While whites used Harlem as a playground, poor black residents were regulars at neighborhood hootch joints or rent parties. Because rents were high in Harlem, and because few African Americans had good jobs, paying rent was always a problem. Resourceful tenants temporarily removed furniture from their apartments to hold a party with free food, music, and space for dancing. Guests paid a small admission charge, which went toward the rent. Patrons brought their own alcohol or bought small amounts at the party. Some tenants held rent parties every week, particularly on weekend nights. To attract guests, operators passed out handbills on the sidewalk, called down from windows, or simply allowed jazz to waft through the neighborhood. Only African Americans were welcome at these events. Because the Prohibition Bureau had very few black agents, a raid was unlikely.
A few owners or operators of speaks became famous. None was more colorful than Texas Guinan, a silent screen star who left California to run a speakeasy in New York. She had grown up in Texas, loved to ride horses, played vaudeville, and became America’s first film cowgirl. At her nightclub, Tex knew how to put on a show. She fondly greeted regular customers by name, tried to cheer up those who seemed depressed, and emphasized that having a good time was more important than drinking, which was just a way to get started on having a good time. She had a big heart. Once, when the journalist Heywood Hale Broun tried to impress his girlfriend by ordering an overpriced bottle of bad champagne, Tex insisted that he buy a regular drink. Later, she told him that she knew his weekly salary, and she had no intention of letting a regular like him go bankrupt on champagne designed for out-of-town suckers.
Drinking also took place discreetly in ice cream stores, soft drink shops, beauty parlors, and funeral homes. Another new type of watering hole in the twenties was the roadhouse, as rising automobile ownership enabled drivers to enjoy liquor out of town. Customers were not likely to be seen, which made these highway resorts good for a tryst. Disguised as restaurants, roadhouses often provided elegant meals, a romantic atmosphere, danceable music, perhaps gambling, a few rooms available to rent for the night, and maybe even discreet prostitution. Other roadhouses were abandoned barns. Federal raids were unlikely, and payoffs were lower than in cities because there were fewer people to silence. The liquor was usually inexpensive, but it might be unreliable moonshine made on the premises.
A lot of drinking took place at home because the law allowed domestic production of fruit wine or cider. A head of household could ferment up to two hundred gallons of fruit juice a year for family use. Grape juice, sugar, and yeast were the only necessary ingredients. California vintners shipped Alicante grapes to make wine, but they also dried grapes, pressed them into bricks, and sold them to make reconstituted grape juice. Vino Sano Grape Brick came with instructions to add water to make juice but warned that sugar and yeast would create an alcoholic beverage. Brick sales soared. The wet editor Arthur Brisbane promoted Vine-Glo: “The Grape Growers are not held responsible for the laws of nature, which seem to have no sympathy for Prohibition, and turn innocent Grape Juice into Wine.”24 Or perhaps one knew a rabbi or Catholic priest, real or fake, who might provide wine in return for a contribution. Home spirits distillation was riskier, because even a small amount of untaxed moonshine could bring a stiff fine, jail time, and possible confiscation of real estate.
One could buy moonshine, but amateur distillers tended to be ignorant and poorly educated. Some moonshine was poisonous redistilled industrial alcohol, and some was equally poisonous wood alcohol. Not every producer knew or cared that the use of a car radiator as a still was dangerous because the lead contaminated the liquor. To mask moonshine’s bad taste, flavorings were added, including Jamaican ginger extract, which led to the product called “jake.” Much of what was sold as jake was poisonous. It might kill, or it could cripple the victim, causing what was called jake leg. In 1930, fifty thousand poor people in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Cincinnati were paralyzed. For home consumption, it was best to buy from a reputable bootlegger. Finding such a vendor was difficult, but once found, the customer treasured the seller. The youthful writer Bernard DeVoto supplied the Harvard faculty with liquor. A master of the back roads in Vermont, he bought excellent liquors and French wines in Montreal before evading US Customs to slip back into the United States.
