored enforcing
the law and putting prohibition in its proper place. Harding said ob-
scurely:
The temperance question is legislative rather than executive, and
is not to transcend all other important issues in this campaign. My
legislative record is written in the journals of two general assemblies.
I couldn't change that record if I would. I stand for enforcement of
the law and would not be worthy of your suffrages if I did not. 8
The Ohio drys, distrusting both candidates, did not influence the
election overmuch; but when Harding ran for the Senate in 1914, the
drys supported him. One of their favorite candidates, Frank B. Willis,
was running on the same ticket for Governor. Harding had their sup-
port both in his defeat of the slippery ex-Senator Foraker in the Re-
publican primaries and in his victorious campaign, since he was run-
ning against a Roman Catholic. Wayne B. Wheeler went so far as to
issue a statement approving of Harding's ownership of brewery stock
as a method of accepting payment for beer advertisements in the
Marion Star. 9 Moreover, the Cincinnati wets came out for Harding, as
they were disgruntled with the "wet" Democratic Governor of Ohio,
James M. Cox, who had actually closed the saloons on Sundays. With
both extremes behind him, wets and drys, opposed only by the pro-
gressives and traditional Democrats, Harding won easily by nearly
75,000 votes. He was sent to drink whisky and play poker, to make
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 255
many friends and influence few, in the most exclusive club in the
world in Washington.
Harding spent the six happiest years of his life in the Senate, in a
hail of respectable fellows well met. 10 He served on many committees,
since he was known to know little about their work and to support the
opinions of their senior members. He served on the committees for
Naval Affairs, Public Health and National Quarantine, Standard
Weights and Measures, Commerce, Claims, Expenditures in the Treas-
ury Department, Foreign Relations, Territories, the Pacific Islands, the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. His attendance at
these committees was little better than his voting record, which was in-
frequent. Out of thirty-two calls on the matter of prohibition, he voted
wet thirty times, mostly opposing unimportant prohibition riders to
other measures. And yet the Anti-Saloon League backed him. For he
stated to them charmingly that he believed in doing what the people
told him to do; he would vote on prohibition as his state voted. Thus,
when the Anti-Saloon League dried up Ohio, they would also dry up
Ohio's mouthpiece, Senator Harding.
In fact, Harding voted to submit the Eighteenth Amendment to the
states before Ohio had voted for constitutional prohibition. It was a
nice and exactly calculated evasion of responsibility. In 1916, most of
the wet Senators who sought re-election had lost their seats. In 1917,
the third attempt to dry up Ohio was defeated by just over a thousand
votes out of a total of one million; at each attempt, the drys had cut
the majority against them and were bound to be successful in 1918.
Harding acted as the go-between of wet Senators and the Anti-Saloon
League in the negotiations for the time limit of seven years given for
ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. But when the vital votes on
the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act veto were counted,
Harding's vote was cast on the dry and winning side.
In the 1920 Republican convention, oil men and the senatorial soviet
pulled the wires, not the advocates of abstinence. The Committee of
the National Temperance Council did send a letter to urge a strong
plank in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment; but the framers of the
party platform were too canny to say anything on the subject. Hard-
ing's unsuitable nomination was fixed by the Old Guard of the Senate
in a smoke-filled room as forecast by Harry Daugherty. The prospec-
tive candidate communed with himself for ten minutes and, ignoring
the fact of his illegitimate child and the rumors of his Negro blood,
announced that there were no obstacles to his running for President.
The convention agreed with the choice of their leaders. The man who
would win the election needed to be the antithesis of the academic,
strong, idealistic Wilson. The country further concurred. And what
256 / THE DRY TREE
had been a conspiracy by a powerful cabal to foist an inadequate fig-
urehead on their party became a popular victory of huge proportions.
A landslide majority of some seven million votes showed that after a
time of war, restrictions, foreign commitments, and introspection, the
country was for peace, plenty, isolation, and no questions. As Senator
Johnson, of California, said correctly, "Rum was not the issue of this
campaign/' 11
Harding conducted most of his campaign from his front porch at
Marion. The party leaders sent him out to speak as little as possible,
since they were afraid of his affable indiscretions. His polysyllabic and
meaningless prose suitably spread an impenetrable miasma around his
views on the League of Nations and prohibition and everything else.
His later speeches reminded Mencken of a string of wet sponges, tat-
tered washing on the line, stale bean-soup, college yells, and dogs
barking idiotically through endless nights. They were so bad that a
sort of grandeur crept into them. 12 While the election headquarters at
Marion flowed with all sorts of liquor, Harding showed his handsome
face and mouthed superfluities about the Eighteenth Amendment, that
it was impossible to ignore the Constitution and unthinkable to evade
the law.
Harding was opposed in the election by the Democratic candidate
James M. Cox. Cox also came from Ohio, where he had been three
times Governor. He was not liked by the leaders of the Anti-Saloon
League, who had bitterly opposed him in many state campaigns. At
the Democratic convention, copies of Cox's wet record in Ohio were
circulated among the delegates by William Jennings Bryan in an effort
to block Cox's nomination in favor of that of the dry A. Mitchell
Palmer or William Gibbs McAdoo. Two officials of the Anti-Saloon
League warned the Democrats against nominating a wet candidate:
William H. Anderson said that Harding would be beaten if the Demo-
crats nominated a dry, and "Pussyfoot" Johnson declared that any
wet seeker after the White House would have as much chance of be-
ing elected as a "tallow-legged cat in hell/' 18 Wayne B. Wheeler him-
self wrote to Bryan, telling him that Cox "must be defeated if there is
any way possible to do it/' 14
Cox was nominated, however, with the support of the wets and
Tammany and the business interests. The Anti-Saloon League refused
to support either candidate officially, although their support went in
secret to Warren Harding. Although both candidates came out for en-
forcement of the dry law, the League had previously supported Hard-
ing in Ohio and had opposed Cox. Moreover, the leaders of the League
thought that they could exert more pressure on the malleable Harding
MASTERS OF INACTION / 257
in Washington than they could on the efficient Cox. Thus Clarence
True Wilson came out with the statement that Harding was 90 per
cent dry, while Cox was accused of being the candidate of the wets. 15
It was useless for Cox to denounce Wayne B. Wheeler as the tool of
the Republican party; for his own party in Ohio and the North was
associated with the wet city machines. 16 The campaign was slanderous
and unpleasant in general. Rumors circulated that Harding was a
Negro, while Cox was accused of heavy drinking and of secret sym-
pathies with Rome. 17 Nevertheless, Harding's victory was assured, for
it was a Republican year.
Once Harding was installed in the White House, he found himself
incompetent, overworked, and in jail. He discovered that he had to
make up his own mind since the best minds of his party disagreed. He
was hounded for his drinking habits and his inefficiencies by Wheeler
and members of the Anti-Saloon League, who had only supported his
weak candidacy because he was weak while they were strong. They
treated him in Washington as they had done in Ohio, as a ninny to be
bullied and cajoled and led. Through their power in the President's
home state and through the appointment of a Buckeye Prohibition
Commissioner, Roy A. Haynes, Wheeler and the League transferred
their influence within a state to influence over a nation.
But other and more dangerous men from Ohio followed Harding to
Washington. These were his personal friends, who became the Ohio
Gang. He needed their poker games and highballs and backslapping
joviality to escape from the rigors of the unknown into the relaxation
of the known. He was unhappy without his cronies. He thought per-
sonal acquaintanceship more sure a basis for trust than past record or
party loyalty. Thus, physically and mentally unfit for his own high
office, he gave his friends high offices too. Washington received the
doubtful benefit of the most efficient gang of looters ever to gut the
capital city since the days of General Grant.
In fairness to Warren Harding, he knew little of the extortions of his
friends. He knew them only as charming boon companions. Alice
Roosevelt Longworth's description of the scene in the study at the
White House above the official reception on the main floor was all that
Harding wanted and expected of his chosen circle.
No rumor could have exceeded the reality; the study was filled
with cronies, Daugherty, Jess Smith, Alec Moore, and others, the air
heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imagi-
nable brand of whisky stood about, cards and poker chips ready at
hand a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the
desk, and the spittoon alongside. 18
258 / THE DRY TREE
It is not established, however, that Harding ever went to the notori-
ous parties at 1625 K Street, where the Ohio Gang took up their head-
quarters and began their system of what Senator Brookhart, of Iowa,
called "government by blackmail." With Harry Daugherty as Attorney
General and the unscrupulous William J. Burns running the Depart-
ment of Justice as a private police force for the gang's benefit, pickings
were large and easy. Indeed, one of the main reasons that the Anti-
Saloon League did not want the Prohibition Bureau transferred from
the Treasury to the Department of Justice was that it would merely be
a transfer from inefficiency to corruption.
Meanwhile, the unknowing Harding was making moral appeals for
good citizens to obey the Eighteenth Amendment. At his home town,
Marion, in 1922, he said that the amendment was the will of America
and must be sustained by government and public opinion. 19 In his
message to Congress in December of that year, he repeated his state-
ment, although the corruption of the Prohibition Bureau had now be-
come too notorious to be ignored. Harding darkly referred to the Vol-
stead Act and "conditions relating to its enforcement which savor of
nation-wide scandal." Yet his remedy was not the reorganization of the
Prohibition Bureau but an exhortation for individuals to refuse to
drink bootleg liquor and for larger appropriations by the states. 20
Harding himself, at last grown aware of the treachery of his friends
and the need of the President to set an example, even began to give
up his own drinking habits. He moved his liquor stock up to the se-
crecy of his bedroom and, under pressure from Wayne B. Wheeler,
announced to reporters in January, 1923, that he had become a total
abstainer. No alcohol was put on the presidential train during his last
trip to Alaska, and if a kind reporter slipped him a bottle of whisky on
the sea voyage, it was his only known backsliding. 21 For Harding be-
lieved what he said, even if his words were incoherent. The job of be-
ing President became, by the end of his term, greater than the man.
He seemed genuinely shocked by New York's repeal of its state
enforcement law in May, and said, in an oblique attack on Governor
Alfred E. Smith, that both national executives and state executives
were equally sworn to enforce the Constitution. 22 He even claimed
that the Prohibition Bureau was doing a good job in his foreword to
Commissioner Roy A. Haynes's book, Prohibition Inside Out. "The Pro-
hibition Department has made, and is making, substantial progress.
It deserves the support of all our people in its great work." 28
Harding spoke for the last time on prohibition at Denver, Colorado,
during his fatal trip to Alaska. He stated that neither party was ever
likely to urge repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. He claimed, to the
derision of the cartoonists, that the wets were a very small part of the
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 259
population. And he puffed out the usual cloudy confusions of the dry
propagandists, who tried to maintain that an occasional drink was
equivalent to a full-scale assault on the American way of life. Hard-
ing's speech mirrored the intellectual inadequacy of the drys; it was a
masterpiece of sonorous fallacies, lifting a difference of opinion to the
level of an attack on order and government.
The issue is fast coming to be recognized, not as one between wets
and drys, not as a question between those who believe in prohibition
and those who do not, not as a contention between those who want to
drink and those who do not it is fast being raised above all that
but as one involving the great question whether the laws of this coun-
try can and will be enforced. 24
Harding died, probably of heart failure, on his return from Alaska.
Had he lived, he might have been impeached for agreeing to sign
away the oil lands put aside for the Navy. Within a few years, his wife,
his doctor, and most of the Ohio Gang were dead or in prison. Allega-
tions that his decease was not natural seem to be unfounded, although
the suicides and sudden deaths of some of his Ohio associates were
suspiciously convenient for the survivors. Whatever the reason for his
end, Harding's burial was timely. Dying was the greatest service he
could have performed for his party. For he was regarded in the suc-
ceeding presidential election as a martyr, killed by overwork and dis-
loyal friends. His omissions over prohibition and greater matters were
forgiven with his death.
CALVIN COOLIDGE: THE BESPONSIBIIJTY OF INACTION
"IN PUBLIC life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really
natural to be actually artificial/' wrote Calvin Coolidge. 25 His own na-
ture was always considered to have been formed by the nature of his
native Vermont. He improved upon that inheritance merely to seem
more like the product of the place. If the people of Vermont were
thrifty and hard-working and ambitious, believers in God and local
government and the worth of business and the Republican party, then
Calvin Coolidge was ostentatiously so, in the clipped manner of his
ancestors. He was parsimonious, even saving part of his presidential
salary. He was industrious, cutting short his honeymoon to return to
his law office. He was very ambitious, rising to be President through a
planned series of electoral victories, which he called fate and his op-
ponents called good management. As President, he left as much as he
could in the hands of God and did as little as possible, in order to
economize on the federal budget and to allow local authorities the
260 / THE DRY TREE
luxury of effecting their own improvements. He trusted businessmen
so faithfully that he even appointed them to staff the federal boards
set up to regulate their businesses. And he was always a convinced
Republican, although his sense that he was "but an instrument in the
hands of God" made him think he was called to be above party, when
he was being efficiently exploited by his own. 26
Prohibition was no private problem to Coolidge, merely a political
bore. He was a teetotaler, who drank rarely on certain social occasions.
He practiced throughout his life his family's virtues of self-restraint
and saving, even to the extent of refusing to allow himself to become
a great President. He wrote, "It is a great advantage to a President,
and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he
is not a great man." 27 Thinking himself inferior, Calvin Coolidge made
no effort to act like a great man. His fear of greatness was so strong
that he let the various forces in American life operate unchecked
except by Providence and the misunderstood principles of economy.
He thought that the integrity of the President's own example was a
better instrument of government than the use of federal power.
Calvin Coolidge's personal honesty was another quality he had in-
herited from his early society. Yet this virtue applied only to his
private life. His political use of his personal honesty was the worst
form of intellectual self-deceit. He took refuge in his own sense of
incorruptibility to allow the powers which backed him, business and
political, to corrupt whomsoever they wished. An honest man may be
a dishonest politician by ignoring the interests of those he represents
in the contemplation of his rectitude. Had Coolidge remained in
Vermont, cultivating the forty acres left to him by his grandfather,
his personal doctrine of work and save would have made him right-
fully respected. But when his ambition drove him to the White House,
he thought that his good fortune was the living proof of his doctrine of
self-help, not the greatest opportunity given to a single man to help
others.
Calvin Coolidge, become great in office, did as little as possible. He
made few mistakes, but he did nothing to prevent the speculative
boom that was to destroy in the slump of 1929 the image of business
as Mammon, the friend of God. He himself personally saved his
salary, put some hundred thousand dollars into safe gilt-edged stock,
and was not affected by the Great Crash in his private life, although
he was partially responsible for the depression by failing to use the
federal power to control the stock market. Prohibition was another
issue on which Coolidge, by doing little, was responsible for much.
When Calvin Coolidge left Amherst College, he went to Northamp-
ton, Massachusetts, to learn and practice law. More interested in the
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 261
acquisition of political office than of money, Coolidge served in many
municipal posts until he finally ran for Mayor of Northampton in 1910.
In this campaign, prohibition first came to his aid. Although Coolidge
was the attorney for a powerful brewery, the drys supported him, since
his Democratic opponent had once, out of academic interest, taken
the wet side in a debate in the Congregational Church. In the cam-
paign, Coolidge followed his lifelong policy of saying nothing on
prohibition at all, in order to appear the friend of all, a private tee-
totaler and a public brewer's lawyer. He won the election, despite an
accusation in the Northampton Daily Herald that his victory was due
to Rum and Religion. As usual, he defended himself from this attack
by a reference to his personal habits, not to his political helpers. He
wrote to his father, "I did not have to reply to the Herald attack, for
everybody knew it was not true. Folks know I do not go into saloons,
and I never bought a drink during the campaign.** 28
Yet his political equivocation was evident on the morning of the
election when he drove down to vote with a dry Methodist minister
on his left and a wet politician on his right. An old friend pointed out
that Calvin Coolidge was holding the communion cup in one hand and
a glass of beer in the other and spilling neither. 29 By refusing to belong
officially to any church until he became President or to any prohibition
organization, Coolidge could attract the negative support of all who
were offended by particular churches and liquor laws.
Coolidge's success in Northampton was due to his appeal both to
the church and to the saloon vote. There were eighteen churches and
eighteen saloons for a town population of 18,000, which was almost
exactly split between the old American stock and the immigrants, be-
tween Protestants and Roman Catholics. This religious and racial split
was a microcosm of the whole situation in Massachusetts and in the
nation. Throughout his political career, Coolidge had to appeal to a
certain number of wet, Roman Catholic, immigrant voters, although
he was personally a dry, nondenominational, traditional Vermonter.
Thus he had to be silent on racial and religious issues. This silence he
built up into a myth of political honesty, not of political acumen.
The steady progress of Coolidge from the post of Mayor of North-
ampton into the state House of Representatives and into the state
Senate demonstrated that his shyness, economy of language, and dis-
cretion were great assets in the elections. For western Massachusetts
was mainly Congregationalist and Republican and dry, the home of
old American stock and small industries; while eastern Massachusetts
was chiefly Roman Catholic and Democratic and wet, the home of
Irishmen and large industries. Senator Murray Crane, the sophisticated
Republican boss of his time in the areas where Senator Lodge had not
262 /THE DRY TREE
carved out his own preserves, helped the prudently silent Coolidge
into the leadership of the state Senate and eventually into the lieu-
tenant governorship and governorship. A man like Coolidge, who had
been progressive when Theodore Roosevelt was progressive within
his party, and who was conservative when big business was accused
of self-interest rather than public interest, was always useful to any
Republican machine. Moreover, both Crane and Coolidge knew that,
except in times of war or crusade, a shut mouth was better than a
fiery tongue. 30
Coolidge took refuge from the danger of opposing the drys on the
good democratic grounds that local government was the best form of
government. In Northampton, he had supported the license system by
saying that total prohibition would be impossible to enforce on a .town
surrounded by wet areas. Besides, he refused to mention the liquor
problem at all during his political campaigns, since he maintained that
it distracted voters from more important issues. In his campaign for
Lieutenant Governor, he was actually opposed by the drys and the
progressives. But his own abstinence, allied with the support of the
brewers and the conservatives, secured him a majority of over 100,000
votes.
But more and more states were going dry. Therefore, the careful
Coolidge was discreet in his campaign for Governor in 1918. The
Republican candidate for the Senate, John W. Weeks, was opposed by
die suffragettes, labor, and the prohibitionists. Coolidge knew this and
avoided any mention of Weeks during his campaign. Weeks lost;
Coolidge won. He was helped by the fact that Frank W. Stearns, his
self-appointed and selfless publicity manager, was actively working
for the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment by the Massachusetts
legislature. Moreover, Senator Crane was backing ratification by
Massachusetts, "first, because it's right, and secondly, because Massa-
chusetts will lose its influence in the counsels of the Nation if it does
not join in this movement of national conviction/' 81 Crane may not
have had a real change of heart in accepting the morality of prohibi-
tion, but he would certainly never be left off a successful bandwagon.
Coolidge, always the lawyer and the friend of Crane, went dry after
die election and after ratification by Massachusetts an important
victory which swung die immigrant and industrial Northern states
behind the drys. In 1919, as Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge
vetoed a bill passed by the wets in die state legislature, which allowed
the sale of weak beer. Coolidge's reason was that the bill was in viola-
tion of the Constitution that he had sworn to defend.
Prohibition was a strange factor in the incident which made Cool-
idge nationally known and led to his nomination as Vice President
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 263
and later as President. The Boston police went on strike in 1919, be-
cause their commissioner refused to allow their union to become
affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The policemen were
badly paid and depended on bribes from saloonkeepers to supplement
their incomes. 32 But in the first two years of prohibition in Boston,
some attempt was made to enforce the law. The old saloons were
closed down, and the new bootleggers were not yet operating on a
sufficiently wide scale to take their place as employers of the police.
Thus, by efficient service, the policemen found themselves with too
little money to support themselves. They went on strike. After some
looting and a riot in Scollay Square, where two were killed and nine
injured by the State Guard, Governor Coolidge intervened with mes-
sages and force, although the whole matter had already been settled
by the Mayor of Boston. Coolidge always believed in gaining the
credit for successful actions without running the risk of performing un-
pleasant ones. His message to Samuel Gompers that there was "no
right to strike against the public safety by any body, any time, any
where" had all the qualities of strength and brevity needed to impress
a people scared of Reds and revolution. It was widely and carefully
publicized.
Therefore, Calvin Coolidge had some hopes of nomination as a dark
horse at the Republican convention of 1920. As always, there was little
to be said against him, even if there was little to be said for him. He
was, in fact, available, especially as he had won many elections in the
key state of Massachusetts. Stearns, conscious of the power of the Anti-
Saloon League, had taken care to have fifty thousand copies of
Coolidge's veto of the beer bill sent around to a carefully selected
list of prominent party members. The veto message had been com-
mended by Wayne B. Wheeler as "characteristically epigrammatic,
faultless in logic, American to the core and in harmony with the
fundamental principles of law and order for which Governor Coolidge
has made himself famous/' 83 The stampede of the convention for
Coolidge as Vice President may have had something to do with his
dry reputation, but it was more a protest against the attempted foisting
of Senator Lenroot on the delegates by the same senatorial soviet that
had nominated Harding.
At this period, the office of Vice President was chiefly a time of
waiting for a dead man's shoes. Coolidge duly waited, and was re-
warded. President Harding died on August 3, 1923. Calvin Coolidge's
father administered the presidential oath to his son at a carefully
simple ceremony at his home in Plymouth Notch. Coolidge continued
the Harding policy and Cabinet, only dismissing Daugherty with the
greatest reluctance when prohibition scandals became too notorious.
264 / THE DRY TREE
The appointment of Harlan F. Stone to the position of Attorney Gen-
eral put a stop to the "government by blackmail" of the Department
of Justice, and to official protection of bootleggers by the enforcement
agencies.
Coolidge, however, was no more prepared than Harding to see that
the Volstead Act was properly enforced. He merely did not collect
official protection from the bootleggers. He was willing, as Harding
was, to make speeches about the need to obey the law. At the Gov-
ernors' Conference of 1923, Coolidge spoke of the necessity for state
co-operation in enforcement and the duty of the citizen to obey the
Constitution. The main problem arose from those who wanted to make
money from bootlegging; if this could be eliminated, the rest would be
easy. 84 In his message to Congress of that year, he again exhorted the
private citizen to abstinence from liquor, asked for large appropri-
ations from the states for enforcement, and demanded an increase in
the efficiency of the Coast Guard by the use of fast speedboats. 35
Congress reduced the appropriation for the Prohibition Bureau from
$8,500,000 to $8,250,000, listening to Coolidge's pleas for national
economy rather than for good government. 86
Coolidge was not prepared to challenge Congress to enforce its own
legislation. He did not point out that the Volstead Act could never be
put into effect by an ill-paid and minute force of agents. He thought
it sufficient to set a good example in personal prohibition, not to force
others to be as good as himself. Alice Roosevelt Longworth found the
atmosphere in the White House under Coolidge "as different as a New
England front parlor is from a back room in a speakeasy." 87 Coolidge
used his own example to cover up his political evasion. Even the
Republican William Allen White complained that, while the Presi-
dent believed in a fair trial at strict enforcement, he refused to evan-
gelize or make sentiment for the Volstead Act the one thing it
needed. 88 White further complained that Coolidge was silent about
the heavy drinking of the upper classes, when "prohibition was pretty
badly up against it in the East/' 89 But Coolidge ignored the moralists,
sat tight, and did little except talk about the duties of the good citizen.
His prudent silence served Coolidge well in the election of 1924.
He was the automatic, if unwilling, nominee of his party in 1924. The
Progressive Senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, bolted
his party to oppose him. And the Democrats nominated a Wall Street
lawyer from West Virginia, John W. Davis. Prohibition was one of the
reasons for Davis's nomination in New York, after seventeen days and
103 ballots, and the longest and most unpleasant convention in a party
history of long and unpleasant conventions.
There, the issues that split the Democrats until the depression came
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 265
out violently and vulgarly into the open. William G. McAdoo, backed
by the Solid South and the drys and the Protestants and the Ku Klux
Klan, was deadlocked with Alfred E. Smith, the reform Governor of
New York, backed by Tammany Hall and the wets and the Roman
Catholics and the Northern urban immigrants. Neither would give way
to the other, and neither could reach the required two-thirds majority
for victory. Cox was also running as Ohio's favorite son, but he had
merely had himself nominated to keep the votes of the state from
McAdoo, whom he disliked. The galleries were full of Al Smith's
supporters. They gave Bryan a dreadful drubbing when he rose to ask
forgiveness for the Ku Klux Klan. He was booed and hissed and
humiliated, and a motion to censure the Klan was lost by only one
vote in over a thousand. Bryan did keep a wet plank out of the party
platform and help to scotch Al Smith's nomination. But his pet abomi-
nation, a lawyer who had taken cases for J. P. Morgan, was eventually
picked out by the tired delegates. Not even the nomination of Bryan's
younger brother Charles as candidate for Vice President could mollify
the aging Great Commoner to approve of Davis as the Democratic
choice for President.
It might have been better strategy for Davis to declare himself in
favor of modification of the Volstead Act, instead of shifting uneasily
from dry foot to wet foot and ending on his knees. For, unless a
Roman Catholic ran as the Democratic candidate for President,
the Solid South would still probably vote solid, and a great many wet
votes might be gained in the Northern cities. Mencken savagely at-
tacked Davis for his evasiveness on the prohibition issue. 40 All Davis
would say was what he said in his acceptance speech, that he held in
contempt any public official who took an oath to uphold the Constitu-
tion and made a mental reservation to exclude any word of that great
document. Silent Calvin Coolidge did far better by saying nothing
about prohibition, or much else.
The continual speeches of Davis insisting that he would enforce the
law properly lost wet votes without gaining dry ones. Wheeler even
accused him of deviating from his party platform and having secret
alcoholic leanings, because he constantly repeated such wet catch
phrases as "personal liberty is the doctrine of self-restraint" and "home
rule." 41 Davis, in trying to please both sides, pleased neither; he polled
even fewer votes than Cox. At the end of the campaign, he wryly told
a joke against himself, explaining how he had lost both wets and drys.
He had received a letter from a habitual Democrat and prohibitionist
who was sorry that he had had to vote for a Republican for the first
time, but he could not vote for a Democrat who had been President
of the New York Bar Association. 42
266 / THE DRY TREE
Mencken, who was normally proud of being a reactionary, voted
in the end for La Follette, since he was that impossible phenomenon,
an honest politician. Yet La Follette, too, was a trimmer on prohibition.
The Wisconsin Progressive and Senator had sometimes drunk too
much in his youth, but he had paid for his sins by joining the Good
Templars. 43 He had made Wisconsin a model state with a reform
government and had led the progressive wing of the Republicans for
many years. With six others in the Senate, he had voted against
America's entry into the First World War. Even when Theodore
Roosevelt had recommended that he should be hanged as a traitor,
he had stuck firm, more for his principles than for the German vote
in Wisconsin. He had supported the Eighteenth Amendment, as the
articles in the Nation backing his candidacy pointed out; but he had
voted against the Volstead Act His decision to run for President at the
age of sixty-nine was only taken when he found the nominees of both
parties to be the friends of big business.
La Follette campaigned on his usual Progressive platform. He was
inevitably and frequently accused of being a Red by Charles Dawes,
Coolidge's Vice President. In addition, he was attacked by Clarence
True Wilson as the only wet candidate for the presidency, although he
had taken up the same position over prohibition as his two opponents,
writing that while the Volstead Act was still law "it should be enforced
for rich and poor alike, without hypocrisy or favoritism/' 44 Perhaps
this was the statement Clarence True Wilson disliked; the drys had
attracted big business to their side by agreeing that prohibition should
be enforced on the poor, with a blind eye turned on the rich. Wheel-
er's opposition to La Follette was more political. He shared in the fear
that a large vote for a third party might throw the presidential election
into the House of Representatives; and a deadlock there would mean
the election by the Senate of one of the two Vice Presidents to the
presidency, a man who probably would not be so amenable to Wheel-
er's dictates as Coolidge.
The danger of La Follette's candidacy was exaggerated. He secured
only one vote out of six, and thirteen votes from Wisconsin in the Elec-
toral College, although he ran ahead of Davis in twelve Western states.
Coolidge won by a landslide, even though it was La Follette who had
come from the genuine log cabin. Davis lost by a greater margin than
Cox, since he had the further disadvantage of representing nothing
except the traditional Democratic party between the candidate of the
Haves and the candidate of the Have-nots.
Calvin Coolidge, elected to the White House in his own right by an
overwhelming majority, presumed that his huge mandate was a public
expression of gratitude for his policy of federal inaction. During the
MASTERS OF INACTION/ 267
next four years, he continued to do little, and never did little when less
would do. The enforcement of prohibition hardly improved, although
Coolidge did sign a bill in 1927 to make the Prohibition Bureau an
independent body. After his reorganization of the 144 departments in
the Massachusetts government into a mere 20, he thought that good
government was the result of the shuffling about of responsibilities
and memoranda, not of increased taxes and increased efficiency.
Coolidge, during the five years he was President, was the curious
negative image of boom times. He was the reverse of the society he
led. He did not seek to end corruption and exaggerated profits and vast
speculation. He did not try to stamp out bootleggers and speak-easies
and bad prohibition agents. He merely was not corrupt himself and
did not drink. He expected the rest of the United States to follow his
good example, without even exhorting them by political speeches. He
had won the election of 1924 by saying nothing about prohibition or
the scandals of the Harding regime; he merely collected votes as he
had done in the Northampton election for Mayor in 1910 by attracting
through silence. La Follette was a Red, Charles Bryan was a radical
Westerner like his brother William Jennings, John Davis was a rich
corporation lawyer, while Coolidge was his thrifty and honest and
negative self. Thus he amassed, as he amassed in all his campaigns,
the votes that were annoyed by some characteristic in the other candi-
dates and could find nothing positive enough in Coolidge to dislike.
As Walter Lippmann pointed out, Coolidge, with an exquisite sub-
tlety that amounted to genius, used dullness and boredom as political
devices; under him America attained a Puritanism de luxe, in which
it was possible to praise the classic virtues while continuing to enjoy
all the modern conveniences. 45 Coolidge was the figurehead of his
people. They felt that, while he denied himself, his abstinence would
excuse their own indulgence, and his narrow sense of his own duties
would allow that indulgence. They were right. Coolidge, incorruptible
to the end, allowed Wall Street and prohibition to plunge the country
into speculative and moral disaster. 46
On the fourth anniversary of his Inauguration, Coolidge announced
that he did not choose to run for President in 1928. This formula was
one of Coolidge's cleverest evasions, where an honest statement of
abdication hid a dishonest attempt to allow his party to renominate
him for a third term. He did not choose to run, but he did not refuse
to run if his party chose him. This was the interpretation put on his
statement by his intimate friends like Stearns and Chief Justice Taft
And if Herbert Hoover gained control of the Republican convention
machinery so effectively that he was nominated on the first ballot,
Coolidge's disappointment was real enough, although his Avtobiog-
268 / THE DRY TREE
raphy states that he never intended to run again, as he did not want to
be thought selfish. 47
Coolidge was always cryptic in order to have an escape route ready
against failure. He was always personally honest in order to defend
himself against the use of corrupt friends. He was a teetotaler so that
he could plead personal abstinence when he was accused of having the
support of the liquor interests, or of failing to enforce prohibition.
He was a small man who pushed himself into great offices by preach-
ing his small virtues and allowing others their large vices. While tens
of millions suffered in the great depression, Calvin Coolidge lived well
and thriftily on the money he had saved from his salary, until he died
suddenly in January, 1933, from coronary thrombosis. He was true to
the grave, doctoring himself with indigestion powders rather than
wasting mqney by consulting a heart specialist.
The drys were unfortunate and the drinkers fortunate that men of
such little stature as Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge filled the
White House during the first eight years of national prohibition. But
the men who were President were not the only men to blame for the
supine enforcement of the dry law. The two great parties in the land,
and the houses of Congress, were equally guilty of doing little about
prohibition, and not doing it very well.
CHAPTER
14
The Amphibious Congress
Congress is the one place in the whole United States in
which a mouth is above the law; the heavens may fall, the
earth be consumed, but the right of a Congressman to He
and defame remains inviolate.
GEORGE CREEL
The Constitution is a document by which Congress can
make its mistakes permanent.
Politicians, in general, are not fastidious, and most of
those from the interior, especially the drys, are ready to
drink anything that burns, at the same time giving thanks
to God.
H. L. MENCKEN
THE DRY POLITICS OF PARTY
THE MAJOR American parties are uneasy coalitions of areas. These
areas have their own faiths and traditions and wants. Indeed, the
conflict of areas within the parties is often more bitter than the con-
flict between the two parties themselves. Yet, for one party to defeat
another, an appearance of harmony must be presented during elec-
tions. Although party conventions may be the place for what Carry
Nation called "hatchetation," the hatchet must be buried to woo the
voters. For this reason, both parties try to avoid those wounding issues
which even party expediency cannot heal. Such an issue was prohibi-
tion.
The straddles of the dry issue by the major parties were remarkable.
Although prohibition was a national problem between 1916 and 1932,
only in that final year did the platform of either party make more than
a passing reference to the need for honest law enforcement. For the
bosses of both parties did not want the subject raised at all. The
Republicans were successful at suppressing debate at the conventions
on the matter until Hoover's second nomination, and the Democrats
270 /THE DRY TREE
were unsuccessful. In this matter, the nature and differences of both of
the major parties were revealed.
The tactics of the Anti-Saloon League played into the hands of the
evasive strategy of the party bosses. For the- League did not want
either party to write a prohibition plank into its platform. Such an
action might make prohibition a partisan issue, and the League was
committed to a nonpartisan policy. As Bishop Cannon wrote in 1920,
"While I would have been pleased had both conventions adopted short
law enforcement planks, yet after it failed of passage by the Repub-
lican convention, it was better for the prohibition cause that it should
not be adopted by the Democratic convention." 1 Thus at the Demo-
cratic convention in San Francisco the strange sight was seen of a
Democratic League leader speaking against a plank for the enforce-
ment of the prohibition law, in opposition to a Republican League
leader, Wayne B. Wheeler, and other dry spokesmen. Cannon was
successful in preventing the Democrats from passing the dry plank in
1920, at the cost of being denounced by William Jennings Bryan as a
real, if not intentional, enemy of prohibition. 2
As Mencken pointed out on the subject of national party conven-
tions, "Of the platform only one thing may be predicted: that it will
please nobody. And of the candidate only one thing also: that he will
be suspected by all.'* 8 He went on to comment that a single factor
broke all the rules in American politics. That factor was prohibition.
It caused the delegates to buck their normal subservience to the party
bosses and the masterminds, and defeated all attempts to bury its
discussion, especially among the Democrats. Moreover, it brought
out a fundamental difference between the personal habits of the dele-
gates to the conventions. "The Republicans commonly carry their
liquor better than the Democrats, just as they commonly wear their
clothes better. One seldom sees one of them actively sick in the con-
vention hall, or dead drunk in a hotel lobby." This individual be-
havior emphasized the party difference. "Republicans have a natural
talent for compromise, but to Democrats it is almost impossible." 4
Until 1932, the history of prohibition in major party politics is a
history of the Democratic party. The discreet Republicans swept the
affair under the carpet and concentrated on the business of Business.
But the Democrats battled the issue up gallery and down hall. It was
a mirror to them, an inescapable revelation of the aged wrinkles that
marred the fair face of their party. In that glass, the uneasy coalition
of Northern cities and Southern states saw its flawed donkey face, and
brayed its self-hate to the ears of the nation. It was not until the South
bolted from the dry cause to the wet Franklin D. Roosevelt that the
Democrats trotted together to victory, pulling in the same harness.
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS/ 271
The Democrats had the bad luck of losing their great leader William
Jennings Bryan to the cause of prohibition. Bryan's way at conventions
was not the way of hidden negotiation but the way of moral stampede.
As an unknown, he had won the presidential nomination in 1896 by
his oratory of righteousness, and his methods did not alter. In 1912,
his resolution against the influence of the big businessmen, Morgan
and Belmont and Ryan, and his switch to the support of Woodrow
Wilson, changed the course of a convention which seemed bound to
nominate Champ Clark, of Missouri. In 1916, Wilson did not need
Bryan's help and used his loyalty to prevent him from forcing the
issue over prohibition. But in 1920, Bryan was not so hampered. He
went there, not in the interests of any candidate, but to combat the
wet element of the East, which clamored for modification of the Vol-
stead Act to allow the sale of light wines and beer. 6 He also went
there, bullheaded and bright-armored, to secure an outright prohibi-
tion plank in the party platform. Rather than Wheeler s wish of a
plank favoring law enforcement or Cannon's wish of no plank at all,
Bryan wanted a plank favoring prohibition as the permanent policy
of the country, and favoring the enforcement of the Volstead Law "in
letter and in spirit." 6
But the delegates at the convention were seduced not by the golden
voice of morality, but by the sly whisper of expediency. Cannon's
policy of silence prevailed. The convention voted down Bryan's dry
plank by 929& votes to 155J, and Bourke Cochran's wet plank by
726X to 356. The platform, which made no mention of prohibition or
of law enforcement, was accepted by acclamation. In the following
struggle for the nomination, Bryan tried to block the nomination of
Cox, who was the moist candidate of the wets, by circulating among
the delegates lengthy statements of Cox's wet record in Ohio during
his three terms as Governor. But the nominee of the drys, William G.
McAdoo, had too many enemies to triumph over Cox, and Bryan's
heart went "in the grave" with his defeat. There is truth in Cannon's
nasty comment that Bryan was despondent because he had hoped to
make prohibition a political asset and realized that possibly his last
chance for the presidency went into the grave with the dry plank. 7
The defeated McAdoo went after the presidential nomination at the
next convention with all his thoroughness and pertinacity. He corralled
behind him the vote of South and West, and the unspoken support of
the Ku Klux Klan, which approved of such a dry representative of old
American ideals and stock. He would have almost certainly won the
nomination but for two factors. The first was the casual revelation of
the corrupt oil millionaire, Edward L. Doheny, in the Elk Hills and
Teapot Dome scandal, that he had employed McAdoo as his attorney
272 / THE DRY TREE
at a retainer of fifty thousand dollars a year. And the second was the
opposition of the Eastern cities, led by the wet Irish Governor of New
York, Alfred E. Smith.
The Democratic convention in 1924 was the bitterest and bloodiest
in party history. The packed galleries howled so savagely for Smith
that a fearful Southern dry delegate ran to the press box for a stiff
drink and protection. Nothing since the slavery issue had so broken
apart the Democrats, and now three implacable divisions had arisen,
those of prohibition and of religion and of the Ku Klux Klan. After
seventeen days of balloting, the deadlock between McAdoo and Smith
was resolved by the election of John W. Davis. But the divisions of
the party, broadcast throughout the nation by radio for the first time,
were neither solved, forgiven, nor forgotten. A resolution to condemn
the Klan failed by one vote; luckily, the Klan itself failed within a
few years. The religious issue would plague the Democrats until Smith
was finally nominated and defeated in 1928. And prohibition remained
the Democratic curse and muckrake.
