Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  The scene, the speech, the promise, the great reformation rang through the headlines. Here was a great and touching thing, usually seen only in the privacy of the parlor, where the prodigal son breaks down and promises that he will sin no more. Ruth became everybody’s son. Everybody forgave him. Everybody went out to the ball yard the following year to see how his repentant prodigal was making out. He made out very nicely, hammering out 41 home runs, increasing to 46 the following year, then dropping to 25, due to his shortened playing year (the Great Tummyache), and then increasing his output again until in 1927 he had amassed the amazing total of 60.

  The man is a hero out of Horatio Alger or Burt L. Standish. He rose from Rags to Riches. Sink or Swim, Do or Die. He is the prototype of every hackneyed hero of juvenile (and adult) dollar literature come to life. The Alger books used to tell us that a poor boy could eventually triumph over temptation and adversity and acquire wealth and position, but nobody ever knew of anyone who really did.

  Ruth came from the slums of Baltimore. He was an orphan. He went to a reform school. At St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore, he played baseball. He was a natural athlete. At the age of 20, Jack Dunn, the owner of the famous Baltimore Orioles, took him out of the school on the tip of one of the brothers. Dunn sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox where his rise to fame was almost instantaneous, curiously enough, as a pitcher and not as a great slugger and outfielder.

  Thereafter he began to amass folder after folder of news clippings, and photographs, the surest gauge of success. There are fourteen envelopes stuffed with clippings, and seven folders of pictures, seventeen inches deep in The New York Daily News Morgue alone. Run through these clippings and you will find no single item of his life omitted, no matter how trivial, from the appearance of a boil on his neck to the mystery that enshrouded the birth of his daughter by his first wife. (He claimed the child was born in February, whereas his wife declared it had happened in June.) Everything is there, his contract squabbles with his owner, his trials with speed cops and the demon rum, his every physical ailment from chipped ankles to flu, pneumonia and tonsil snatching. You find him in the movies, on the stage, engaged in fights on the ball field, suspended by his manager, barnstorming against Landis’s orders and suffering punishment therefor. You witness his grief at the grave of his first wife, his courtship, and his marriage of his second, his yearly struggle with avoirdupois, his casual winter golf games, his lawsuits, his sentimental journeys to the bedsides of sick youngsters.

  The Babe has become a member of every family in the country that cares anything about Sport, and a great many that don’t. No one goes to see him play ball impersonally. No one can look impersonally upon a public figure about which so much is known. British athletes are presented in the glossy print weeklies wearing blazers and smoking pipes, and that is that. The Frenchman makes a fuss over his athletic hero while he is on the scene, but promptly forgets him between games or matches. The Germans react coldly towards their own world’s heavyweight prizefight champion, Schmeling. A professional athlete relegating political and national news to page two in Europe is simply unthinkable. But snoopiness is a national disease with us. We are a nation of gossips and Walter Winchell is our prophet. Snoopiness, our unceasing thirst for information about people in the public eye, and the activity of our press in supplying this information, has built up an orphan boy and a reform school graduate to a high estate where he receives as large a salary as the President of the United States, and far more sustained publicity. It could only occur, we are told, in a democracy, hence we are a democratic nation. It is about the only remaining proof left to us.

  BOOTLEGGING FOR JUNIOR

  DALTON TRUMBO

  FROM JUNE 1932

  When an impartial history of the Great Depression is written, it will be set down therein that while bankers squealed hideously for a place at the public trough, their closest competitors for our national income—the bootleggers—asked no favors. On the contrary (the account will continue), they went hopefully forward, conducting their comings, goings and killings with regularity worthy of Hooverian applause. Nor will anyone gainsay the historian’s comment that in no instance did a good liquor merchant trade his rugged individualism for a place in the breadline.

  In penning this tribute to a struggling industry, the chronicler will not overlook the fact that the panic was felt keenly by many prominent rum sellers. Some of them played the market, others dabbled in real estate, and all of them had an extremely tough time of it convincing the gendarmerie that in view of the general wage decline a copper’s mite should be reduced accordingly.