Because the safest place to drink without being arrested was at home, the middle class invented the home cocktail party. Hostesses issued written invitations, and dress was often formal. Cocktails were modern and sophisticated, and women found taking a mixed drink to be an adventure. Because the mediocre bootleg spirits had to be cut with a mixer to be palatable, the hostess prepared cocktails in the kitchen and then passed them around the living room on a tray. Men drank martinis and Manhattans, while women took sweeter drinks such as gin fizzes or lime rickeys. Both drank highballs: liquor with club soda, tonic water, or ginger ale served in a tall glass over ice. The New Yorker published street prices for alcohol as well as recipes for mixed drinks. Fashionable stores sold serving trays, cocktail shakers, tall highball glasses, and stirring sticks. Canapés were also provided, but at many parties the purpose was to get smashed. The question was which gave out first, the liquor or the guests.
House parties could be grand affairs. The owner of a mansion might entertain hundreds of guests, many of whom he had never met. They were not friends but people who had heard that there was a party, knew that alcohol would be available, and owned an automobile to get there. The bootlegger George Remus loved to entertain this way in Cincinnati, although he frequently got bored and retreated to his library to read a book. The fictional Jay Gatsby also held big parties at his house on Long Island Sound. “The fashionable rich,” complained the Ladies Home Journal in 1923, “demand their rum as an inalienable class privilege.”25 So did the middle class. In the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt (1922), real estate broker George Babbitt and his middle-class friends drank cocktails while endorsing prohibition for the working class.
The class bias of prohibition was extraordinary. The Yale Club legally served prewar alcohol to its members, but working-class speakeasies were raided. “It makes for hypocrisy and class hatred,” said the New York World.26 Louis Swift, the wealthy Chicago meatpacker, told a journalist that prohibition was good for the working class. He held a cocktail in his hand as he made the remark. Speaks near factories were closed when employers tipped the Prohibition Bureau. Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, defended prohibition despite the class bias. Workers used to spend entire paychecks in saloons; now they bought consumer goods. Small-town drys cared only about the drinking of Catholic and Jewish immigrants and African Americans who were either working class or poor. Wets were, accordingly, “un-American.” Before prohibition, drys had denounced the saloon for victimizing the drinker. Now they denounced the drinker for defying the Constitution. “If they do not like the way things are being done,” advised the Methodist Board of Temperance, “let them go back to Europe.”27
Youth drinking was another feature of the 1920s. Elders were alarmed that young men and women drank together. To the young, who had missed the moral zeal of the Progressive Era, the idea of prohibition seemed bizarre and unfair. In 1926, a poll found that four-fifths of Yale University students opposed prohibition; nearly half favored a government alcohol monopoly. One Columbia University student observed, “They say we should cultivate respect for the prohibition law because they fixed it so it can’t be repealed. Queer reason for respecting a law!”28 Drinking was just one way young Americans rebelled. Flappers talked dirty, bobbed their hair, wore short skirts, put on lipstick, and carried flasks in their boots. The automobile made a love nest for premarital sex, which was contemplated and discussed even if uncommon. Much of what happened in the twenties was a youthful show put on to shock strait-laced older people. There was quite a bit of play acting.
Through self-promotion, the Prohibition Bureau agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith frequently made the New York Times. Einstein was
a natural actor, and he loved faking his identity to catch liquor violators. He appeared to care less about prohibition and more about being able to con crooks. At one time or another he pretended to be a rabbi, a violinist, a fisherman, a baseball player, an ice man, and an undertaker. His victims fell for his phony lines and tried to sell Einstein liquor, whereupon the game was up. In 1925, jealous superiors fired Einstein and Smith. Another publicity hound was Eliot Ness of the Untouchables, an elite unit of the Prohibition Bureau that had been hand-picked for being free of corruption. Ness vied with Internal Revenue for taking credit for ending Capone’s career.