The effort of the Democrats to sidestep the prohibition issue by try-
ing to make the Republicans wholly responsible for the evils of en-
forcement met with no success, liie wets knew already what the
Democratic platform charged, that "the Republican administration has
failed to enforce the prohibition law, is guilty of trafficking in liquor
permits, and has become the protector of violators of this law." They
did not want to vote for a party pledged "to respect and enforce the
Constitution and all laws," but for a party pledged to outright modi-
fication or repeal. The wets were even disappointed by the radical
Progressive, La Follette, who was so equivocal over prohibition that
the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment refused to endorse
him for the presidency. 8
Yet, if the Anti-Saloon League played hell with the politics of the
major parties, so did the major parties cause rifts in the united front
of the League. After the death in 1924 of Purley A. Baker, the national
superintendent of the League, a compromise candidate, F. Scott Mc-
Bride, was put in his place. Wayne B. Wheeler and Bishop James
Cannon then settled down to a bitter struggle for control of the
political power and image of the League. Cannon relinquished the
Republican party to the tender care of Wheeler, but he resented
Wheeler's forays into his own sphere of influence, the Democratic
party. He maintained that Wheeler's Republican bias and his backing
of Coolidge for re-election in 1928 made him unfit to influence the
choice of the Democratic candidate. Cannon allowed that it was fair
enough for Wheeler to do his work among the Democrats through
Bryan, who was a close friend of his; but he bitterly resented Wheel-
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS/ 273
er's attempt to take credit for defeating a wet Democratic candidate
in the convention of 1924. He issued a statement of his own on behalf
of the Anti-Saloon League which merely read, 'The wets have been
defeated in their efforts to secure a wet plank or a wet candidate at the
Democratic convention. There is no smell of beer or wine in the Demo-
cratic platform, and the candidate is a strong advocate of law enforce-
ment/' 9
But although the League was split on its attitude toward the major
parties, it was united on its attitude to Congress. In Washington,
Wayne B. Wheeler had full control. He sat smiling in the Visitors'
Gallery, counting the number of the drys and keeping them true to
the cause by threats of retribution at the polls. As Senator Bruce, of
Maryland, scornfully declared, 'Wayne B. Wheeler had taken snuff,
and the Senate, as usual, sneezed. Wayne B. Wheeler had cracked his
whip, and the Senate, as usual, crouched/' 10
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS
AN ABTICLE in 1923 described the Volstead Act as neither wet nor dry.
There was only one word to describe it. It was "amphibious." 11 This
was also the public and private position of Congress during the course
of national prohibition.
The mood of Congress after the passage of the Volstead Act was one
of relief. They appropriated $2,000,000 for its enforcement, and hoped
to be left by the triumphant drys in a decent peace. They should
concentrate on more important matters, such as America's part in the
League of Nations and the "nation-wide industrial war" threatening
the United States. 12 During the first six months of national prohibition,
the subject of liquor was mentioned in Congress only six times. Al-
though the newspapers and law-enforcement agencies showed how
wet the cities still were and how liquor smuggling was making a non-
sense of the border, Congress remained in willed ignorance. The only
serious contribution to the problems of prohibition was made by
Senator Warren, of Wyoming, who pointed out that a proper attempt
to enforce the Volstead Act might cost $50,000,000 a year. Senator
Sheppard read in reply a letter from Wayne B. Wheeler which stated
that, even if Senator Warren's figure was true, it would not be "an
inexcusable expenditure," considering the waste of a billion dollars a
year for liquor and in view of the lawlessness of the liquor traffic. In
Wheeler's opinion, however, $5,000,000 a year was ample to enforce
the Volstead Act, and this sum might even be reduced if the liquor
dealers suddenly became law-abiding. 18
The second year of prohibition was also quiet for Congress. It was
274 / THE DRY TREE
true, there were complaints about the difficulties of enforcement from
the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the Attorney General. An
increased total of $6,350,000 had to be voted to pay for enforcement
in 1921. But the Anti-Saloon League was happy with the state of af-
fairs, boasting that a billion dollars had been saved by the country in
1920. 14 Wayne B. Wheeler even predicted that prohibition enforce-
ment would pay for itself in 1921, since its costs would be less than
the money received from the sale of confiscated goods. 15 Only Attorney
General Palmer's ruling in favor of the medical prescription of beer
and wine disturbed the honeymoon of Congress and the dry lobbies.
Nevertheless, the passage of the Willis-Campbell Act, to restrict the
medical prescription of liquor, rebuffed the medical profession and
overruled the Attorney General.
During these two years of congressional inaction, liquor entered
America in an increasing flood. This was fully reported in the news-
papers. Yet the dry lobbies made no protest. For they were in a diffi-
cult position. They were no longer revolutionaries seeking change, but
conservatives defending the changes made. They could not admit that
bootleg liquor was easy to get in America without seeming to confess
to the failure of national prohibition. They could not agree that law
enforcement was inadequate without seeming to preach increased
taxes in a Republican age interested in public economy. And above
all, they could not confess that the Volstead Act was a bad act, for
they had written it themselves. They had to ignore their critics and
cry complacency. For they were no longer the accusers, but the
accused.
In one aspect of prohibition enforcement, however, the Anti-Saloon
League and Congress were blatantly guilty. That aspect was the clause
in the Volstead Act which exempted prohibition agents from Civil
Service examinations. The National Civil Service Reform League op-
posed the clause in 1919, but Congress ignored their opposition. The
secretary of the Reform League, finding Congressman Volstead un-
sympathetic, went to see Wheeler to plead his cause. Wheeler ad-
mitted the desirability of putting the Prohibition Bureau under Civil
Service rules, "but he believed it would be impossible to obtain the
passage of a bill in the House unless the places were exempted from
the civil service law." 16 In other words, Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon
League were prepared to let "the slimy trail of the spoils serpent" issue
from Congress in return for the passage of the Volstead Act. 17 Wheeler
wanted, in the words of Senator Bruce, of Maryland, "to trade the
offices to be held by [prohibition] agents for congressional votes/* 18
Later, when corruption in the Prohibition Bureau became a national
scandal, Wheeler admitted his mistake. But while appointments to the
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS/ 275
Bureau remained in his hands and those of Congress, he would not
relinquish such a fertile field for negotiations and pressure, even
though several political appointments were made to the Bureau over
his veto. Wheeler would never give up any area of his personal power
even for his cause. For he had identified the cause of the Anti-Saloon
League wholly with himself. Bishop Cannon later wrote that Wheeler's
policy of political interference and personal aggrandizement under-
mined the real power of the Anti-Saloon League and brought it .into
discredit in later years. 19 It is certainly true that President Coolidge
did not sign a bill to put the Prohibition Bureau under Civil Service
rules until the year of Wheeler's death.
During the twenties, the Anti-Saloon League increased its power
within Congress, and Wheeler increased his power within the Anti-
Saloon League. The new national superintendent of the League, F.
Scott McBride, gave Wheeler a free hand in Washington. Meanwhile,
in the elections of 1922, Wheeler had provoked the wets into declaring
a list of the candidates whom they were supporting. Such a deluge
of letters poured upon the endorsed wet candidates that many of them
swore to Wheeler that they were dry, and repudiated wet support.
Although Volstead lost his seat in Minnesota, the drys increased their
count in the House to 296, and won twenty-five out of thirty-five con-
tests for the Senate. 20
During the next two years, Congress still pussyfooted over the
issue of prohibition. While the newspapers reported that the law-
enforcement situation was steadily growing worse, Congress did little
to increase the appropriations of the Prohibition Bureau. $6,750,000
was voted for 1923 and $8,500,000 for 1924. This provided for a field
force of just over 1500 agents and investigators to dry up a nation
whose coast line and border were 18,700 miles long, whose total area
was more than 3,000,000 square miles, and whose population was over
105,000,000. 21 The statistics made each prohibition agent responsible
for 12 miles of border, 2000 square miles of interior, and 70,000 people.
Of course, if the states had been prepared to bear their share of en-
forcement, matters would have been easier for the Prohibition Bureau.
But the states took their responsibility under the phrase "concurrent
power" to mean that they should and did spend one-quarter of the
amount on enforcing national prohibition that they spent on the up-
keep of their monuments and parks. 22
Proposals were made in 1924 for an investigation into the problems
of law enforcement, but these were voted down by the dry majority.
Senator Sheppard characterized an investigation as worse than use-
less, "a waste of funds and energy and time." The Prohibition Bureau
should not be investigated but given a vote of thanks. 28 The drys in
276 / THE DRY TREE
Congress feared that an impartial investigation under the auspices of
Congress would confirm what the wet press trumpeted, that prohibi-
tion was not and could not be enforced. Until there was such an im-
partial investigation, the drys could dismiss the allegations of reporters
as biased balderdash. Meanwhile, they pursued a popular policy of
government economy, moral protestations, and lax enforcement, which
satisfied both the ears of the drys and the throats of the wets. Above
all, Congress did not want a searching examination of the Prohibition
Bureau, since it might reveal how political appointments had made the
Bureau into a corrupt and inefficient institution.
In the elections of 1924, with the Democratic party crippled over its
internecine struggle over prohibition and with the Republican party
bound for an easy victory, the drys increased their three-to-one major-
ity in both houses of Congress. This time, the wets published a list, not
of those they supported, but of those they opposed. Five out of six
candidates for the House opposed by the wets were elected. Of the
thirteen new Senators in Congress, eleven favored prohibition legisla-
tion. Wheeler estimated that the Senate was dry by 72 to 24, and the
house by 319 to 105. 24 He counted the defeat of Senator Stanley, of
Kentucky, as a personal victory. The Senator had attacked the Anti-
Saloon League on the floor of the Senate, and Wheeler's personal
assistant had spent seven weeks organizing his overthrow. 26 "Each
year," Wheeler testified complacently, "the Congress that has been
elected has been drier than its predecessor." 26 Unfortunately, each
year the country was growing wetter.
Increasingly, the wet minority in Congress became vocal and mili-
tant Outside Congress, wealthy wet organizations such as the Associ-
ation Against the Prohibition Amendment were offering statistics and
political aid to champions of their cause. Fifty-nine identical bills to
provide for the sale of light wines and beer were introduced in Con-
gress; all came to grief in the dry House Committee on the Judiciary.
Although the wets were powerless in Congress, their complaints be-
came more and more publicized. Moreover, the dry majority in the
House continued its policy of letting sleeping bootleggers lie by fail-
ing to increase appropriations for law enforcement to any great de-
gree. The sums appropriated for the years between 1924 and 1926
averaged $9,310,000 a year. The lack of proper prohibition enforce-
ment was blamed on the Prohibition Bureau, which was reorganized
time and time again. But little was done to improve the poor quality
of its agents, whose appointment was largely in the hands of that very
same dry majority in Congress.
Congress showed its temper by its treatment of the program of the
new head of the Prohibition Bureau, General Lincoln C. Andrews.
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS / 277
Wheeler had not been consulted about Andrews's appointment in
April, 1925, and he disliked his exclusion. The efforts of Andrews to
replace political appointees in the Bureau with retired Army and Navy
officers brought a rebuke from Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, re-
quiring Andrews to consult members of Congress before making new
appointments to the Bureau. In his report to the executive committee
of the Anti-Saloon League, Wheeler wrote, "Political leaders in the
various states will resent the idea that their directors should be re-
moved. It will interfere with political patronage." 27 Andrews antagon-
ized the government, Congress, and Wheeler by his sincere efforts to
get effective enforcement.
In 1926, Andrews proposed to Congress that the Prohibition Bureau
should come under Civil Service rules, and should be given an in-
creased appropriation of $3,000,000 a year. It should also have more
control over medicinal liquor, industrial alcohol, and breweries which
ostensibly manufactured near-beer. It should be given authority to
board ships outside the twelve-mile limit, to confiscate captured ves-
sels, and to search private homes on suspicion of commercial manu-
facture. 28 None of these recommendations was passed by Congress
until Andrews had been forced to resign by Mellon because of grow-
ing disaffection with that law enforcement which he was not allowed
to reform.
But Congressional rebellion against Wheeler and the dry lobbies
had already begun in 1926, the very year that Wheeler's superhuman
labors made him a sick man and kept him sick until his death two
years later. This rebellion suddenly became public, although it had
always smoldered in private. The appointment of the wet leader
Senator James Reed, of Missouri, to a subcommittee of the Senate
Committee on the Judiciary was the beginning of the congressional
counterattack on the Anti-Saloon League. Congress had been humili-
ated too often by the League to treat its enemy lightly.
The private rebellion of Congress against prohibition was the pri-
vate rebellion of drinkers all over the nation. In this way, the rebellion
at Washington can be excused. For, although it was unconstitutional, it
was truly representative. Like the public, members of both houses of
Congress voted dry and drank wet. If there was no hypocrisy in their
attitude, there was a fine distinction drawn between public and private
belief. Some drys even defended such behavior as a sign of the good
practical politician. It demonstrated, according to them, the strength
of prohibition. 29
And they were right. When a private habit cannot be made public
by politicians, it is because they are truly afraid to speak. Fear of the
Ajiti-Saloon League made a monstrous conspiracy of silence descend
278 / THE DRY TREE
upon the national capital. An article in the Washington Post of 1928,
quoted by Senator Blease, of Arkansas, claimed that there were nearly
a thousand speak-easies in the city. 30 A new art had been discovered
there, "the art of sotto voce in little back rooms/' These speak-easies
were not molested, as the powers-that-be wished for them to let
alone. 81
Yet, however discreet the politicians were, they provided evidence
enough of their defiance of the law which they were sworn to uphold.
Conditions in Washington under the presidency of Harding were
notorious. The Ohio Gang openly peddled bootleg liquor from 1625 K
Street. The liquor was brought there in plain view by agents of the
Department of Justice; it was liquor which had been confiscated by
the Prohibition Bureau. Coolidge's succession on Harding's death did
something, however, to clean up the blatant scandals in the capital.
The President's personal abstinence made the congressional drinkers
less loud about their practices. Even those who made a profession of
their wet beliefs, such as George Tinkham and Nicholas Longworth,
did their drinking privately, although Tinkham kept on the walls of
his office a collection of wild beasts' heads named after the dry lead-
ers. It was perhaps unfortunate that the most convinced dry of all
the Presidents, Herbert Hoover, was in power during the chief expos6
of high life in Washington.
Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General in 1929,
wrote about the Inside of Prohibition. According to her, many Con-
gressmen and Senators who voted dry were persistent violators of the
Volstead Act. Senators and Representatives had appeared drunk on
the floor of the Senate and House. A waiter had dropped a bottle of
whisky on the floor of the Capitol Restaurant. Nothing had done more
to disgust honest men and women against prohibition. Why, Mrs.
Willebrandt demanded, had no search warrants ever been issued to
rout bootleggers out of government buildings? One agent had applied
for such a warrant, and been refused it. This was, surely, bad law and
bad policy.
Mrs. Willebrandt discovered a curious state of mind among mem-
bers of Congress and other government officials. They believed that
they were "above and beyond the inhibitions of the prohibition law." 82
One Congressman had been sentenced for conspiring to sell and trans-
port liquor on fraudulent permits. 88 Another had been found "not
guilty" by a jury, although he had in his possession "nonintoxicating"
wine containing 12 per cent of alcohol. 84 Other Congressmen re-
quested "freedom of the port" from the Treasury Department, and
they landed their luggage unchecked by Customs. On one famous
occasion, the baggage of a dry Congressman from Illinois went astray
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS/ 279
and was found to contain a keg of rum and twelve bottles of liqueurs.
On another occasion, a Congressman from Ohio was discovered with
booze in his baggage on a return trip from Panama. Although juries
were lenient to these two offenders, who swore that the contrabrand
was not theirs but another's, Mrs. Willebrandt and the grand jury of
the Southern District of New York thought that "public officials should
be the first to set the example of scrupulous acceptance and observ-
ance of the burdens of the law." 85
The final denouement, which would have shattered the last pre-
tensions of dry Washington, was fortunately suppressed. When the
Senate Lobby Investigation Committee seized the complete secret
files of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment in 1930,
they found a confidential report of the private drinking habits of
members of Congress. 36 The report was never made public. As the
Outlook commented, "Dry members of the Senate Lobby Committee
welched very prettily when it came to a genuine showdown." 37
The record of the behavior of members of Congress during prohibi-
tion is a nasty one. Many of them were dry in public speech and wet
in private life. Many of them were whipped onto the prohibitionist
side solely from fear of the influence of the Anti-Saloon League at the
polls. Many of them were content to appropriate too little money for
law enforcement, and then to denounce the evils of that inadequate
enforcement. Many hoped that if they glossed over the problems of
prohibition the problems would somehow disappear of themselves.
Many wanted the appearance of morality, not the fact. Many echoed
the personal habits of a Harding and the political quiescence of a
Coolidge.
THTR REED COMMITTEE
IF PROHIBITION made difficult the congressional and private lives of the
representatives of the people, it also caused havoc to their electoral
machinations. In 1926, Senator Reed, of Missouri, and four other
Senators were directed by the Senate to investigate abuses in certain
primary campaigns during the senatorial elections. This subcommittee
turned up an extraordinary brew of corruption and crookery. As a con-
sequence of its findings, William Vare, of Pennsylvania, and Frank L.
Smith, of Illinois, were unseated by the Senate. Further evidence
showed that the Ku Klux Klan had partially taken over the government
of Indiana, and that copper companies were trying to take over the
administration of Arizona. Only in Washington, where the dry Senator
Wesley Jones had alleged that his Democratic opponent was using a
slush fund of $150,000 donated by bootleggers, did the investigation
280 / THE DRY TREE
discover that the charges were smears. The findings of the subcom-
mittee are the most damning indictment of American democracy ever
produced, and are also a searchlight on the corrupt politics which the
dry and the wet lobbies encouraged in their struggle over prohibition.
Reed strained his powers as chairman of the subcommittee to seize
the secret files of the Anti-Saloon League. He tried to prove that the
League had interfered with the processes of democracy in Pennsyl-
vania. But all he revealed was that the League had little real power in
Pennsylvania at all. The Republicans were in such control of the state
that victory in the primary there meant election to the Senate. Un-
fortunately, the Republican machine had fallen out with itself, and
a three-cornered fight for the senatorial nomination had developed.
Vare, the boss of Philadelphia, ran on a wet ticket calling for legal
light wines and beer. The incumbent Senator Pepper, backed by die
powerful Mellon interests, ran on a middle-of-the-road ticket, appeal-
ing to both wets and drys. And the state Governor, Gifford Pinchot,
ran on an extreme dry ticket, backed by neither city machines nor
billions of dollars.
The result of the election was that the Mellons elected their candi-
date for Governor and Vare elected himself as Senator. Pinchot ran
well behind Vare and Pepper in the primary. He could not even get all
the dry "decent vote" behind him, for both Anti-Saloon League and
Woman's Christian Temperance Union were split between voting for
him and voting for Pepper, whom Vare's manager called "dry in the
east and wet in the west . . . wobbling from one side to the other,
trying to dip in and get a little from both sides/' 88 Although all the
speak-easies and brothels in Pittsburgh displayed prominent signs
asking their patrons to vote for Pepper, the dry lobbies did not con-
demn him. 89 Wayne B. Wheeler testified that the League had been
split between Pepper, who "voted right," and Pinchot, who was "very
aggressive on prohibition and its enforcement." In the end, the League
put out a statement asking "all friends of good government to concen-
trate their vote on that one of the two satisfactory candidates who has
the best chance to defeat Mr. Vare." This split dry vote was the reason
that the drys, in Wheeler's words, "got licked." 40
In fact, the leading organization of the wets, the Association Against
the Prohibition Amendment, came out of the election far worse than
the Anti-Saloon League, whose equivocal and unilateral methods of
endorsing candidates it had adopted. A letter was sent to the 30,000
members of the Pennsylvania Association asking them to support Vare.
The letter said that Pinchot, who was an honest and good reformer,
had "intellectual affinities that did not justify anybody in supporting
him for a dignified office"; that Pepper, although a good citizen, lacked
THE AMPHIBIOUS CONGRESS/ 281
"moral courage" and voted dry; and that Vare, although associated
with a corrupt machine in Philadelphia, did possess "moral courage"
and should be supported. 41 It was a choice among evils for the wets,
but Vare was the least of the three evils. Like the dry lobbies, the wet
lobbies would vote for any supporter, however bad, against any op-
ponent, however good. Prohibition was the sole judge of their "moral
courage" and fitness to represent their fellows.
In the Illinois election, however, the League came out of the investi-
gation in a worse light than the Association. The League had success-
fully supported the nomination of Frank L. Smith in the Republican
primary. After the primary, Smith was proved to have accepted a sum
of at least $125,000 from the public utilities magnate of the Midwest,
Samuel Insull. His Democratic opponent, George E. Brennan, was a
Chicago boss and a wet. Thus the contest appeared to be one between
business corruption and the corruption of prohibition. But at the last
moment, a dry Independent candidate, Hugh S. Magill, announced his
candidacy in the name of good government and honest law enforce-
ment. He asked for the support of the Anti-Saloon League and its
mailing list of 125,000 voters. Yet the League stuck to Smith. As the
state superintendent of the League, George Safford, testified, the
League felt forced to choose between the two major party candidates,
since the Independent Magill did not have a chance of winning. The
League's attitude was that of the Reverend John Williams of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, "I will hold my nose and vote for
Smith." 42 Indeed, the League tried to persuade Magill to withdraw
and accused his supporters of wanting a wet victory, for his candidacy
would split the dry vote and let Brennan win. This attitude provoked
from Magill the declaration that he would "never take dictation from
Wayne Wheeler or Scott McBride or George Safford, because by their
actions in this case they have demonstrated to the Nation that they
are absolutely unfit to advise, much less, dictate to the decent people
of Illinois and the Nation." 48
The scandals in Pennsylvania and Illinois did harm to the League
and the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. It showed
that both put their cause above the cause of reform and good govern-
ment In addition, it showed that their support was often ineffective.
For neither in Pennsylvania nor in Illinois did the League and the
Association mean much. It was money and machine support that
counted. The two radical diys, Pinchot and Magill, both came last
in the polls by a large margin. A labor leader testified in Pennsylvania,
"When the two extremely rich men got into a fuss, then it was a
choice of the two evils." 44 In estimating the real source of each candi-
date's strength, the dry and wet factor sank into insignificance. 45 In
282 /THE DRY TREE
fact, the true manipulator of elections was the hidden hand of big
business and criminal interests, which often worked together. As an
oil and mining operator told the state superintendent of the Anti-
Saloon League in Arizona, "You can't do anything out here; this is a
campaign for the big boys . . . Little tiddle-de-winks folks like the
Anti-Saloon League couldn't buck that sort of game." 46
The conditions prevalent under prohibition made it easier for big
business men and criminals to co-operate and interfere in elections. A
general tolerance of the bootlegger and a disrespect for federal law
were translated into a widespread contempt for the processes and
duties of democracy. This played into the hands of those who wished
to elect their own agents to positions of power. A vice president of the
American Federation of Labor told the Wickersham Commission,
'There is a feeling of corruption, of everything being corrupt, and it
is bringing itself into the trade-unions. They feel if a judge can be
bought for liquor, he can be bought for anything else; if a police
officer can be quieted by a little money for liquor, he can be quieted
for something else." 47 It was the profits and power derived from pro-
tection rackets and bootlegging that gave the gangsters the gall to
interfere flagrantly at elections. The Reed Committee discovered that
gunmen had openly run the polls at the election of 1924 in Cicero,
Illinois, the headquarters of Al Capone. They found out that the
Chicago election judges and clerks were, in the testimony of one
witness, "ex-convicts, confirmed criminals, disreputable men." 48 Mean-
while, in Indiana, the backers of the moist Senator Watson were boot-
leggers who were "forced at the point of a gun" by the police to
contribute to his campaign. In addition, in Lake County, Indiana,
there were "a large number of sluggers . . . from Chicago, who went
from one polling booth to another, intimidating voters. They had at
every polling place . . . polling officers favorable to the Watson
organization." 49
Indeed, if the dry lobbies put through prohibition under the theory
that they were saving good government in America from the mon-
strous conspiracies of the liquor trade, they did not realize that they
were delivering politics into the far worse hands of the bootleggers,
fraudulent businessmen, and criminals. The use of sub-machine guns
and bombs in elections was a result of the impudence of small-time
crooks and big-time politicians, who thought themselves great from
the profits of prohibition. It was the unlimited opportunities for graft
as well as prosperity that made the America of the twenties seem such
a rich and careless place. Clive Weed drew rightly in Judge the hand
behind the back, waiting for the bribe as "The National Gesture." But
few cared. The scandals of the Harding regime were not enough to
By dive Weed in Judge
THE NATIONAL GESTURE
bring down the Republican party; they only served to confirm the
Grand Old Party in power. Mass unemployment was the shock that
made bribery and dirty business seem a shameful way of depriving
the needy of the money and the jobs which were their due.
The last service of the Reed Committee was to reveal the most
sinister element of all in American politics, the Ku Klux Klan, which
had appointed itself in many American states as an unofficial dry
284 / THE DRY TREE
enforcement agency as well as a political pressure group. Because of
a split in the Klan in Indiana, many disgruntled Klansmen were pre-
pared to break their horrific oath of secrecy and to reveal the work-
ings of the organization there. The split was caused by the use of the
Klan as an out-and-out political agency rather than as a "Christian,
benevolent, fraternal organization principles that the Klan stood
for/** The leader of the political Klan machine, as a prohibition agent
testified, was guilty of throwing drunken orgies in his own home, while
some of the local Klan leaders had been convicted of preserving the
purity of American women by trying to rape them. Indeed, the reputa-
tion of the Klan in Indiana had become so noisome that its member-
ship had dropped to one-quarter of its former numbers. However
stupid the Klansmen were, they had joined the Klan for a moral pur-
pose, however mistaken, and would not tolerate the misbehavior of
their leaders. As an evangelical minister said, **We have had some
good men in the Klan. They are not staying by it now." 50
Prohibition added lobbies to legislatures, corruption to corrupt poli-
tics, and conspiracies to democratic practice. The drys became, often
enough, the unwitting whitewash on a rotting sepulcher. Indeed, the
rackets which their moral legislation encouraged made that very moral
legislation seem a racket in itself. Some of the chiefs of the gangs
contributed to the dry movement and employed as fronts "Bible-
backed" citizens. These employees were referred to as "amen racket-
eers." 51
If great parties are fearful of offending, if Congresses care overmuch
for economy and the electorate, if elections are often corrupt and
nasty affairs, then prohibition increased the fear and the care and the
nastiness of politics in its time. The Anti-Saloon League and the
Eighteenth Amendment appeared to be permanent and implacable
features in American life. Under their banner, the country took heart,
and rallied in the presidential election of 1928, when the farm boy
from Iowa beat the slum child from New York.
* The ignorance and social class upon which the Klan thrived is shown by some
revealing remarks in the testimony of an Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Order. He
said that the Grand Wizard of the Klan, Doctor Evans, "could almost convince the
average Klansman that we had in the State of Indiana that Jesus Christ was not a
Jew." Doctor Evans had also been asked why the Klansmen did not parade with
their hoods raised; he had replied, "The morale of the Klan would kill itself."
CHAPTER
Last Victory
15
I'd rather see a saloon on every corner in the South than
see the foreigners elect Al Smith President.
REVEREND BOB JONES
God is still greater than Tammany. For if Al Smith is
elected in November the Democratic Party with its heritage
of glorious principles becomes the party of Rome and Rum
for the next hundred years.
REVEREND BOB SOHULER
THE INTERACTING roots of prohibition, the psychology of country
and rural reform, the progressive temper of die times, the support
of the middle classes and women, the social influence of the Protestant
evangelical churches, and the particularism of the South were begin-
ning to wither and separate in the twenties. But the presidential elec-
tion of 1928 brought them together again briefly and powerfully. The
threat of Alfred E. Smith in the White House combined against him
many of those nativist, reform, and reactionary elements which had
opposed the saloon as the home of rum and Rome.
By the end of the Great War, more people earned their living in a
factory than on the land. In 1919, farmers had only 16 per cent of the
national income; by 1929, only 9 per cent. Yet they were increasingly
conditioned by advertising to desire the cash goods of the city, elec-
trical appliances, automobiles, radios, smart clothes. Meanwhile, the
howl of derision from the cities at the country's expense grew and
grew. The attacks of Edgar Lee Masters on small-town life in Spoon
River Anthology, of Sherwood Anderson in Winesbur g, Ohio, and of
Sinclair Lewis in Main Street were nothing to the persecution and
baiting of H. L. Mencken and his hounds. As Walter Lippmann wrote
in 1926, Mencken was "the pope of popes/' the most powerful personal
influence on his whole generation of educated people. 1 His chief target
was country prejudices, which he answered with six volumes of his
own. To him, the South was the Sahara of the Bozart, the small town
285
286 / THE DRY TREE
the home of the boobery and the booboisie, and country Methodism a
theology degraded almost to the level of voodooism. Prohibition was
the result of the spite of envious yokels who wanted to force the city
dwellers to drink the revolting mixtures of the farm. In a nation where
Mencken was considered an intellectual leader, the country and small
town were held beneath contempt.
The rural crusades of the twenties did much to increase the city's
ridicule of the rube and the hick. Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, and
the campaign against the teaching of evolution were unfortunate and
tragic causes. They were the sad remnants of what had once been a
fine frenzy for a republic of small farmers, a New World of husband-
men to redress the balance of the Old World of dwellers in Sodom.
When the witty apostles of urban life, Clarence Darrow and H. L.
Mencken, mocked the balding and corpulent old countryman, Wil-
liam Jennings Bryan, at the Scopes trial of 1925, they showed a pride
and complacency and vindictiveness as mean as the bias of a dry
fundamentalist. If the declining country had a paranoiac fear of the
growing city, the city replied, despite its boasted superiority, with an
equally vicious counterattack on the beliefs of the small town. Thus
the farm belt of America was pressured into an even greater fear of
urban power, which made it find a suitable hero and villain in the
contest between Hoover and Smith.
Moreover, the country drys found themselves abandoned by some
of their early supporters. The progressives became weak in the twen-
ties, and lost much of their appeal. They suffered from the nationwide
disgust which the antics of the drys gave to the name of reform. The
drys themselves, by being successful with their legal victory, were
damned with the curse of trying to enforce the unenforceable and the
unpopular. And when the women of America received the vote with
the Nineteenth Amendment, they proceeded to put their new privilege
to little significant use. The millennium promised by woman suffrage
was no more real than the millenniums of the referendum and the
recall and national prohibition. When the three movements had come
to their apogee, the sins of society remained much the same. The
revolution in America was mechanical rather than spiritual, a meta-
morphosis of organization and mass rather than a return to the myth
of America's rural youth. "The founder of the oil trust may give us
back our money," a dry progressive had lamented, "but not if he
send among us a hundred Wesleys can he give us back the lost
ideals/' 2 In this disillusion, the reformers blamed each other and
split apart.
Not only did the reformers split apart, but they became openly
hostile to each other. The progressives were disillusioned about their
LAST VICTORY/ 287
procedures for increased democracy, which only seemed to place
political power more firmly in the hands of the party bosses, and about
the increased power of the federal government, which was used by
conservative Republican Presidents to buttress the power of the trusts
rather than to regulate them. In the reaction from the misused powers
of centralization, the old progressives tended to become the new
liberals, more concerned with protecting the rights of individuals
against federal coercion than with protecting human rights through
the intervention of the government. Moreover, the determinism im-
plicit in the current doctrines of Darwinism and Marxism and Freud-
ianism made the reformers look upon their own motives for reform
with suspicion. When Ben Hecht said, "To hell with Sigmund, he's
corrupted immorality," he should have added that Freud had also
corrupted morality, 3 The fine crusading drive of the progressives gave
way to that moral relativism which swept through the United States
in the twenties. The attack on the evils of society was turned into an
attack on those men who saw the evils of others without looking into
their own.
Moreover, many American women took their emancipation literally.
They thought that freedom meant liberty to do what men did. As a
woman writer had warned in 1917, "Women will drink, smoke, bet,
swear, gamble, just as men do. Whether they like it or not, does not
matter: men do these things, therefore women must, to show that they
are as good as men/' 4 The old concept of the drys, that a woman's vote
would be a dry vote, was shattered. Women took to the speak-easy
like ducks to water. They set up a rival image to the sober example of
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, an image under which
women were supposed to drink and make drink to prove their equality
with men. The muckraking feminist, Ida M. Tarbell, was forced to
admit, "Where fashion points, women follow. They set up bars in their
homes, boast of their bootleggers and their brews, tolerate and prac-
tice a looseness of tongue and manner once familiar only in saloons
and brothels." 5 Under prohibition, the sight of women drinking in
public became normal and respectable in large cities. Prohibition even
provided a means for the economic emancipation of the female sex.
The story was told, in the Wickersham Report, of a widow whose
neighbors took up a collection to buy her a still and set her up in
business. 6
The prohibitionists, by their success, turned themselves from radi-
cals into reactionaries. "We had to give America prohibition so the
people could see exactly what it was," said one dry leader. "Now we
will make them like it" 7 By concentrating on their one particular re-
form, as Susan B. Anthony had recommended to the suffragettes, the
288 / THE DRY TREE
drys had largely disassociated themselves from other reformers. The
Anti-Saloon League had always sought after a single object, the aboli-
tion of the liquor trade; the Woman's Christian Temperance Union
had followed its example after the turn of the century, dropping its
general reform program to concentrate utterly upon prohibition. The
decline of the progressives and of the Progressive party in the twen-
ties, and the dissolution of the Woman's party after the Nineteenth
Amendment, left the prohibitionists and the Ku Klux Klan as the sole
representatives of a great rural and urban reform wave that had
changed the Constitution and the laws of a nation. The drys and the
Klansmen were the hideous ghosts of a noble past, squatting in the
new Eldorado of the twenties that had forgotten the morality which
had once given the ghosts flesh. Indeed, the victory of the drys
throughout the twenties seemed to be a proof of the lasting malice of
the early reformers, rather than of their good intentions.
The monstrous dry bones of their past crusades led the progressives
to deny the excesses of the leaders of prohibition. Although the old
progressives in the Senate under La Follette supported prohibition on
the whole, their support was all for the theory rather than the practice.
They deplored the fanaticism which the issue of prohibition had
brought to public life. The endorsement of political hacks by wets and
drys exclusive of any considerations of good government, and the use
of the Prohibition Bureau as a political pork barrel, deeply offended
the old progressives. National prohibition, as administered by the
Republican government and the Anti-Saloon League, was a national
disgrace. When the progressive George W. Norris wrote his auto-
biography in 1925, he called it Fighting Liberal His judgment on
prohibition reflected the alienation of progressives and moderates from
the dry leaders:
I have been an abstainer throughout my life. I believe that temper-
ance is the only rule of life. Yet on both sides of this issue are pro-
hibitionists supporting a prohibitionist, regardless of how he may stand
on any other governmental question, and wet bigots, narrow-minded
enough to support a man opposed to prohibition regardless of how he
may stand on other questions. I am sorry that these things exist. 8
The South and the West remained true to the drys, but in such a
way as to damn their cause by bad publicity. The crusade of the Ku
Klux Klan and the fundamentalists in the twenties brought out the
worst in rural manners. 9 The Ku Klux Klan had been, in some ways, a
respectable resistance movement against the carpetbaggers after the
Civil War; in its revived form, it was a pitiful expression of the preju-
dices and assumptions that underlay the usual attitudes of the
LAST VICTORY/ 289
country. The Klan satisfied the small-town urge towards regalia and
secret societies; the hooded Kleagle or Klaliff of the Great Forest could
easily believe that the Jews of Wall Street or the Knights of Columbus
were engaged on a similar political conspiracy. A plot creates its own
counterplot in its imagination. The prejudices of the small town
against liquor, prostitutes, divorce, Roman Catholics, aliens, Reds,
Jews, Negroes, Darwinism, modernism, and liberalism were excellent
ground for commercial exploiters of hate. For an initiation fee of ten
dollars, these salesmen of unreason gave the bigoted members of the
majority group the organized luxury of hating the monstrous sub-
version of the minority groups around them. 10
Harry Herschel has defined a majority group as a minority group
careless with its membership. It was lucky that the Klan and the
fundamentalists never became more than minority groups, although
they claimed that they were the moral champions of the majority of
white, Protestant, native-born Americans. The fear of their success
was sufficient to destroy the unity of the Democratic party at its con-
vention in 1924 and to bring out the defenders of liberalism in hordes
to the Scopes trial one year later. Although the flagrant immorality
of its leaders killed the Klan, and the overeating of Bryan, the cham-
pion of temperance and the Bible, killed him and the fundamentalist
movement, their temporary threat was real enough. But while men
in white sheets whipped bootleggers and prostitutes, smothered labor
organizers and Negroes with tar and feathers, and forbade school-
masters to teach that human beings were descended from the lecher-
ous ape, the red lights of the sprawling cities cast their glow ever more
brightly from New Orleans to Chicago, from Hollywood to New York.
Prohibition brought some prosperity to the backwoods. Sharecrop-
pers, tenant farmers, fishermen of the bayous, dwellers on the mud
banks of the Mississippi, all found the tending of stills or the sailing
of rumrunners more profitable than the cultivation of the overworked
soil. Corn whisky averaged five dollars a pint between 1920 and 1925.
West Indian rum fetched more. The illicit liquor trade became almost
decent as well as profitable. A student put himself through a Southern
theological seminary by selling bootleg liquor to Congressmen. Fed-
eral enforcement of the liquor laws by a Republican government was
resisted in the South in the name of Confederate pride and the
Democratic party. Even the poor Negroes benefited, from the owners
of the "speak-easy cabins" to the winking bellboys and porters at
Southern hotels. Indeed, the simultaneous prohibition of prostitution
and liquor below the Mason-Dixon line for the purpose of curbing
the Negroes had the perverse effect of increasing their contempt for
the white man's hypocrisy. For they became the procurers of alcohol
290 / THE DRY TREE
and whores for their white masters, with aU the accompanying privi-
leges of pimps and middlemen. 11 Prohibition, instead of keeping
Negroes from vice, put them in control of it
The Protestant evangelical churches also suffered a relative decline
in the twenties. As Harry Emerson Fosdick admitted, science had be-
come "religion's overwhelmingly successful competitor in showing men
how to get what they want." 12 Public schools and high schools and
colleges began to take over the function of the churches as educators.
Moreover, the automobile, the radio, motion pictures, and outdoor
sports proved more attractive than the pulpit on a Sunday. Welfare
agencies pushed the minister out of his role as counselor and guide.
Although congregations nominally increased, the influence of religion
declined. In rich city churches, the minister became increasingly a
mere preacher to comfortable souls, a businessman of God among
other businessmen. In poor city churches, the congregation was drawn
chiefly from country immigrants, who sought the consolation of the
old-time religion which they had left behind them.
Prohibition itself caused some unpleasant scandals in the churches.
Those churches which used alcoholic sacramental wine found that
not all of the wine reached the altar. Roy Haynes discovered hundreds
of false rabbis manufacturing wine for fictitious congregations, while
bootleggers were apt to hijack wine on its way to the sanctuary. 18 A
report of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America
showed that nearly three million gallons of sacramental wine were
withdrawn in 1924 from government warehouses. The report estimated
that not more than one-quarter of this amount was used for the sacra-
ments the rest was used sacrilegiously. 14 Holy wine, however, was
a mere drop in the ocean of the bootleg liquor which was swamping
America.
The split ideology of the churches concerning prohibition was re-
vealed while the "experiment, noble in motive" ran its course. The
fundamentalist wing of the churches, those who backed the crusade
against evolution and the sagging morals of the times, helped the
enforcement officers and the Ku Klux Klan to persecute bootleggers.