  But to a man they maintained a wholesome trust in the old sock as the safest place for emergency cash. Thus, instead of being flat when the crash came, they merely were deflated. With the nest egg in reserve, it is not surprising that a tax-free business requiring only a small investment and numbering its customers by the tens of millions, turned in profits while others ran into debt for red ink. If it lost thousands of clients who formerly purchased by the case for celebration, then it gained millions who now buy in pint lots for consolation.

  Moreover, the liquor barons displayed an adaptability woefully lacking among other big-wigs. Sensing that a certain portion of their customers no longer could afford strong liquor, they turned to beer—a product which can be made from last night’s garbage and sold for a better price than tomorrow morning’s milk. This stroke saved many from disaster, although, fundamentally, whisky is the only drink for a red-blooded American. And so long as $200 invested in its makings can produce a profit in the neighborhood of $5,000, the liquor business will pay dividends—such large ones, in truth, that an increasing number of college graduates will cast longing eyes in its direction before going over bodily to the wholesale meat racket.

  Indeed, it is a question whether the graduates need the profits of bootlegging more than bootlegging needs the enthusiasm of the graduates. Certainly the affinity of youth for an undeveloped field is nothing new. There is every evidence that the gangsters, having grown rich and powerful from selling booze, are neglecting their original bonanzas for the heady profits of racketeering, extortion and political graft. The field from which they are receding inevitably will be occupied by a New Era Bootlegger, for which position there is no likelier candidate than the college man who finds his pathway to legitimate success swarming with Masters of the Arts and Doctors of Philosophy.

  The university-trained bootlegger will understand that a law which does not receive public support morally is no law at all. Thus his conscience will be assuaged. From his under-graduate training he will have developed a Messianic enthusiasm for his product, which, combined with the industry and intelligence necessary for survival in any business, will assure him abundant profits. But above all, he will be honorable—a gentleman in the finest sense—for a business in which a contract is illegal and a lawsuit out of the question requires personal honesty to a degree not comprehended in legitimate undertakings. Naturally, the first to analyze the situation and plunge into the fray will reap the richest reward.

  • • •

  Since the liquor business is a comparatively young and struggling industry, each center of population has developed its hooch supply independent of every other. Nothing short of a national survey can determine where pickings are choicest. The central and eastern states are dominated by gunmen, and the Solid South by thirsty but moralistic fanatics. From Milwaukee to St. Louis, good brewery beer strangles all competition. The Northwest draws upon Canadian neighbors, and the scattered folk of the Rocky Mountains make excellent potato whisky in their own private gullies. Only the Southwest and its highly publicized metropolis, Los Angeles, remain as inviting territory to the peaceful newcomer.

  A numerous, hard-drinking clientele which makes no social distinction against the bootlegger is but one of its advantages. The religio-sex mania which places rape and erotic murder second only to backgammon as a public dive
rsion gives the police little time for liquor-snooping. Moreover, the gang as it is known elsewhere does not exist. Bootleggers are divided into cooperative districts which pay lump tributes to the police. A new dealer is expected cheerfully to share his portion of the bribe money, after which he may buy and sell where he pleases, and at whatever price he considers equitable. Instead of gang warfare, all is peace, harmony and loving-kindness. There is no better place for Young America to learn its alcoholic ABC’s.

  Patently, the bootlegging profession is neither simple nor safe, else its ranks would be clouded unendurably. Like any other enterprise in which money can be made, it will bear thoughtful—even prayerful—study. The grimy lad who peddles pint bottles for $1.50 a throw is but the lowest of a social order which finds its height among the distillers. Between the two extremes stretches an immense and surprisingly efficient organization.

  Alcohol, being the base of everything intoxicating, receives the undivided attention of big-time commercial distillers, who leave to their customers the task of converting it into whisky, gin or scented messes for the ladies such as crème de menthe and liqueur d’abricot. Hi-proof alcohol made from beet sugar is the most popular grade, although in quality it is preceded by grain and cane sugarhol—to lapse into the vernacular—and followed by moon and lowproof, which are products of cheap stills, cheap materials and generally unethical proprietors.