The chief enforcer in the United States was Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who was the highest-ranking woman in the federal government. Before prohibition she drank alcohol, but she believed in law enforcement. From 1921 to 1928, she was the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department in charge of liquor prosecutions. Early on, she realized that enforcement funds were inadequate, that there were too few agents, that small fry were arrested while powerful gangsters were ignored due to lack of local police cooperation. She disapproved of the wiretap in the Olmstead case. In 1928, Willebrandt strongly backed the dry Herbert Hoover for president. She had known Hoover from her days in California, and she hoped that his enforcement would be more energetic than Coolidge’s. A vigorous campaigner among dry women’s groups, she expected to be named attorney general. Hoover won, but she was not nominated. She returned to California to practice law, and in 1930 she became the top lawyer for the California Fruit Growers Coop, which produced grape concentrate to make wine.
Mlle. Rhea, a vaudeville entertainer, displayed the latest garter flask while on tour in Washington, DC, in 1926. National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-00150
The politics of alcohol began to change during Coolidge’s presidency. Better enforcement had failed to dry out the cities, and gang wars had become more violent. By the mid-1920s, growing numbers of Americans questioned the wisdom of prohibition. In 1926, Al Smith sponsored a referendum in New York State calling for modification, which won by a 3 to 1 margin. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, under the leadership of Ella Boole, seemed out of touch with public opinion when it demanded tougher penalties, and the Anti-Saloon League lost much of its power when Wayne Wheeler died suddenly in August 1927. Wheeler was a lawyer, a brilliant lobbyist, and a subtle political strategist who understood how to keep Congress on the dry side. The Ohio Republican resisted actions that he thought would undermine prohibition. To Wheeler, the law worked well enough in small-town America that it deserved to remain in place. He was optimistic that education and proper assimilation of immigrants to the standards that he espoused would dry out the cities in another generation.
Wheeler insisted that prohibition not become a partisan issue. If one party went wet, the wet party might eventually gain power and destroy prohibition. To prevent that result, dry majorities were needed in both parties. After Wheeler died, the ASL’s Washington lobbyist was James Cannon, the Methodist bishop of Virginia. Not only was Cannon a moralist blind to political complexities, but he was also an ardent southern Democrat. His lack of influence with the Republican majority in Congress weakened the ASL, and his strident demand that the Democratic Party be dry clashed with the growing influence of wet urban Democrats inside the party. Booming industrial cities in the 1920s were beginning to tilt power in that direction. The ten most populous cities grew by 24 percent in the 1920s, when the entire country gained only 16 percent. Urban growth was concentrated in wet New York, Chicago, and Detroit.
In 1924 and 1926, Al Smith easily won two new two-year terms as governor of the battleground state of New York, the most populous state, and in 1928 he ran for president a second time. William Jennings Bryan had died in 1925, which put dry forces at the Democratic National Convention on the defensive. Party leaders saw Smith as the strongest candidate. To placate Bishop Cannon and the dry southerners, the platform was wishy-washy on prohibition. Smith was nominated with the understanding, arranged by party leaders, that he would downplay the issue. The nominee, however, was a product of New York City’s Tammany Hall, a political machine rooted in saloons. Just before the convention adjourned, Smith announced that he favored modifying the Volstead Act to allow beer or beer and light wine. He shrugged off saloons as “defunct.”29 Excluding brief stays at the governor’s mansion in Albany, the parochial Smith had never lived anywhere except New York City. In supporting alcohol, he spoke from the heart, and no doubt most of the city’s residents agreed with him. To dry southerners, however, he had betrayed the convention agreement, and he seemed to be sneering at ignorant rural hicks.
Then Smith dropped the bombshell that the head of the Democratic National Committee would be John Raskob, a former Republican donor, a General Motors executive, a militant wet, and a fellow Roman Catholic. Indeed, Smith and Raskob had met through service at Catholic charities. The appointment signaled that Smith was pro-business, and the party chair raised so much money that the Democrats outspent the Republicans, which was unusual. Raskob feared federal power and wanted the Democrats to be a wet business party. The executive was close to Pierre du Pont, another wet business leader who had organized the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) with the insight that income taxes on the rich could be reduced if prohibition was repealed. Many southern Democrats despised northern capitalists, liked income taxes, and regarded drinking as the bane of the urban masses. Those southerners found Smith’s views and actions galling, even before they considered the religious dimension.