For their nativist followers, Billy Sunday preached his new "Booze
Sermon," entitled "Crooks, Corkscrews, Bootleggers, and Whisky Poli-
ticians . . . They Shall Not Pass," with its savage calls for deportation
of foreign bootleggers and radicals and dissenters who would not kiss
and obey the American flag. 15 The moderate group in the churches
straddled the issue, preached obedience to the law, and kept mum.
The liberal wing, however, supported the actions of the social gospel
movement and of the Federal Council of Churches, even when these
actions seemed to condemn the dry cause. The actual report of the
LAST VICTORY/ 291
Federal Council which revealed the facts about sacramental wine
was hailed by the wet propagandist Hugh Fox as a "searching criticism
of prohibition conditions," although it was condemned by the dry
Clarence True Wilson as a paid document of the Association Against
the Prohibition Amendment 16
The report contained many damning facts about prohibition. Its
publication with the apparent endorsement of the Federal Council
of Churches was a telling blow to the claim of the Anti-Saloon League
to represent the Protestant churches in action. Moreover, the report
contradicted flatly many of the dry assertions that prohibition was be-
coming increasingly successful. The report stated the truth, that, al-
though it had not yet been proved that prohibition could not be
enforced, no adequate attempt at enforcement had so far been made.
The fundamental fact was that a large part of the American people
opposed the Eighteenth Amendment. The trouble was with the peo-
ple rather than their government, which had tried to administer in-
adequately an impossible reform. The bootleg traffic had caused
political corruption as well as being affected by existing corruption.
The favorable trend toward temperance before 1920 had been re-
versed, at least temporarily, by 1925. In the matter of temperance
education, the delinquency of the churches was greater than that of
the federal government. Even the inferior type of religious temperance
education, which was common before the Eighteenth Amendment, had
been largely stopped. Prohibition was doomed unless religion and
education changed the minds of the people about the virtues of the
reform.
The Anti-Saloon League put such pressure on the Executive Com-
mittee of the Federal Council of Churches that steps were taken to
brand the report as the sole work of the head of the Research Depart-
ment. Furthermore, the Executive Committee issued a second report
affirming its unequivocal support of national prohibition. But the
damage was already done. The division of the churches over the mat-
ter of prohibition had been widely publicized across America. Criti-
cism from inside the Protestant churches, widely touted by the drys as
solid for the cause of prohibition, had at last become overt. 17 Bishop
Cannon admitted that, in the judgment of men and women who had
led the prohibition fight for very many years, "no document had ever
been printed which had been productive of more real harm to the
cause of prohibition." 18
In face of their growing loss of public sympathy, the drys insisted
on the ultimate success of their cause. As their power declined, their
voices rose. As their difficulties increased, their confidence kept pace.
As law enforcement became more impossible, the drys demanded more
292 /THE DRY TREE
of it. In 1926, Wayne B. Wheeler declared, "The very fact that the law
is difficult to enforce is the clearest proof of the need of its exist-
ence/' 19 Setbacks did not dismay the militant prohibitionists, but drove
them on to greater efforts. The climax of the crusade of the Protestant
evangelical churches was reached in the presidential campaign of
1928. They treated the battle between the dry Hoover and the wet
Smith as a national referendum on prohibition. And if much of the
opposition of fundamentalist clergymen to Smith was on the grounds
of his Catholicism and immigrant city birth rather than his habit of
drinking cocktails, the liquor issue provided a genuine and convenient
mask for religious and ethnic bigotry. Moreover, to the prejudiced
mind, Smith's sins were the same. Liquor and the Pope, cities and
immigration, were linked evils, an unholy unity which was the cause
of all Protestant ills.
THE BATTUE OF THE BACKGROUNDS
THE CONFLICT between Herbert Hoover and Alfred Emanuel Smith
for the presidency in 1928 was an excellent example of the divergent
upbringings of those Americans who lived in the country and those
who lived in the cities. Hoover was brought up on an Iowa farm.
Rugged individualism and self-sufficiency were the facts of country
life which Hoover later elevated to a philosophy. The farm produced
its own foodstuffs, made its own soap, stored up against time of
winter or slump full bins and jars and barrels, which were "social
security itself." Hard times were to be helped, not by handouts in the
Tammany fashion, but by hard work and trips to the private stores
which every decent man put aside for bad days. Life on the homestead
was thrifty and self-disciplined, especially among Quaker families
like the Hoovers. His parents' view on education was as narrow as the
limitations of their lives; they were "unwilling in those days to have
youth corrupted with stronger reading than the Bible, the encyclo-
pedia, or those great novels where the hero overcomes the demon
rum." Hoover's mother, better educated than most of her contempo-
raries, spoke frequently at Quaker and prohibition meetings. On one
occasion, the child Herbert was "parked for the day at the polls, where
the women were massed in an effort to make the men vote themselves
dry." But, by the age of eight, Hoover was orphaned of both parents,
to be brought up among the virtues of toil and Inner Light on his
uncle's farm. Long hours spent in the Quaker meetinghouse waiting
for the spirit to move someone were an "intense repression" on the
boy, who learned patience at the price of play. 20
Hoover began his career as a mining engineer and consultant. He
LAST VICTORY/ 293
called himself "an industrial doctor/' 21 He traveled continually over
the world, introducing modern engineering methods to Australia and
China and Russia. But, after a time, he found the promotion of com-
panies in London more profitable than the sinking of mine shafts. He
was concerned in a number of speculations. Accounts of these transac-
tions were used against him in the campaigns of 1928 and 1932 by smear
biographers. 22 Most of the transactions, however, are masked in a de-
cent obscurity. Hoover's fortune at the outbreak of the First World
War was some four million dollars. During the next fourteen years, he
used up three million dollars in his political career, and in philan-
thropy.
During the War, Hoover made his reputation as the Great Engineer.
He carried out two efficient jobs. The first was the repatriation of
Americans stranded in Europe at the outbreak of the fighting; the sec-
ond was his handling of the United States Food Administration to con-
serve supplies in America and feed starving Europe under and after
the German occupation. Prohibition was one of the methods of con-
serving grain. Hoover was against stopping the production of beer,
since he thought that saving four million bushels of grain monthly was
not worth the likely substitution of whisky and gin for beer in the
mouths of the munition workers. Al Smith, in a speech at Philadelphia
in 1928, tellingly quoted Hoover's views of ten years before, that 2.75
per cent beer was "mighty difficult to get drunk on" and that "any true
advocate of temperance and national efficiency" would shrink from
stopping the making of beer altogether. 28
Hoover was as practiced at promoting his own reputation as his com-
panies'. The legend of the Great Engineer was so potent in 1920 that
both parties approached him as a presidential possibility. He declared
himself a Republican, and, although he did not secure many votes at
the nominating convention, he made a good enough showing to make
sure of a post in the Cabinet. For eight years he was Secretary of Com-
merce and "Undersecretary of all other departments." 24 He took the
credit for the boom as though it were his own personal doing. His De-
partment's press releases came "like flakes of snow in a heavy storm"; a
small-town California editor declared that he had received a piece of
Hoover publicity every day for several years. 25 Hoover used his un-
doubted efficiency in government as an instrument of advertisement.
His Inner Light was not kept under a bushel.
While this image of Hoover the Master Builder was to help him
against Smith, it was to damn him against Roosevelt. If he was the
architect of prosperity, he was presumably also the architect of de-
pression. When Will Rogers commented in 1927 that Herbert Hoover
was "just waiting around between calamities" in his role of "America's
294 / THE DRY TREE
family physician/* he was describing the image that the Hoover pub-
licists had put into the mind of many Americans. 26 Thus, after calamity
came and Hoover was incompetent to deal with it, he was disbelieved
when he said that the slump was not his fault. He had cried too often
that the wolf of poverty was always shut out by the door of Republi-
can prosperity. As Elmer Davis wrote, "Hoover said what he correctly
judged the majority of voters thought, and promised what the majority
wanted. Adult Americans elected him for the same reason that would
have led Americans under the age of ten to elect Santa Glaus/* 27
Alfred E. Smith represented the antithesis of Hoover. His tradition
was the tradition of the American urban immigrant. He was the son of
poor Irish parents. His mother brought up his sister and him with de-
cent devoutness in a slum. When his truckman father died, Smith went
out to work in the Fulton Fish Market at the age of twelve to support
his family. He was an altar boy at the Roman Catholic Church of St.
James, a frequent performer in amateur theatricals as long as he did
not have to play the part of the villain, and an ambitious political sup-
porter of Tammany. When he was twenty-six, he married an Irish girl,
by whom he was to have five children. His loyalty, respectability, and
dramatic talents recommended him to the Tammany organization. He
rose steadily to prominence in the city and then in the state through
the offices of subpoena server, assemblyman, majority leader in the As-
sembly, member of the State Constitutional Convention, and sheriff.
Although he had the reputation of being a safe machine politician and
of regularly voting the Tammany ticket, he was also known as a sup-
porter of industrial and social legislation after the tragic Triangle
Waist fire of 1911. If he always supported the liquor interests because
they supported Tammany, he was still aware that unless they put their
own house in order, the drys might do so for them. 28 But wherever
the sale of liquor was prohibited he said that hypocrisy reigned. 29
The Anti-Saloon League lobby at Albany depended largely on the
Republican party in the state. Both organizations were based on the
country districts. Yet the Republicans could not be too overtly dry, for
they needed wet city support to elect their candidates for Governor.
Although the League exploited the division between upstate and New
York City, the urban areas were too powerful to give the prohibition-
ists the stranglehold over legislation that they had in Southern and
Western states. Throughout his life, Smith courageously attacked the
Anti-Saloon League. He accused it of influencing legislators against
their better judgment and of being almost identical with the Ku Klux
Klan. 30 The League suffered the mortification of seeing Governor
Smith's majority increase election after election, although it had its re-
venge when he ran for President.
LAST VICTORY/ 295
Smith was a Democrat in belief as well as in party. He thought that
the cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy. 31 Thus he
based his opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment on the grounds
that it was not ratified by the people, denied the states* rights prin-
ciple in the Constitution, and deliberately avoided definition of the
word "intoxicating" in order to be passed without fear of failure. 32 He
thought the definition by the Volstead Act of "intoxicating" was hypo-
critical and deceitful. He claimed that Wayne B. Wheeler had been
unable to defend this definition, and had excused the drys by saying,
"Well, we were in the saddle and we drove through/' 88 For Smith,
much of the hatred of the saloon by the prohibitionists was a covert
attack on the immigrants who liked beer and wine more than cider. It
was also an attack on the Irish control of city politics and on the
Catholic religion, which was more concerned with salvation through
temperance and faith than through legislation and repression. More-
over, prohibition was a Republican weapon in the state, and Smith was
a Tammany Democrat.
In his successful campaign for Governor in 1918, Smith first met the
anti-Catholic and prohibitionist sentiment that was to aid his defeat ten
years later in his campaign for President. But New York was numeri-
cally powerful enough to cancel out the ill effects of the dry and Re-
publican attempts at slander. Moveover, as Smith noted, the religious
issue reacted in his favor in such places as the city of Albany, out of
resentment that religion should be an issue at all. 84
When the Eighteenth Amendment came up before the two houses of
the state for ratification in 1919, Governor Smith sent his first message
to the legislature, asking them for a referendum on the matter. He
wrote, "I believe it is our duty to ascertain the will of the people di-
rectly upon this subject/' 35 But a caucus of the Republican party,
which was in a majority in both houses, insisted on ratification. The
Republicans feared that a vote against the amendment would turn the
dry rural areas against their traditional representatives. The Anti-Sa-
loon League encouraged this belief. Smith was amused when the same
Republican majorities, in an effort to placate the wet cities, passed a
light-wines and beer bill, allowing the manufacture of beverages con-
taining 2.75 per cent of alcohol. This bill was declared unconstitu-
tional by the state Supreme Court. The Republicans had tried unsuc-
cessfully, in Smith's later words, to carry water on both shoulders, dry
among the drys and wet among the wets 3S
For eight of the ten years after 1918, Smith was Governor of New
York. His only losing campaign was in the Republican landslide of
1920, although he polled a million more votes than the Democratic
candidate for President. He regularly polled more votes as Governor
296 / THE DBY TREE
than his party's nominee in presidential years owing to his huge popu-
larity and to the separate ballot system of voting in New York. 87 A
regular Republican majority in the Assembly blocked his reform pro-
gram during his first three years as Governor; but, by 1927, he had put
through a large schedule of better housing, better highways, and bet-
ter administration. He made New York an example of efficient govern-
ment, and himself both a genius at the practical details of state politics
and the leading candidate for his party's choice as President.
In the Democratic convention of 1920, Smith's position as favorite
son of New York was only a maneuver on the part of Boss Murphy to
keep the delegates from voting for the dry McAdoo. The move was
successful, and the moist Cox was nominated. But after his second
election as Governor in 1922, Smith knew that his presidential chances
were greater. Few Presidents had been elected without carrying New
York State, and Smith seemed capable of doing so. From this date, a
significant and interesting change in Smith's attitude towards prohibi-
tion showed his increasing awareness of his presidential possibilities.
His behavior over the repeal of the Mullan-Gage Law, which had been
passed in 1920 to provide for the strict state enforcement of the terms
of the Volstead Act, demonstrated his increasing caution to do nothing
on "the liquor issue which might prejudice his chances at a national
convention of his party.
Although the Democratic state platform of 1922 had discreetly con-
tained no condemnation of the Mullan-Gage Law, the suffering wets
of New York had presumed that Al Smith would be more ready than
his opponents to call off the state police from pursuit of the speak-
easies. He was elected by a large majority and then proceeded to say
and do nothing about the Mullan-Gage Law. But the Republican party
was unlikely to let slip such a perfect chance for the political embar-
rassment of their enemies. They repealed the state enforcement law
and sent the repeal bill to the Democratic Governor to approve.
Various pressures were put on Smith during the thirty days' grace
he had in which to sign the bill. His presidential advisers warned him
that his approval of the bill would make him the acknowledged leader
of the wets and confirm the antagonism of the dry South and West
within the Democratic party. His state advisers, Boss Murphy and
Tammany, insisted that he sign the bill, for the state Democratic party
depended on the wet vote. In addition, Al Smith had a personal con-
viction of his own honesty and courage, upon which he often acted.
He himself drank and considered prohibition an intolerable affront to
personal liberty. Yet he spent the full thirty days coming to a decision.
The alternatives were clear. If he vetoed the repeal bill, he might lose
his state at the next election, and thus lose all chances of the presiden-
LAST VICTORY/ 297
tial nomination. If he signed the bill, he would retain the governorship
of New York and his chances of nomination for President, but he
would probably lose the following campaign. He signed the bill. An
Albany in the hand was worth a White House in the bush.
Smith was conscious enough of the future, however, to send back
with his approval a long memorandum to the legislature. The docu-
ment was as specious and evasive as the best straddles of his Republi-
can enemies. He pointed out that the repeal of the Mullan-Gage Law
eliminated the possibility of double jeopardy by prosecution for the
same crime in both state and federal courts. He denied that the word
"concurrent" in the Eighteenth Amendment imposed a duty on the
forty-eight states to enforce the Amendment. He stood up for the Jef-
fersonian and Southern doctrine of states' rights. He stated the obvious
in saying that drinking was still illegal; but he became hypocritical in
stating that repeal did not "in the slightest degree lessen the obliga-
tion of police officers of the state to enforce in its strictest letter the
Volstead Act." By confining prosecution of prohibition cases to the
already overflowing federal courts and by making the aid of the state
police to the federal agents a mere obligation rather than a law, Smith
ensured that New York would surpass even Chicago in its crusade to
be the wet Jerusalem. His memorandum did him no good among the
drys, and was immediately denounced by William Jennings Bryan and
by representative Andrew Volstead, of Minnesota and notorious name. 38
Smith tried to restore his position among the prohibitionists by
making huge claims for the efficiency of enforcement in New York at
the Governors' Conference in October, 1923, under the leadership of
President Coolidge. He sought to prove by various figures that the
value of liquor seized and the number of arrests in the state had
doubled in the six months after the repeal of the Mullan-Gage Law,
when compared with the six months before. 39 Half a million more
dollars had been appropriated to policing the Canadian and interstate
borders, since Smith maintained that smuggling was the chief source of
liquor in New York. Thus he sought to allow home-brew to flourish
and attract wet votes within the state, while the example of seized
liquor from outside might attract dry votes from without the state.
The Democratic convention of 1924 in New York was a microcosm
of the feuds, phobias, and hatreds that were to split the traditional align-
ments of the party wide open four years later. If the galleries were not
packed in favor of the Governor from New York, at least they saw in
him one of themselves, and hallooed for their likeness. Although the
terrible struggle over the vote condemning the Klan pushed the pro-
hibition issue into the background, the attitude of the Klan itself, with
its declared prejudices against Catholicism and immigrants and sa-
298 / THE DRY TREE
loons and the immorality of cities, reflected overtly the actual opposi-
tion to Smith that was to hide in 1928 under the name of prohibition.
Here was the first hero of the new blood and iron of modern industrial
civilization. 40 Against him stood the last dry nominee of the Demo-
crats, William Gibbs McAdoo, backed by the Klan and the Anti-Sa-
loon League. It was not surprising that the convention took 102 dead-
locked ballots before nominating John W. Davis, who would call a
brief truce in the death struggle of city against country and put off the
fight until the next election.
Of course, by seeking an armistice in the vital battle, the Demo-
crats ensured their defeat and an election of apathy, where all relied
on the tepid support of their friends and sought to make no enemies.
Less than half of the electorate bothered to vote. In New York State,
however, Al Smith, running for the third time as Governor, polled over
a million more votes than Davis and was the Democrats' only consola-
tion in the worst defeat in their history.
But Smith's inadequate speech at the convention had shown that he
was as much hampered by the narrow provincialism of the city as his
enemies were by that of the village. He spoke of little else than his
achievements in governing New York well. He seemed to know of
nothing outside his own state, and confirmed the suspicions of the
South and the West that he was too urbanized to want to understand
their particular problems. But in the next four years Al Smith was
groomed for a larger role by his clever advisers, the Moskowitzes and
Judge Proskauer. Smith often picked his aides from among the New
York Jews, knowing that they felt that he was their representative as
much as did the Irish and the other American groups who found
themselves unfairly considered as aliens.
So Al Smith from the East Side learned something of farm prob-
lems, international affairs, and national economics. He took up the
challenge of his religion after an open letter in the Atlantic Monthly
had voiced the fears of the Protestants that the Pope might have an
undue influence on a Roman Catholic in the White House. 41 Smith
wrote a dignified and brilliant reply. He stated that he would be a
poor American and a poor Catholic alike if he injected religious dis-
cussion into a political campaign. He denied the possibility of any con-
flict between his religion and his duty as President And he took up
an extreme Protestant position in preferring to consult in difficult
matters the dictates of his conscience rather than any ecclesiastical
tribunal. 42 He appealed to the common brotherhood of man under the
common fatherhood of God. If Protestant prejudice could have been
allayed by anything Smith said, this letter should have done the mir-
acle. Instead, it forced those of Smith's religious enemies who did not
LAST VICTORY/ 299
relish the name of bigots to concentrate on his wetness rather than his
faith.
A discreet silence on the subject of prohibition except in terms of
law enforcement shows Smith s wariness of further compromising situ-
ations, although he did sign the bill providing for a wet referendum
in New York in 1926. By more than a million votes, New York asked
for modification of the Volstead Act to allow the states to define their
own criterion of what the Eighteenth Amendment meant by "intoxi-
cating." Al Smith could point to his home state in his request for states'
rights on the matter of prohibition. And if he said nothing on the sub-
ject of his wetness in 1927, much to the annoyance of Mencken, he
was presumed to be on the side of the angels of alcohol. 48 His occa-
sional demands for strict enforcement of the Volstead Act were pre-
sumed to be the result of politic advice and presidential ambition.
The glaring availability of Al Smith made the dry forces uneasy.
The wet Chicago Tribune reported that the Anti-Saloon League was
raising a special fund of $600,000 in 1927 to defeat any candidate for
President who was not dry. 44 Wayne B. Wheeler issued a statement
which was disavowed by more discreet officers in the League; he
wrote that "if Governor Smith is nominated and the drys in the South
would rather vote for an independent dry candidate for President than
for a dry Republican, this would give them a chance to register their
protest/' 45 Bishop James Cannon, casting around for a dry candi-
date, was even ready to support McAdoo's nominee, Senator Walsh, of
Montana, although he was another Roman Catholic. 46 Walsh would
be, after all, the answer to those who accused the drys of fearing
Smith more for his religion than his wetness. In fact, the drys knew
that Walsh could never beat Hoover after eight years of prosperity,
while they feared that Smith might win.
Thus Hoover and Smith approached the Republican and the Demo-
cratic nominating conventions in 1928. Each was the most available
candidate of his party. Each represented a fundamental and antagonis-
tic principle in American life. Each would symbolize in his victory
more than the victory of a party, and in his defeat more than the de-
feat of a man.
VICTORY IN DEFEAT
AFTER CALVIN COOLIDGE'S announcement that he did not choose to run,
the Hoover managers arranged that the next Republican convention
would be in their candidate's pocket. He was nominated on the first
ballot. The party platform on prohibition matched the evasive stand of
their nominee on the question. Senator Carter Glass, of Virginia,
300 / THE DRY TREE
offered to pay a thousand dollars to anyone who could produce a
single categorical dry declaration by Hoover; the money was never
claimed. The Republican plank favored strict enforcement and observ-
ance of the Eighteenth Amendment; it did not say that the Grand Old
Party approved of the principle of national prohibition. Hoover took
the same line as his party, promising strict enforcement of the dry law
as it stood, and calling prohibition "a great social and economic experi-
ment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose." Although Hoover
was not responsible for the popular paraphrase of his words as a
"noble experiment/' he did admit later that his words had unfortunate
repercussions. He stated, "To regard the prohibition law as an 'experi-
ment' did not please the extreme drys, and to say it was 'noble in mo-
tive* did not please the extreme wets/' 47 It was unfortunate that
Hoover's straddle ended in a muddle.
The Smith forces were equally in full control of the Democratic na-
tional convention at Houston, Texas. The Platform Committee was
overwhelmingly wet. But because Smith's partisans wanted a "har-
mony" convention and the nomination of their candidate by a united
party, they accepted a plank written by the dry Senator Glass and
approved by Josephus Daniels. The plank pledged enforcement of the
Eighteenth Amendment, although it was not as extreme as the Anti-
Saloon League would have wished. This tactical victory by the Smith
forces was a strategical error in the long run. For it allowed the anti-
Smith prohibitionists to claim with some justice that Smith's telegram
of acceptance denied his party's platform. 48 Smith was nominated on a
revised first ballot with a dry Southerner, Senator Joseph Robinson,
of Arkansas, as his running mate. The delegates ignored the prohibi-
tionist sermons of the preachers outside the hall on the text that God
would block Al Smith's nomination. 40 Certainly, sections of the Method-
ist and Baptist churches were to ensure that their version of God's
will blocked Al Smith's election.
Smith sent a telegram of acceptance to the convention. He stated
his old position on prohibition, which had only been played down for
the purpose of having him nominated with Southern support. He said
that he was well known to support fundamental changes in the provi-
sions for national prohibition, based on the principles of Jeffersonian
democracy. Although he appreciated that these changes could only be
made by the people themselves or their elected representatives, he felt
it the duty of the chosen leader of the people to point the way. Bishop
Cannon immediately called an anti-Smith meeting at Asheville, North
Carolina, declaring himself stunned by Smith's shameless proposition
of political double-dealing and his action of brazen political effron-
tery. 50 In fact, Cannon could only have been surprised at Smith's sin-
LAST VICTORY / 301
cerity in declaring himself a wet. His position on prohibition had re-
mained consistent, though tacit.
The Nation called the following election the dirtiest political cam-
paign ever, although one of its editors had spread the dirt with an
article on Smith which stated that he drank four to eight highballs a
day. 61 It was widely believed that Smith was a drunkard and had to be
supported while he made his speeches in order to keep upright. The
fact of the matter was that he drank beer when he was young, a little
hard liquor when beer became difficult to procure under prohibition,
and champagne with repeal and riches.
The religious campaign against Smith is impossible to distinguish
from the dry campaign against him. They were part and parcel of the
same attitude. The pretense of the drys that prohibition had every-
thing to do with Smith's defeat and religion little is untrue. Cannon
may have accused Smith of dragging the religious issue into the cam-
paign to bring out the Catholic vote for the Democrats; but he cannot
be excused from distributing 380,000 copies of his virulent anti-Catho-
lic pamphlet Is Southern Protestantism More Intolerant than Roman-
ism? The pamphlet was paid for by the money of a Republican finan-
cier; the greater part of its contents were called by Current History
"completely untrue or gravely misleading." 52 Cannon's own freedom
from religious bigotry was not shown by his judgment of Al Smith,
that Smith was "of the intolerant, bigoted type, characteristic of the
Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy of New York City/' 53
While Cannon still maintained that the bolt of the Southern Demo-
crats to the side of Hoover was over prohibition, his helper at Ashe-
ville was more outspoken. 54 Dr. Arthur J. Barton, of the Anti-Saloon
League, said openly in his address at Birmingham, Alabama, that reli-
gion was more important than prohibition; if Al Smith were to be
elected, America would come under the domination of a "foreign reli-
gious sect"; in fact, Herbert Hoover was the real Democratic candidate
for President. 55 Mabel Walker Willebrandt was sent by the National
Republican Committee to exhort the Ohio Conference of the Method-
ist Episcopal Church; she begged the Methodist leaders to defend pro-
hibition against Al Smith, who had dragged the issue into the cam-
paign; the Republicans did not put an end to her speaking tour until
the "moral" aspects of prohibition were significantly exploited. 56
Mencken, subscribing to all the Methodist and Baptist newspapers be-
low the Potomac, found that two-thirds of them devoted half their
space to bawling that anyone who was against prohibition was against
God, and the other half of their space to damning the Pope 57 As fair-
minded a religious leader as the great Reinhold Niebuhr said that the
real issues in the campaign were hid under the decent veil of loyalty
302 / THE DRY TREE
to a moral ideal prohibition. 58 Smith himself, his campaign supporters
and biographers, most Roman Catholics, Senator Norris, Harold Ickes,
the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas, James M. Cox, and those
acute commentators on the South, Gunnar Myrdal and Wilbur J. Cash,
all considered religion to be the real reason for Smith's defeat.
Smith, however, was stung to the limits of his courage by the vicious-
ness of the attacks upon him. He chose to defend himself on the
charge of religion in tie Klan country of Oklahoma City, against the
advice of his entourage, who feared that the prejudiced crowd might
attack him. He reminded the audience that religious toleration was
written into the American Constitution. To his way of thinking, he
said, anyone who voted against him because of his religion was not a
good citizen. 59 In New York, he called the Anti-Saloon League the
twin brother of the Ku Klux Klan, and accused the Republicans of con-
niving at a campaign based "on religious bigotry and religious intoler-
ance/' Senator Moses, the Eastern manager of the Hoover campaign,
had been discovered mailing to Kentucky scurrilous literature which
attacked Smith from the point of view of his faith. 60 Smith's courage
in his campaign even won over his opponent, William Allen White;
White wrote that he had wound up his campaign against Smith with
the pity that is akin to love for his opponent, a hero of tragedy. 61 Of
course, White voted Republican as did many traditional Democrats,
protesting their religious tolerance and casting a ballot for their
bigotry.
Smith spoke out more against those who attacked him for his faith
than for his wetness. He even denied in Omaha that prohibition was a
great issue in the election, 62 while Senator Robinson was discreetly
sent to the South to pacify the drys there. But Smith did speak out on
prohibition in the wet cities, swinging them towards the Democrats.
In Milwaukee, he called prohibition "the great political pork barrel
for the Republican party." He quoted Senator Gore, who had stated
that the Republican policy was to give liquor to the wets and law to
the drys. Smith promised he would enforce the law as he found it, but
he would work for the repeal of the Volstead Act to give the states
control over their own liquor policy and police power. 63 He spoke
similarly during his campaign in Nashville, emphasizing states' rights; 64
in Chicago, stressing the need to put an end to crime; 65 in Philadel-
phia, ridiculing former Governor Hughes for saying that prohibition
was unimportant in order to disguise Hoover's evasiveness over the
issue. 66 In Baltimore, he attacked Republican "wiggling and wobbling"
over prohibition; he denounced the "cold-blooded threat" of the Anti-
Saloon League; and he pointed out that no one could "make a new sin
by law." 67
LAST VICTORY / 303
The stand of Hoover and the Republicans on prohibition was indeed
unsatisfactory. All that could be safely said of them was that they
were more dry than their opponents. Senator Borah was sent through
the South and West to represent that each vote for Smith was a vote
for wetness; he had correctly predicted in Hoover's case that everyone
would be talking about prohibition except the deaf, the dumb, and the
candidates. 68 Meanwhile, F. M. Huntingdon-Wilson declared that the
wets had their best chance of legal wine and beer under Hoover,
while Charles Evans Hughes called Smith's plan for liquor control
"State Socialism/' 69 In general, the Republicans tried to bring out the
rural vote in large quantities by calling the prohibition issue in the
country "a city issue," while they quieted the cities by calling prohibi-
tion "a sham battle." 70 But perhaps no statement of the campaign ap-
proached the silliness of a declaration of J. W. Walker, when he
termed Alfred E. Smith "America's greatest prohibitionist." 71
Mencken put one problem of the election succinctly on the eve of
polling. "If Al wins tomorrow, it will be because the American people
have decided at last to vote as they drink, and because a majority of
them believe that the Methodist bishops are worse than the Pope. If
he loses, it will be because those who fear the Pope outnumber those
who are tired of the Anti-Saloon League." 72 In fact, Al Smith lost by
some six million votes mainly because of what he called "the false and
misleading issue of prosperity." In his opinion, the Republicans had
claimed so often to be the architects of good times that the Democrats
were associated with bad times. 73 Yet, if no Democrat could have won
against Hoover in 1928, it is surely true that no Protestant Democrat
could have lost five Southern states. The South had stood firm in the
Democratic dtbdcles of 1920 and 1924. It was religion and the South-
ern churches that broke the Solid South in 1928.
Yet the victory of the evangelical churches and the drys in 1928 put
their cause in peril. By taking a presidential election to be a referen-
dum on prohibition, they put the Eighteenth Amendment in jeopardy
on the day when the presidential election should go against them.
Moreover, this major incursion by the Protestant churches into politics
brought to a head the old American resentment against clerical med-
dling in lay affairs. How could the Protestants maintain that they were
attacking Smith to keep the Pope from dictating American policy
when they themselves were denying the separation of church and
state?
The candidacy of Smith had forced the Anti-Saloon League into a
policy of what appeared to be religious bigotry and partisan politics.
The League had always had tenuous relations with the Roman Catho-
lic Church through the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, and some
304 /THE DRY TREE
Catholic drys voted for Hoover. But the foulness of the religious cam-
paign against Smith seemed part and parcel of the virulence of the
dry campaign against him. Although Senator Simmons could accuse
the Democrats of hiding behind a "smoke-screen of intolerance" to dis-
guise the real fault of Smith's wetness, although Clarence True Wilson
and Scott McBride could call for a dry vote against Smith rather than
a bigot vote, the fact was that prohibition and bigotry were associated
in the public mind. 74 Moreover, once the election was ended, the drys
claimed that the result was a referendum in favor of the drys, despite
the opposite claim of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. 75 As Ernest Cher-
rington wrote, the election was "a referendum not only on prohibition
but also upon the right of a President to use his office to secure practi-
cal nullification of the Constitution and the right of a state to interpret
a provision of the Constitution to suit itself." 76
The election of 1928 seemed to prove that the progressives and the
women still supported prohibition, but they voted more for Hoover
and against Smith than for the dry cause. The rural progressive coun-
ties which voted for La Follette in 1924 and Hoover in 1928 were vot-
ing for the Great Engineer and against the East Side Irishman from
New York. Although Mrs. H. W. Peabody might call prohibition
"women's only issue" and Mrs. Ella Boole might claim that women
won the election for Hoover because he was a dry, the large women's
vote for Hoover was, in part, a protest against the nasty manners of
Al Smith. 77 The election of 1928 was not a popular referendum on pro-
hibition, though it was held to be so. Conservatives voted for the con-
servative candidate, radicals for the radical candidate, and traditional
Republicans and Democrats stuck to the parties of their prejudice.
Wet to the wets and dry to the drys, Hoover was swept to victory
by a majority of over six million votes. The acute comic writer of the
New Republic, Felix Ray, had his newsdealer Elmer Durkin comment
on the three different fights going on at the same time.
Hoover was telling the come-ons about how the Republican party
had invented prosperity, bank accounts, good crops, radios and ben-
zine buggies. Smith was shooting the works on prohibition, water
power, wasteful government and farm relief. The rest of the popula-
tion was talking about Al where he went to church, what kind of a
lid he wore, what liquids he took with his meals, how he was born and
brought up in Tammany Hall and the way he pronounced "foist."
In Ray s opinion, it did Al Smith no good that he was the Happy War-
rior, for he could not get the enemy to "trade wallops." 78
The campaign of 1928 was the last great campaign fought by the
drys. They took Hoover's victory as a referendum in favor of the
HOSANNA !
From New York World
Eighteenth Amendment, and an approval of the methods of the Anti-
Saloon League. Kin Hubbard's bootlegger Ike Lark might construe the
result "as simply a vote of confidence"; 79 but the general feeling was
that the Great Engineer would now enforce efficiently a law that had
been famous only for the amount of crime and alcoholism that it had
produced. Hoover would bring relief and good administration to dry
America as he had done to starving Belgium. His propaganda had as-
sured men so.
306 / THE DRY TREE
Although Smith lost the election, he totaled the largest number of
Democratic votes ever cast Many of these ballots were cast by new
voters, children of immigrant families, whose numbers were to provide
the Democrats with majorities for twenty years. Moreover, it was not a
Democratic election. As Will Rogers commented, "Women, Liquor,
Tammany Hall all had their minor little contributing factors one
way or another in the total, but the whole answer was: We just didn't
have any Merchandise to offer the Boys that would make *em come
over on our side of the Street." 80 Depression would provide for that
lack of merchandise.
The last major victory of the country over the city, of the old Amer-
ica over the new, was in the presidential election of 1928, when the dry
Quaker from Iowa defeated the wet Roman Catholic from New York.
But Smith, in his defeat, pulled the Northern cities into the Demo-
cratic column, where they stayed. Lippmann noted that the objections
of the drys and the Protestants to New York and Tammany were per-
fectly sincere. They helped to make up an opposition to Smith which
was as authentic and poignant as his support by the immigrant urban
masses. The opposition was inspired by the feeling that the clamorous
life of the city should not be acknowledged as the American ideal. 81 A
man with an East Side accent and a brown derby, who spat frequently
and publicly, should not be elected to represent all America. And he
was not.
PART
3
The Blight of Repeal
CHAPTER
16
The Spreading Change
The liquor traffic may have been possible in the age of
the ox-cart, but it is not possible in the age of the auto-
mobile.
ERNEST CHERRINGTON
The Anti-Saloon League Yearbook, 1922
AT THE VERY time that the country defeated the city by the pas-
sage of the Eighteenth Amendment and by the election of Herbert
Hoover, the city had finally overcome the country through technology
and economics. The city newspapers largely displaced the country
newspapers. Automobiles and movies and radios brought the imagined
manners of the urban rich to every village. Again, the assault of metro-
politan habits on rural habits increased the desperation of those who
loved the old country ways. But they could not keep back the new car-
riers of change, which helped to destroy prohibition along with the
isolation of the small town.
THE POPULAR PBESS
FOR MORE than forty years before the passage of the Eighteenth
Amendment, the press of the United States was flooded with articles
and editorials alleging that alcohol was the chief cause of poverty,
crime, disease, and insanity. Paid advertisements were the only means
of representing the wet point of view. Yet, by 1930, the position was
exactly the reverse. 1 The change of the popular press both led and
reflected the change of the American people in their attitude toward
prohibition.
In a series of studies made at the close of national prohibition, this
change was carefully calculated through samplings taken from middle-
class magazines. In 1905, out of 175 articles on prohibition taken from
the Atlantic, the Arena, the Independent, the Review of Reviews, the
Survey, and the World Today, not one article was unfavorable to the
dry cause. Out of a larger sampling taken in 1915, which also included
309
310 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
the Ladies' Home Journal, the Living Age, the Nation, the New Re-
public, the North American Review, and the Outlook, articles ap-
proved of prohibition in a ratio of nearly twenty to one. By 1920, the
ratio had shrunk to less than four to three on the dry side. By 1930,
with the addition of Harper's, Collier's, the Commonweal, and World's
Work, the articles favoring prohibition had decreased until they com-
pared with wet articles in a ratio of less than one dry article to two
wet pieces. A parallel sampling showed a less dramatic shift from a
dry to a wet attitude in these magazines; but if the two studies are
taken together it can be said that opposition to prohibition in Ameri-
can bourgeois magazines increased five times between 1914 and 1931,
while attitudes towards drinking also reversed themselves to a lesser
degree. Similar magazine studies showed a switch from religious sanc-
tions to scientific sanctions in this period, whereas the years from 1925
to 1928 were the peak of articles against religion and in favor of sexual
freedom. 2
A like process took place in the newspapers of the country. The dry
monopoly of favorable comment at the beginning of the century gave
way to an increasing wet attack throughout the twenties. While Purley
A. Baker could claim justly that more than half of the nation's secular
press supported the drys in 1907, twenty years later hardly a major
newspaper praised them. 8 This change was partially due to the chang-
ing organization and techniques of the popular press of the day, but it
was also due to the methods used to influence the press by wets and
drys.
The drys had early set up methods of swinging newspapers to their
side. They pioneered the clipsheet, which gave newspaper editors a
cheap source of news, although the news itself was biased. They cir-
cularized a large number of Tboiler-plate" articles, ready for' printing,
which cut down costs in small-town newspapers. They would send,
free of charge, information and statistics and "fill-ins" to sympathetic
dry editors. They would encourage dry manufacturers to advertise
only in dry newspapers; indeed, half the newspapers of the country, in-
cluding the New York Tribune, the Chicago Herald, and the Boston
Record, would not accept liquor advertisements in 1912 out of convic-
tion and fear of losing dry customers. 4 Moreover, the drys would buy
full-page advertisements before elections to make converts for their
cause. Charles Stelzle ran a "Strengthen America Campaign" to put
across the Eighteenth Amendment, which used full-page advertise-
ments in the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, the Inde-
pendent, the Outlook, and the labor press, while a mass of articles was
supplied without fee to those editors who would print such propaganda.