  Stills—pots, professionally—vary in daily capacity from fifty to several hundred gallons, and in type from poison-producing tin affairs to magnificent automatic instruments of burnished copper. The distiller’s heaviest expenditure (the combined wages of a cook, helper and truck driver amounting only to $250 each week) is for beet sugar—a commodity which cannot be obtained without considerable finesse, since Federal officers are inordinately interested in heavy sugar consumers. The usual method is to visit a thinly disguised supply house where the transaction is inviolate from public scrutiny. Here the distiller may obtain all the sugar he needs, paying the highest retail price, not in cash, but in alcohol evaluated at its lowest wholesale cost. The supply merchant’s percentage of profit must be reckoned by the thousand.

  • • •

  Each distiller deals exclusively with one or two responsible jobbers. Truck-loads of five-gallon cans are delivered on consignment, the jobber paying for the last consignment upon the following delivery—a benign credit system which permeates the industry. The jobber in turn delivers his merchandise to wholesalers, contenting himself with a quick turn-over and not more than 200 per cent profit.

  The rôles of the distiller and jobber are somewhat unimportant when compared to that of the wholesaler, for the latter’s success or failure is that of the whole system. And as the system depends on the wholesaler, so does that gentleman depend on his Kid. Whether he is fifteen or fifty, the Kid is known by no other name. Even if he had a name it would be unethical to call it out. He receives only $35 a week, plus rent, but he doesn’t need to worry about bail or fines, and he is learning a profession which pays even better than the movies. Sympathy for him is wasted utterly.

  The Kid lives at the plant—an unostentatious private residence—attending to the mysterious enterprise of transmuting raw alcohol into sound whisky. His most important labors are strictly by formula—three parts of hiproof alcohol, testing 190, and two parts of distilled water, mixed in a charred barrel and treated with the electric needle. This widely misunderstood instrument is a simple, foot-long heating element which carries enough current to keep the contents of the barrel gently bubbling for the required twelve hours. It is a greedy consumer of power, and, since an electric bill of $30 or more soon attracts attention, must be fed from a tapped power line—one of the few genuinely dishonest practices in which a liquor worker is forced to participate.

  After the needle’s work is done, the liquor has absorbed from the barrel an amber color and a whisky flavor. The barrel itself is turned in on a new, freshly charred one, since a single filling exhausts its aging powers. Booze obtained by this process varies from 110 to 115 proof—still too strong for human consumption—and is diluted until its potency registers between 95 and 100 proof. It is important that the alcoholic voltage be always the same, for speakeasy proprietors are shrewd souls. They test each can with the hydrometer and howl fearfully if it is below par.

  Discounting loss from evaporation, three cans of alcohol—fifteen gallons—thus treated blossom into twenty-eight gallons of fair whisky. At $15 each, the original cans have cost $45; yet selling for the rock bottom price of $5 a gallon, they will fetch $140—a cool profit of more than 300 per cent, and one reason why bootleggers’ children always have shoes. But the eventual profit does not end here. A hip-pocket bootlegger buying at $5 a gallon will sell it for $12, providing he violates a tenet of his trade and does no cutting on his own account—140 per cent profit. And a speakeasy proprietor selling the same gallon by the drink will take $32 into the till for a profit of 640 per cent.

  Obviously, the college man contemplating an assault on the liquor citadel can do no better than to become a Kid. The salary is low, but the experience is priceless. He will learn to recognize good liquor and to know why it is good. He will discover trade secrets denied the ordinary blundering amateur and thus save himself many embarrassing skirmishes with the law. Always providing he is honest, he will be able to inspire that confidence and trust among his fellow workers which must precede a larger success with the drinking public.