Given the recent activity of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, it was hard to see how Smith’s religion was not going to be an issue in 1928. In the North, where most rural Protestants were Republicans, the issue was not important, but rural dry southern Democrats who disliked Smith as an urban wet could not help but play the religious card. Bishop Cannon wanted to teach his party not to take the South for granted. He had no use for a wet Democratic Party. “I have been fighting the liquor traffic all my life,” he wrote Bishop Warren Candler of Georgia.30 Smith’s wet Catholicism led Cannon to back the dry Quaker, Herbert Hoover, and Cannon’s power was such that Virginia voted Republican. Smith also lost North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as the border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Although the loss was later seen as proof of widespread anti-Catholicism, most commentary at the time stressed Smith’s liquor stand as the key to his southern debacle.
Smith did gain wet-urban-Catholic votes in the North, mostly from immigrants who registered and voted for the first time. From 1896 to 1924, with the exception of Wilson’s first election, Republicans had carried the country’s twelve most populous cities, but the great wet cities voted Democratic in 1928. Smith won the customarily Republican wet states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island on a tide of new voters. The Republican vote in both states remained the same, but the Democratic vote soared. In Chicago, 61 percent of Smith’s voters had never before cast ballots. Smith also carried his native New York City, but not by enough to overcome the dry Republican majority in rural upstate New York. While the militantly wet Smith lost his home state and thereby forfeited any chance to be the party’s nominee a second time, his protégé, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who waffled on prohibition, got more upstate votes, narrowly won the New York governorship, and emerged as a strong presidential contender for 1932.
Waffling captured the public mood in 1928. Coolidge’s pledge to improve enforcement had failed in areas where wet defiance was commonplace. In 1920, there were 1,520 federal agents; ten years later, 2,836. During the 1920s, New York City had thirty thousand speakeasies and nightclubs. The Prohibition Bureau budget had increased from $4.75 million in 1921 to $12.4 million in 1929, but it did not seem to matter. Federal and local courts were clogged with liquor cases, and routine business cases were caught in the jam. In the federal courts in New York City, prohibition cases were two-thirds of criminal cases from 1920 to1922. Plea bargaining, ne
w to federal court, became rampant, and Volstead Act violators usually got off with small fines. There was little interest in sending moonshiners or bootleggers to prison, which cost taxpayer money. The fines, however, made up for the loss of alcohol taxes. Courts scheduled bargain days, where hundreds of violators who pleaded guilty to lesser charges in mass proceedings paid their fines immediately.
The wet state of Maryland had never passed an enforcement statute, so the only prohibition cases in the Free State were in federal court, but the number of Prohibition Bureau agents was insufficient to make even a small dent in the Baltimore liquor traffic. By 1929, the states of Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Montana had joined New York in repealing state dry statutes, and so, they, too, lacked state enforcement. States spent little on enforcement; in 1927 twenty-eight states spent nothing. In Virginia, dry laws were mainly used by politically connected bootleggers to ruin competitors or to harass poor whites and African Americans who tried to sell liquor. In California, enforcement depended on county prosecutors. In wet San Francisco, the district attorney brought only a few cases; in Los Angeles, police ignored major bootleggers but arrested many Mexican Americans who sold small amounts of alcohol.31
Although Hoover won the 1928 election largely thanks to prosperity, he also played the prohibition card. Raised as a dry Quaker, Hoover was married to a prohibitionist, but his record was not that of a teetotaler. He did not believe 2.75 percent beer was intoxicating, he had opposed wartime prohibition, and he had once owned an excellent wine cellar. While secretary of commerce in the 1920s he had sometimes stopped for a cocktail at the Belgian embassy, which was wet foreign soil. Like many moderates, he did not necessarily see legal compulsion as the best solution to the liquor problem. He was deeply offended by the rise of organized crime among bootleggers, and in 1928 he supported the Anti-Saloon League’s call for better enforcement. The dry forces believed that Hoover’s election had been a referendum on prohibition and that they had won a convincing victory. In early 1929, the ASL asked Congress to increase the number of Prohibition Bureau agents, but conservative Republicans in Congress opposed any increase in government spending. Members may also have sensed a lack of public support for more agents.
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