The campaign was budgeted at a cost of a million dollars. 5
THE SPREADING CHANGE/ 311
The brewers and distillers probably spent more than the drys on
subsidizing the popular press and on buying advertising space and
editors. But their money was not placed wisely. Too much money was
spent on the converted, on the foreign-language press. Too little money
went into the popular magazines and uncommitted newspapers, except
into ill-judged attempts to buy control of them. 6 But once national pro-
hibition went into effect, the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment increasingly adopted the methods of press influence of the
drys. Articles were written and placed by writers who were ostensibly
impartial but who were in reality supporting repeal for a fee paid by
the Association. Statistics, clipsheets, pamphlets, and free copy were
supplied to any newspaper on demand. Similar means of exerting
pressure on editors through advertisements were employed. There was a
significant letter from Pierre S. Du Pont, the head of the Association,
to a leader of the wets in Philadelphia, which asked him to point out
to the officials of the Saturday Evening Post that the magazine was
"intimately related to both the General Motors Corporation and the
Du Pont Company," and that, as the aim of the paper was "to promote
the welfare of the people of the United States/' the Du Fonts hoped
the paper would join them "in a move toward better things with re-
spect to the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages." 7 By such
indirect pressure, large sections of the press were swung over to the
wet cause, although a few newspapers, such as those of Frank Gan-
nett, remained dry to the end. A dry survey in 1931 found that the cir-
culation of wet newspapers outnumbered that of dry newspapers by
two to one. 8
The propaganda techniques and economic pressures used to win
over the press were developed by the drys and used against them by
the wets. For most of the moneyed men changed in their attitude toward
prohibition and took many of the newspapers and magazines with
them. It was a case of the persuaders persuaded. Also the change of
the progressives and men of science in their attitude toward alcohol,
and the realization that the evils of prohibition were as great or greater
than those of the saloon, were mirrored in the popular articles of the
time. While, in 1917, the American Magazine would reprint an article
of Booth Tarkington's on how he gave up liquor, and Cleveland MoflFat
in McClure's would warn girls not to give themselves even to moder-
ate drinkers because their procreative powers were seriously impaired,
by 1920 the articles had already begun to switch to the "Collapse of
Prohibition," and by 1930, to sophisticated and witty pieces like "Have
a Little Drinkie." 9 The warnings of the muckrakers about the evils of
the saloons gave way to the accusing farragoes of a Mencken and the
spiky witticisms of the New Yorker or Vanity Fair, whose solution to
312 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
the problem of policing the Canadian border was not to erect a
barbed-wire fence there, but to erect a brass rail. 10
The metamorphosis of the American press itself did not help the
dry cause. It was an age of the growing chain newspapers, competing
savagely with each other and pushing local newspapers to the wall. In
the war for increased circulation, quality and truth suffered and sensa-
tionalism and "human interest" stories gained, until some newspapers
all but excluded legitimate news. The success of the tabloid New York
Daily News in the twenties led to many imitations of its exploitation of
melodrama and photographs; the success of True Story and True Con-
fessions in the magazine field forced similar changes. Prohibition was
marvelous copy for such presentation, in the large headlines and scare
lettering developed by the war. Rumrunners and speak-easy proprie-
tors and gangsters were interesting people and sensational stuff. Social-
ites caught in a raid made for good pictures and exposes. And the
small man tried for brewing his own beer or carrying a hip flask always
brought out mass sympathy for the underdog. 11 Moreover, the/con-
temporary crimes of Leopold and Loeb, of Hall and Mills, and of Ruth
Snyder, the sex dramas of Fatty Arbuckle and "Daddy" Browning, the
gay escapades of Mayor Jimmy Walker and Big Bill Thompson all
this "series of tremendous trifles" provided that mixture of lawlessness
and gaity, sex and crime, which cast the artificial glamour of the "jazz
age" over an era in which many evils were excused on the grounds of
a false, but glittering, scale of values. When Elinor Glyn was asked
which way Hollywood would go after the notorious scandals of the
early twenties, she answered for a whole national ethos which was to
endure until the depression, "Whatever will bring in the most money
will happen." 12
With such a vogue for glamour and sensation, the dry cause was
bound to suffer. The patriots of the war became the patsys of the
peace. They had won the Eighteenth Amendment at a time when news
of war crowded interest in prohibition to the back pages. But, as
Mabel Walker Willebrandt wrote, the moment that prohibition went
into effect, the subject became, for the first time, "big news" for the
city press. 13 And the city press was becoming more and more the press
of all America. Between 1925 and 1930, rural subscriptions to city
newspapers doubled. 14 And the city press grew wetter and wetter. In
New York, the Times and the Herald and the World were always op-
posed to prohibition, although the World died in the depression before
the repeal came which it had advocated. The Hearst chain switched to
support of modification of the law to allow the sale of light wines and
beer, although it ran a competition in 1929 for plans to tighten up en-
forcement. In Chicago, four of the five newspapers, including the influ-
THE SPREADING CHANGE/ 313
ential Tribune, were wet in 1930. This wetness of the city press repre-
sented its wish to appeal to the new market of the semiliterate workers
as well as its exploitation of the color stories of the time. For the popu-
lar newspapers were little better or little worse than the tastes and
opinions of the mass of their readers. If the drys attacked the wet
press as a conspiracy against the people, they were really attacking
the city majority as a conspiracy against the country minority.
Still, wet propaganda could be dismissed as mere lies, as could dry
propaganda. What was difficult to dismiss was the evidence collected
by the polls of the Literary Digest. In three sensational polls, which
were copied by small polls conducted by other papers, the Digest
showed the slipping of prohibition sentiment A poll in 1922 showed
that, of nine hundred thousand owners of telephones who answered the
pollsters, two-fifths supported modification and one-fifth repeal. In
1930, five million owners of automobiles and telephones gave a ma-
jority for repeal or modification in every state in America except for
five. In the poll of 1932, all the states except Kansas and North Caro-
lina gave a majority for outright repeal. An exhaustive analysis of the
Literary Digest polling techniques revealed a bias in favor of the
wets. 15 But, even if the margin of wet sentiment was exaggerated, it
nevertheless had received the accolade of the great American creed
that a fact is always true as long as it is supported by figures. More-
over, the prestige of the Literary Digest was extremely high through-
out the country until it dug its own grave by predicting the victory in
1936 of Alfred Landon over President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The dry leaders became so incensed by the attitude of the press that
they proposed to establish a chain of daily newspapers which would,
in Bishop Cannon's words, "place the truth and the moral betterment of
the people above the cash box/' Cannon wanted a "stream of clean,
properly filtered news" to be substituted for the "sewage which pours
into our homes almost daily from the columns of many of the present-
day secular dailies, weeklies and monthlies." The chain was to preach
the great benefits of prohibition in place of the misrepresentation of
the popular press, which preferred "to picture all the boys and girls
with hip flasks, daring bootleggers outwitting enforcement officers,
or tyrannical. officers murdering innocent law violators." 16 The news-
paper chain was never set up, and its success would have been doubt-
ful. For the formula of success at that time was sensationalism, and
the press was not responsible for the evils of prohibition which it
exploited in its reports.
-Indeed, there was much good in the publicity which the newspapers
gave to the gangsters of the time. As John Landesco said in his study
of crime in Chicago, "If it were not for the newspapers, gangdom and
314 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
its political henchmen and protectors would have stolen this town/' 17
James O'Donnell Bennett's exposure of the local gangsters in the Chi-
cago Tribune was so salutary that it was reprinted in full in the Wick-
ersham Report. 18 Indeed, the massive publicity given to Al Capone
was really the reason for his downfall. He became too much of a threat
to be ignored by the Department of Justice. Herbert Hoover made
himself personally responsible for his imprisonment. 19 * Other and
wiser gangsters, such as the New York racketeer Owney Madden, had
an unholy fear of the attention of newsmen. As the city editor of the
New York Herald Tribune wrote, it was a sure sign of doom to the
Maddens of the world when they began to get too much publicity. All
publicity, to them, was bad publicity. 20 Rackets did not flourish in the
open.
The fact that much of the city press dramatized the evils of enforce-
ment did not prevent them from dramatizing the heroes of the en-
forcement service. Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, who made over four
thousand arrests and confiscated more than fifteen million dollars'
worth of liquor in their brief careers, probably made the front pages
more often than any other personages of their time except for the
President and the Prince of Wales. 21 Indeed, their dismissal in No-
vember, 1925, seems to have been due to the offended dignity of the
heads of the Prohibition Bureau, who thought that Izzy and Moe cor-
ralled too much of the good publicity which should have gone to the
rest of the Bureau. Moreover, even a wet newspaper such as the New
York Times was scrupulously fair in printing the dry point of view,
running for months the writings of Roy Haynes and Wayne Wheeler
and Mabel Willebrandt. 22 Indeed, there was so much favorable dry
publicity in the wet press that Mencken was put into a rage in 1927,
writing that, although every reporter in America knew of the failure of
prohibition enforcement, it was rare that an American newspaper came
out "without a gaudy story on its first page, rehearsing all the old lies
under new and blacker headlines." 23
The popular press of America had much to do with the passage and
repeal of prohibition. In doing so, it both mirrored and directed the
thoughts of the majority of Americans, as well as of the dry and wet
pressure groups. The extending influence of the city press over the
country areas of America broke down that isolation in which rural
prejudice and faith could support prohibition without doubt or con-
trary argument. If the drys profited from the trend in America towards
* Hoover, while writing of Al Capone, thought that "it was ironic that a man
gudty of inciting hundreds of murders, in some of which he took a personal hand,
had to be punished merely for failure to pay taxes on the money he had made
by murder."
The Hydra-Headed Monster
Washington, D.C., Herald
the national control of social problems, they were attacked by the in-
struments of that control, the improved communications of their land
The prohibitionists wished to make the United States into a large
Kansas. But as the Boston Transcript commented, to do so, they would
have to imitate Kansas and abolish all cities of more than fifty thou-
sand people" Instead, the large cities engulfed the small towns.
THE CABMERS OF CHANGE
Ar TOE close of the twenties, Robert Binkley pointed out that the sex
dZ^ * r? ? I*" 0011 centuries of ^ uor ' but had broken
down wrth two decades of motoring. The car was the chief cause of
stnfe between cbldren and parents, between husband and wife It
had [increased crime and wasteful spending. It had killed tens of thou-
sands of people It had taken away the American "birthright of health "
men w rSr,, ****** * habit-forming. Millions of healthy
Zm^lS 7 again - ^ *^ had * e *y- not F hib ^
automobiles? The answer was that cars were useful, and that thev
were kept under control by the responsibility of drivers, by compuT
316 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
sory insurance, by licenses and by laws. Could not the same be done
for liquor? 25
The same was not done for liquor. Imperfectly regulated, it deluged
America again after 1933. But the automobiles rolled on, wheel after
wheel, despite the efforts made to control them. They were the car-
riers of change, along with the motion pictures and the radios. They
broke into the old rural isolation and the pockets of prohibition which
spotted the land. They brought the manners of the cities into the ham-
lets of America. They spread wet propaganda throughout the villages.
If prohibition put more money in the hands of a workingman so that
he could afford to buy a car, that car gave him the means to go where
liquor was to be found and to bring that liquor back to his own home.
Without the carriers of change, the dry argument that a sober nation
was necessary to meet the demands of a technological revolution
would have been futile. But with the carriers of change, the enforce-
ment of prohibition became impossible. The new devices helped to
bring about the boom, which was claimed as a dry triumph; but they
also took bootleg liquor or its tidings wherever they moved. Prosperity
and booze seemed to be the new Siamese .twins. There was a wry
truth in the New Yorkers comment on Henry Ford's declaration that
he would stop making cars if prohibition was repealed, "It would be
a great pity to have Detroit's two leading industries destroyed at one
blow." 2 '
Henry Ford himself was the symbol of his time. The Model-T
wrecked rural America more surely than any devastation. Yet Ford
spent many of his millions in re-creating that lost past in his Green-
field Village. He also revived the square dance and hillbilly music,
while his automobiles were shaking to pieces the settled communities
that had developed these rough arts. 27 Ford was a sort of Wild West
Wind of Change, a destroyer and preserver. While his mind created
the mass ways of a new civilization, his feet dragged in the folkways
of the old customs of his childhood. Although he was the apostle of a
new creed of business with the dictum that "anything which is eco-
nomically right is also morally right," he could also be the prophet of
nostalgia with advertisements which aimed to cure the depression of
the thirties by asking Americans to return to their roots and "cultivate
a plot of land" in the "good old pioneer way." 28 His coexistent mixture
of invention and reaction made him the appropriate godhead of his
days, capable of supporting mass production and prohibition at the
same time, although they were natural enemies.
In 1900, there were some eight thousand horseless carriages on the
American roads, which, in themselves, were little better than excuses
for roads. Four years later, there were only 150 miles of paved high-
THE SPREADING CHANGE/ 317
way in the United States, and 150,000 miles of surfaced track. The
villages of America were connected by railroads, or else by dust
and horses and buggies and bicycles. Thus the prohibitionists could
dry up the country piecemeal, congregation by congregation, small
area by small area. In places where the scarcity of news made all news
welcome, and the lack of visitors made the itinerant clergyman an
event, the dry control of the pulpits and the Chautauquas was all-
important in bringing out the voters in the backcountry. Where culture
was identified with the traveling tents of the Chautauqua shows, which
brought their light orchestras and moral dramas and inspirational talks
and dry lecturers to small towns that knew no better and sought the
good, the prohibitionists were thus assured of steady and unfailing
support. Even if the large and alien cities were growing in numbers
and in evil, they were far away and unseen, dangerous rather than
attractive. Those speakers who had seen them merely told of their
depravity; there were few speakers to emphasize their virtues. The
people of the country relied on their dominant faith to rule forever.
They applauded such orators as the presidential candidate of the
Prohibition party at the Wisconsin Chautauqua at Camp Cleghorn in
1911, when he declared, "No matter what may happen in spots in the
United States, don't you people ever get alarmed, for in the long run
the Anglo-Saxon is going to boss the job of running the United States
of America." 29
But the cars and the roads multiplied, and the confined audiences of
the Chautauquas crumbled away. By 1916, there were more than
3,000,000 cars in the United States; by 1921, more than 9,000,000; by
1929, more than 23,000,000 cars, one for every five Americans. In 1930,
the length of the surfaced roads was nearly 700,000 miles, of which
125,000 miles were paved highways. Tourism and the comforts of
tourism - garages, filling stations, hotels, roadhouses, and snack bars
had created a new method of escape from the spying eyes of neigh-
bors, and were permitting a New Freedom for the owners of cars that
Woodrow Wilson had hardly envisaged.
The car developed into a symbol of success and prosperity, of liber-
ation and power, to such an extent that it was the last luxury which the
unemployed would relinquish. It became a necessity, for it conquered
that space which kept Americans apart from each other. It even
brought the family together in vacations and trips, although it also
took children far away from home restraints. One Middletown mother
confessed, "I never feel as close to my family as when we are all to-
gether in the car." And, above all, to an America whose gospel was
work and self-denial for material rewards, the car represented the
accrued benefits of toil and foregone pleasure. "It's prohibition that's
318 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
done it," said an officer of the Middletown Trades Council; "drink
money is going into cars." 30
The car swept away many of the old sanctions of a closed village
society. The repressive threats of nineteenth-century morality relied
for a great part on the impossibility of escaping from the consequences
or the place of misbehavior. The car and the contraceptive broke down
many of the taboos and prohibitions of the time, to such an extent that
a judge in a juvenile court referred to the automobile as "a house of
prostitution on wheels/' 31 Moreover, the anonymity of the new motor
hotels and roadhouses, which supplied the liquor and jazz demanded
by the drivers of the cars, gave a faceless freedom to the "easy riders"
of the time. If speed was an intoxication in itself, liquor was sought
to intoxicate the mind into more speed.
The very philosophy of Fordism, that of the assembly line and the
standardized part and the five-dollar day, compelled workers and
executives and their children to search madly for individuality at any
price, at the wheel or in the speak-easy or on the bed. The warning of
Billy Sunday, that no one could pray "Thy Kingdom come" and then
look at God through the bottom of a beer mug, was meaningless to
people who could not sit at a conveyor belt all day and then look at
their own selves through the glass of the evangelical virtues. The new
speed and spread of living brought by the mass-produced car was the
necessary reward for the confined and mechanical labor put into the
making of the mass-produced car. The modern factories made possible
the escape of their toilers to the country, at the price of rural peace
juid the past.
The automobile became so much the representative of the new way
of life that its use in nullifying national prohibition was inevitable. It
was used to take buyers to the source of liquor, and liquor to prospec-
tive buyers. "Secondhand Fords are the bootlegger's chief deputies,"
wrote one social worker. Another lamented the widespread drinking of
drivers with the dictum, "Fords have taken the place of the saloon." 82
Criminals penetrated the trucking companies and the Teamsters*
Union, in order to acquire control of fleets of trucks to transport their
supplies of bootleg from still to sale. 83 The armor-plated cars with
windows of bullet-proof glass, the murders implicit in Hymie Weiss's
phrase "to take for a ride," the sedans of tommy-gunners spraying the
streets of gangland, all created a satanic mythology of the automobile
that bid fair to rival the demonism of the saloon. The car was an
instrument of death in the hands of crook and drunk, and prohibition
was held to have spawned both of them. "Gasoline and alcohol will
not mix," declared Judge Elliott, of Sioux Falls. 84 One of them had to
be prohibited. And, although the abolition of the car itself was never
Brown Brothers Photographers
EASY RIDERS
seriously suggested, its misuse did add weight to the wet arguments
for repeal, especially when several innocent drivers were shot down
by prohibition agents on the watch for bootleggers. Indeed, the car
was thought to be such a dangerous vehicle in prohibition days that
the attorney general of Michigan had to forbid local drivers from
putting on their windshield stickers which bore the American flag and
the legend "Don't Shoot, I'm Not a Bootlegger/' 35
The second revolutionary carrier of change was the motion picture.
In the beginning, it was welcomed by reformers and prohibitionists.*
Such films as The Saloon Dance and The Saloon-Keeper's Nightmare
in 1908 and The Saloon Next Door in 1910 preached dry propaganda.
Reformers themselves introduced sex into the movies in an effort to
warn audiences of the perils of the white-slave trade; but the popular
success of Traffic in Souls in 1913 conjured up a host of imitations
* Only the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was always leery of the
cinema. As early as 1906, it denounced the places where films were shown as "Five
Cent Schools of Crime."
320 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
which were more concerned with giving their audiences a glimpse of
vice than with teaching them how to avoid it. 36 Even so, the drys were
quick to praise the twenty-one thousand picture houses which had
been built by 1916. For these were substitutes for the saloon and kept
drinkers out of the bar. The brewers were equally quick to denounce
these competitors, both as false prophets and trade rivals. The wet
Mida's Criterion complained, "Who has ever seen liquor portrayed in
any but the most unfavorable light by the movies? The films accept
every chance to link liquor with the drug habits. What makes the
rural lover go wrong? Liquor, always liquor. And hooked up with
liquor must be evil women. The movies have made a goat of liquor."
And an investigator advised the Mayor of Cleveland that, although an
occasional clergyman or educator criticized the movie theaters, 'If
you want to see the motion-picture business flayed alive and its skin
hung up to dry, talk to a saloon-keeper or a pool-room operator or a
prize-fight promoter or the manager of a burlesque show." 37 To the
drys, the early motion pictures were a qualified good, and to the liquor
trade, an unqualified evil.
By 1919, there was a growing movement among the drys to regulate
and censor the motion pictures, although not to prohibit them. For the
drys realized that they had done much to fill the gap of the closed
saloons. One female dry even talked of the "divine right of the weary
brain" to pleasure, and the necessary relaxation which the movie
theaters provided through "the warmth, the low music, the soft light
and the absence of the human voice." She thought that the movies
were not a competition but a help to the home, for whole families
could attend decent films there. The makers of films, however, were
too concerned, as the brewers had been, with profits. If they did not
clean up themselves, they would be cleaned up despite themselves.
Close investigation has discovered that a large percentage of motion
pictures are as harmful to the mind as alcohol is to the body. Many
pictures are vulgar and have a tendency to lower public taste. Most
pictures are melodramatic, stultifying and deadening all tender emo-
tions and injecting into the mind scenes of crime and degradation,
which tend to morbidity." 88
The scandals of Hollywood in the early twenties, the divorce of
Mary Pickford, the deaths of Virginia Rappe and William Deane Tay-
lor and Olive Thomas, led to so much unfavorable publicity that the
motion-picture industry intervened in the celluloid and private lives
of the stars. The chairman of the Republican National Committee,
Will H. Hays, who had conducted President Harding's successful cam-
paign, was called in to become the moral censor of Hollywood, the
THE SPREADING CHANGE/ 321
official adviser against the bad taste that might lead to low profits. At
first he was unsuccessful at stopping the deluge of daring movies
which were assaulting the preconceptions of the small-town mind. The
Middletown screens of 1925 sported a plethora of films about the gay
and immoral doings of the imaginary upper crust of America. Such
films were showing as Alimony "brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies,
champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn,
all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp";
Flaming Youth "neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-
mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers, by an author who didn't
dare sign his name; the truth bold, naked, sensational"; and other
suggestive titles like Married Flirts, Sinners in Silk, Women Who Give,
The Price She Paid, Rouged Lips, and The Queen of Sm. 39 * Although
slow to realize the enormous effect that these visual examples would
have on the manners and morals of the young, the protests of re-
formers and drys soon gathered momentum, and led to further regu-
lation.
In 1933, the Motion Picture Research Council publicized the fact
that nearly thirty million young people under the age of twenty-one
visited the cinema each week. There they saw pictures, of which three-
quarters dealt with crime, sex, and love. The films were concerned
chiefly with the wealthy, and their violent and amoral lives. In only
one-third of these pictures was there any effort by the hero or heroine
to marry for love. Such revelations led to action by the Roman Catho-
lic Church, which formed a Legion of Decency to boycott films that
might harm its communicants, and the establishment in Hollywood of
the "Breen Office" to ensure that the right always won on the screen,
and that the law was always upheld. 40
But in the same year that some prohibition of immorality in films
was achieved in Hollywood, the prohibition of liquor was ended
More than any other mass medium, the movies had attacked the
ideology of the drys and their primal faith that liquor was a sinful
drink. A study in 1932 showed that films approved of drinking in a
ratio of more than three to one. 41 Another study found that there was
some reference to liquor in three films out of four. Moreover, while
the hero drank in two out of five films and the heroine in one out of
five, the villain swilled liquor in only one film out of ten. 42 There had
been a sharp shift from the popular films of the boom, which still
* Similar lurid titles graced the stage of the time: Yemng Blood, Sex, She
Wouldn't Say No, Strictly Dishonorable, Bad Girl, and Greeks Had a Name For It.
Drinking was prevalent on stage throughout prohibition, although what was liquor
to the audience was cold tea to the actors. There were even two moderate plays
on the subject, Speakeasy and Light Wines and Beer.
322 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
preserved traces of the old rural morality, to the films of "realism" and
violence, which were popular in the depression. A comparison of two
successful pictures, one released at the peak of boom and one in the
trough of slump, gives some idea of how films dealt with prohibition
and reflected the changing attitudes of the time to that issue.
Lights of New Yorfc was the first all-talking motion picture. It was
released in 1928. Its plot was simple. Two young men from Main
Street are tricked by two city slickers into investing their all in a
Broadway speak-easy, disguised as a barbershop. The Main Street
hero meets his long-lost Main Street heroine, who is dancing in a night
club. Both hate the wicked big-city life, which is shown in great de-
tail; but they cannot return home to their small country town as fail-
ures. Eventually, the villainous owner of the night club murders a
policeman over some cases of bootleg whisky, symbolically named
Old Century. The villain tries to frame the hero with these cases of
whisky and to have him "taken for a ride." He fails and is assassinated
by his jealous mistress. The hero and heroine are suspected of the
crime, but are saved by the confession of the murderess. The tough
cop, spitting out a kindly thought from under his snap-brim hat, then
delivers the moral from wicked New York to good Main Street: "If
ye take my advice, ye'll get on the first train to the mountains an' the
flowers an* the trees, an' leave the roarin' parties of the city to roar on
without ye."
The film follows perfectly the pattern and assumptions of the old
revival sermon. It makes out that cities are bad and that Main Street
is good. It describes the life of sin in titillating detail, only to eschew
the attraction of evil by making the lovers flee back to home, sweet
home. It presumes that liquor was only drunk in the cities, and that
prohibition was a joke there. City life is merely the distance from one
speak-easy to another, or the interval between night clubs. Country
life is the love of white-haired mothers and pure virgins, who com-
pletely trust their men. Lights of New York was a great success in
America, since it provided an overdressed version of the same old
hokum that had shocked and flattered the small town for a hundred
years.
But the success of James Cagney in The Public Enemy provided a
new type of screen hero and heroine for the hard-bitten audience of
1932. Mae West played in her first picture, Night After Night, with
George Raft as the hero. He is also the owner of a speak-easy, but he
is tough, brutal, a slum kid and a crook, lusting after the culture which
he can never acquire. There is no pandering to rural virtue in dialogue
or plot. When Raft asks one of his mistresses, 'What's with you?" she
replies, "Three cocktails." When one of Raft's clientele tells him that
From the Warner Brothers picture Lights of New fork
NIGHT CLUB ENTERTAINMENT
she has just got her divorce and he replies that he never knew she was
married, her answer is, "Joe, youVe been watching me too closely/'
The once-rich society flapper, with whom Raft falls in love, is roughed
up by him and told that she is just "another dame with a skirt on."
The only difference between her and a cheap girl is how she manicures
her nails. Raft's brutality is greeted by her adoring devotion. He then
walks out to save his speak-easy from a hijacking attempt by a rival
gang of crooks. The moral of the film seems to be that the crooks are
loved by the cultured, and that the way to the rich and wenching life
is the ownership of an illegal night club. No policeman appears in the
piece at all, not even as comic relief. Vice is rewarded, and virtue
ignored. Indeed, one line from Mae West summarizes the gospel of
the whole film. In reply to a girl who admires her jewelry with the
remark, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!" Mae West says, rolling
up a flight of stairs with her inimitable shake, "Goodness had nothing
to do with it, dearie."
The millions who liked and laughed at such films were not the
millions who would vote against the repeal of prohibition. For better
324 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
or for worse, the American films of the twenties had spread every-
where the desire to imitate the life of the rich, whether they were rich
by inheritance or rich by lawless grabbing. And the life of the rich
included liquor, its use and abuse. The usual drunkard on films,
whether portrayed by Ben Turpin or Charlie Chaplin or W. C. Fields,
was more a comedian than a menace to society. The usual hero,
trapped into bootlegging by necessity, was less a crook than a creature
of circumstance. And the criminal owners of speak-easies rose from the
role of villain to displace the hero himself. In 1931, Alva Johnstone
was to congratulate Al Capone ironically for carrying Broadway and
Hollywood on his shoulders, and for solving the problems of the
motion-picture industry. He had replaced sex with violence on the
screen. "The movie massacres were like a breath of fresh air after all
the impropriety and misconduct of the films/' 43 Johnstone did not men-
tion, however, that liquor played an integral part in portraying both
sex and violence, and was glorified in the glorification of both. If the
picture theaters were at first the rivals of the saloons, at the last they
were the deluge of the drys.
The third carrier of change was the radio. The Census of 1930 re-
ported that after less than a decade of the industry more than twelve
million American families owned radios. By the end of 1933, there
were seventeen million radios in the country. Two in every five vil-
lagers and one in every five farmers owned a set. 44 The ubiquitous
voices of the air brought a standard pattern of culture to the land,
based on the wish of the advertisers to please the greatest possible
number and to offend the least. Thus, although praise of liquor was
prohibited from the air, jokes at the expense of prohibition and the
influence of city manners spread unchecked. Moreover, the political
use of the radio by Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a great popular sup-
port to the economic methods which he advocated, such as repeal.
The radio was yet another powerful instrument in bringing the city
to the country.
The strength of the drys was based on the small town. Yet their
control of methods of instruction and entertainment through churches
and Chautauquas and isolation was broken down by the invasion of
the automobiles and the movies and the radios. And this was no bad
thing, even if some evils resulted from the new way of life, and even
if national prohibition was destroyed in the process. As an analyst of
the small town wrote in 1938:
The people living in the little town have a richer life than their
parents did. They can reach a motion-picture theater by a twenty-
minute drive, they have radios, and they think nothing of jaunts to
THE SPREADING CHANGE/ 325
Boston, New York or Canada that many of the old residents never
made in an entire life-time. The point is not that Me is better or worse.
It is different. The town is no longer self-contained. Invention and
change have let the inhabitants out, the outer world in. 45
The changes of the new technology were irresistible. Isolation and
ignorance became more difficult to conserve as communications be-
came easier to develop. The psychology of prohibition in the small
town was gradually replaced by a yearning for the life of the big city.
Yet this metamorphosis of the country mind was not confined to the
rural West and South. It was also evident in the urban literature of
America, whose writers gave up their Jamaicas of Remembrance for
an attack on abstinence.
CHAPTER
17
Jamaicas of Remembrance
Did it occur to you that personal liberty
Is liberty of the mind,
Rather than of the belly?
EDGAR LEE MASTERS
PROHIBITION produced no great literature. There was no Uncle
Tom's Cabin of the dry cause, although the drys hoped in 1931 that
Upton Sinclair's The Wet Parade might be this long-awaited work of
art. It was not. Nothing replaced the most popular of all the temper-
ance novels, T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, written in 1854,
and the play adapted from it, The Drunkard. Such different crusaders
as Carry Nation and W. C. Fields played in The Drunkard, and it is
the play with the longest consecutive run in the history of the world,
over nineteen years without a break in the city of Los Angeles. In it
and the novel, the classic conflict between good and evil, God and the
saloon, pure small girls and unredeemed villains, is fought out to the
last breath of sentiment and the last drop of innocent and guilty blood.
The saloonkeeper, Simon Slade, gradually degenerates along with his
inn, taking his family to perdition with him. The corrupter, Harvey
Green, is the cause of ruin. "In what broad, black characters was the
word TEMPTER written on his face! How was it possible for anyone
to look thereon, and not read the warning inscription!" Only the
drunken Joe Morgan is saved by the death of his little daughter, hit on
the forehead by a beer mug in a saloon brawl. She dies, forgiving her
father and making him swear to the pledge, for she is, as her mother
says, "better fitted for heaven than for earth/' Thus the good end
chastened but happy, and the bad end chastized and unhappy, and the
moral of the piece shines through any faults of characterization and
style. 1
The temporary alliance between the prohibition movement and the
progressive movement led to some minor works by the social novelists
of the time, Jack London and Upton Sinclair. London's autobiography
326
JAMAICAS OF REMEMBRANCE / 327
of his drunkard's career, John Barleycorn, written in 1913, is as honest
and moving a piece of work as he ever wrote. There is a terror of
truth in his own knowledge of himself, a prophecy of his inexorable
end through liquor and depression. The melancholia which drove him
to drink drove him to that fatalism which made him write, "Suicide,
quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the
years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever es-
capes making the just, due payment." 2 The gift of alcohol was the
dreadful "white logic/' This revealed to the depressive drinker the
veiled, bloody truths of existence and destroyed the illusions neces-
sary for happy living, or living at all. London was a pessimist by
nature, a believer in the tragic and fatal destiny of mankind. His
dislike of liquor, his belief that it was a habit-forming poison which
degenerated the race, his faith that women would preserve sinful men
from their temptations all these creeds turned John Barleycorn into
marvelous dry propaganda. London's own tragic death made him ap-
pear the victim of the alcohol poison which he could not avoid.
When Upton Sinclair, dedicated to the same goals of his youth,
wrote his indictment of liquor, The Cup of Fury, London's name led
the list of those famous people known to Sinclair who had destroyed
themselves by drink. O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Eugene Debs, Sinclair
Lewis, Isadora Duncan, Sherwood Anderson, all figured in Upton
Sinclair's appeal for prohibition. 3 But they were dead, while Sinclair
lived on into a time when national prohibition was thirty years gone
and gone for good.
Yet, although prohibition produced no great literature, the reaction
to its morality and psychology produced much. The rigid tenets of the
evangelical creed, which made inhibition and self-control the highest
good, helped to cause a tension in some writers that made their
creation possible. Mark Twain puts this conflict amusingly, although it
gave him enough woe.
Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one
duty to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occa-
sions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. ... In
my early manhood and in middle life I used to vex myself with re-
forms every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these
divergencies for, whether the resulting deprivations were long or
short, the rewarding pleasure which I got out of the vice when I
returned to it always paid me for all that it cost. 4
But if the revolts of a Twain against nineteenth-century morality
were mild, those of an Emily Dickinson were more extreme. To her,
the philosophy of restraint and inhibition was a crime. She was in
328 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
rebellion against repression, in search of that liberty which America
promised and American churches denied. In one charming poem, she
spoke of this urge for an intoxication of the spirit.
A Drunkard cannot meet a Cork
Without a Revery -
And so encountering a Fly
This January Day
Jamaicas of Remembrance stir
That send me reeling in
The moderate drinker of Delight
Does not deserve the spring
Of juleps, part are in the Jug
And more are in the joy
Your connoisseur in Liquors
Consults the Bumble Bee 5
With the muckraking novelists and social writers and poets, Theo-
dore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and
Sherwood Anderson, the revolt against the mentality of prohibi-
tion became more explicit. Their writings reflected a philosophy of
pragmatism, an ethical relativism, a wish to see the world as it did,
as it ate and drank and had sex. Although there was a sentimentalism
born of a long literary tradition in the writings of these five men, their
attack on the country morality of the time was new. Masters's sneer
at dry motives was uncomfortably accurate in his Spoon River An-
thology.
. . . Or do you think the poker room
Of Johnnie Taylor 9 and Burchard's bar
Had been closed up if the money lost
And sr>ent for beer had not been turned,
By closing them, to Thomas Bhodes
For larger sales of shoes and blankets,
And children's cloaks and gold-oak cradles?
Why, a moral truth is a hollow tooth
Which must be propped with gold*
And Sherwood Anderson, who began the whole school of writing of
the Lost Generation, was not kind in his picture of lusting ministers
and drunken farmers in his Winesburg, Ohio. 7
Denis Brogan has emphasized the importance of the wet and dry
issue to American literature. It was, in Brogan's opinion, almost as
devastating as the fight between the clericals and anticlericals in
France. Indeed, it was a fight between clericals and anticlericals.
It mixed up Catholics, romantics, expatriates, libertarians, art-for-
art's-sakers in a battle for free drinking, evolution, free thought, free
JAMAICAS OF REMEMBRANCE/ 329
love, Al Smith, Freud, Joyce, Karl Adam, Karl Marx, Russian movies,
against traditionalists, Jew-baiters, Catholic-haters, political and social
conservatives, moralists, legalists. Critics or so-called critics ceased
to ask "What is he saying? How well does he say it?" and fell back on
the simpler "Is he on our side?" It was possibly a greater crime in
Stuart Sherman to defend prohibition than to be an academic critic
and disciple of Paul Elmer More. 8
On the wet side stood Hemingway, Dos Passos, Caldwell, Cabell,
Cummings, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, Scott Fitzgerald, Faulk-
ner, and Thomas Wolfe. The critics aligned with them were Mencken,
Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson, and Harold Stearns. Against them
stood the last of the old muckrakers, Upton Sinclair, and the followers
of the tradition of James and Howells, such as Edith Wharton, with
their critical allies, More and Sherman, Irving Babbitt and William C.
Brownell. Uneasily, in no man's land, stood Sinclair Lewis, with his
savage eye and George F. Babbitt heart, and Willa Gather, whose
"world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts/' 9
Posterity has sanctioned the rebels and repeal, not the defenders
and prohibition. Yet, the rebels at home suffered the same eclipse as
the drys in the depression. Vanity Fair went into a common grave with
the Eighteenth Amendment. Mencken could warn Paul Elmer More
in 1922, "The Goths and the Huns are at the gate, and as they batter
wildly they throw dead cats, perfumed lingerie, tracts against pre-
destination, and the bound files of the Nation, the Freeman and the
New Republic over the fence/' 10 He could get hordes of young intel-
lectuals to attack with the syringes of their contempt "the messianic
delusion [which] is our national disease/' 11 But the contempt of the
twenties for reformers and their works because all reform seemed
to be garbed in the hypocritical shroud of prohibition was super-
seded by the reforming drive of the thirties, when economic and social
cure-alls pushed Mencken's diatribes into the dusty nostalgias of aging
minds. The repeal of prohibition itself left the New Deal to promise
new heavens on earth for those who looked for Messiahs. The pre-
occupation of the twenties with sex and liquor was displaced by a
more basic search for food. For a rebellion against reform can only
flourish on Easy Street.
But prohibition also sent the wet rebels abroad. They went to Paris
and followed the creed of Hemingway's Lieutenant Frederick Henry,
"I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and
drink and sleep with Catherine." 12 The trinity of food and sex and
liquor, the directness of action and thought and word, which is the
last refuge of sophistication, the search for the simple life and the
American Adam, which had once been the mythological right of the
330 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
frontiersman and the Indian these were what the Lost Generation
sought in the Select and the Ritz Bar. They sought an escape from
that Puritan morality which they could never escape. In their flight,
they created great works, which they thought sprang from nihilism
and Dada, but which really sprang from their dream of the lost youth
of a great nation, now corrupted in their minds by the materialism of
easy money and the caricature of idiotic reforms. Yet, the expatriates,
in their prohibition of the mentality of prohibition, did not give up
the code of the drys. The drinking and the girls were taken less for
themselves than for the cult of taking them. There was a sort of reli-
gious dedication to the Pamplona trail. 13 Liquor was drunk not only
for enjoyment but as the liquid food of emancipation. For, as William
Carlos Williams wrote, ". . . whisky was to the imagination of the
Paris of that time like milk to a baby." 14 In this desperate reaction
from prohibition, the Lost Generation prohibited itself from the need
to understand complex humanity and its urgent problems. The escape
from prohibition was the escape into egocentricity, and the blindness
of the drys to anything but their own cause was matched by the blind-
ness of the self-styled American expatriates to everything but the
satisfaction of their own despair.
But some could neither fight at home nor flee abroad. Hard as they
tried to escape from the social responsibilities of their time, their own
lives involved them in the tragedies of a nation. Scott Fitzgerald was
one of these. At first, he reflected current Princetonian manners in
This Side of Paradise, and was surprised that the novel should become
the pattern of two generations, first that of his own, and then that of
his parents. The year of 1922 had been the peak of the younger gener-
ation. Although the Jazz Age went on afterwards,
... it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a
children's party taken over by the elders, leaving the children puzzled
and rather neglected and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders,
tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered
that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a
whoop the orgy began. 15
The writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, who had forged somewhat
unconsciously the image of an era, was broken by that image, even as
the image itself was broken by the Great Crash and the depression.
Fitzgerald had seen the portents in the "widespread neurosis" which
began in 1927. Contemporaries of his had begun to commit suicide.
A speak-easy in Chicago killed one; a speak-easy in New York killed
another. A maniac killed a third with an ax in a lunatic asylum, where
they were being confined. The bloodiness of living was beating its way
JAMAICAS OF REMEMBRANCE/ 331
into the dream of boom, until, by 1931, the Jazz Age seemed as distant
as the days before the First World War. "It was borrowed time any-
how the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance
of grand dues and the casualness of chorus girls." 16
The shock of consciousness was so great to Fitzgerald that he
cracked up, and even forgot his lack of political commitment enough
to flirt with the economic certainty of Marxism. He also kept to the
bottle and the hard-drinking habits of prohibition; for, as George
Bernard Shaw said of the Irishman, his imagination is such a torture
that he cannot bear it without whisky. 17 Fitzgerald's prophecies and
tragedies again ran neck and neck with the fact. In his finest novel,
The Great Gatsby, the hero, Jay Gatsby, builds up a dream life of
luxury on an estate at West Egg. The money of his fortune comes
from crooked deals associated with prohibition. 18 The people who pass
through the parties there are as temporary as the visitors to the speak-
easies; Jay Gatsby's wealth and love of Daisy vanish like the boom.