  Under new guidance, the distiller’s art—once an honored and holy calling—might again be raised to its ancient dignity. It is not unreasonable to hope that modern science would be called upon to prepare a new ambrosia, the bouquet of which could be hailed proudly as the epitome of our peculiar and exciting civilization—a liquor of such charm and potency as forever to silence the moans of those who cannot forget. Perhaps the depression with its diminished opportunities for college men is but the means of ushering us into the Golden Age of Bootlegging. If this be true, we have not suffered in vain.

  THE JIMMY WALKER ERA

  ALVA JOHNSTON

  FROM DECEMBER 1932

  The resignation of Jimmy Walker ended the office-holder’s bull market. The crash overtook business in 1929; it did not catch up with New York politics until 1932. During the three years of the depression, Jimmy Walker compelled the treasury of New York City to function on the old boom and bubble basis, with increased dividends, extras and bonuses for job-holders, politicians and contractors. He boosted his own pay from $25,000 to $40,000 in 1930—gave a part of it to charity, to be sure, but kept on drawing it in full—and increased the city’s disbursements by a score or more of millions during each of the panic years. Nobody told him about the depression; he thought Hard Times was the name of a book; Jimmy was the last and greatest of the bulls. He probably fancies that Judge Seabury chased him out of office, but the truth is that Jimmy is a delayed victim of the crash. He led Tammany’s Dance of the Tax-payers’ Millions three years too long. Tammany succeeded in sidetracking McKee but was forced to recognize that Walker was politically dead. Now Jimmy belongs to the ages.

  • • •

  The Jimmy Walker Era was over the day that his successor used the axe on the city payroll. When Joseph V. McKee cut his own salary, New York had a new sweetheart. When he dismissed an aggressively wasteful department head, he was hailed by the taxpayers as a rescue boat is hailed by the shipwrecked mariner. When McKee performed the sensational civic feat of accepting the lowest bid instead of the highest bid on a printing contract, Jimmy Walker was hissed in the cinema palaces.

  Jimmy was not the only politician who was late in hearing of the crash. It took two years after 1929 to convince Herbert Hoover that anything had happened. Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed the cost of running New York State to soar in 1930, 1931 and 1932. In 1931, when litigation was falling off, Roosevelt signed a bill compelling the public to pay $300,000 a year for a dozen new and superfluous jud
ges. Politicians everywhere, and especially politicians in the cities, continued after 1929 to act on the theory that the public was richer than ever. By 1931 many of them had been forced to respond to the changing times, but Jimmy Walker and Tammany Hall continued to cherish the belief that all New Yorkers were plutocrats. As against the rest of the country, New York was a “Lost World” like Conan Doyle’s imaginary plateau which escaped all changes and was still inhabited by the tyrannosaurus and the brontosaurus. Politically and governmentally, New York remained in the Age of the Dinosaurs; it was still the home of every type of out-of-date tax-eating monster. Giant carnivores, extinct elsewhere, preyed ravenously on the citizens until Joe McKee came to the rescue.

  It was the popularity of Jimmy Walker and the power of Tammany Hall which, for three years, kept the citizens of New York City docile under ruinous taxation. Jimmy was not looked upon as an ordinary elected official; he was a sovereign; New York idolized him as England formerly idolized the dear good little Queen. Jimmy kept the tax-payers quiet through love; Tammany kept them mute through fear. Tammany’s grip on New York had become absolute. To grumble and murmur against Tammany was not ordinary political opposition; it was disaffection, sedition, conspiracy. A business man, who talked too freely, might find himself gravely embarrassed. All business men have to violate trick ordinances in any over-regulated modern city; a business man who offends Tammany loses the services of the usual fixers and may find it very expensive to mollify inspectors and open the minds of the inferior tribunals. The idea of turning Tammany out of power by the normal use of the ballot is fantastic; it takes a coup d’état to change the government of New York City. Entranced by Walker, enslaved bv Tammany, the New York tax-payer continued to be pitilessly exploited. The real estate of New York City was the last Golconda; it was forced to produce more and more revenue, panic or no panic, until it escaped from the fatal fascination of Walker.