Only in the mind of the narrator from the Midwest is Gatsby remem-
bered, hopelessly, lovingly. For Gatsby, like his America, remained
true to the illusion of the rich and careless society which finally
destroyed and ignored both him and his creator.
Another great writer who was damned by prohibition was Ring
Lardner. He was also a victim to the heavy drinking of intellectuals
during prohibition, when alcohol turned from being a mild aid to
dining and conversation into almost a primary and constant necessity. 19
Lardner mocked at prohibition, but was drowned in a personal melan-
choly which drove him to the oblivion of bootleg liquor. He found in
1928 that prohibition had "sure been a godsend in a whole lot of
ways/' It had given lucrative employment to a great many men who
did not have anything before except their courage. It had cemented
the friendship between America and Canada. It had given women a
new interest in life and something to talk about besides hair and
children. And it had made the government appreciate the enormous
extent of the coast line and the difficulty of defending it against in-
vasion. Lardner concluded his remarks with an accurate forecast of his
own and prohibition's future. "As far as it affecting the present and
future consumption of alcohol is concerned, why a person that said
that drinking in the U. S. was still in its infancy would be just about
hitting the nail on the hammer." 20
Indeed, as with any revolution, the ones who survived prohibition
best were those who mocked it lightly and skirted it, those who
sniped continually at human folly from the pages of the New Yorker
and the tables of the Algonquin Hotel. Prohibition was neither to be
attacked in a Mencken rage nor defied in a Fitzgerald "collegiate
332 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
drunk.'** It should be defeated with mild quips, like those of Elmer
Davis, who explained away the national tolerance of the Volstead Act
by saying it made any place at all that contained liquor look like a
wild caf. 21 Prohibition was a tragedy only to alcoholics such as
Dorothy Parker's Big Blonde, who regarded prohibition as "only a
basis for jokes" until bootleg liquor made her sodden and suicidal. 22
It was also fatal to those who were trapped and killed by the excesses
of the times, such as Scott Fitzgerald's friends and many thousands of
the nameless murdered. The casual slaughter caused by prohibition
was merely another sign of the contemporary carelessness of the
wealthy and the creative, who would let society go hang as long as
they did not have to be bored by the hanging. Occasionally, however,
the killings of prohibition became too much for some of the sensi-
tive, and provoked such bitter remarks as Ellen Glasgow's, "In the
South we are substituting murder for a mint julep and calling it
progress/' 23
With the depression, the intellectuals forgot about the war between
the wets and the drys, the clericals and the anticlericals, and turned
to economics and welfare and social analyses. Sex and God and liquor
were shoved to one side to make way for life and Marx and food.
Federal writers' and artists' and theater projects employed those
creators who could not make a living. The government intervened to
feed those who had, less than a decade before, mocked at all govern-
ment. The contempt of Stearns's thirty young intellectuals of 1922 for
their crass mother-country was replaced by their content in 1938 for
the efforts she was making to rescue herself and them. The prohibition
mentality, which had seemed stupid when restricted to banning liquor
in time of boom, seemed sensible enough when applied to personal
sacrifice to save a nation's economy. When Stearns himself returned
with other American exiles after his "thirteen years' French Sab-
batical," it was to find a new hope in a new country, a new willingness
to deny self for the good of everybody, "the communism beside which
the shabby political doctrine of envy usually called by that name is as
evanescent as steam the communism of the spirit." 24 Only with such
a feeling, could personal prohibition have some meaning in the in-
creased liberty of all.
The excesses of the intellectuals in the twenties were sometimes a
match for the excesses of the wets and drys. The intellectuals gave up
their duty to defend the cause of reason against the propaganda of
prohibition. When such a good writer as Sinclair Lewis could have a
* Walter Winchell nastily defined a "collegiate drunk" as a state in which the
drinker pretended to be completely drunk on two glasses of whisky.
JAMAICAS OF REMEMBRANCE / 333
great popular success with his travesty of a satire, Elmer Gantry,
moderation was at a discount in America. When widespread applause
could greet the remark that the center of American culture, New York,
was an alien island off the eastern coast of the United States, rolling
with wealth, bursting with pride, and scorning the Ten Command-
ments, reason was a drug on the market. 25 Indeed, the only reaction
to such excesses and follies among intelligent people could be the
despair of a Joseph Wood Krutch, who defined the "modern temper" as
a disgust with all theories and philosophies, a sort of expectant hope-
lessness, a resignation with the human condition. "Ours is a lost cause
and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not,
for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die as men than live
as animals/' 26 Yet the prohibitionists refused to recognize that their
cause, which was the cause of the human race, was lost. To the last,
they insisted that prohibition made men live properly and alcohol
made them die like animals.
CHAPTER
18
The Wet Counterattack
Those who deliberately violate the law and disregard the
Constitution because of their appetite for cocktails will some
day face the situation where workingmen who hunger for
bread will defy other laws as well as the Constitution and
appropriate for themselves that which will satisfy their
hunger. The slogan "To hell with the Constitution" is a
boomerang.
CHARLES STELZLE
THE FAILURE of the enforcement of national prohibition created
great difficulties for the drys. Although they claimed that enforce-
ment was improving each year, the progress was merely comparative,
from the worst possible to the worse. The evils of prohibition, in turn,
gave heart to the wets, whose contention that prohibition could not be
enforced seemed to be true. Giant wet organizations, formed to fight
the power of the Anti-Saloon League, seemed to spring up like genies
from old bottles. For the first time, the dry pressure groups had a
similar and challenging enemy to face.
The drys sought to draw attention to conspiracies abroad in order
to explain the failure of prohibition at home. It was an old trick,
recommended by Machiavelli. Congress itself, thankful to be spared
the necessity of appropriating more money for home enforcement,
spent the early days of prohibition trying to extend the provisions of
the Volstead Act to the Philippines and to the American consular
districts of China. It was part of a "fresh advance on a broad front
west toward Asia/' 1 The dry leaders said that the greater part of the
liquor in the country came from foreign rumrunners and conspirators
overseas, who were attacking the global prohibition revolution by try-
ing to wreck it in the country of its birth. Roy Haynes, the Prohibition
Commissioner, reported the meeting of an antiprohibition congress in
Brussels, attended by representatives from Belgium, Canada, Spain,
Finland, France, England, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and
Switzerland. There, "a world fight against prohibition was planned,
with the United States as the center of the wet campaign." A certain
334
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 335
Count de Mun, of France, was placed at the head of an "international
committee of defense to bring the dry people back into the wet fold/' 2
With such delusions of international conspiracy, the drys explained
their lack of success^
But, by 1926, prohibition was seen to be a failure at home and
abroad by all except the drys. The New York World ran an article on
the ebbing tide of prohibition. The article pointed out that Communist
Russia had allowed the sale of vodka again after 1921. Almost all of
the Canadian provinces had also dropped their dry laws. Turkey had
established a state liquor monopoly in 1924, while referendums in
Norway and Sweden had gone against total prohibition. England and
France and Germany had loosened their liquor regulations. The article
concluded, "The cause of temperance in many quarters of the globe
exhibits a steady and hopeful progress that might well be envied by
this Nation, in which fanatical legislation has done so much to destroy
it" 3
With the failure of the world prohibition revolution, the drys took
refuge in isolationism. America was better than the rest of the world
and should stay that way. But prohibition had the reverse effect on
the wets, who became more international in their choice of liquor and
holiday resorts and way of thinking. Indeed, the lapse of the Canadian
provinces from prohibition to liquor sales was partly in answer to the
enormous profits brought to Canada by smuggling and thirsty Ameri-
can tourists. More than a million American automobiles crossed yearly
into Canada throughout the twenties. King George V of England, who
thought American prohibition was an "outrage," was reported to be
delighted by a contemporary rhyme:
Four and twenty Yankees,
Feeling mighty dry,
Took a trip to Canada
And bought a case of rye.
When the case was opened
The Yanks began to sing
"To hell with the President!
God save the King!"*
Everywhere a contagion of foreign travel caught the imagination of
the newly rich in America. They followed the advice of the song, 'Way
Down Yonder in the Cornfield":
Forty miles from whisky
And sixty miles from gin,
Tm leaving this damn country
For to live a life of sin.
336 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
The answer of the drys to drinking tourists was a recommendation
by William Jennings Bryan that any American tourist seen drinking
overseas should have his passport removed. With such suggestions of
petty coercion, the great international crusade of the prohibitionists
ended. And as their vast ambitions faded and the promised dry
millennium failed to materialize, so their erstwhile supporters blamed
them for being the deceivers of themselves and the whole nation. One
by one, the five hundred thousand "opinion-makers," on whom the drys
had relied to push through their reform, deserted the banner of the
prohibitionists.
It was the loss of the support of the manufacturers, the middle
classes, and the workingmen of America that doomed the drys. What
had been sound eugenics and reform in 1910 was bad economics and
fanaticism in 1930. Moreover, many of the more questionable policies
of the League boomeranged against them. One was the use of smears
in campaigns. When W. E. "Pussyfoot" Johnson confessed that he had
had to lie and bribe and drink to put over national prohibition, telling
enough falsehoods "to make Ananias ashamed of himself," he did not
attract those men who believed in good government as well as the dry
cause. 5 When Wheeler publicly praised the insertion of poison into
industrial alcohol on the theory that those who drank it were com-
mitting deliberate suicide, he did not persuade others of the humani-
tarian aims of the League. 6 When Purley A. Baker advocated the use
of economic boycott to drive wet businessmen to their knees, he could
hardly be said to have the interests of industry at heart. 7 The truth
was that the League was only concerned with the interests of the
League, and it would use any methods to further its cause. Its good
was prohibition, and its good was revolutionary in judging others and
justifying itself by the sole touchstone of that good.
The League's techniques of lobbying might have been forgiven if
the League, like the corporation lobbyists, had been discreet. But the
dry leaders preferred to blazon abroad their cleverness, writing up
their own smartness for the columns of the press. This helped their
cause immediately, in the same way as terrorism immediately helps
the cause of invasion by bringing about a universal panic. But, in the
long run, this boasting damaged their cause irretrievably. For those
who have been deceived into fear are unlikely to respect the em-
ployers of those deceits, once they have revealed themselves. When
the League proclaimed itself in 1918 "the strongest political organ-
ization in the world," it remained powerful just as long as it persuaded
others that it was the strongest. But the moment that the rival wet
organizations appeared stronger than the League, the League was
doubly lost. For boast of strength breeds real strength in opposition.
"HERE'S How!"
THE RESPECTABLE REPEALERS
ONCE THE Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act were accom-
plished facts, the drys had new foes. Those who wished to drink
liquor by inclination rather than sell liquor by profession began to
protest and organize themselves. The American Federation of Labor
staged a spectacular rally in Washington, and its president Samuel
Gompers warned the House Judiciary Committee that such oppressive
legislation as the abolition of beer would lead to a rise of Bolshevism
338 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
and radicalism in America. 8 An Association Opposed to National Pro-
hibition, financed by hotel and real estate interests, asked all malcon-
tent wets to wear a flower in their buttonholes on "Daisy Day/" 9 And
quietly in Washington, a Captain William H. Stayton formed the
nucleus of the wet answer to the Anti-Saloon League, the Association
Against the Prohibition Amendment. But these tiny beginnings of wet
opposition were too late. By failing to organize an opposition outside
the liquor trade, the wets chose to lose to the drys by default. 10
The chief dry lobby and wet lobby, the Anti-Saloon League and the
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, were both investi-
gated by the Senate, in 1926 and in 1930. The investigations merely
showed how faithfully the organized drys and the organized wets
imitated each other. Indeed, in the summary of his evidence before
the Reed Committee in 1926, Wayne B. Wheeler admitted as much.
He answered the charge that the League's political methods were un-
ethical by saying falsely that they were the identical methods used by
the liquor trade to control the politics of the nation for many years,
and by saying truthfully that the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment had copied these methods to fight the League. 11
The Association used precisely the same threats and organization at
the grass roots as the League had. It supported all wets in elections,
regardless of their party or their personal morality. It kept records of
the votes of Congress on wet and dry measures, and circulated these
records to its members. It subsidized research studies and put out
propaganda to show the failure of prohibition. It encouraged the sup-
port of businessmen for economic reasons. It tried to place favorable
articles in the newspapers and magazines. Indeed, in every political
action, it was the Siamese twin of the Anti-Saloon League.
There was, however, one significant difference between the two,
which the drys were quick to point out, since their mentality fed on
theories of conspiracy and the machinations of Wall Street. While
nine-tenths of the money donated to the League came through the
churches from small contributors, three-quarters of the money given
to the Association in 1929 came from the pockets of fifty-three million-
aires. 12 The Association was definitely backed by the very wealthy,
who hoped for relief from corporation and income taxes if a tax on
liquor once again brought in money to the United States Treasury.
The roll of contributors to the Association is a roll of the privileged,
containing the names of three Du Pont brothers and John J. Raskob
and Edward S. Harkness. It was unfortunate that the genuine inter-
est of these men in personal liberty and repeal could be construed as
an interest in the financial benefits which repeal might bring to them.
The case against them was even more damning when the roll of the
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 339
Liberty League in the thirties revealed the same names that had
backed the Association, the names of millionaires who opposed the
taxes of New Deal economics in the name of personal liberty.
Nevertheless, support for the Association did not come directly from
the liquor trade. Captain Stayton testified that a limit of one-twentieth
of the total budget of the Association was allowed to be given by
liquor interests. The rest was donated by other kinds of businessmen. 13
And this presented a new problem to the drys. They themselves had
solicited the support of businessmen such as S. S. Kresge on the
grounds that prohibition brought untold financial benefits to industry.
Thus it was difficult for the League to resent an Association which
sought the help of businessmen on the grounds of the economic bene-
fits of repeal. Moreover, Pierre Du Pont, the head of the Association,
had himself been a dry at the beginning of the twenties, and had only
switched to the side of the wets when the economic benefits of prohibi-
tion appeared to be less than those of repeal. 14
The decline of business support of the dry cause is reflected in the
sorry tale of the League's finances which fell by one-fifth between
1920 and 1926 and by over one-half within the following six years.
The final blow to the League was the defection of John D. Rocke-
feller, Jr., from the dry cause to the wet cause in 1932. Except for the
faithful Kresge, who was too embarrassed financially to pay his
pledged sums to the League, only Henry Ford was left among the
billionaires to back prohibition with words rather than capital. He had
written that if booze ever came back to the United States he was
through with manufacturing. He was not interested in putting auto-
mobiles "into the hands of a generation soggy with drink/' 15 Repeal
came, but Ford went right on manufacturing.
Other wet organizations, staffed from the ranks of the respectable,
were working for modification and repeal. A group like the Moderation
League, formed in 1923, may have produced wrong statistics in proof
of the failure of law enforcement, but its membership included such
unimpeachable men as Elihu Root and Henry S. Pritchett, President
of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The
increasing opposition by the lawyers of America to prohibition, which
culminated in a two-thirds vote against the Eighteenth Amendment
by the American Bar Association in 1930, could not be brushed aside
by dry apologists as a demonstration of "the supercilious attitude of
these great lawyers and their contempt for law." 16 Nor could the group
of young repealers known as the Crusaders be wholly dismissed as a
band of "young millionaires whose sense of social responsibility was
perhaps not overwhelming, the sons of the munition manufacturers
and Wall Street magnates," whose only object was "to help their
340 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
fathers get rid of their income and corporation taxes.'* 17 Whatever the
motives of these repeal groups and the Association Against the Prohibi-
tion Amendment, they were representative of the majority of Ameri-
cans in their wish for repeal, as the testimony of the labor leaders
before the Wickersham Commission demonstrated. They can only be
called guilty of undue influence in their insistence on the unconditional
surrender of the drys. Although both major parties agreed to provide
against the return of the saloon in 1932, the influence of the wet
lobbies upon Congress was so great that repeal was passed without
any such safeguards. The victorious wets were no more ready to
compromise than the victorious drys had been.
The intemperance of the winning wets was an exact replica of the
excesses of the drys in their palmy days. If the Anti-Saloon League had
accused the liquor trade of being more interested in profits than in
the virtues of strong drink, so did the wets accuse the professional dry
agitators of supporting their cause merely for their salaries. With
Senator Reed, they denounced the League as a collection of Richmond
Pearson Hobsons, "for God and morality at a price/' 18 That this charge
did not explain the labor of a Wheeler, who worked himself to death
with assiduous devotion for a salary of $8000 a year, did not matter.
The charge was made often enough to convince most people in a
dollar-mad era that every reformer merely wished to feather his own
nest and keep himself in a job. When Mayor Jimmy Walker charac-
terized a reformer as a guy who floated through a sewer in a glass-
bottomed boat, he was paying tribute to the rich who could afford the
expense of glass boats as much as to fools who floated in such insane
contraptions.
Even the attacks which the dry lobbies had made on the liquor
lobby in Washington were now turned against them. Wayne Wheel-
er s claim that the Anti-Saloon League had spent $50,000,000 to put
over prohibition made it appear the League had bought the Eight-
eenth Amendment. 19 The conspiracy theories which the drys had
applied against the liquor trade were now leveled at themselves. They
were the victims of their own victims. The wets hounded them con-
tinuously for lobbying and "government by propaganda."
In a popular series of articles in the Chicago Tribune, Arthur Sears
Henning made an appeal to the conservative strongholds of prohibi-
tion sentiment by attacking the interlocking directorates of the dry
lobbies, the pacifists, and the radicals at Washington. He denounced
the "new lobbying" perfected by the church politicians, with its use
of church voters, "canned" resolutions, tons of literature, chain letters,
petitions, telegrams, "honorariums" to dry speakers, and "compen-
sation" to favorable small-town newspaper editors. Moreover, he
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 341
pointed to the misuse of free congressional mailing privileges by dry
Representatives, who sent out their prohibitionist speeches from the
Congressional Record to their constituents through the dry lobbies.
The proliferation of executive secretaries and moral lobbies at Wash-
ington was a menace to fair government. The Anti-Saloon League was
the most powerful lobby of all, "the mightiest engine of propaganda
the world has ever beheld," and the lobby which spent the most
money, about two million dollars a year. 20 There was, by this theory,
a conspiracy of drys and money dedicated to reforming America by
hook, crook, and Good Book.
Others took up the attack. Silas Bent, in Strange Bedfellows, said
that the union of church and state had already come about. "The
churches need no longer persuade; they need but issue a fiat to their
servants in Congress, and the thing is done. They are becoming a little
dizzy with their power. They realize that they have set up a political
engine of infinite possibilities, and the effect upon the ministerial mind
may possibly prove disasterous." 21 According to Bent, the power of
the Federal Council of Churches had caused the abandonment of
Secretary Wilbur's naval program, which was estimated to cost two
billion dollars. The churches were making Congress adopt their poli-
cies of peace without defense and prohibition without the possibility
of enforcement. Bent listed twenty-six religious or dry lobbies in
Washington, which were spending some four million dollars a year
on propaganda in Washington. The Methodist Board of Temperance,
Prohibition and Public Morals claimed to influence the votes of four
and a half million voters, the Anti-Saloon League the votes of twenty
million voters. "It is enough to frighten any Congressmen especially
as the League has a card-index on each 'with special attention to mis-
demeanors.' " 22
Similar attacks even reached Congress. Henry B. Joy sent to the
Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives evidence of the
interlocking directorates of the Anti-Saloon League and the Federal
Council of Churches. League leaders such as Bishops Nicholson- Shd
Cannon, and Cherrington and McBride, held powerful positions within
the Council of the Churches. Joy reminded the Judiciary Committee
that the duty of Congress was to the public and to the Constitution,
"not to the Protestant Church hierarchy." The self -assumed claim of the
Anti-Saloon League and of the Federal Council of Churches to repre-
sent twenty-five million communicants should be disrupted and ex-
posed. 23
The truth of these attacks did not matter so much as the fact that
they were made and spread abroad. Although, in the short term, the
attacks seemed to confirm the claim of the dry lobbies to huge in-
342 /THE BLIGHT OF KEPEAL
fluence and power, in the long run the dry committees suffered for
their presumption. Once their methods and pretensions were exposed,
their so-called followers refused to follow them. The revelation of the
workings of the skeleton within the body of the evangelical churches
led the flesh of the prohibition movement to desert the dry bone. The
massive revolt of the South from prohibition in Congress was less a
revolt from dry ideology than from ecclesiastical leadership. More-
over, the liberal element among the evangelical churches genuinely
wished to concentrate on wider social problems than the narrow war
against liquor. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, went so far
as to abolish its dry lobby after repeal, in the interests of general wel-
fare as much as economy. For, as Bishop Mouzon said in an oblique
assault on the head of the dry lobby, Bishop Cannon, "We used to
have a Board of Temperance and Social Service. It paid mighty little
attention to social service. Its attention was devoted principally to
devising political methods to get rid of liquor." 24
This perversion of some American churches into political action led
many of their fervent believers to support repeal as a method of free-
ing their churches from pursuit of the false god of the dry lobbies.
Their wish was to loosen what Congressman Boylan, of New York,
called "the unholy alliance existing between many of the God-fearing
people of this country and the bootleggers, hi-jackers, extortionists,
and kidnapers/' 25 Indeed, they would have supported the wet cause
in larger numbers if the wet lobbies had not shown the same intoler-
ance and fanaticism as the drys. Senator Glass actually accused the
wet pressure groups in the Senate of "that sort of tyranny of spirit,
that sort of mistaken feeling of domination, that almost literally des-
troyed the Anti-Saloon League, and wrought a damage to the churches
and to religion that will not be repaired in the next half a century.* 26
But if their methods and their propaganda boomeranged against the
dry lobbies, little hurt them more than the stand taken against them
by their favorite ally, the women of America. Major Henry H. Curran,
President of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, gave
the wet women the credit for the sudden and melodramatic collapse
of prohibition. He told Mencken that there was no way for a politician
to avoid their cajoling. Congressmen could not refuse to see them, and
began to fear their entreaties and power. When the wet Women's
Organization numbered over a million members, "the great retreat
began." Curran thought that the fight for repeal
. . . offered the women their first chance to show that they could
think for themselves in politics and, what is more, the first chance to
prove that they had a very real power. The drys had been depicting
all women as natural prohibitionists, which was just as offensive to
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 343
intelligent women as it would have been to intelligent men. So they
leapt at the opportunity to give the dry evangelists a beating. 27
In fact, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the National
American Woman Suffrage Association had already shown the power
of women in politics. Moreover, these groups had been led in their
early days by women who had dedicated their whole lives to reform
and had given up the pleasures of society. The wet women were, how-
ever, a different breed of reformer. Their organization was founded
in 1929 by Mrs. Charles H. Sabin, the wife of the treasurer of the
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, and a leader of the
smartest set in New York society. 28 Modeling her methods on those of
her husband's organization, which was careful to choose a "man of
reputation" to head each state group, Mrs. Sabin took her lieutenants
from among her social equals, choosing women such as Mrs. August
Belmont, Mrs. Pierre S. Du Pont, Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll, Mrs. Archi-
bald B. Roosevelt, and Mrs. Coffin Van Rennselaer. 29 This policy
solved the problem of fund-raising and propaganda at one blow. Such
fashionable matrons needed no salaries, had large incomes and little
to do, and could command newspaper space by their actions and
antics. Repeal became the smartest social movement ever put before
American womanhood. An irresistible combination of snobbery and
social betterment was offered to its adherents. To be one of the "Sa-
bine Women" was a passport to social acceptance far more sure than
was once rape by a Roman.
The vicious reaction of the embattled dry women to their new
rivals showed how much they feared the appeal of the rich and the
smart to their own sex. The Georgia Cyclone, Dr. Mary Armor,
promised that, "as to Mrs. Sabin and her cocktail-drinking women, we
will outlive them, out-fight them, out-love them, out-talk them, out-
pray them and out-vote them." 30 A dry newspaper, the American
Independent, said that "these wet women, though rich most of them
are, are no more than the scum of the earth, parading around in skirts,
and possibly late at night flirting with other women's husbands at
drunken and fashionable resorts." 81 To the Prohibition party historian
and leader, such females were "Bacchantian maidens, parching for
wine Wet women who, like the drunkards whom their program will
produce, would take pennies off the eyes of the dead for the ake of
legalizing booze." 32 But for Clarence True Wilson, they were merely
contemptible, "The little group of wine-drinking society women who
are uncomfortable under Prohibition." 33
For the drys knew the enormous damage which the hordes of wet
women did to their propaganda. Prohibition had been put through
344 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
and was defended in terms of the necessary protection of the woman,
the home, and the family. In 1920, every important organization of
women, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the League of
Women Voters, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Law
Enforcement League, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs
had endorsed prohibition. As long as the female sex kept a united
front of organizations in favor of prohibition, no politician would dare
perform an action which might seem to offend more than half of the
electorate. Alfred E. Smith said, "When women entered the fight for
repeal, sanity began to return to the country." 34 He could have added
that sanity also began to return to Congress, once it realized that the
militant wet females could vote as formidably as the militant drys. In
the words of a Southern organizer of the wet women, "One bee is
troublesome, yet not anything to bother about, but when a swarm
gets after a man, he will take to the tall grass without arguing. So when
the women get aroused and combine, the politicians capitulate." 33
Indeed they did, to what Mrs. Sabin called "the largest body of
instructed, knowledgeable women ever let loose in a democracy." 36
The dry organizations would never admit publicly that the wet op-
position to them had changed its nature. To the end, they insisted that
the wet pressure groups were financed in secret by the liquor trade. The
large popular votes in favor of modification and repeal were caused
by "political manipulation in connection with unparalleled vicious
and insidious propaganda, backed by most powerful national and in-
ternational financial interests/' 37 Moreover, there was a complacency
in the dry ranks about the inviolability of the Eighteenth Amendment
as strong as the touching faith of the wets in 1918 that they could pre-
vent the ratification of that amendment indefinitely. As the National
Advocate noticed in October, 1930, there was an "astonishing indiffer-
ence" among many of the friends of prohibition. Meanwhile, "the ene-
mies of the amendment are organized and determined; they have un-
limited financial resources, and they are led by a superb strategy. To
counter all that the orators of the Anti-Saloon League close their eyes
to the danger, and laughingly tell us that prohibition is here to stay.' "
While such assurances may have been necessary to keep up the good
heart of the drys, they gulled the prohibitionists into a false security.
Indeed, their self-confidence was contagious even to their enemies.
Clarence Darrow wrote an article in Vanity Fair at the same time,
pointing out that the Eighteenth Amendment "was not written to
be repealed, but to make a change impossible." There was no hope,
according to Darrow, of two-thirds of the Senate ever voting for re-
peal. Therefore, the only course of the wets was to annul the Volstead
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 345
Act by a simple majority in Congress and suffer the constitutional
amendment forever. 38
This feeling of inviolability and inherent fanaticism among the dry
leaders prevented them from making terms with the wets while they
still had the chance. A bloc of liberal dry leaders tried to persuade
their standpat colleagues to back the resubmission of the Eighteenth
Amendment; their reward would be safeguards from the wets against
the return of the saloon. This plan, however, was opposed by F. Scott
McBride and Arthur J. Barton and other militants. It came to nothing.
And that, in the opinion of Colonel Patrick H. Callahan, an Irish
Catholic dry, was the end of prohibition.
After that it was every man for himself. The dry outfit was divided
and full of dissension. What those fellows lack is the capacity to give
and take. They have no sense of humor. The whole prohibition move-
ment would have been better off if there had been more Irish in it.
You can't do much with Puritans. They are too sure about every-
thing. 39
TURN LABOR, TURN CAPITAL,
THE DRYS had the support of the overwhelming majority of employers
and a small majority of labor leaders in the days before the Eighteenth
Amendment. The actual workings of the prohibition law turned both
of these groups against the drys. For the promise of the law was lost in
the inadequacies of its practice.
The leaders of labor had supported, on the whole, the campaign
against the saloons. But the answer to the heavy drinking of industrial
workers was not to prohibit the saloons and the liquor trade by law
but to provide the workers with acceptable substitutes. As Florence
Kelley pointed out prophetically in 1923:
Forbidding them beer, without affording an available substitute
wherever they suffer from heat and heavy work, is merely tempting
them to violate the Amendment. It is living in a fool's paradise to
suppose that they will not violate it. They will also hate it. They will
believe that they have been deprived, against their will, of beer which
they have found refreshing and have been taught to regard as a food,
and furnished instead with worthless stuff which they dislike. Their
experience will, moreover, be incessantly so interpreted to them by the
advocates of light wines and beer, within and without the ranks of
organized labor. 40
This was precisely what happened. The leaders of organized labor,
who had supported both prohibition and beer, now came out openly
for modification of the Volstead Act to permit the sale of beer and
light wines. Samuel Gompers, the leader of the American Federation
346 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
of Labor, had always taken a position in favor of beer. In 1922, the
conference of the Federation passed a resolution supporting modifica-
tion, and repeated the performance annually. By 1931, Labor's National
Committee for Modification of the Volstead Act had been set up, and
had decided that "Labor, above all, is the sufferer and victim when
liberty is denied." 41 Moreover, many less abstract considerations had
turned the leaders of labor from covert support of prohibition to open
support of repeal.
The first was the failure of the unions in the twenties. Trade-union
membership declined from more than five million members to less
than three and a half million in the decade. The decline was due partly
to prosperity, partly to the racketeering within the labor unions, partly
to the "open shop" plans of the manufacturers, and partly to prohibi-
tion. For prohibition had strengthened the forces of corruption among
employers and union leaders, had made the winning of strikes more
difficult, and had blunted the edges of the class war. "Prohibition is
making a capitalist of the worker," exulted John Cooper, of the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, "creating a general ownership
of the means of production and solving a strife that once seemed per-
petual." 42 But not all labor leaders were so happy at the prospect of
industrial peace. Watching the declining figures of their membership
and fearing the competition of gangsters' and employers' unions, the
labor leaders used prohibition as a means of whipping up class hatred
again. They pointed out truthfully that prohibition was a rich man's
law in fact, even if it applied equally to everybody in theory. They
pointed out what even the wealthy Mrs. Sabin stressed, that the pro-
hibition law was "the greatest piece of class legislation ever enacted
in this country/' 48
This dangerous emphasis on the class aspects of the dry law was
boosted by the wet press and the wealthy wet organizations. Cartoons
and editorials lambasted the drys for their failure to enforce their law,
thus creating one law for the rich, who could get decent drink, and
another for the poor, who could not. It was useless for Ernest Cher-
rington to. protest, "Before prohibition, industry was demanding total
abstinence of the working men, while granting drinking privileges to
the rich. There are some who would like to see that condition restored
with its favored class." 44 The truth was that the rich drank openly and
well under prohibition, while the poor were forced to drink badly. This
increased the resentment of the poor against the rich. In vain, drys
warned the well-to-do that their smartness in drinking was "the rank-
est stupidity, for as a class they would suffer most should the lawless
get control and break up all law." 45 The rich went right on drinking,
while the poor envied them and drank what they could.
"Beer's Bad for Our Workers
The depression brought to a head the resentment of the workers and
the fear of that resentment among their employers. According to
Matthew Woll's accusation in 1931:
Certain great employers supported prohibition so that the workers
might be more efficient to produce, to produce, to produce. Well, we
have produced and six million are unemployed. And prohibition has
produced, too. It has produced the illicit still, the rumrunner, the
speakeasy, the racketeer, graft, corruption, disrespect for law, crime. 46
348 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
This lawlessness, spawned by prohibition, now threatened to spread
with mass unemployment, and shake the roots of society. The same
employers who had supported the Eighteenth Amendment a decade
earlier to benefit themselves and their workers now advocated repeal
to protect themselves from their workers. They hoped that legal beer
would relieve some of the social tensions of the time and lessen class
hatred. Indeed, they even seemed to confirm one of the theses of
Engels, who made out that alcohol was a means of capitalist control as
it made sodden the minds of the workers.
There were other reasons for the manufacturers to change over to
the side of repeal. The first was that prohibition seemed to have lost
them more than it had gained. The deficiency in government revenue
from the liquor tax had been made up by a tax on the incomes of the
wealthy and of corporations. The restoration of these incomes would
be an incentive to business in the depression. Moreover, the labor
unions still existed outside the saloons, and were strengthened when
their members attended sober labor meetings. The failure of federal law
enforcement showed that the private laws of the major companies
against drinking by employees, which were widely used before pro-
hibition, were sufficient to prevent industrial accidents; indeed, it was
preferable for the workers, if drink they must, to drink good beer
rather than bad hooch. Also, the increased consumer market promised
by prohibition had not materialized. In fact, the profits of the liquor
trade had been turned from the pockets of brewers and distillers to the
pockets of criminals, who were making a nuisance of themselves by
trying to muscle into legitimate industry. As a whole, prohibition now
seemed to the manufacturers of America to be more trouble than it
was worth.
Thus labor followed capital in accepting prohibition, and capital
followed labor in accepting modification and repeal. The switchover
of both employers and workers from the side of the drys to the side of
the wets paralleled the switchover of the country. The change was
mostly due to the economic propaganda of the time, and the fact that
years of boom had changed to years of slump. It was strange, as Gil-
bert Seldes noticed, that the American people gave up the right to
drink when they could most afford to drink, and clamored for its res-
toration when they did not even have the price of a bottle of good
Burgundy. 47
Resistance to the drys was contagious. Once their bandwagon to
victory began to stall, the voices of the wets grew bolder. And once
the wets had copied the methods of the Anti-Saloon League, they too
had a club to brandish in the faces of members of Congress. Wet
THE WET COUNTERATTACK/ 349
retribution at the polls could be even more damning for a politician
than dry opposition. In wrecking the cause of moderation on dry
Scylla, the politicians found themselves menaced by the equally fear-
some wet Charybdis. It was in obedience to this new menace that they
began to stand up against the Anti-Saloon League in Congress.
CHAPTER
19
The Restive Congress
Prohibition is not an issue in the Republican Party, and I
don't believe it is in the Democratic Party.
SENATOR SIMEON FESS, of Ohio, 1930
Histhry always vindicates th' Dimmycrats, but niver in
their lifetime. They see th* thruth first, but th' trouble is
that nawthin' is iver officially thrue till a Raypublican sees it.
FINLEY PETER DUNNE
THE FIRST major victory of the wets in Congress was won by Sena-
tor Reed, of Missouri, during the hearings of his subcommittee in
1926. He sent messengers to the Anti-Saloon League's headquarters at
Westerville, Ohio, and commandeered the files of the League. Photo-
graphic facsimiles of secret letters and papers were leaked to the press
to show up the dubious political methods of the League. Moreover,
Reed subpoenaed the failing Wheeler to testify before the subcommit-
tee, and browbeat him badly. Yet Reed failed to prove that the League
had employed corrupt or unethical political methods. But he did
demonstrate that the League was vulnerable to a determined frontal
assault. The myth of the League's inviolability was never put together
again.
The first effects of Reed's bludgeonings were evident in the elections
of 1926. All lobbies and pressure groups walked warily. Although the
drys held their three-to-one majority in the House, they lost ground
slightly in the Senate. For the Democratic convention of 1924 had finally
identified the Northeastern section of the Democratic party with the
wet cause. Moreover, the wets had found a powerful leader in Alfred
E. Smith, four times governor of New York, and obvious presidential
timber for the 1928 election. Even Wheeler only claimed that 70 per
cent of the Democrats in the Senate supported him, a drop of 5 per
cent from the vote on the Eighteenth Amendment. Moreover, Wheeler
had supported the candidacy of Frank L. Smith in the senatorial race
in Illinois against an eminently respectable dry candidate. When Smith
350
THE RESTIVE CONGRESS / 351
was unseated for corruption, Wheeler suffered from his endorsement.
His excuse for doing so was Machiavellian and suspect. He referred to
a rule in an old Anti-Saloon League textbook which said that the
League should support partially acceptable candidates whose election
was certain, rather than entirely acceptable candidates whose election
was impossible. 1
Congress did little more for enforcement in 1927 and 1928 than it
had done in previous years. While Coolidge kept cool, Congress blew
cold on schemes for greater federal spending. A little under twelve
million dollars a year was appropriated for the two years. One major
prohibition measure was passed. The bill separated the Prohibition
Bureau from the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue;
furthermore, prohibition agents were at last brought under Civil Serv-
ice rules, although no additional money was voted to carry out this
purpose. 2 Ironically, although the bill was sponsored by Wheeler, its
promulgation led to the dismissal of Roy A. Haynes from the Bureau
and the end of Wheeler's influence over prohibition appointments. 8
The debates on the bill showed how much the wet leaders of Con-
gress had adopted the threats, slanders, and tactics of the drys. Sena-
tor Bruce turned Dr. Johnson's remark on Goldsmith, that he touched
nothing he did not adorn, into the remark that prohibition touched
nothing it did not defile. He accused Senator Smoot, of Utah, and the
other drys of opposing the Civil Service rules in order to return to the
old spoils system. He referred darkly to influences pushing the Senate
on, which were "apparently stronger than the majority of the Members
of this body." He then used a new wet weapon and an old dry weapon,
when he said that he would keep the Association Against the Prohibi-
tion Amendment and other wet organizations informed about any
Senator elected with wet support who dared to vote dry. The wets had
been forced to adopt this policy in answer to those dry members of
Congress who were "held to the severest accountability by such a
system of drastic and all-pervading tyranny as was never known in
the history of this Government." Bruce ended with a personal attack on
the "third-sex" of "part preachers and part stump orators, part clergy-
men and part political intriguers and agitators, whose political in-
struments are scurrilous abuse, bulldozing, and the lavish use of money
in political campaigns." Indeed, these were the very lessons which the
drys had learned from the wets and the wets were relearning from
the drys.
In particular, Bruce had singled out Wheeler for attack, as a "pro-
fessional agitator and unofficial interloper." Senator Edwards, of New
Jersey, followed with an assault on the Anti-Saloon League, with its
"un-American, entirely selfish, bigoted, and intolerant appeals." As
352 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
prejudiced as any dry reformer, Edwards found that prohibition and
temperance were "as contrary and opposed as black and white/' The
bill itself was "a pork-barrel for the Wheelers, the McBrides, and the
Wilsons," who, except for bootleggers and dive-keepers, were the only
ones to reap a prohibition harvest. In view of these assaults, the sharp-
tongued Senator from Missouri, James Reed, was remarkably mild.
He merely bowed to Wheeler in mockery and termed him "his
majesty/' 4
But the death of Wheeler's wife by fire in 1928, shortly followed by
his own, removed him from the unkind tongues of all except those
Anti-Saloon League leaders who spoke at his funeral. These other
League leaders had always been jealous of Wheeler's personal power
and prestige. The press had usually taken Wheeler's personal attitude
to be the authoritative statement of the Anti-Saloon League. The other
League leaders did not want such a situation to be repeated. They
wished for all official statements of the League to be restricted to
statements of the executive or legislative committees. Although Wheel-
er's policy of pressure politics was endorsed with the re-election of
McBride as general superintendent of the League in 1928, a new edu-
cational campaign was launched under the leadership of McBride's
rival, Ernest H. Cherrington. The League then agreed to bury its in-
ternal differences with the body of the dead Wheeler, and to unite
in the campaign for a dry President in 1928. 5
The congressional elections of 1928 were overshadowed by the
bitterness of the presidential struggle between Hoover and Smith.
For the first time, the leader of a major party was an avowed wet.
Democrats, running for Congress on the Smith ticket, reaped the
advantage of his attitude in the wet Northern cities and the disad-
vantage of his attitude in the dry rural areas. Although Smith split
the Solid South, he also split the Republican North. If he lost more
than 200 Southern counties, which had never voted Republican since
the Civil War, he gained 122 Northern counties from the Grand Old
Party. 6 Smith carried St. Paul, St. Louis, Cleveland, San Francisco,
and Boston, and carried the ticket with him, on the whole. In
Chicago, although Smith narrowly lost the city, he broke the com-
placent grip of the Republican machine there. Smith won new wet
Democratic votes among those of German, Irish, and Slavic ancestry.
He attracted many of the seventeen million new voters who had come
of age in the previous eight years and who lived mainly in the large
wet cities. Although the drys considered Herbert Hoover's plurality of
more than six million votes to be an overwhelming referendum on the
virtues of prohibition, Smith's defeat foreshadowed the defeat of the
drys in four years' time. For he had identified repeal with the dominant
THE RESTIVE CONGRESS / 353
group in the Democratic party, and he had swung behind that party
the wet centers of population.
The vote in the House on the Jones Law shows the result of the
election clearly. The law provided for the increase of penalties on first
offenders against the Volstead Act. Although there was a classic de-
bate in the Senate between Reed and Borah on the whole question of
prohibition, nothing of importance was said in the House. The drys,
however, seemed to gain their greatest congressional victory there
by winning the roll call, 284 votes to 90. This was the lowest vote
ever put together by the wets in the House on a major roll call. A
comparison of the wet vote with the 128 votes which they mustered
on lie Eighteenth Amendment shows that the wets had lost 24 votes
in West and South, but only 14 in the North. The North, which had
provided little over half of the wet vote in 1917, now provided just
under two-thirds. The strength of the wets was now concentrated in
the Northern cities. A further analysis of the party vote on these two
divisions shows that the Democratic party was split much more sharply
between North and South on the issue of prohibition, while the Re-
publican party had become more dry. Thus, although the drys had
won their greatest victory in the House, the seeds of their defeat lay
in that victory. Prohibition was at last identified with major party
politics, for the wets had gained control of one of the two important
parties. The defeat of the Republicans in a presidential election would
now be considered a defeat of the drys, so long as the Northern wets
controlled the Democrats. And the return of the Solid South to their
Democratic allegiance could also mean their support of a wet policy.
The debate in the Senate on the Jones Law is one of the few living
things in "that vast necropolis of buried oratory, the Congressional
Record." 7 Reed was the most cutting and clever of the wets, Borah
the most able and weighty of the drys. Such diverse Senators as Heflin
and Brookhart joined in praising the debate as the best they ever
heard. Reed first commented on the wetness of the Republican con-
vention in Kansas City and of the Democratic convention in "dry"
Houston, Texas. He had wanted to write a list of those who voted dry
and drank wet in Congress; but, although he had done many wicked
things in his life, he had* never fallen yet to the level of a prohibition
informer. He made a personal attack on Bishop Cannon, who had
broken the Solid South against Al Smith. Cannon was one of America's
"three popes/' 8 Wayne B. Wheeler might be dead, "but his mantle has
fallen upon the shoulders and his soul has entered the body of the
Right Rev. Bishop Cannon. The philosophy of hate survives."
Reed found that the drys, in applying only the yardstick of voting
on prohibition measures to their endorsed candidates, showed a lower
354 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
morality in their choice of officeholders than slum bosses. The fact
that the drys had given up the old style of temperance lectures showed
prohibition was doomed. It was making no new and passionate con-
verts. "We have abandoned the Bible, the prayer book, and the tem-
perance tract for the lash, the prison, the gun, and the bludgeon." In-
tolerance now ruled the land. "There is no knife so sharp as that held
in the hand of the bigot ... no cruelty so relentless as the cruelty of
fanaticism/' Christ had been crucified according to the forms of the
law. Joan of Arc had been so burned. Now the Jones Law sought to
persecute the modern defenders of freedom. Prohibition had filled the
land with spies, and the jails with 130,000 prisoners in two years. Did
this show the spirit of Christ at work in America?
As for the Volstead Act itself, which the Jones Law sought to sup-
plement, it had been rightly vetoed by Woodrow Wilson for its idiocy.
The only people whom it helped were the farmers. The vineyards of
California were booming wine-grapes had gone up from $20 a ton
to $175. As for cider, "they have now worked out a plan where one
can let his cider get hard, freeze it in a refrigerator, bore a hole in the
center where the alcohol is, and be drunk in five minutes. Compared
with that stuff old bourbon whisky was a mild tonic."* After a pause
for laughter, Reed continued, "Even from the silos, where nature
makes tie stuff, the farm boy is drawing a supply."
Reed denounced the drys for failing in their purposes under pro-
hibition:
The bar is condensed into a gripsack. The sales are by the case
instead of by the glass. The saloon is still here, and more people are
engaged in the business than in pre-Volstead days. You did not exter-
minate the brewery. You made millions of little breweries and in-
stalled them in the homes of the people.
Worse that that, under prohibition, drug addiction had multiplied,
while American girls were guzzling liquor for the first time. Reed con-
cluded with the observation of Montaigne that "it would be better for
us to have no laws at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as
we have/'
Reed's speech was so effective that Jones inserted an amendment
to his law pointing out that it was "the intent of Congress, that the
courts, in imposing sentence hereunder, should discriminate between
casual or slight violations and habitual sales of intoxicating liquors or
attempts to commercialize violations of the law." The increased penal-
ties were now specifically aimed at large bootleggers, not at petty
* Senator Heflin later commented that one man had shushed another in the
gallery of the Senate during these remarks from Reed. The man's excuse had been
that he wanted to get the recipe.
offenders. And Senator Borah, of Idaho, rose to defend the laws of
prohibition with all the reason at his command.
Borah reminded the Senate that the Eighteenth Amendment would
stand in the Constitution "until the moral forces of the United States
decide that something better is presented to control the liquor prob-
lem." The evils of prohibition were nothing compared with the evils
of the saloons, even as the "pilfering thieves" of the Department of
Prohibition were trivial in the light of the "saturnalia of corruption"
in the high places of the government between 1921 and 1923. Borah
disapproved of the philosophy of Mussolini, but he recommended his
action of closing down 25,000 Italian saloons overnight by the stroke
356 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
of a pen. America, however, was a democracy. The liquor traffic could
not be ended so easily. "Possibly we can not prevent it entirely; pos-
sibly we can not ever prevent the use of alcoholic drinks altogether,
but shall we continue the effort or shall we surrender in the fight?"
Borah answered his own question by saying that, as long as the
Eighteenth Amendment was in the Constitution, just so long would
Congress be sworn to enforce it. Both he and Reed would "never see
the day when the eighteenth amendment is out of the Constitution
of the United States/* That being so, Congress should co-operate,
willy-nilly, in enforcing the law of the land. 9
Whether Borah won his debate with Reed or not, the drys easily
won the roll call, by 65 votes to 18. Although the wet vote in the
Senate as in the House dropped from the total vote cast on the Eight-
eenth Amendment, a similar shift to a center of power based on the
Northern Democrats is evident. While only 8 out of 20 wet votes came
from the Northern Senators in 1917, 10 out of 18 did so in 1929. The
North had become the rallying point of the wets. More and more,
politicians had to be wet in the North to be elected at all.
Although these signs of the growing enmity of Congress to the dry
lobbies were no bigger than a man's mouth or a minority vote, they
were the beginnings of rebellion. And the dry majority in Congress
continued their equivocal policy of speaking for prohibition and re-
fusing to vote enough money to enforce it. The episode of the Bruce
appropriation showed just how careful Congress was to keep bootleg
liquor flowing. During the debate on an Appropriations Bill, the wet
leader, Senator Bruce, of Maryland, suddenly offered an amendment
which increased the appropriation of the Prohibition Bureau some
twenty times. The new Prohibition Commissioner, Dr. James M.
Doran, had asked for $300,000,000 a year to enforce the Volstead Act.
Senator Bruce proposed to give it to him, on Ulysses Grant's principle
that the only way to get rid of a bad law was to enforce it rigidly,
rather than to let it fall into Grover Cleveland's "innocuous desue-
tude." This would compel the people to consider whether prohibition
was a good or a bad thing, for they had never had prohibition. "The
dry has the law, the wet has the liquor, and the prohibition agent has
the boodle, and consequently more or less general contentment with
the situation exists all ound." In answer to the gibe of Senator Cara-
way, of Arkansas, in the debate on the Jones Law, that those who said
the law was unforceable were those who did not want it enforced,
Bruce led those who wanted no dry law at all in an attempt to have
it enforced and thus to end it. In a surprise roll call, which found
wets and drys voting on the same side, the Bruce amendment for an
THE RESTIVE CONGRESS/ 357
increase of $256,000,000 to the appropriation of the Prohibition Bureau
was passed.
But the dry lobbies, faced with this unwelcome gift, turned it down.
They seemed to fear that large-scale enforcement would change their
growing unpopularity into public disgust. Four days after the Bruce
amendment was passed, it was eliminated from the Appropriations
Bill. 10 A modest proposal by Senator Harris, of Georgia, to double the
appropriation of the Prohibition Bureau to $25,000,000 was also turned
down, since Secretary Mellon opposed the increase.
In the debate in the House, the wets also led the battle for an
increase in the money spent on enforcement, while the drys opposed
the increase. As La Guardia, of New York, said:
It behooves the drys of the House to stand up courageously and
demand the hundreds of millions of dollars it will require to enforce
prohibition, and as they fail to do it, demonstrating the impossibility
of enforcement, it is our right to seek through proper, constitutional,
and legislative channels a change in the law.
The drys had no answer to La Guardia except the sneer of Crampton,
of Michigan, that if states such as New York would only share the
responsibility of enforcement with the federal government, the land
would go dry without more federal spending. To this observation,
La Guardia merely pointed to the lawlessness of Michigan, and said,
"Let enforcement and prohibition, like charity, begin at home/' 11 The
final increase of the budget of the Prohibition Bureau was set at little
more than a million dollars.
The dry majorities in Congress remained faithful to their policies of
low budgets for prohibition enforcement. During the Hoover Admin-
istration, appropriations for the Prohibition Bureau averaged a little
over fourteen million dollars a year, a mere annual increase of three mil-
lion dollars over the sums spent by the purse-proud Coolidge Con-
gresses. Only the President himself denied the policy of his do-little
predecessors by election promise and executive practice. Originally,
in his acceptance speech at Palo Alto after the Republican convention
of 1928, Hoover had promised to set up a commission to investigate
the problems of prohibition. Once in the White House, however,
Hoover expanded the duties of the commission to include an exami-
nation of the whole field of law enforcement. This was a large under-
taking. But, while the commission set about its tedious labors, the
drys in Congress had a perfect excuse for doing next to nothing until
the findings of the commission were made known. 12
While the drys were waiting, the wets in Congress were not idle.
In the second session of the Seventy-first Congress, more than sixty
358 /THE BLIGHT OF BEPEAL
bills and resolutions were introduced to amend the prohibition laws.
All died in Senate or House Committee, for these committees were
strongholds of the drys. But when the preliminary findings of the
Wickersham Commission were released on January 13, 1930, wet
ribaldry in Congress rose to new heights. The commission recom-
mended that the Prohibition Bureau be transferred to the Department
of Justice; this should have been done ten years back. It advised the
codification of prohibition laws over the last forty years and the
strengthening of the padlock provisions of the Volstead Act; the laws
should never have been so complex or so easily evaded. And worst
of all, the commission recommended that "casual or slight violations*'
of the prohibition laws should be handled without trial by jury, to
ease the congestion in the federal courts, many of which were four
years behind schedule.
This last proposal brought wet shouts against tyranny to a crescendo.
As Congressman Black, of New York, jeered, "die mountains labored
and all they have brought forth is a ridiculous mess, a ridiculous legal
mess. . . . How can you enforce a law that requires 50 per cent of
the people to keep the other 50 per cent in jail all of the time?'' Black
could not resist a further jab at an unfortunate utterance on the sub-
ject of the Volstead Act by the favorite wet bogieman of the time.
"The hereafter does not require its ministers to be sheriffs and police-
men, and here we have Bishop Cannon the other day going a long,
long way from the fundamental principles of Christianity in saying
that he wanted to call out the army to wipe out the violators of this
law." It was time for Congress to revolt with the people against
clerical domination. 13 The Congress, however, ignored Black and
passed another Prohibition Reorganization Act, at last transferring the
Prohibition Bureau to the Department of Justice, although the Treas-
ury kept control of industrial alcohol. As Major Henry Curran, of the
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, confessed, 'There
isn't a chance of Congress voting our way yet." 14
In 1930, the state party conventions put the writing on the wall for
the drys. Twenty-one state platforms in fourteen states demanded
outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. A repeal plank was
adopted by the Democrats in all fourteen of these states, but only in
seven by the Republicans. For the Grand Old Party had become,
willy-nilly, identified as the party of the drys. It could not escape its
record. Ohio leaders of the Anti-Saloon League had always preferred
to work through the Republican party; even the Democratic Bishop
Cannon had bolted to Hoover in 1928. The Republicans had been
in power for nearly all of the time in which the Volstead Law had
ruled in America. They were in charge of dry enforcement and pro-
THE LEANING TOWER SHOWS SIGNS OF COLLAPSE
hibition appointments. Thus the odium which prohibition brought to
its supporters was also extended to the Grand Old Party.
In the congressional elections, the depression was largely ignored.
Prohibition was the battleground not economics. 15 Indeed, the only
way that economics affected the situation was in the small fund at
the disposal of the dry lobbies. The rich contributors to the dry cause
could no longer afford to pay. The drys had a low campaign budget,
while the wets had more and more money in their hands to secure
repeal as a stimulant to the economy. The Democrats and the wets
gained some notable victories. For the first time in more than a decade,
the Democrats equaled the number of Republicans in the House and
360 /THE BLIGHT OF KEPEAL
Senate. Even though the drys managed to secure the defeat of one
of their enemies, Thomas Heflin, of Alabama, the wet victories of
Senator Buckley in the Anti-Saloon League stronghold of Ohio and of
Senator Marcus Coolidge in Massachusetts showed that the wets were
gaining significant strength in Congress for the first time in thirty
years.
How much strength the wets actually gained was not evident im-
mediately. Congress was careful to avoid any showdown on prohibi-
tion. Senate and House committees continued to kill bills before they
reached a vote on the floor. Congress and the nation were waiting
expectantly for the report of the Wickersham Commission.
20
CHAPTER
Dry President, Divided Commission
"If eleven men for twenty months
Write all they see and hear,
Do you suppose/' the Abstainer said,
"That they can make it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Drinking Man,
And wept into his beer.
ANONYMOUS
WHEN HERBERT HOOVER accepted the Republican nomination
for the presidency in 1928, he promised to appoint a commission
to examine the workings of national prohibition. Once he was elected,
he broadened the purpose of the promised commission. His Inaugural
speech defined the duty of the commission as
... a searching investigation of the whole structure of our Federal
system of jurisprudence, to include the method of enforcement of the
eighteenth amendment and the causes of abuse under it. Its purpose
will be to make such recommendations for reorganization of the
administration of Federal laws and court procedure as may be found
desirable. 1
The wet supporters of Hoover were disappointed by his modified
proposal. It both lessened and increased the original purpose of the
commission. The commission was limited to a consideration of the
methods of enforcement. It was not allowed to say whether there
should be a prohibition law at all; it had merely to discover how the
workings of the law could be improved. Moreover, the commission
was charged with examining the problems of all enforcement of the
law, and this wide field might detract from the particular examination
of prohibition. In addition, the opponents of prohibition did not class
dry laws with other laws. They insisted that the drinker and the maker
of drink could still be a law-abiding citizen. The defined purpose of
the commission seemed to them to put consideration of the liquor
question on the same level as consideration of murder and rape. The
wet newspapers urged the commission to ignore all subjects other
361
362 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
than prohibition. "Not to do so/' Frank Kent wrote, "would be to build
on a false bottom." 2
Hoover had great difficulty in staffing his commission. The members
had to be chosen from the ranks of the moderates, who were more
concerned with the question of good government than with the rights
and wrongs of the prohibition problem. Thus the final choice of the
eleven commissioners comprised people used to general problems of
law and administration, although they had little actual knowledge
of the particular problems of prohibition. The head of the commission,
George W. Wickersham, had been Attorney General under President
Taft; he was Hoover's fourth choice. The other ten included a former
Secretary of War, a former state Chief Justice, a Circuit Judge, two
District Judges, three practicing lawyers, the Dean of the Harvard
Law School, and the President of Radcliffe. Hoover turned down the
people recommended by the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union, and the commission refused to hear their
spokesmen. Similarly, Hoover and the commission ignored the spokes-
men of the extreme wets. Yet the commission, as a whole, was com-
posed of safe conservative members, who could be expected to find in
favor of the prohibition laws, if such findings were possible.*
While the commission collected evidence, Hoover, unlike the dry
members of Congress, was not idle. He set about securing stricter
enforcement of the dry law. The number of those jailed for liquor of-
fenses rose steadily from 21,602 in the fiscal year of 1929 until it had
more than doubled three years later. 3 The building of six new prisons
was begun in order to accommodate the increased number of federal
convicts. For Hoover wished his morality to be judged by his effi-
ciency. He was concerned with the application of the laws rather than
their validity. As he said to the Associated Press annual meeting in
1929, "If a law is wrong, its rigid enforcement is the surest guaranty of
its repeal. If it is right, its enforcement is the quickest method of
compelling respect for it." 4
Hoover's exhortations to the populace to obey the laws of the land
exceeded those of Harding and Coolidge in volume and moral fervor.
In his Inaugural address, Hoover discovered the illuminating fact that
"there would be little traffic in illegal liquor if only criminals patron-
ized it ... patronage from large numbers of law-abiding citizens is
supplying the rewards and stimulating crime/' 5 At the initial meeting
of the Wickersham Commission, he said, "A nation does not fail from
* Even the wet press approved of Hoover's choice of commissioners. The Boston
Transcript found the commission full of "sturdy American brains." The New York
Times had "nothing but praise," and the Evening World found it difficult to see
how the commission could have been improved on.
"DON'T MIND ME, Go RIGHT ON WORKING"
its growth of wealth or power. But no nation can for long survive
the failure of its citizens to respect and obey the laws which they
themselves make/' 6 Nevertheless, Hoover appointed to his Cabinet six
wets out of a total of ten men, according to the head of the Association
Against the Prohibition Amendment The two chiefs of the Treasury
Department who were at first responsible for enforcement were both
wet, Andrew Mellon and Ogden Mills. The Postmaster General was a
wet machine politician. Hoover allayed the fears of the drys by asking
his Cabinet to refrain from serving liquor in their own homes. 7
In the meantime, the Wickersham Commission stuck to its task. The
364 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
commissioners heard evidence for nineteen months, and spent half a
million dollars. They found it impossible to restrict their investigation
of prohibition to a mere examination of the problems of enforcement.
Thus they decided
... to go into the whole subject of enforcement of the Eighteenth
Amendment and the National Prohibition Act; the present condition
as to observance and enforcement of that Act and its causes; whether
and how far the amendment in its present form is enforceable;
whether it should be retained, or repealed, or revised, and a con-
structive program of improvement. 8
This departure from their original purpose was to prove a great source
of embarrassment to Hoover, who had tried to restrict the commission-
ers in such a way that he could adopt their recommendations without
seeming to endorse or oppose national prohibition itself.
After a preliminary report, recommending minor changes, the Wick-
ersham Commission came out with its final report. Two of the com-
missioners favored repeal, five wanted revision and government
monopoly of the liquor traffic on the model of the Swedish system, two
favored revision and further trial of the Eighteenth Amendment, and
only two supported the status quo, with minor alterations. Only one
of the commissioners directly opposed resubmission of the Eighteenth
Amendment to the people. Yet ten out of the eleven commissioners
signed a summary of the conclusions of the Wfckersham Report, which
stated that the commission as a whole opposed the repeal of the
Eighteenth Amendment, the return of the legalized saloon in any form,
the entry of the federal or state governments into the liquor business,
and the modification of national prohibition to permit the sale of light
wines and beer. The summary further stated that there was, as yet,
no adequate observance or enforcement of the dry laws, since the
means of enforcement were insufficient. There were other general
recommendations for revision of the laws. These included abolition of
the limitations on the prescriptions of medical liquor, repeal of the cider
clause in the Volstead Act, strengthening of the regulations governing
industrial alcohol and padlock injunctions, and quick trial of petty
violators of the laws without benefit of jury. The summary concluded
with the equivocal statement that there were "differences of view
among the members of the commission as to certain of the conclusions
stated," and that these differences were shown in the separate and
individual reports of each commissioner. 9 The fact was not set down,
however, that the individual reports made absolute nonsense of the
so-called agreement of the commissioners in the summary. The diver-
gent views of the commissioners individually and collectively can only
DRY PRESIDENT, DIVIDED COMMISSION/ 365
be explained by their need to produce something definite after nine-
teen months of hard labor.
The method of release of the Wickersham Report to the press
further darkened the obscure. Hoover first sent a message to Congress
which said, "The commission, by a large majority, does not favor the
repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment as a method of cure for the
inherent abuses of the liquor traffic." 10 Hoover himself said that he
agreed with the majority of the commissioners in wanting to keep the
Eighteenth Amendment in its old form. He should have said that he
agreed with the minority of the commissioners. For seven out of the
eleven explicitly favored a change in the wording of the Eighteenth
Amendment to allow the legal sale of some liquor. As Walter Lipp-
mann commented:
Everything possible was done officially to conceal this truth from
the public generally, and from the rural voters in particular. It was
cut out of the conclusions. It was suppressed in the official summary.
It was ignored by the President. The official summary was so trickily
devised that for nearly twenty-four hours it fooled every newspaper
in America. . . . What was done was to evade a direct and explicit
official confession that federal prohibition is a hopeless failure.
According to Lippmann, Hoover's repudiation of the real views of his
commissioners put him straight in the camp of the nullificationists of
the dry law, whom he continually denounced. For he could not enforce
the dry law, and he refused to revise it. Therefore he must agree with
the existing situation of widespread nullification in the United States. 11
Once the full version of the Wickersham Report had reached the
press, a howl of derision arose, which gave way to more sober com-
ment. The New York Herald Tribune said that the general excellence
of the report made all the more regrettable President Hoover's hasty
and inexact comments upon it. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot said that
the report packed "the most damaging blow against constitutional
prohibition that has been delivered." The San Francisco Chronicle
found the report "a perfect picture of the public mind," for the con-
fusion and conflicts of the commissioners over prohibition represented
the confusion and conflicts of the country on the matter. The New
York Daily News found one thing certain, that Hoover was drier than
his picked crowd of intellectuals. The New Haven Journal Courier
was profoundly disappointed that Hoover was "unable or unwilling
to see this social tragedy in all of its dreadful aspects." Frank Kent, in
the Baltimore Sun, confirmed this judgment, saying that any hope that
President Hoover might "supply the leadership toward bettering the
intolerable and disgusting condition prohibition has brought on the
366 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
country a condition vividly mirrored in the report has no founda-
tion/' And the New York Times deplored the writing of "a dry caption
on a wet article/*
But the comments of the more responsible members of the press
were nothing compared with the excuse which the Wickersham Report
gave to the wits of the world of print. Howard Brubaker, in the New
Yorker regretted the appearance of the report, for "from now on the
people will have to do their own disagreeing on prohibition/' Hey-
wood Broun held that:
Mr. Hoover stands revealed as the driest body this side of the
Sahara. ... He is for the Methodist Board of Morals lock, stock and
bootlegger's barrel. . . . From now on he will campaign as a Repub-
lican only in name. He is endeavoring to put over a political merger.
It is his apparent intention to fuse the Anti-Saloon League and the
Republican Party, retaining the worst features of each.
Franklin P. Adams wrote a much-quoted poem in the New York
World, called "The Wickersham Report'':
Prohibition is an awful fop.
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,
It's filled our land with vice and crime,
Nevertheless, we're for it. 12
The House of Representatives also had its fun with the report. As
La Guardia pointed out, the Wickersham Commission itself was "not
the child of those of us opposed to prohibition." It was "packed with
drys." Yet only two of the commissioners favored no revision and no
repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, while the
other nine disagreed, in one way or another. Boylan, of New York,
joked that each individual commissioner understood the report, as did
Chairman Wickersham and President Hoover, who had both said that
the report was fully behind the Eighteenth Amendment. But there
were at least eleven different ways of interpreting the report, and if
two commissioners ever met with each other, they would never come
to a mutual understanding of what they had done. Boylan suggested
the appointment of a commission pledged that it "will not agree on
anything. It must be understood before they are appointed that they
must agree to disagree." Celler, of New York, termed the whole report
the "Wicked-and-Sham" report, and asked why the commission could
produce nothing better at die cost of half a million dollars.
DRY PRESIDENT, DIVIDED COMMISSION/ 367
The drys in the House were forced, like Blanton, of Texas, to find
"a crumb of value for the people." He said that the commission as a
whole did oppose the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, the return
of the saloon, modification, and the entry of the government into the
liquor trade. Moreover, the Eighteenth Amendment could never and
would never be repealed. Finley, of Kentucky, congratulated La
Guardia on his "undesirable eminence" as a wet leader, and was glad
that he did not share it. The debate then degenerated to Celler quoting
from a parody on the report printed in the New York Evening Sun.
According to the parody, the commission had found that the country
was divided into two parts those who had a little still and those who
still had a little. It had also found that corn sugar was the staff of life,
with malt liquor a close second. Moreover, the report itself could be
seized and searched, and no consistency would be found. 13
The Wickersham Report did most damage to Hoover and the mili-
tant drys. Hoover now seemed to be more dry than the evidence of
his own appointees warranted. And the militant drys, who had ap-
proved of the composition of the commission in the beginning, found
it too late to attack its findings; Chairman Wickersham himself said
that the report favored the wets rather than the drys. 14 Prohibition had
been damned officially by a government commission appointed by a
dry President. When Hoover stuck with the drys in his evaluation of
the report of the commission, it was at the price of losing the support
of moderates and of smirching his reputation for integrity and honesty.
The presentation and reception of the Wickersham Report was un-
fortunate. For it is a fascinating and fair document, if its summarized
conclusions and Hoover's comments are ignored. It describes the un-
fortunate effects of an unpopular law on American society. It makes
clear that, whatever the economic benefits of prohibition, dry enforce-
ment is impossible outside a society rigidly bound by political and
religious sanctions against alcohol, and by a police power intolerable
in a democracy. It presents a fair view of the impossible burden of
enforcement on weak federal institutions. It shows how the power of
the states and of the people was still great enough to make any law of
this nature unworkable, even if the federal government had wanted to
make it work. In the commission's own words:
There has been more sustained pressure to enforce this law than
on the whole has been true of any other federal statute, although this
pressure in the last four or five years has met with increasing resistance
as the sentiment against prohibition has developed. No other federal
law has had such elaborate state and federal enforcing machinery put
behind it. That a main source of difficulty is in the attitude of at
least a very large number of respectable citizens in all communities,
368 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
and of the majority of the citizens in most of our large cities and in
several states, is made more clear when the enforcement of the Na-
tional Prohibition Act is compared with the enforcement of the laws
as to narcotics. There is an enormous margin of profit in breaking the
latter. The means of detecting transportation are more easily evaded
than in the case of liquor. Yet there are no difficulties in the case of
narcotics beyond those involved in the nature of the traffic because
the laws against them are supported everywhere by a general and
determined public sentiment. 15
In the absence of this sentiment, the prohibition of liquor in America
was a dry dream.
CHAPTER
21
The Fanaticism of Repeal
All laws which can be violated without doing any one any
injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing any-
thing to control the desires and passions of men that, on
the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more
toward those very objects; for we always strive toward what
is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to
have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity
needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate
things which cannot be entirely forbidden. ... He who
tries to determine everything by law will foment crime
rather than lessen it.
SPINOZA
Nothing is more attractive to the benevolent vanity of
men than the notion that they can effect great improvement
in society by the simple process of forbidding all wrong
conduct, or conduct that they think is wrong, by law, and of
enjoining all good conduct by the same means.
JAMES COOLDDGE CARTER
There is something sacred about big business. Anything
which is economically right is morally right.
HENRY FORD
MANY OF THE distinguished supporters of repeal were as fanatical
as the drys. "My own feeling toward prohibition/' said Dr.
Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University,
... is exactly the feeling which my parents and my grandparents
had toward slavery. I look upon the Volstead Act precisely as they
looked upon the Fugitive Slave Law. Like Abraham Lincoln, I shall
obey these laws so long as they remain on the statute book; but, like
Abraham Lincoln, I shall not rest until they are repealed. The issue
is one of plain, simple, unadorned morality. 1
In such clear-cut terms, which smacked of the simple choices of a
William Jennings Bryan, one of the leading educators of the nation an-
369
370 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
nounced his continuing opposition to prohibition. Other teachers of the
young joined in the chorus, until even Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the
President of Harvard University, added his moderate protest against
prohibition: "It seems to have been an economic benefit not unmixed
with a distinct moral detriment/' 2 When such apostles of the law sup-
ported the repeal of one of the laws, the young in their charge could
not be expected to obey what their teachers condemned.
But even worse for the dry cause than the distinguished advocates
of repeal were the distinguished advocates of nullification of the law.
According to Clarence Darrow, nullification of an unpopular law was
an old national habit. 8 In the words of Walter Lippmann, it was "a
normal and traditional American method of circumventing the inflexi-
bility of the Constitution/' 4 Even the President Emeritus of Yale Uni-
versity referred to nullification as a "safety valve which helps a self-
governing community avoid the alternative between tyranny and
revolution." 5 The plea of the drys for obedience to the Constitution,
since the Eighteenth Amendment could never be repealed, was an-
swered by the accusation of the wets that the drys had forced America
into nullification by writing such an amendment into the Constitution.
Indeed, the extreme wets urged every free-thinking American to drink
until the drys had to capitulate. "Drink what you please, when you
please," wrote Corey Ford. "Urge others to drink. Don't betray the
bootleggers who are smuggling liquor for you. In every way possible
flaunt your defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. Render it inopera-
tive; ignore it, abrogate it, wipe it out. While it stands there, let it be
disobeyed." 6
To such frank advocacy of counterrevolution by illegal means, the
drys had no real answer except contempt. Senator Borah found nullifi-
cation of the dry law "a slinking, silent, cowardly sapping of the very
foundation of all order, all dignity, all government the furtive, evasive
betrayal of a nation." 7 Yet the militant wets saw nullification as the
only course of action open to a brave man, the only "method of relief
from oppression and corruption," the only way to get rid of '"obsolete
and unpopular laws." 8 In such an extreme situation, with neither drys
nor wets yielding an inch of ground, only the compromisers and the
law suffered. There could be, and was, no tenable middle ground in
the battle.
A position of limited defeat could probably have been held until
this day by the drys if they had supported the believers in modifica-
tion. These men agreed with the dry premise that the Eighteenth
Amendment could not be repealed and the wet premise that prohibi-
tion was impossible to enforce. Therefore, they suggested that the
definition of the word "intoxicating" in the Eighteenth Amendment
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 371
be modified to allow the sale of beer and light wines in those states
which legalized that sale. Alfred E. Smith put forward this point of
view in the campaign of 1928. His proposal was seriously discussed, as
was another modification plan of 1930, the legalization of home-brew.
But the dry leaders had been too long in the saddle to realize that
they would have to shift their position to the center to save themselves
from defeat. And the wets, watching their forces grow continually be-
hind them, would not be satisfied after the major party conventions of
1932 with less than unconditional surrender, although their early cam-
paign slogans had been modest enough "Beer and Light Wines Now,
but No Saloon Ever."*
Many respectable educators and lawyers supported the doctrines
of repeal and nullification to save, in their opinion, respect for the law.
Yet the immediate effect of their actions was to increase the very
spirit of lawlessness which afflicted the twenties. When such rocks of
integrity as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler spent much of their time in
assaulting the dry laws, many violators felt themselves justified in their
violation. For they were told often enough that widespread violation
was the short cut to repeal. And their personal example of defiance of
the law was passed on to their children and acquaintances. The ex-
tremft of the prohibition law encouraged an equally pernicious extreme
of Opposition. As Elihu Root wrote in 1930, "Compulsion through the
law creates revulsion. You cannot make man just through the law, you
cannot make man merciful through the law, you cannot make man
affectionate through the law." 10 But, apparently, the drys could make
men excessive in their opposition to the law.
The wet propagandists also imitated the fanaticism of the drys.
Prohibition was accused of four major economic crimes which had led
to the Great Depression. The first was the destruction of the brewing
and distilling industries; if these industries were restored, a million
men would be put back to work. The seqond was the agricultural
depression; if the supply of grain to^hJofi.weries were begun again,
the farmers would benefit. The thfrdjvagJbhe large amount of govern-
ment spending associated with enforcement of the prohibition law;
repeal prohibition, and the federal government could cut its expenses.
The fourth was the huge loss in federal revenue caused by the eigling
of the liquor tax; this tax had been made up, in the twerifieTBThigh
income tax on the incomes of the wealthy; if the tax were restored,
ffieh the wealthy would get back their money and would invest it
wisely, and the wheels of industry would begin turning again. When
Bernard Baruch changed from support of the Eighteenth Amendment
to support of repeal, he gave as three reasons for his metamorphosis
that prohibition "encouraged disrespect for law, increased taxation,
372 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
and transferred evils into homes/' 11 Although his legal and moral
reasons were admirable, his financial reason was the most urgent for
rich supporters of repeal in the early years of the depression. For,
throughout the twenties, the level of federal income had averaged
three billion dollars a year, of which more than two-thirds came from
taxes on incomes and corporations. The wealthy in America were pay-
ing three-quarters of a billion dollars a year on their private incomes.
They were looking for some way to shed the load. Repeal of national
prohibition seemed to be that way.
Indeed, if the tax situation of the wealthy is considered, national
prohibition seems to have been an inefficient means of redistributing
the wealth of America. The workingmen of America drank half their
usual amount of liquor and saved one billion dollars a year. The
middle classes drank the same amount of liquor and lost one billion
dollars a year. The federal government lost something over half a
billion dollars a year on liquor taxes, which it made up on income taxes
from the rich and the corporations. Moreover, between one and two
billion dollars were transferred from wealthy brewers and distillers
to the nouveaux riches among the criminal classes, and from them to
the underpaid judges and attorneys and policemen of the United
States. Altogether, prohibition was a sort of irresponsible Robin Hood,
stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Only, unlike Robin
Hood, prohibition was not thanked by the poor for its pains.
THE REVOLT OF CONGRESS
THE FIRST serious attack on prohibition after the Wickersham Report
came from Congressman Lehlbach, of New Jersey, who introduced a
resolution in the House calling for "naked repeal" of the Eighteenth
Amendment. Lehlbach did not shilly-shally. He wanted two things
made clear about the Wickersham Report. "The commission is prac-
tically unanimous that the Eighteenth Amendment is not observed
and not enforced. A majority of the commission unequivocally state
their belief that the Eighteenth Amendment can never be adequately
enforced/' Therefore, repeal was the only solution. With repeal, Con-
gress should be given the power to aid the various states in enforcing
their laws against the liquor traffic. In fact, Lehlbach wanted a return
to the position in 1913, after the passage of the Webb-Kenyon Law.
This was Woodrow Wilson's position before his death, and was the
position later taken up by the sponsors of the Twenty-first Amend-
ment. But the time for repeal had not come, and Lehlbach's resolu-
tion was killed in the House Committee on the Judiciary. 12
The opening sessions of the Seventy-second Congress talked a great
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 373
deal about prohibition during 1931, and did little. In that, they denied
the example of the Wickersham Commission and showed an admirable
consistency. They were, as usual, sitting on the fence, waiting for the*
results of the elections. The drys were obviously declining in power,
the wets rising. It was not yet clear, however, that the wets would win
in the presidential campaign. Congress did not want to jump into an
apparent flood, only to break its ankle in hidden dry shallows. On the
question of a popular referendum on prohibition, over one-third of
House and Senate abstained from voting, although the drys only
managed to defeat the measure in the Senate by three votes.
Nevertheless, the wets did force one showdown in the House. In
La Guardia's words, the people had a right to know where the House
stood on the issue of prohibition, "an opportunity heretofore denied
them by their own Representatives." 18 On March 14, 1932, Congress-
man Beck, of Pennsylvania, and Linthicum, of Maryland, introduced a
resolution to discharge the bill for repeal of the Eighteenth Amend-
ment from further consideration by the House Committee on the
Judiciary. Boylan, of New York, exulted in the growing power of the
wets after twelve years of high taxation and bigotry. He was anxious
to see such a splendid House returned in the elections; its return
would depend in a large measure upon its vote on the present resolu-
tion. O'Connor, of New York, observed that only eighty-two members
of the House had voted on the Eighteenth Amendment; a new body
had since been elected. He was amused to see a complete volte-face
in the attitude of the drys. He quoted Senators Sheppard and Jones
and Bishop Cannon, who had pressed for the submission of national
prohibition to the people in 1917 and now opposed a popular refer-
endum. He was glad that the time had come to show who were the
friends and foes of prohibition. He declaimed, " Tis the ides of March!
Stand up and be counted!"
Indeed, the dry appeals of 1932 were the wet appeals of 1917.
Where the wets had cried out for unity in time of war, the drys now
cried out for unity in time of depression. Sumner, of Texas, spoke of
the need for "a united people to deal with this terrible economic crisis
of ours." He made the challenge to wet and dry: "Let us not turn aside
from the challenge of the hour and divide our people." And he paral-
leled the complacency of the wets in 1917, that they could hold thir-
teen states indefinitely, by his assertion that the wets would never get
two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states to support
them.
But Beck himself, in the last speech before the roll call, gave the
most eloquent statement yet made in the House. He found it strange
that the drys should maintain that the Constitution was unchangeable,
374 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
when they themselves had written the Eighteenth Amendment into
the Constitution and thus had destroyed the basic American principle
of self-government. There was, in addition, no doubt that prohibi-
tion was an "experiment," and experiments should be voted upon
frequently. He reminded the drys that "no such general revolt against
the enforcement of a law has ever been known in our history/' The
amendment was passed in a "time of great hysteria" by Senates and
legislatures not elected for that purpose. He quoted the Talmud and
Aristotle to show that the prohibition law could never be enforced.
As for the dry argument that unity was needed in time of depression,
he said that depression demanded the repeal of prohibition "to clear
the decks for other important public policies." Until prohibition was
repealed, there would be "continued chaos in our national councils." 14
The Beck-Linthicum resolution was defeated by 227 votes to 187.
But the wets had made their best showing on a major vote since the
Hobson resolution in 1914. In three years, they had doubled their vote
in the House. A comparison of the vote with that on the Hobson reso-
lution shows what had been prophesied in the vote on the Jones Law.
The wets had gained support in the populous North and had lost it
in the South. They had gained support in industrial states and had
lost it in rural areas. The party conventions, however, would define the
party line on prohibition, and the vote in the coming elections would
be taken as a referendum on the issue, partially binding upon Con-
The President, like Congress, was wary of prohibition. He was too
clever a politician not to see that the wet tide was flooding in. He
approached the Republican convention of 1932 with massive discre-
tion. Many in New York suggested that the new bridge from Fort
Tryon to the Palisades should be called the Hoover Bridge, since it
was wet below and dry above and straddled the river with one foot
on either side. This joke was at least more humorous than those which
referred to the shack-towns outside Chicago as Hoovervilles and to
newspapers stuffed inside trouserlegs to keep out the cold as Hoover
Trousers. To one enemy, Hoover was the "Janus of America, with one
wet face and one dry face, and neither face very handsome." 15 Ready
to change his mind over prohibition, Hoover waited for the results of
the Chicago convention.
Mencken noticed a vast change in the Republican delegates in 1932.
They were aggressively wet. Never in his Me had he been witness to
"a more pervasive confidence, a showier or more bellicose cockiness." 16
This may have been partially due to the anger of the delegates in find-
ing that racketeers had pushed up bootleg prices to double those of
New York City. But the enthusiasm of the wets was also due to the
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 375
bouquet of victory; more and more states were repealing their enforce-
ment laws. The keynote speech at the convention incredibly made no
mention of prohibition. The real battle for the plank took place before
the Resolutions Committee in the parlor of the Congress Hotel. Bishop
Cannon found himself treated with contempt. The two planks pre-
sented at the convention were not a wet and a dry plank, but a moist
plank and a dripping one. The delegates, ignoring minor problems
such as the worst depression in American history, fought cup and lip
over the prohibition issue. The Hoover group secured only a three-
fifths majority for their moist plank, which favored resubmission of the
Eighteenth Amendment to the states if the federal government re-
tained power to protect dry territory and to prevent the return of the
saloon. The plank also declared with more hope than faith that prohibi-
tion was not "a partisan political question/' 17
But the drys themselves had made prohibition a partisan political
question, by taking Hoover's victory in 1928 as a dry referendum. They
had branded the Republican party as the party of prohibition. This
charge appeared even more true when the Democrats adopted at their
convention in 1932 a plank for the outright repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment. The Democrats had come out into the open as the party
of the wets. By default, the Republicans were the party of the drys,
even though their prohibition plank was, in Franklin D. Roosevelt's
terms, "words upon words, evasions upon evasions, insincerity upon
insincerity, a dense cloud of words." 18 This statement by Roosevelt,
who seemed to many in 1932 the veritable apostle of repeal, would
have also been a just description of his own past attitudes toward
prohibition.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: FROM CAUTION TO REPEAL
As AL SMITH exemplified the immigrant's view of prohibition, and
Herbert Hoover the view of the native-born rural American, so Roose-
velt had the attitude of the old American aristocrat towards the dry
issue. The Roosevelt and the Delano families belonged to the squire-
archy of upper New York State. They moved in an ordered and secure
and polite society, undisturbed by the new rich and the new poor of
the industrial cities. They believed in good manners rather than in
rude honesty, in the compromises of well-bred tact rather than in the
quarrels of opposed convictions. Roosevelt accepted the habits of his
class unquestioningly throughout his life, even if he was thought to
be a traitor to that class. He came into politics to heal, not to antag-
onize. He did not insist until he was powerful enough to command.
He expected to govern all, not to lead a faction or a party. His equiv-
376 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
ocations on such subjects as prohibition were understandable in a
man who thought that conversation on unpleasant matters was a sign,
not of truth, but of boorishness.
Roosevelt preferred to try all things for all men, to apply "bold,
persistent experimentation" to all problems and relationships in order
that everyone might be a little gratified and served. 19 If this effort
"above all, [to] try something" made Roosevelt seem slippery and
evasive and weak to such commentators as Lippmann, yet it made
him seem a good leader to the Brains Trust, who were to experiment
under him. Raymond Moley wrote of Roosevelt just before his nomi-
nation in 1932:
There is a lot of autointoxication of the intelligence that we shall
have to watch. . . . But I believe that his complete freedom from
dogmatism is a virtue at this stage of the game. He will stick to ideas
after he has expressed them, I believe and hope. Heaven knows
Hoover is full of information and dogmas but he has been imprisoned
by his knowledge and God save us from four more years of that! 20
The instinctive quality which Roosevelt had, "a desire to please and
an inborn intuition of what means would attain that end/' made him
not only a great democratic politician, receptive to the wants of the
governed, but also a weathercock man, often uninsistent upon his own
desires. 21
Roosevelt even married into his own clique. He married his god-
father's daughter, Eleanor Roosevelt. The godfather was a drunkard,
who was loved by his daughter; in sorrow at his habits, she became a
confirmed dry. 22 She married Franklin Roosevelt despite the disap-
proval of his formidable mother, Sara, who was also a dry. The tee-
total tendencies of mother and wife often irked Franklin, although he
could make political capital out of their known prohibitionist sym-
pathies. He was a moderate drinker throughout his life, and even the
passage of the Volstead Act did not make him dry. Rosenman's claim
that Roosevelt drank only a "horse's neck*' of ginger ale and lemon
peel before repeal and beer after repeal is erroneous; 23 in fact, during
the campaign summer of 1932, he often drove out to Rosenman's house
at Wappingers Falls to drink cocktails there, since he was deprived of
them in his own home. 24 Although no liquor was ever served officially
in the Executive Mansion when Roosevelt was Governor of New York,
he did serve cocktails after repeal in the White House.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had "the best trade name in American
political life." 26 He was inspired early with thoughts of a political
career by the example of his distant cousin Theodore and by the lists
of past Presidents in the family genealogies which his mother recited
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 377
hour after hour. Although he was a traditional Democrat, there were
certain similarities in his political career to that of the Republican
Theodore. Both rose by holding positions in their state legislatures.
Both were Assistant Secretaries of the Navy. Both were Governors of
New York. Both ran as candidates for the vice presidency, although
Franklin was unsuccessful. And both served more than one term as
President of the United States. But their characters and policies were
divergent. If Franklin tried to evade the issue of national prohibition
by the same means as Theodore, by supporting local option and later
state repeal, yet he used persuasion and silence rather than speeches
about order and liberty to advertise his stand. If evidence of a wet
majority in 1932 made Franklin declare for repeal in much the way
that evidence of a dry majority had made Theodore declare for pro-
hibition during the First World War, yet Franklin could claim reason-
ably that he had always been temperate in habits and speeches about
drink. The evidence of Theodore's face and words made it difficult
for him to pose as a moderate champion of the drys.
As state senator from upstate New York, Franklin Roosevelt was
early dependent on rural votes, rural beliefs, and rural prejudices. In
the elections and during his time in the Assembly, he attacked Tam-
many and machine politics, and voted puritan and progressive and
dry, as a good farmer should. The fact that he was a Democrat was
forgiven him in the country districts because he was connected with
the great Republican, Theodore. His support of local option on the
ticklish questions of prohibition and woman suffrage was acceptable in
country and town alike as a reasonable method of sitting on the fence.
Roosevelt had already determined to rise to the presidency by means
of the state governorship. Thus he had to placate the wets in New
York City as well as the drys in Dutchess County. Unfortunately, he
came under heavy pressure from the Anti-Saloon League while he
was still dependent on the country vote for his seat in the Senate. In
January, 1913, he unwillingly introduced a city option bill for the
League against the opposition of Tammany. He was much more ready,
however, to support the closing of the saloons in Highland Falls, the
town adjoining West Point. He imitated Theodore Roosevelt in sup-
porting prohibition where it aided military efficiency. In fact, he voted
so regularly for dry measures that he was praised in an editorial of the
American Issue. 2 * The early dry record was used against him by the
wets of both parties until he adopted the wet Democratic plank in
1932.
Roosevelt was made the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the
Wilson administration. He worked under Josephus Daniels and sup-
ported his measures for enforcing overt prohibition on the United
378 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
States fleet. Although the American Navy was distinguished as much
by its drunkenness as for its bravery in the ports of Europe, its teetotal-
ism on the high seas could not be questioned.
The nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt as Vice President at the
1920 Democratic convention was due to his name rather than his na-
tional reputation. James M. Cox, the presidential candidate, was a wet
from Ohio, the nominee of the party bosses. Roosevelt, throughout the
convention, voted for Cox's dry opponent, McAdoo. But a man was
needed to balance the ticket who was dry, Independent, identified
with the Wilson administration, and likely to carry a valuable state.
Roosevelt was available on all four counts. Boss Murphy backed him
to get rid of a dangerous antagonist in state politics, the Westerners
backed him as an opponent of Tammany, and the Southerners backed
him for his supposed dry sympathies. There were no obvious oppo-
nents. The convention delegates were in a hurry to get home. The name
of Roosevelt was thought to be a magic capable of gulling simple pro-
gressives into the belief that they were voting for Theodore.* Franklin
Roosevelt was nominated by Alfred Smith, and was accepted by
acclamation.
In the disastrous Democratic campaign of 1920, Roosevelt made
valuable contacts among the leaders of the local state Democratic
organizations, and created some good will for himself throughout the
country. Reporters found him affable and charming, although he was
widely suspected of weakness and lack of character. 27 These charges
were harder to bring against him after his attack of infantile paralysis
and his subsequent determined return to politics even though he was
a permanent cripple. Roosevelt refused to recognize that he would
never again be able to use his legs properly, and thus deceived himself
into hope; it was 'questionable whether he ever faced up completely
to his condition." 28 This quality of self-deception was at once Roose-
velt's greatest strength and weakness. It gave him the strength to over-
come such crippling disabilities as poliomyelitis, and the weakness to
evade a firm stand on such dangerous issues as prohibition.
For Roosevelt saw that, if prohibition were allowed to become a
major issue, it would split the Democrats irreconcilably and prevent
the party from concentrating on more important issues of economics
and government. If party solidity was the aim of the good Democrat,
he must equivocate over prohibition at the price of personal honesty.
Thus Roosevelt spent some of his time recuperating from his disease
in searching for an acceptable straddle for the liquor problem. In
wet Republican Chicago Tribune commented sourly on Franklin Roose-
velt's nomination, "If lie is Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root is Gene Debs, and
Bryan is a brewer."
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 379
September, 1922, he advocated that a follower of his in Dutchess
County should support a proposal for legalizing beer with a volume
of up to 4 per cent of alcohol; but care should be taken about sup-
porting light wines, which contained up to 15 per cent of alcohol. In
1923, Roosevelt saw William Jennings Bryan in Florida and suggested
a national referendum on prohibition, saying that the drys would, of
course, win easily. He wrote later to Bryan that New York State was
not nearly as wet a state as some Democrats liked to make out an
oblique reference to Al Smith, the Governor of New York. 29
However hard he tried, Roosevelt could not fail to take sides be-
tween Bryan and Smith. Although he warned Bryan that "hopeful
idiots" among the wet Democrats were trying to arrange for the meet-
ing of the party convention of 1924 in New York City in order to make
the passage of a wet plank easier, he still nominated the wet Smith
at the New York convention as the Happy Warrior. For Smith was the
leader of the New York Democrats, and Roosevelt knew that he could
not hope for a future in politics without some support from his home
state. Both ambition and courtesy demanded that he should back
Smith. Indeed, he had earlier commiserated with Smith over the re-
peal of the Mullan-Gage Law, and the difficult problem in which "this
darned old liquor question" had placed the Governor of New York. 80
Roosevelt had pointed out the obvious, that repeal of the state enforce-
ment law would hurt Smith nationally, although it would win him sup-
port in New York City and other large industrial centers. Roosevelt
had suggested his usual subtle straddle, that Smith should veto the
repeal bill on the grounds of moral obligation to support the Volstead
Act and should then call a special session of the state legislature to
pass another bill, which would effectively draw the teeth from all the
penal provisions of the Mullan-Gage Law by requiring the law officers
of the state to enforce the Volstead Act only when requested to do so
by federal agents.
The antagonisms revealed between city and country Democrats in
the convention of 1924 confirmed Roosevelt in his chosen role as
peacemaker. Aided by his familiar and manager Louis Howe, he
corresponded widely with all those who were powerful in the party
organization, asking their views on how to strengthen the Democratic
party. The answers demonstrated the deep divisions among the Demo-
crats over the Ku Klux Klan and prohibition. Roosevelt's most useful
role was obviously to be the doctor of the wounds of the party. He
should try to concentrate the attention of the Democrats on the basic
issues of prosperity and administration, even though prohibition had
swelled out its monstrous importance until it overshadowed the minds
of both parties and people in America.
380 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
In a state convention keynote speech for Smith in 1926, Roosevelt
managed to talk so adroitly about prohibition that he was praised by
his old dry Navy chief, Josephus Daniels. "I think you took only a light
bath and came out in fine shape. From that speech nobody would call
you an immersionist like Al Smith; they would rather think you took
yours by sprinkling or pouring/' 81 Although Smith was being equally
cagey on the subject of prohibition before 1928, he was damned as a
wet by his past. Roosevelt's straddle was far more effective and
recommended him to the South and West as reasonably dry, even if he
was not considered to be dedicated to the Eighteenth Amendment.
Roosevelt confirmed this impression at a meeting of Democratic lead-
ers in Washington at the beginning of 1927, when he urged them to
issue a declaration of fundamental Democratic principles on Jefferson's
birthday and to avoid such controversial issues as prohibition. There
was even a movement by the Southern drys, led by Daniels and Carter
Glass, to back Roosevelt against Smith in 1928. Louis Howe managed
to quash this forlorn and damaging attempt at support. It could only
precipitate a break with Smith and alienate the wet, industrial dele-
gates, whom Roosevelt would need at succeeding conventions.
The best reason for Roosevelt's refusal to run in 1928 was that
continuing prosperity had made it unlikely that any Democrat could
oust the Republicans from control of the White House. Both Roose-
velt and Howe knew this and concentrated on building up support for
Roosevelt at the following convention. Al Smith's defeat in 1928 might
make Roosevelt the most available candidate four years later. The
example of William Jennings Bryan had taught the Democrats not to
run losing horses two or three times. So Roosevelt demonstrated his
faith in party unity by nominating Smith again at the national con-
vention at Houston, and by suggesting that Cordell Hull, Roosevelt's
new Southern supporter, should run as Vice President. Unfortunately,
Hull's advisers tried to run him for the presidency, which made Smith
favor the Arkansas Senator, Joseph Robinson, as his fellow candidate
and sop to the South.
Roosevelt's influence helped to prevent the Smith supporters on the
Resolutions Committee from writing a wet plank for the convention.
He thought that Smith's repudiation of the dry compromise plank was
ill-advised, and he strongly opposed Smith's choice of John J. Raskob
as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Raskob was a
conservative and wealthy businessman, a Roman Catholic, and a wet;
he emphasized the very issues which Roosevelt wanted ignored. If
there was fundamental agreement between Republicans and Demo-
crats on business matters, prohibition and religion would become
disastrous major issues. 32 Roosevelt wrote to Daniels on July 20, 1928,
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 381
that he was still doing his best to line up the campaign issues on
something other than the wet and dry question, but that he was
disturbed by events. 33 Yet he agreed to support Smith by running for
Governor in New York State, although he was worried that prosperity
might ensure both the election of Hoover and the Republican candi-
date for Governor of New York, Albert Ottinger.
While Smith lost his home state of New York to Hoover, Roosevelt
narrowly won against Ottinger by twenty-five thousand votes. The
religious prejudice, which had worked covertly against Smith, bene-
fited Roosevelt, despite his pleas against any form of religious dis-
crimination. For Roosevelt was an Episcopalian, while Ottinger was a
Jew. Both candidates in New York played down the prohibition issue.
Roosevelt did so because of his upstate support, Smith's wetness, and
his own future national chances, while Ottinger concurred because of
the wet New York City vote, Hoover's dryness, and the equivocal
position upon prohibition of the Republican party in the state. In his
twelve major campaign addresses, Roosevelt mentioned prohibition
only twice. In upstate Utica, he declared that repeal of the Mullan-
Gage Law had lessened graft without any effect on the efficiency of
law enforcement against the bootleggers. 34 But in downstate Yonkers,
Roosevelt misquoted Hoover's support of the "noble experiment" and
identified himself with Governor Smith's stand against the Volstead
Act. By a miracle of devious sincerity, Roosevelt said that both he and
Smith demanded constructive action, which meant change from pres-
ent conditions. Only Roosevelt carefully failed to state what specific
change he and Smith desired. 35
Roosevelt's victory and Smith's defeat put the new Governor in an
embarrassing position. Smith would demand a say in the management
of the state on the reasonable grounds of four terms' experience. If
Roosevelt accepted the offer, he would appear to be Smith's figure-
head. Therefore, he refused Smith's help and began the breach that
presidential ambitions would make so bitter. For Roosevelt repre-
sented to Smith those very country, old-stock, mannered, Protestant
people who had opposed the Roman Catholic city politician within the
party and nation.
As Governor of New York, Roosevelt concentrated on an agricultural
program to harden his upstate support; he also continued the type of
progressive legislation which Smith had put through in his tenures of
office. Roosevelt, however, did more than Smith by introducing relief
measures against the effects of the depression. With these economic
reforms, he sought to take the emphasis of his administration off pro-
hibition. Yet, when he was called to the Governors' Conference at
New London by Hoover on July 16, 1929, Roosevelt used prohibition
382 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
to advertise himself. He said that the states were not doing enough
to combat large-scale organized crime. There should be crime com-
missions in all states like the one in New York. This statement would
have made no headlines, except that Roosevelt ended his plea by read-
ing a letter from George W. Wickersham. This letter was Wicker-
sham's first public statement since the session of his commission on
law enforcement; it recommended that the states should give more
help to the federal authorities in the enforcement of the Volstead Act.
An immediate quarrel broke out among the dry and the wet gover-
nors; they voted, in the end, to shelve Wickersham's suggestion. Roose-
velt cannily took no side in the debate. 36 He had secured publicity
without committing himself.
Roosevelt continued to withstand pressure from both wets and drys
to come out into the open about prohibition. When he was charged
with lax enforcement of the federal laws in New York City, he quoted
Police Commissioner Grover Whalen's figures, which proved that all
but one in fifty prosecutions in the federal courts were initiated by the
city police. When Walter Lippmann attacked him in the New York
World for failing to support the states' rights solution to the prohibi-
tion problem, Roosevelt wrote in a hurt manner to a friend that it was
the World
. . . which literally drove Al Smith into sending that fool telegram
after the Houston convention telling how wet he was. Al had every
wet vote in the country but he needed a good many millions of the
middle of the road votes to elect him President ... the World did
more harm to Al Smith's candidacy than all the Republican news-
papers in the United States put together. 37
But Roosevelt saw that the wets were gaining ground. He would not
be able to straddle the prohibition issue during the gubernatorial cam-
paign of 1930. Thus he thought it better to declare himself and ap-
pear honest than seem to be forced into wetness by his state party
platform. He wrote, therefore, a public letter to Senator Robert Wag-
ner, who had been elected temporary chairman of the Democratic
state convention. Roosevelt said that he thought public opinion was
overwhelmingly opposed to the Eighteenth Amendment. The amend-
ment had not fostered temperance in the population but, to quote from
a resolution of the American Legion, had "fostered excessive drinking
of strong intoxicants," had "led to corruption and hypocrisy/' had
brought about "disregard for law and order," and had "flooded the
country with untaxed and illicit liquor." Roosevelt stated that he
personally shared this opinion. The principle of home rule over the
liquor trade should be extended to states, cities, towns, and villages.
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 383
But each state should keep full control over the sale of liquor to
prevent the return of the saloon. 38
This letter was a calculated risk on Roosevelt's part. He hoped, by
taking up a damp position, to appear as the friend of the moderate
drys against the extreme wets. He succeeded. Of the letters that
greeted his announcement, most were laudatory, although there were
a few protests from the South. Even Raskob approved of Roosevelt's
stand. Only five out of twenty-nine members of the Democratic Na-
tional Committee who answered a circular from the New York Times
opposed Roosevelt's solution to the prohibition problem. 89 Roosevelt,
by returning to local option, had thrown back the responsibility of
efficient enforcement onto each local community. A dry neighborhood
could be dry; a wet one could be wet. Roosevelt was difficult to attack,
since he had appealed to democracy as the answer to the problem of
prohibition.
In the election for Governor, the Republican candidate, United
States Attorney Charles Tuttle, came out for repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment and caused a landslide vote in favor of Roosevelt. He fell
into the Democratic trap. The Roosevelt forces had arranged for an
extreme wet plank to be written at the state convention so that Roose-
velt himself could appear to be drier than his party, the last dike
against the Democratic flood tide. 40 Tuttle, however, was responsible
by his office for law enforcement in New York. His wet stand disgusted
the dry upstate Republicans, who nominated a second candidate, a
prohibitionist professor from Syracuse University. Roosevelt had great
fun at the expense of his opponents, saying that the Republicans were
trying to make their state party "an amphibious ichthyosaurus equally
comfortable whether wet or dry, whether in the sea or on the land or
up in the air." 41
Roosevelt won New York by 725,000 votes, twice the majority Al
Smith had ever polled. Roosevelt even carried upstate New York, the
Republican stronghold. He immediately became front runner for the
Democratic nomination for President in 1932. His policy on prohibi-
tion and economics seemed to be able to hold Democrats and win
Republicans. Only blocking by Al Smith or sudden prosperity under
Hoover appeared likely to keep Roosevelt from the White House.
But Roosevelt still had to walk delicately. He had to hold the
Southern and Western Democrats behind him but avoid antagonizing
Smith's city supporters enough to make them bolt in 1932. A split
Democratic party would go down to certain defeat. Roosevelt saw
himself as the great healer. He would use his personality like Warm
Springs to relax the ills of his party. Thus, after his election in 1930,
he was again silent on the subject of prohibition. Over and over again,
384 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
he repeated that economics and depression were the big problems.
He disliked the stupidity of such groups as the National Economic
League, which decided in January, 1931, that prohibition was the
major "paramount problem*' of the United States; to them unemploy-
ment was far less important. 42 The Smith group in the Democratic
National Committee agreed with this analysis. For Smith had become
more and more a friend of big business and wanted to fight the Repub-
licans on prohibition rather than depression, even if he split his own
party behind him.
The quarrel between Roosevelt and Smith came into the open on
the question of the Democratic party's stand on the Eighteenth
Amendment. The supporters of Smith had kept their hold on the
Democratic National Committee through John J. Raskob and Jouett
Shouse. They hoped, by making prohibition a leading issue in the next
convention, that a militant wet majority would block the Roosevelt
bid to heal the party split by temporizing over the liquor problem, and
would elect Smith as the obvious candidate of the wets.
In March, 1931, a combination of Roosevelt and the dry Southerners
blocked a resolution by the Democratic National Committee to press
for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. The price Roosevelt paid for
this evasion was to allow for six years the Southern Democratic lead-
ers of the houses of Congress to be the spokesmen of their party be-
tween elections, and thus to have a veto over national legislation. He
also lost Smith's friendship. Smith thought Roosevelt was dodging on
the subject of prohibition. He exploded to Clark Howell on December
2, 1931, "Why the hell don't he speak out he has been more out-
spoken on the question than even I have been, and now ain't the time
for trimming!" The time had come for a "showdown" against the
iniquity of the Eighteenth Amendment; the Democrats should demand
a referendum. Howell discreetly said that Roosevelt agreed with
Smith's ideas. 48
But Roosevelt evaded the prohibition issue more and more during
the months before the presidential convention. Less forthright than
Smith, he hedged on the ticklish subject, rather than being silent about
it. His supporters on the Democratic Resolutions Committee were
about to present a plank no wetter than the moist effort of the Repub-
licans. Nevertheless, when Senator Barkley's keynote address demand-
ing repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment was widely cheered by the
convention delegates, Roosevelt withdrew by telephone his opposition
to Smith's minority wet plank some fifteen minutes before Smith was
due to present it from the convention floor. 44 Support of the Smith
plank by most of the Roosevelt group on the National Committee ex-
cept for Cordell Hull turned it into a majority plank at the last mo-
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 385
ment 45 Smith was cheered tumultuously as he presented his wet plank.
He attacked the moist minority plank of Cordell Hull and the hypoc-
risy of Herbert Hoover, who had sent for blotting paper and had
dried up the report of the Wickersham Commission.
Roosevelt's political manager, Jim Farley, released the pledged
Roosevelt delegates when the wet planks came up for the vote at the
convention, knowing that the passage of the extreme wet plank would
eliminate the best reason for nominating Smith or Governor Ritchie,
of Maryland. With a repeal plank written into the party platform,
Smith had little else to offer, while Roosevelt was offering panaceas
for unemployment. Cordell Hull, presenting the minority damp plank,
attacked Raskob for trying to emphasize prohibition and ignore de-
pression after the Republican manner. In fact, if the Democrats imi-
tated their opponents, it would be "a damnable outrage bordering on
treason/' Hull gave an indirect and moving defense of Roosevelt's
political wisdom in seeking to bury the prohibition issue, while the
delegates by a four-to-one majority whooped up Al Smith's personal
honestly over repeal. 46 Even the Southern delegates mainly voted wet,
with only Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Georgia holding firm for the
drys.
The dry McAdoo, Smith's enemy, had his revenge as the spokesman
for the California delegation that switched to Roosevelt and gave him
the nomination. As Mencken wrote, eight years ago McAdoo had
... led the hosts of the Invisible Empire against the Pope, the rum
demon and all the other Beelzebubs of the Hookworm Belt . . . The
man who blocked him was Al Smith, and now he was paying Al back.
If revenge is really sweet he was sucking a colossal sugar teat, but all
the same there was a beery flavor about it that must have somewhat
disquieted him. 4
Roosevelt had made a virtue of necessity over prohibition. Com-
mitted by his party to outright repeal, he could forget his own equiv-
ocations on the issue in condemnation of Hoover's wobbling stand
on the wobbling Republican plank. Once a decision was forced upon
him, Roosevelt had the courage of his choice. For Roosevelt's way
was that
... of the common man as opposed to the intellectual and un-
common man. The common people understood Franklin Roosevelt
and he understood them, largely . . . because their processes of
looking at things and coming to conclusions were almost the same.
This probably was why they trusted him even in situations where he
took an action they didn't like. 48
386 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
A majority of the common people may have been prepared to accept
prohibition in time of war and boom, but not in time of depression.
Roosevelt mirrored their feelings. If his evasive attitude toward pro-
hibition before his election to the presidency in 1932 did not indicate
his later strength in office, it is because the job of President gave the
malleable Roosevelt the capacity to do the job well. For him, there
was one way to power, the way of trimming; and another way in
power, the way of power itself.
THE REPEAL ELECTION
THE MAJOR party conventions of 1932 showed how much the strength
of the drys had suddenly collapsed. Mencken exulted, "Prohibition
has suddenly fallen over like a house of cards. A year ago, even six
months ago, the drys were still full of confidence, for they were sure
that they had Lord Hoover in their cage. But he has broken out,
slipped off his nose ring, and headed for the bad lands/' 49 Walter
Lippmann thought the conflict over the prohibition plank at both con-
ventions reduced itself to the question of whether to be misleading or
frank. Hoover was in control of the Grand Old Party, and Hoover
wished to be misleading. He was thus regarded as a deserter by the
drys, and by the wets as an unreliable convert. Yet Lippmann warned
the wets that they were "certainly as fanatical and as ignorant and
as intolerant as the drys ever were in the days when they were in the
saddle^^But the moist Republican plank, which asked for resub-
mission of the Eighteenth Amendment to the states, was outbid by the
Democratic plank, which demanded outright repeal. The wets backed
Franklin Roosevelt, who promised them the most. And the drys were
left in the sad position of choosing moderate wets against extreme
wets. Will Rogers commented, "Both sides are wet and the poor old
dry hasn't got a soul to vote for. He is Roosevelt's 'forgotten man/ " 51
The drys had nowhere to go in 1932. Senator Borah rightly com-
plained that the major parties had disenfranchised them. 52 But the
fact was that the people were not interested in prohibition, except as
an economic fallacy. The Christian Century wailed, "So far as the
presidential campaign is concerned, the question of prohibition is a
washed-out issue/' 58 Although not a single church journal supported
Roosevelt editorially, they also said little in praise of the moist Hoover.
The reason for their offended silence was as blinkered as the reason
for the Republican enthusiasm at the Chicago convention.
How often did the reader of the church press in the depression
start an editorial or article entitled "The Need of the Hour," "A Time
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 387
of Crisis," "The President Must Lead," "Moral Issues in the Election,"
"The Stakes in the Election," "It Is Time for the President to Act,"
only to discover that, far from dealing with the economic crisis, it was
concerned with prohibitionl 54
The landslide victory of Roosevelt showed the ineffectual quality of
the church press. The preachers had shot their bolt against Al Smith in
1928. The virulence and unfairness of their attack upon him had lost
them much of their former influence.
During the campaign of 1932, Hoover at last made what he thought
was a definite statement upon prohibition. With unconscious humor,
he said at Washington on August 11 that his conclusions on prohibi-
tion were "clear and need not be misunderstood." He then proceeded
to obscure obscurity. He stated that he refused "on the one hand to
return to the old saloon with its political and social corruption, or on
the other to endure the bootlegger and the speakeasy with their abuses
and crime." Either was intolerable. Resubmission to the states (which
was a means of avoiding an outright declaration for repeal) was the
answer. American statesmanship, exemplified by himself, was capable
of working out such a solution and making it effective. 55
But prohibition was no longer an important moral issue m^ajdime of
degression. Senator Moses migiit excuse the evasive Republican pro-
JiiBiEiSfrpIank by saying that it must "appeal to that sweet reasonable-
ness of the great majority of American people that always manifests
itself, in the long run, whatever may be the bone of contention." 56 But
the voters were only interested in die economic benefits which repeal
might bring. And the Democrats shamelessly exploited the illusory
prosperity which would result from the opening of the distilleries and
the breweries, and the illusory relief which would be felt by the tax-
payer. The Governor of Maryland, Albert Ritchie, claimed that the
liquor trade would provide jobs for a million people. 67 Moreover, as
Franklin Roosevelt himself charged, prohibition was diverting vast
quantities of money into the hands of criminals and bootleggers, whose
business "was in a real sense being supported by the government." 58
The dry crusade had become an economic whip for the Democrats to
use in the flogging of the Republican party. The propaganda for
Hoover and the prohibitionists in 1928, that they were the saviors of
prosperity, branded them later as the traitors who had conspired to
cause the depression.
In despair of both presidential candidates, the combined dry forces,
which called themselves the National Prohibition Board of Strategy,
declared war on both parties and decided to concentrate on holding
Congress. Some dry leaders such as Daniel A. Poling did declare in
388 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
desperation for Hoover. 59 But only a few. The disorganization of the
drys was complete. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union rec-
ognized as much and decided to endorse neither candidate; it asked
its members to vote according to conscience and appeal to the winner
to enforce prohibition. 00 As Wheeler had said to Senator Reed, if the
difference between the two candidates is "just a degree of wetness,
you cannot get much moral enthusiasm up/' 61
The result of the election doomed the drys. The extreme candidate
of the wets, Roosevelt, easily triumphed over the moist candidate,
Hoover. The supporters of prohibition had called the previous election
a referendum, and now the vote had gone against them. Although they
rightly denied that prohibition was a major issue in the campaign, the
very fact that it was an issue at all, and an economic issue, was fatal.
For as a bootlegger had said at the Republican convention, the issue
was now bread, not beer. 62 And if a party was returned to power with
a mandate to put the nation back to work again, few would cavil at a
measure designed to provide bread for millions through the manu-
facture of beer.
Herbert Hoover was defeated by the inadequacy of his moral and
economic philosophy, as the prohibitionists were by theirs. Several
decades of vindication by him and the drys have not whitened their
sepulchers. Hoover believed in rugged individualism and free enter-
prise, as the advocates of abstinence believed in enforced teetotalism
and lack of compromise. Hoover could not see that the nineteenth-
century country morality which might suit the boom America of 1920
was a catastrophic basis on which to construct relief measures for the
depression America of 1930. Equally, the drys could not accept the
fact that the conditions caused by industrialism would never be fertile
ground for those social restrictions which rural villages might welcome
as safety precautions. Hoover, shifting about in the White House to
save prosperity and party, was too narrow and too late to do so. The
Anti-Saloon League was similarly too narrow and too late to concede
enough to the supporters of temperance in 1932 to save the Eighteenth
Amendment. Both the President and the drys worked long hours with
convinced faith to rescue lost causes. Both failed.
Hoover claimed to be superman and myth, as the drys claimed to
speak for majorities and God.
The Herbert Hoover whom the people elected in 1928 never did
exist in flesh. That Hoover was the embodiment of an idea, a legend-
ary ideal, a portrait of intentions and not a picture of realities. That
Hoover was the Great Humanitarian, the Great Engineer, the Great
Secretary. The trinity was a creation of adulation, publicity, and
vicarious materialization. 63
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 389
The drys puffed themselves up as much as Hoover, and were as limited
in fact. When Hoover, in 1930, accused the advocates of excessive
appropriations of "playing politics with human misery," he had for-
gotten that he had played politics with the relief of human misery in
war and with human prosperity in peace. The drys also forgot their
exploitation of the psychology of war and of boom when they accused
the wets of using the depression to secure repeal. The Anti-Saloon
League linked the dry cause to Herbert Hoover and prosperity, and
drowned with him in those chains.
THE TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT
/ONCE THE depression had become too blatant to be ignored, the
morality of prohibition seemed ridiculous^ Hunger was more of a
temperance teacher than any dry. Repeal became merely another
method of fighting the slump. When the same Congress that had voted
against the Beck-Linthicum resolution met again, it showed how much
more it cared for the voice of the electorate than for its personal con-
victions. The drys were no longer so awesome. The popular vote had
shown them powerless to prevent the elections of Democrats and wets.
Thus the rump Congress merely did what its successors would have
done, even if it contradicted all its previous professions by doing so.
Both houses voted overwhelmingly for a Twenty-first Amendment to
the Constitution to repeal the Eighteenth.
The drys tried to salvage what they could. On December 6, 1932,
Senator Elaine, of Wisconsin, introduced a resolution which embodied
the moist proposals of the Republican platform. He said that the
political parties had finally resolved upon the question very definitely.
Now was the time and now was the occasion to carry out that resolve
which in his opinion reflected "the mature judgment of the people of
the country." He opposed wet states interfering with dry states, or
vice versa. Congress should prevent such interference and also, as both
parties had pledged in their platforms, prevent the return of the saloon
in any form. Otherwise, to paraphrase President Lincoln in saving the
Union, it was his paramount object in this struggle to take prohibition
out of the Constitution, either through state legislatures or through
state conventions or even through plain congressional action.
But the wets were as pitiless in power as the drys had been. They
would settle for nothing less than outright repeal of prohibition by the
methods most favorable to them. They insisted on repeal by elected
conventions. For, as Hastings, of Delaware, pointed out, "What they
propose and what they hope to carry through is that the populace in
the cities, most of which are wet, shall be arrayed against those in the
390 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
country, most of whom are dry/' The Census of 1930 had shown that
more people now lived in the cities than in rural areas. By the conven-
tion method of repeal, the unfair representation of the country in the
state legislatures would be discounted. For the delegates to the repeal
conventions would be elected by straight numerical majorities.
The wets also insisted that nothing should be done to prevent the
return of the saloon under another name. Walsh, of Massachusetts,
read out an article which said that, even if the saloon was bad, the
speak-easy was worse. The decision was not between saloon and no
saloon but between saloon and speak-easy. For "the liquor evil is with
us. Prohibition has moved the saloons from the street corners into the
speakeasies/' The return of the saloon would be the lesser evil, for
evil there had to be. 64
This naked demand for the return of the saloon so horrified Glass, of
Virginia, that he accused the wets of pride. He warned them that the
return of the saloon would suit the drys best, for they could still in-
flame men's minds on that issue. And Capper, of Kansas, made a
simple appeal from the last dry ditch. "All over the world a colossal
struggle is going on between right and wrong. Crime has increased
everywhere. As die population of the world is larger than ever before,
I doubt if it has ever witnessed so gigantic a contest between good
and evfl as is now taking place/' The propaganda of the wets was
false. Repeal of prohibition would do nothing to help agriculture. The
Senate must keep to the good side and preserve the Eighteenth
Amendment.
The wets ignored the pleas of the drys. They listened to Tydings, of
Maryland. He asked them, "Shall we be a bunch of hypocrites, lashed
by the lash of the Anti-Saloon League, in the face of 13 years of dismal
failure; or shall we honestly face these facts as they are now presented,
and as everyone of us knows them? We have made a failure of this
thing." The Senate agreed, and faced the facts. On February 16, 1933,
they voted by 63 to 23 to submit the Twenty-first Amendment, which
provided for the outright repeal of the Eighteenth, to state conven-
tions for ratification. The only protection allowed to dry states by the
Amendment was contained in the second section, which read: "The
transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of
the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors,
in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited."* 5
The House debate on the measure on February 20 followed the pat-
tern of the Senate. There were eloquent appeals from the extremists
on both sides. For the wets, Celler, of New York, declaimed, "Let us
flee from prohibition as one would from a foul dungeon, from a char-
nel house." For the drys, Blanton, of Texas, exhorted them to "Hold
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 391
that Line!" Letters and telegrams were swamping him, urging him to
fight the great fight to hold that line. It was La Guardia who pointed
out gently that the line had been broken. The people and Congress
were tired of prohibition. They had more important matters to debate.
The wets had won. Nevertheless, "we are now too weary and too law-
abiding to celebrate our victory. Congress will now be able to give its
undivided attention to economic matters, less controversial but far
more important." The division was taken. It gave the wets a victory by
289 votes to 121. 66
An analysis of the votes on the roll calls in Senate and House show
how the wets acquired their new majorities. The North even more pre-
ponderantly voted wet. The Midwest voted half wet and half dry, with
many members voting wet from the industrial cities of Ohio and In-
diana and Illinois and from the farming lands of Wisconsin and Michi-
gan and Minnesota. Kansas alone remained true to the dry cause,
with no wet vote in twenty years. The Far West remained largely dry,
although the wets picked up sporadic support there. But it was the
heavy defection of the South to the wets that tipped the scales. From
the Southern and border states, the wets had only gained 38 votes in
the House on the Hobson resolution in 1914; on the question of the
Twenty-first Amendment, they gained 104 votes. Only six Senators
from these areas had voted against the Eighteenth Amendment;
twenty voted in favor of the Twenty-first Amendment. The South had
stopped whoring after the false gods of clerical politicians, and had
returned to the fold of the Democratic party. So long as the Demo-
cratic President was a Protestant and a gentleman, the Solid South
would follow his lead on prohibition and on economics. For the Demo-
cratic party was the party of the South, right or wrong, but always
the party of the South.
In the interim period before the state conventions ratified the
Twenty-first Amendment, President Roosevelt and Congress passed a
bill allowing the sale of beer at 3.2 per cent of alcohol by volume or
less. And the states themselves were quick to ratify the constitutional
amendment. The drys at first were confident of holding at least thirteen
states for the seven years allowed for ratification. But the apostasy of
Southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas by large ma-
jorities showed that the old arid areas had followed their members
of Congress into the wet column. Even Bishop Cannon recognized a
"mad stampede for repeal," although he salved dry pride by forecast-
ing the return of national prohibition in the future. 67 On December 5,
1933, Utah became the thirty-sixth state to vote for the Twenty-first
Amendment. In the capital of Maryland, a policeman immediately
392 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
served formal notice on the State House bootlegger to stop his busi-
ness. 68
After some fourteen years of trial, national prohibition had been re-
pealed. William Jennings Bryan, the greatest political champion of the
drys, had been dead eight years. But Al Smith, the wet leader, was
made president of the New York convention for repealing the Eight-
eenth Amendment. In his speech before the convention, Smith gave
exactly the same reason for supporting the Twenty-first Amendment
that Bryan had for the Eighteenth, that it was a vindication of the
theory of democratic government. The wheel had turned full circle.
The drys had once been radicals and democrats; they ended conserva-
tives and autocrats. The wets had once been reactionaries and defend-
ers of the Constitution; they ended as progressives and changers of the
Constitution. Only Congress remained constant throughout national
prohibition. It hated the nonsensical standards which the drys had
inflicted upon politics, and did its best to ignore the matter.
Saloons were restored in 1933 under other names. They were called
taverns, bars, cates, clubs, and rests, but not saloons except in the Far
West, which stuck to the old name. State laws enforced certain regula-
tions on the drinking places. In some states, customers had to be
visible from the street. In others, since standing drinkers were sup-
posed to consume double the amount of seated drinkers, the regulars
at the bar were forced to squat on small steel toadstools. Swinging
doors were no longer legal. Sometimes, only beer of 3.2 per cent of
alcohol by volume could be served. Sometimes, saloons were entirely
forbidden and retail liquor stores substituted. But, however it was, the
bar and bartender, the liquor store dealer and his counter were again
broadcast through the land. And they were regulated only as well as
the government of each state would allow. The drys had the sole con-
solation of knowing they had made the word "saloon 9 * an anathema
and bad business, while they had failed to change the fact As a dry
pamphlet had warned before repeal, a rose by any other name was
still a rose. For the saloon was "simply a place where men drank liquor
and more liquor," whether they "painted it white, sold lilies at the door
and had Uncle Sam for a bartender/' 69
THE IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE WETS
WITH THE fanatics leading the drys to destruction, the wets paid them
the compliment of imitating their fanaticism and winning the victory.
The price of that victory was great many of the five million alco-
holics that now present the United States with one of its worst social
problems. For the wet lobbies insisted on outright repeal rather than
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 393
temperate and moderate repeal legislation. Even though their leaders
claimed that "the repeal forces of the country have become the tem-
perance forces of the country/' they did not back up their words with
acts. 70 It was the pressure of the wet lobbies on the Senate that caused
the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in its naked form, stripped
of clauses requiring Congress to take concurrent action with the states
to regulate the liquor trade and prevent the return of the saloon. Re-
peal was ratified haphazardly. The states were left high and wet, each
to work out its own method of dealing with strong drink. There was no
national monopoly set up to regulate the liquor business and to apply
its profits to social welfare projects on the model of the Bratt system
of Sweden or the Anderson plan in the Wickersham Report. The drink
trade was returned to the hands of private interests, which once again
sought to influence state legislatures and Congress, thus beginning
again the sad cycle of liquor and politics and corruption.
The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment took the credit
for the passing of the Twenty-first Amendment in its entirety; it had
gained its victory "by bringing to bear every proper influence on Con-
gress/' 71 But it had also thrown away the only chance ever given to the
federal government to take over a trade, whose misuse could bring
great evil, in a year when the federal government could even have
taken over the banking system of the country with popular approval.
But, as Franklin Roosevelt was the savior of capitalism in the United
States, so the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment was the
savior of the private drink industry. Indeed, the chief members of the
Association were such rock-ribbed conservatives that they refused to
endorse Roosevelt against Hoover in 1932, although their constitution
demanded that they back the wetter of the two candidates for Presi-
dent. Neither the Association, nor the Crusaders, nor the Voluntary
Committee of Lawyers, nor the Hotel Men's Association would come
out for Roosevelt, despite their dedication to repeal. Among the lead-
ing wet groups, only the Women's Organization for National Prohibi-
tion Reform endorsed Roosevelt. Even if the wet women leaders may
have preferred Roosevelt as a product of fashionable New York society
like themselves, they must be given the credit of being the only major
wet organization to put repeal before Republicanism. 72
'tVith repeal, the fanaticism of the leading wets was turned against
the economic and "socialist" measures of the New Deal, especially
when it became clear that the drys would never succeed again in forc-
ing through another constitutional amendment. But the fanaticism of
the dry lobbies lingered on. Repeal for them was a setback necessary for
prohibition's "permanent progress." 73 In January, 1933, they predicted
that "within a year or two, the economic issue will have lost its impor-
394 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
tance and the wet and dry issue will have come to the fore again." 74
They took comfort in the fact that only a little more than one in five of
the voting population had actually voted for repeal by state conven-
tions. Among these voters, so the drys claimed, were many sincere pro-
hibitionists who wanted to support Roosevelt's measures for economic
recovery and clear the decks for a new counterattack on the evils of
drink through a better-phrased constitutional amendment. In true mil-
lennial style, the National Advocate held out a hope of a glorious fu-
ture to the prohibitionists. "There have ever been Gethsemanes, Cal-
varies, crosses and dark tombs. There have also ever been glorious
resurrections, heavenly ascensions and a progressive kingdom of
'God." 75 National prohibition would come again, and would come to a
nation prepared to enforce such a great reform properly and decently.
For, in the words of Clinton N. Howard, America's one hope was "not
in repeal, but in repentance; not in revenue, but in jpghteousness; not
in returning to grog, but in returning to God." 76
The'wets, in their victory, were as arrogant as the drys had been.
Like Wayne B. Wheeler, they were in the saddle and they drove
through. Like the Anti-Saloon League, they gained support through
false propaganda and plain lies. With the onset of the depression, they
forgot their argument that prohibition had nothing to do with pros-
perity. They now said that, since the drys had claimed that prosperity
was all their doing, then they were also responsible for the depression.
This reasoning fitted in with the popular feeling against the false
prophets of business and government, who had claimed too often that
they had brought about good times to be able to disavow bad times.
As Will Rogers commented sourly and truthfully in 1931:
What does prohibition amount to, if your neighbors children are
not eating? Its food, not drink is our problem now. We were so
afraid the poor people might drink, now we fixed it so they can't
eat. . . . The working classes didn't bring this on, it was the big boys
that thought the financial drunk was going to last forever. 77
With fourteen million unemployed, what worthy laborer without hire
was going to believe the preacher who said that prohibition was the
God-given remedy for keeping everyone in their jobs? When there was
no work, what worker was going to credit the word of Ford that booze
was bad for workers? After the slump, the images of preachers and
businessmen as the voices of incontrovertible authority had cracked.
Their pipings for teetotalism were jeered and ignored. The Anti-Saloon
League and Wall Street had committed worse sins by more immoral
methods than any occasional drunkard. All the dry horses and all the
rich men could not put the shell of prohibition together again.
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 395
Yet the collapse of the drys along with the boom hardly excused the
wets for misleading the United States over the economic reasons for
repeal. The arguments of the Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment were gravely misleading. Although jobs for some quarter
of a million people were created directly by the return of the legal
trade in liquor, and although some three-quarters of a million more
men were benefited in the service trades connected with liquor, an
equal number of bootleggers and alky cookers lost their jobs at the s^me
time. Although bootlegging continued throughout the thirties because
of unemployment and existing plant, it operated on a diminished scale.
Moreover, the farmers were not helped by repeal. Even if many
fanners voted for repeal, thinking that "the opening up of the brewer-
ies and distilleries of the United States means prosperity for the farmer
and the nation/' only crops of barley, rye, and hops had an increased
sale. 78 If anything, repeal hurt those farmers who made a profitable
sideline out of moonshining, without doing anything to alleviate the
distress caused by the slump in world food prices. When a national
director of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment assured
farmers in North Dakota that prohibition had destroyed half of their
resources, and that repeal would let them keep their money at home
and sell their crops well and value their land at its true high value, he
was guilty of the same biased exaggeration which the drys had shown
in the Great War by promising the people victory over Germany as the
return of prohibition. 79
Repeal exposed yet another wet falsehood. The wets had accused
prohibition of costing hundreds of million of dollars to enforce over
the years. But the cost of enforcement of the liquor laws in the United
States after the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment was hardly
less than it had been before, since the volume of bootlegging was still
large. In addition, a further disappointment was suffered by the wealthy
backers of the wets, who had supposed that their taxes would be low-
ered after repeal. The huge spending of the New Deal Programs in-
creased taxes on the wealthy, so that the opponents of prohibition
became the opponents of the New Deal. For the taxes caused by the
second were even greater than the taxes caused by the first. It was a
sad May Day in 1936 for Al Smith, when his name was paraded around
New York on a swastika, in company with the names of three other
notorious and wealthy wets, Du Pont and Mellon and Hearst. The
defenders of liberty against Hoover had become the defenders of re-
action against Roosevelt, in the name of their morality and their taxes.
From the point of view of taxation, the prohibition crusade through-
out had led to some strange situations. The fact that the Protestant
churches had engaged in political activity during their fight for the
396 / THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
Eighteenth Amendment sparked off proposals that they should be
taxed like other political organizations. The tax-exempt churches re-
sisted this proposal with all their power, although they did not cease
from political activity. The cities, too, had objected, in the days before
the Eighteenth Amendment, that when the country districts of a state
went dry the taxes levied in the wet cities of the state were used to
enforce the very law which they opposed. The thing was ridiculous.
Yet the strangest situation of all had been rendered legal by a deci-
sion of the Supreme Court. The Court had ruled that the Bureau of
Internal Revenue had the right to request income-tax returns from
bootleggers. The Court saw no reason "why the fact that a business is
unlawful should exempt it from paying the tax that if lawful it would
have to pay." In the argument of the case, it was even suggested that
bribes paid to government officials might be held deductible as busi-
ness expenses. 80 To this day, the bootleggers of the last dry state in
the Union, Mississippi, pay federal income tax and a state tax on
their illegal profits.
PROFn AND LOSS
The Eighteenth Amendment was voted in and voted out by Con-
gress in unusual times. The war hysteria of 1917 was partly responsible
for the large dry majorities in the Sixty-fifth Congress, the mentality of
depression for the wet landslide in the Seventy-second. Both majorities
were obtained by false economic promises, false appeals to patriotism,
and false pleas for democracy. The Eighteenth Amendment was urged
as a means of allowing the people to vote on the question of prohibi-
tion; the Twenty-first likewise. The Eighteenth Amendment was meant
to put a sober America to work in winning the war; the Twenty-first
to put a drinking America to work in defeating the depression. Both
wet and dry oratory was equally misleading, from the cry of Con-
gressman Hersey, of Maine, in 1917 to the chimera of Congressman
Linthicum in 1932. Hersey had hoped that it would never be said of
America that she sent her soldier boys to die to save democracy for
the world, but herself she could not save. 81 Linthicum had said, "Pass
this resolution, and depression will fade away like the mists before the
noonday sun. The immorality of the country, racketeering, and boot-
le gg in g will be a thing of the past." 82 Prohibition did not save America,
nor did repeal end immorality, racketeering, bootlegging, and the de-
pression. The crime of Congress was in believing the panaceas of its
members, when desperate times encouraged a belief in simple and
fallacious and exaggerated remedies.
The economic claims of the wets were as biased and false as those of
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 397
the drys. Neither the loss nor the gain of prohibition can be calculated
in terms of dollars and cents. There can be no wholly reliable statistics
of the volume and worth of the illegal liquor trade. Nor can there be
any statistics of the exact value of prohibition in helping the United
States to continue its period of prosperity throughout the twenties.
Some things are, however, sure. In strictly economic terms, prohibi-
tion helped the poorer people of America. The testimony of social
workers is practically unanimous that during the first few years of
the "experiment, noble in motive," the health and wealth of the work-
ers of America increased and their drunkenness decreased. As one so-
cial worker wrote, "Formerly, drunkenness was taken for granted; now
it is regarded as a problem." The price of this economic gain was the
resentment of the poor against the "rich man's law" of prohibition, the
murderous deaths of thousands of workers from foul bootleg concoc-
tions, and the demoralization of their children by teaching them con-
tinual and open defiance of the law. "The illegal liquor traffic," as an-
other social worker wrote, "appears to have a fascination for these
youngsters whether they actually participate in it or not." 83
It is also sure that prohibition did nothing to help the middle classes
or the rich of America. In fact, they turned against it, except in those
rural areas where the prohibitionists were still strong. The increase of
the federal income tax and the abolition of the liquor tax made very
seductive the wet argument that prohibition was costing the country
two million dollars a day in taxes. 84 Even the industrialists of America,
whose favorable statements were quoted by the drys in the thousands
before the depression, deserted to the standard of the wets. The argu-
ments for the increased productivity of a sober labor force lost their
impact with the inefficient enforcement of the dry law and with the
promised business benefits of repeal.
The failure of the drys, too, was also an economic one. At a critical
moment in its career, the year of 1932, the Anti-Saloon League found
itself short of funds. Its own bank in Westerville failed. As the Cali-
fornia Liberator confessed, "The depression has hit the Anti-Saloon
League just as it has hit every other agency. We must roll responsi-
bility on the friends of prohibition as never before. Sacrificial service
must be added to sacrificial giving." 85 But the friends of prohibition
were hard hit too, and the siren song of wet propaganda was very ap-
pealing. Some lifelong drys voted wet in 1932 and 1933, in order to
put an end to the depression through repeal, before regrouping their
forces to fight for national prohibition once again. They had been con-
vinced by the continuous wet campaign, now supported by the wealthy
industrialists of America, as the drys had once been. This campaign
aimed to lay every ill in the United States at the door of prohibition. A
398 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
sympathetic member of Congress outlined the basic principle of the
wets.
Every time a crime is committed, they cry prohibition. Every time
a girl or a boy goes wrong, they shout prohibition. Every time a police-
man or politician is accused of corruption, they scream prohibition.
As a result, they are gradually building up in the public mind the
impression that prohibition is a major cause of all the sins of society. 86
By 1932, this image was fixed in the popular mind. The people of
America were persuaded that, with repeal, sin and depression would
disappear from the land.
Of course, sin and depression remained in the land. Repeal did not
solve the problems of America any more than prohibition had done.
Thus, die drys accused the wets of having bought repeal by lies and
millions of dollars. They had deluded the people into error. Yet, it was
the dry James A. White who had invented the slogan, "No money is
tainted if the Anti-Saloon League can get its hands on it." 87 It was the
dry Wayne B. Wheeler who had calculated that the Eighteenth Amend-
ment cost $50,000,000 to secure; another $15,000,000 was spent during
the life of the amendment, making a total of $65,000,000; yet repeal
had cost only $20,000,000. 88 It was the drys who invented the tactics
of political pressure that the wets exploited so efficiently in their turn.
It was the drys who claimed that prohibition would bring prosperity to
American industry; the wets merely followed their example. Fanaticism
bred fanaticism. The benificee was the liquor trade, which returned
after repeal to the same position of power that it had held before
prohibition. And Viscountess Astor, who said that the United States
was wet when called dry and hoped that it would be dry when called
wet, was disappointed. 89
Three years after repeal, there appeared a good and detailed study
of its consequences. The study found that women and the young drank
much the same as in the prohibition era; businessmen drank less on
week ends, and the poor and the respectable drank more. The oppor-
tunity for efficient regulation of the liquor traffic had been let slip at
the end of repeal. Although this was partly due to the weakness of the
drys after 1932 and to the strength of the fanatical wets, it was also
due to the indifference of the American people.
The general public, having, with a feeling of immense relief, voted
for repeal, were singularly apathetic about the precise control methods
which were then to be established. People had become tired of liquor
as a topic of conversation, a topic which had claimed so much atten-
tion during prohibition, and were content to let the subject drop. 90
THE FANATICISM OF REPEAL/ 399
In this lassitude about liquor laws, this infinite weariness about the
evils or virtues of drink, the crazy quilt of American regulations for
drinking was allowed to develop haphazardly, a tribute to the interac-
tion between a powerful and dangerous drink trade, a preoccupied
federal government, inadequate local administrations, and an indiffer-
ent people. If much of the present liquor problem in America is the
price of dry laws, too hastily adopted and too hastily repealed, then
the fault must be put to a national characteristic, an urge towards ex-
cess which has made this nation great in a small time, and has left little
room for moderation.
22
CHAPTER
The Blighted Roots
The League was born of God, it has been led by Him,
and we will fight on while He leads.
F. SCOTT McBuiDE
THE WETS were flabbergasted that repeal of prohibition came so
suddenly and unexpectedly. Many of the leaders of the wets in
1931 did not expect repeal within ten years, if ever. Even after repeal,
they feared that prohibition might return again. But, had they con-
sidered carefully, they would have seen that the return of prohibition
was impossible. Many of its roots suffered from an enduring blight.
The tragedy of the prohibition movement was that it lost the support
of moderates and liberals and became a revolutionary faction. The
leadership of the movement, which included many intelligent reform-
ers with wide social interests, such as Frances Willard and Jane
Addams, Josephus Daniels, and Charles Stelzle, was taken over by
extremists, who mistook the support of moderates against the saloon
for their support in banning liquor altogether. The camp followers of
prohibition always contained an extreme element, but the cause was
not lost until the fanatics became the chieftains. The death of the
supple Wayne B. Wheeler in 1928 left the image of the movement to
farce and exaggeration, which the press exploited in the antics of
Bishop James Cannon, Jr., Mabel Walker Willebrandt, and Ella A.
Boole. Intelligent moderates, even though they might be personal tee-
totalers, turned against this dry caricature, which claimed to represent
them. The leadership and membership of the drys were taken increas-
ingly from lower social and economic groups. 1 The wealthy classes left
the movement, including even the stern Rockefellers. Fanatics from
the lower middle classes carried on the dry cause. Prohibition, which
had always attracted bigots, ended by yielding to their domination.
Wheeler, although bitterly attacked during his lifetime, was re-
spected for his genius at political manipulation. He was even liked by
his political enemies. James M. Cox, who found Purley A. Baker, of
400
THE BLIGHTED ROOTS/ 401
the League, utterly without character and moved only by thought of
self, revealed an unwilling admiration for Wheeler. He "would make
any combination, would cohabit politically with the devil himself, to
win." 2 Other wets paid tribute to Wheelers likability and subtlety.
Even Alfred E. Smith found that he had a "friendly personal attitude." 3
But once Wheeler was dead, Bishop Cannon took over the limelight
with all of Wheeler's flair for personal publicity and little of his gift for
political management. His trial before Congress and the council of the
Southern Methodist Episcopal Church on charges of immorality, flour
hoarding in the Great War, misuse of campaign funds, and speculation
on the stock market did not help the dry cause, even though he was
acquitted on all charges.
Some idea of the virulence stirred up against Cannon can be seen in
the remarks of Senator Bruce, of Maryland, and Matthew Woll, of the
American Federation of Labor. Bruce trumpeted:
God forbid that any clergyman of this kind should ever come near
me for the purpose of exercising any office that appertains to his pro-
fession. . . . Just as soon would I have a raven perched upon the head
of my bed as to have such a clergyman approach me in my last agony.
If he were to preach a funeral sermon over my corpse, I believe that
like Lazarus, I would throw aside the cerements of the grave and
come back to life in indignant resurrection. 4
The fact that a bishop of the church refused to testify on certain mat-
ters before a congressional committee made him even more culpable.
Matthew Woll told the Wickersham Commission that he did not know
of any one who had done more damage than Cannon to respect for
federal law, "because when we find a man in that position entering
into the wet and dry controversy, and refusing to answer or challeng-
ing the authority of the Government to question him; if the church can
defy the law and authorities, why can not everyone else?" 5 Indeed,
Cannon became such a hated symbol of the League that Captain Stay-
ton nominated him as the man most responsible for the repeal of the
Eighteenth Amendment. 6
By their refusal to compromise after their victory with the Eight-
eenth Amendment, the drys alienated the support of the psychologi-
cally tolerant, who had only supported them against the evils of the
saloon and the trade in liquor, not against liquor itself. The definition
in the Volstead Act that "intoxicating" meant one-half of 1 per cent of
alcohol by volume, less than the alcoholic content of sauerkraut, was
bad politics and bad psychology. Rollin Kirby's famous caricatures of
the prohibitionist as a beak-nosed, top-hatted, etiolated, black string-
bean, carrying an umbrella, seemed to be true, once the fanaticism of
402 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
the victorious drys was revealed. The Christian Century itself admitted
at the close of 1931 that the prohibitionists had "invited such a carica-
ture and lent plausibility to it." 7
Moreover, the wets were better at appealing to the temper of the
times in the twenties. When the popular mood demanded laughter
and Mayor Jimmy Walker and What Price Glory? in place of patriot-
ism, the wet magazines such as the Periscope switched to mockery and
good humor at the expense of their opponents. By these means, the
wets won over to their side the psychologically tolerant and moderate,
who were disgruntled more by the excesses of prohibition than they had
been by the excesses of the saloon. The old-time liquor trade no longer
seemed to be the vicious bloodsucker of the economy, the Shylock of
society who gouged the wages from the honest workingman. It could
complain, in all fairness, that it was the only business expropriated
without compensation in a free capitalist country. Thus, when the de-
pression came and wet propaganda claimed that repeal of the Eight-
eenth Amendment would put a million men back to work, restoration
of a regulated liquor trade seemed economically and morally sound,
just as its suppression had seemed so in time of war.
The wets won their eventual victory through injured innocence and
sweet reason. They appealed both to the psychology of boom, when
people wanted liquor to enjoy themselves, and slump, when they
wanted liquor to forget themselves. Prosperity, as Frederick Lewis
Allen pointed out, is more than an economic condition; it is a state of
mind. 8 So is depression. Repeal came with startling suddenness be-
cause of the collapse of the national psychology along with the Stock
Exchange. Conditions all over America paralleled those noticed by a
Middletown businessman.
I don't know whether it was the depression, but in the winter of
'29-30 and in '30-'31 things were roaring here. There was much
drunkenness people holding these bathtub gin parties. There was
a great increase in women's drinking and drunkenness. And there was
a lot of sleeping about by married people and a number of divorces
resulted.
The same man noted that "drinking of the early-depression blatant
sort" let up with repeal, although in the first days of repeal there were
long lines standing at the store counters waiting to buy liquor. 9
Freud put forward the hypothesis that many societies, like many
people, might become neurotic under the pressures of civilization. 10
The demands of the ethical norms required by a social system create
so many neuroses in so many individuals that the whole society may
become neurotic. This hypothesis helps to explain the hysteria of the
Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
LAW ENFORCEMENT
America of the jazz age and the prohibition era The ethic of to
was in such discord with the fact that the conflict created in the indi-
vidual made him prey to many disorders. The huge increase of tiie in-
fluence of psychoanalysis in the twenties points to a mass disturbance
in the minds of Americans of the time. The crack-up in the Me of
F. Scott Fitzgerald, as he knew, was paralleled by the ^ck-up of his
contemporaries, when the new gods of business failed and the old God
was dead. The answer of the thirties should be a sober qualified hap-
404 /THE BLIGHT OF KEPEAL
piness, not a forbidden spree. Liquor should be regulated and taxed,
not totally banned and openly bootlegged.
Freud opposed prohibition because he knew that conflict between
the individual and society was inevitable. There could be no dry mil-
lennium, however desirable it might appear to be. "It almost seems as
if humanity could be most successfully united into one great whole if
there were no need to trouble about the happiness of individuals/' 11
But there is always need to trouble about the happiness of individuals.
If any government tries to ban any particular form of happiness for
any people, many will revolt in order to continue that habit of happi-
ness. The old American belief in Adam, in a Garden of Eden on
American soil, in the perfectability of the New World, in Rousseau's
dangerous dictum that there is nothing bad that cannot be made good
for something such a dream of coerced paradise on earth is an illu-
sion. For the only way to gain a paradise on earth is to persecute those
who stand in the way of that paradise. The means of making a nation
better than other nations often make it worse.
National prohibition is the reform which best demonstrated a curi-
ous ambivalence in the American character. There seemed to be a
genuine desire for an ideal to be enacted into law, coupled with an
equally genuine need to break that ideal law. As Rudyard Kipling
wrote of the American, there was a "cynic devil in his blood . . . that
bids him flout the Law he makes, that bids him make the Law he
flouts/' 12 It was as though America, conscious of the continual vio-
lence in her land, demanded stern regulation which she could not
obey. Her urge to reform could only be allayed by the actual proof
that reform did not work. The repeal of prohibition proved the truth
of Mr. Dooley's remark, 'What we call this here counthry iv ours
pretinds to want to thry new experiments, but a sudden change gives
it a chill. It's been to th' circus an' bought railroad tickets in a hurry
so often that it thinks quick change is short change." 13 America may
try many experiments, but it only tries failure once.
NEW EVIDENCE
THE OLD dry propaganda on medicine and venereal diseases, which
had terrified voters into supporting the cause of prohibition, became
increasingly ineffective. Indeed, the teaching of the drys seemed, in the
light of new scientific research, as much of a caricature as their psy-
chology. Their onetime standbys the textbooks on hygiene, the doc-
trines of eugenics, the fear of syphilis, the rights of women, and the
endorsement of the American Medical Association were transmuted
into weak or downright antagonistic elements in society.
THE BLIGHTED ROOTS / 405
Teachers' associations, which cared that children should be taught
the truth, began to weed out dry horror propaganda from textbooks on
hygiene. The percentage of space in these texts which was devoted to
the topics of alcohol and tobacco declined to 2.7 in 1935 compared
with 12.9 in 1910 and 13.4 in 1885. 14 The old texts
. . . were literally "dripping wet" from alcohol and "reeked" with the
odor of tobacco. On the tide page, in the preface, the bulk of the
introduction, a part of every chapter, one complete chapter, the
glossary and index, the subject of alcohol and narcotics was presented
prominently, seriously, diligently, and thoroughly with their morbid
and demoralizing effects. 15
Gradually, however, physiology and hygiene were no longer presented
as subordinate branches of temperance teaching. The foundation of
the Yale School of Alcohol Studies and the declining power of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union after repeal finally ensured a
fair and reasonable treatment of the topics of alcohol and narcotics in
most public schools. The Union, however, still sends its literature
to many thousands of classrooms, telling of Mr. Intoxicants and
Messrs. Pancreatic and Intestinal Juices, of Mrs. Gray Bunny and her
six hoppy little teetotal bunnies, and of the victim of the nicotine weed
who is a "cowardly worm twitching with dependence."
The supporters of eugenics did win some victories in the twenties.
The immigration acts of 1921 and 1924, based on the false and racist
findings of the Dillingham Commission and the Laughlin report, did
restrict immigration into America in favor of the "Anglo-Saxon" peo-
ples. But after the depression, economics took over from eugenics as
the chief scientific interest of laymen. Moreover, racist assumptions
were profoundly antagonistic to the philosophy of the New Deal. This
philosophy assumed that men were equal and should be helped equally,
whether they were "Anglo-Saxons," Balkan immigrants, or Negroes.
People were ashamed of Madison Grant's praise of Nordic supermen
and Lothrop Stoddard's fear of the "vast hordes of poor mongrelized
creatures [from] the festering purlieus of Old World cities and the
filthy villages of backward countrysides." 16 A feeling of equality comes
more easily when the many are poor. The racist movements of the
thirties such as the Silver Shirts seemed to be a threat to American in-
stitutions and democracy, not a defense of them. Although the extreme
drys remained faithful to the last by commending the Nazi policy of
the sterilization of the racially unfit and by praising Hitler as a "de-
voted teetotaler," few people listened to them any more, 17
The drys lost another weapon when medical research increasingly
confirmed the fact that alcohol did not attack the reproductive organs
406 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
in human beings. Liquor in parents was not a menace to unborn chil-
dren. A drunken mother could still have healthy babies. In addition,
national prohibition did not reduce the number of feeble-minded chil-
dren or die number of cases of venereal disease, which rose through-
out the early twenties to an annual total of nearly half a million re-
ported cases. Winfield Scott Hall, a devoted dry, was still lamenting
after eight years of the dry reform, "Close to half our population are
suffering in some degree slightly or seriously the ravage of that
scourge which an outraged Mother Nature visits upon those who have
broken her law of chastity/' 18
Indeed, prohibition did nothing directly to combat the huge amount
of venereal diseases prevalent in the United States. After the moralistic
efforts of the American Purity Alliance to fight the evil had culminated
in its merger with the more scientific American Federation for Sex Hy-
giene in 1914, the war brought all the strength of patriotism to the
reform. Venereal diseases were accused of being as secret, treacherous,
and heartless as submarines. In 1918, the passage of the Chamber-
lain-Kahn bill in Congress set up a Division of Venereal Diseases in the
United States Public Health Service, with an appropriation of more
than four million dollars. By 1931, some 850 clinics had been founded,
employing the Salvarsan and neo-Salvarsan remedies, which were far
more effective than the old mercury cure. Although the Lynds dis-
covered that Middletown doctors opposed the state clinics in order to
keep the profits of curing venereal diseases to themselves, great prog-
ress was made in eliminating the evil during the twenties.
Eventually, venereal disease became such a problem in the depres-
sion that the American Institute of Public Opinion took a Gallup poll
on the subject in 1935. The poll showed that a majority of the public
wanted the topic discussed openly. The Reader's Digest published an
article in July, 1936, "Why Don't We Stamp Out Syphilis?'* This was
followed by two popular books, Shadow on the Land: Syphilis, and the
sensational Ten Million Americans Have It. The author of the first was
Surgeon-General of the Public Health Services. He revealed that there
were six million cases of syphilis in America. Every year, sixty thou-
sand babies were born with congenital syphilis. Half of those who
contracted the disease contracted it innocently. 19
After these revelations, a full-scale campaign was launched against
venereal diseases. After three centuries of misrepresentation, the illness
was at last named and recognized. Indeed, the drys had helped by
crusading against the menace in the first place. But prohibition was not
the way to deal with syphilis. Penicillin was discovered, and the last
great plague brought under control.
Perhaps nothing hit the ideology of the drys harder than the huge
THE BLIGHTED ROOTS / 407
success of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform,
which boasted over a million members before it was disbanded with
the repeal of prohibition. The first party which had asked for female
suffrage in its platform, the Prohibition party, ended by being totally
repudiated by many of the sex that it had sought to aid. Likewise, the
leaders of the women's crusade had hoped to save America from male
corruption and evil by the ballot. Their followers retorted by voting
nine times out of ten in the same way as their husbands.
Dry propaganda depended on one premise, that good women did
not enjoy drinking liquor. By definition, a woman was bad who did en-
joy strong drink. This viewpoint made such drinking as there was
among bourgeois city women in the nineteenth century a clandestine
affair. Patent medicines were a great source of the 'supply of alcohol;
when Lydia E. Pinkham's famous remedy for female ills was first
analyzed, it was found to contain nearly one-fifth pure alcohol. Ed-
ward Bok, of the Ladies Home Journal, wrote to fifty members of the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union and found that three out of
four used patent medicines which had an alcoholic content of one-
eighth to one-half pure spirits. 20 In fact, the general use of alcohol by
women after the passing of prohibition seems to argue a surreptitious
taste for liquor before. Although many women began their drinking in
the speak-easies, some were merely doing openly what they had done
before at home.
Drinking by women in industrial areas was always prevalent. A so-
cial worker who lived in the grim Lighthouse district of Philadelphia
wrote of the era before prohibition:
It is false to assume that women do not share the moral standards
of their country, their class, and their neighborhood. The men drank
at night and the women drank by day, gathering in this one's and
that one's kitchen, supplied from the corner saloon where they carried
their kettles. When too drunk to navigate thither themselves they
sent the children as their messengers, who received their share on
their return. 21
Conditions did not improve during prohibition. Bootlegging became
such a profitable sideline for housewives that great numbers took to
the trade, both as manufacturers and carriers. Many speak-easies in
New York were located in the front parlor of "first-floor flats," which
still served as ordinary homes. Indeed, the widespread manufacture of
home-brew during prohibition put children even more in contact with
liquor than they had been during the days of the saloon.
Yet the drys ignored all evidence contrary to their creed, and in-
sisted that only prostitutes and the selfish daughters of the rich drank
408 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
illegally. The vast majority of the female race were virtuous. If only
women were educated to see their own advantage, they would refuse
to touch liquor. As late as 1929, Ella A. Boole admitted to only three
sorts of women who opposed prohibition: those deceived by the wet
newspapers, the "women of the underworld, with illiterate aliens from
wine-growing countries, who cannot be counted upon for moral or
patriotic issues," and a small, privileged class of self-centered women
who held themselves above moral and civil law. Women as a whole
were far too responsible to touch a drop of liquor, even if they were
less clever than men.
Men think logically, women biologically. The preservation of the
race rests with the woman. Her instinct to protect the child leads her
to deny herself privileges and liberties that injure the child. The
woman's major reason for no repeal or modification of the Eighteenth
Amendment is found in one word "Children." 22
The prohibitionists, by their preliminary backing of women's rights,
found themselves burned by their own torch of freedom. The dry plea
that the abolition of liquor would save the mother and the home be-
came ridiculous when mothers sold liquor to provide an income for the
home. With genetic and medical arguments against alcohol losing their
vigor in the twenties, the drys could no longer scare the more sophisti-
cated women into teetotalism for the sake of their babies. The connec-
tion between prostitution and the saloon no longer terrified a sex
which now accompanied its menfolk into the speak-easy. In fact, pro-
hibition did not reduce the number of whores in America; the number
fell because of the very competition of the respectable women whom
prohibition was designed to protect.* Efficient and popular methods
of contraception allayed many of the sexual terrors of women, who
had remained chaste less for fear ^Sf hell than for fear of pregnancy.
The diys, by helping the emancipation of women, helped their own
defeat. They had not foreseen that women, in demanding the rights
of men, might also demand the right to drink, saying with Dorothy
Parker that the Nineteenth Amendment came just too late to stpp the
Eighteenth.
But the unkindest cut of all to the drys came when the doctors of
America reversed their position over the medicinal value of beverage
alcohol. In 1921, after prohibition was safely part of the Constitution,
the American Medical Association reconsidered its resolution declaring
that liquor had no therapeutic value. Faced with attack from the
spokesmen of the drys and with mounting opposition from the rank
* Because of the competition of enfranchised womanhood and the pressure of
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, only one official red-light district re-
mained in the United States by 1925. That district was in Reno, Nevada.
Brown Brothers Phoi
RARE BEFORE PROHIBITION
COMMON DURING PROHIBITION
Brown Brothers Pho
410 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
and file of American doctors, who were making a fortune in prescrib-
ing liquor for the ills of their patients, the leadership of the Association
changed its mind. In 1921, the Council of the Association refused to
confirm the resolution of 1917. In 1922, it adopted a report declaring
that it was "unwise to attempt to determine moot scientific questions
by resolution or by vote." 23 The report recommended that the Con-
gress of the United States should take no action on the therapeutic
value of alcohol. The doctors of America were, and should be, a law
unto themselves on medical matters.
For the doctors had fallen out with the drys. In the first six months
after the passing of the Volstead Act, more than 15,000 physicians and
57,000 druggists and drug manufacturers had applied for licenses to
prescribe and sell intoxicating liquor. 24 The law-enforcement agencies
of the government were insufficient to check the credentials of all the
applicants. During this period, more than half a million doctors' pre-
scriptions for whisky were issued in Chicago alone; the Treasury De-
partment thought that over half of these prescriptions evaded the spirit
or letter of the Volstead Act. 25 The notorious king of the bootleggers,
George Remus, bought up chains of drugstores so that he could order
truckloads of medicinal liquor and hijack his own drink on the road.
The scandals about liquor, druggists, and doctors grew to such propor-
tions that the prohibitionists had to proceed against their old sup-
porters.
At the end of the Wilson administration, Attorney General Palmer
had ruled that the Volstead Act placed no limit on the amount of beer
and wine which doctors could prescribe to their patients. The drys,
who still hoped in 1921 to banish all liquor from the United States,
were angered by this ruling. They retaliated by forcing the Willis-
Campbell Act through Congress, which had a dry majority in both
houses. The Act forbade the prescription of beer as a medicine and
limited the issuing of wine and hard liquor by doctors to one-half pint
of alcohol for each patient every ten days. No doctor could issue more
than one hundred prescriptions for liquor in ninety days unless some
extraordinary reason made a larger amount necessary. 26
The druggists and doctors of America called the act an attack on
their professional integrity. It was also an attack on their profits. Since
the Willis-Campbell Act remained on the statute books, the American
Medical Association began to proceed against the prohibitionists. In
addition to passing resolutions that alcohol might still be good for
therapy, the Association polled nearly 54,000 doctors to discover how
widespread the use of alcohol actually was in the field of medicine. It
received 31,000 replies. Half of the doctors thought whisky was a
THE BLIGHTED ROOTS / 411
necessary therapeutic agent, and one-quarter approved of the prescrip-
tion of beer and wine. In addition, a quarter of the doctors said that
they had seen cases of unnecessary suffering or death caused by boot-
leg liquor and the prohibition laws. Significantly, doctors in large cities
were more in favor of alcohol than those in small towns and the coun-
tryside.
The physicians of America continued to prescribe strong drink for
their patients throughout prohibition. In 1928, the Bureau of Prohibi-
tion reported that nearly seventy thousand doctors used alcohol pre-
scription books, even if the amount of medical liquor was only a small
proportion of the total liquor in circulation. During the fourteen years
of prohibition, an annual average of ten million doctors' prescriptions
for more than one million wine gallons of liquor soothed the ailments
of sick Americans. 27 But the licensed pharmacists of America were
being hard hit by the competition of the pirate drugstores, which were
springing up all over the country and adding to the peculiarly Ameri-
can phenomenon of stores containing a soda fountain, a magazine
stand, a counter for beauty products and biologicals, and an office for
medical prescriptions all in one. Many of the new drugstores of the
twenties took over the desirable corner sites of the old saloons and
performed some of their functions. They provided a meeting place,
partially satisfied the craving for social drinking with ice-cream sodas,
and often sold illegal hair tonics to those with an urge for alcohol in
any form.
Thus the prohibitionists alienated both the doctors and the pharma-
cists. The doctors were antagonized by the insistence of the drys that
the prohibition laws could be enforced only when physicians sub-
mitted to regulation. The pharmacists were angered by the failure of
the drys to enforce the laws and to eliminate the competition of drug-
stores which pretended to sell chemical products as a cover for selling
alcohol. Long before 1933, both doctors and druggists realized that
their efforts to gain a monopoly of beverage alcohol were unsuccessful.
They welcomed repeal as a method of putting a moral front on their
professions, discredited by the alcohol controversy. Moreover, new
sources of income were appearing for the medical trade. Specializa-
tion, new hospitals, restricted entry into the profession at a time of
expanding population, and laws putting many drugs under the power
of a doctor's prescription, all forced medical fees upwards. 29 The phar-
macists also benefited by the increasing dependence of Americans on
pharmaceutical products. The trend has continued to the present day,
when the drug manufacturers and doctors and pharmacists are among
the most highly paid and privileged members of the community.
412 /THE BLIGHT OF REPEAL
Thus the drys, in the years following the Eighteenth Amendment,
were deserted by medical research, by textbooks on hygiene, and by
the majority of women and doctors. The popular support of the dry
cause dwindled throughout national prohibition and after repeal. The
new society and morality of the urban twenties appeared to make pro-
hibition and the ethics of the small town grotesque, antiquated, and
downright disgusting. And when the slump came, rural discontent,
which had provided m 
