As a substitute for more agents, Senator Wesley Jones (R-WA), one of the ASL leaders in Congress, introduced a bill to increase penalties for violating the Volstead Act. Whereas the old law called for first offenders to receive a prison term of six months and a maximum fine of $1,000, the new statute, called the Jones Act, imposed five years and $10,000 for a first offense. In addition, possession of alcohol in a speakeasy became a federal crime. A customer who failed to report any illegal sale that he had witnessed could be charged with a felony. Coolidge signed the “five and dime” law as his term expired. Harsh penalties were supposed to end moonshining and bootlegging, but prosecutors disliked the Jones Act. Plea bargains became more difficult, which further clogged the courts, and jurors in wet areas resisted convicting violators when jurors felt that the punishment was extreme.
Facing mounting criticism over the failure of enforcement, including public reaction to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Hoover appointed a commission headed by the respected attorney George Wickersham to ponder national law enforcement policies. The Wickersham Commission took testimony for two years. The evidence overwhelmingly showed that prohibition was not being enforced and realistically could not be enforced short of creating a national police state. Few Americans liked that idea. The Prohibition Bureau was corrupt and incompetent, and the idea of joint federal-state law enforcement failed whenever the two sets of officials operated under different principles, political constraints, and legal systems. Federal prisoners rose from three thousand in 1915 to twelve thousand in 1930; one-third were liquor violators. State prisons were similarly crowded.
In 1931, the Wickersham Commission was ready to report, but the group was badly split. Nine of eleven members stated that the public did not support the Eighteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, five wanted to pursue better enforcement, while six called prohibition unworkable. Of this latter group, four wanted to modify the Volstead Act to allow beer and light wine, and two urged repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which was politically impossible in 1931. Forewarned about the split and alarmed by how his dry backers would react, Hoover demanded that the report unanimously stress better enforcement. Privately, he called the report “rotten.”32 The original split, however, was leaked to the press, and Hoover’s emphasis on enforcement sounded limp. For two years the administration had awaited a report that blandly embraced failed policies; the report made the government look inept. Even without the Great Depression, Hoover was in deep political trouble because of the failure of prohibition.
By 1931, the dry movement had produced decidedly mixed results. The politically crooked, vice-ridden saloon was dead, and overall drinking was reduced. In the early 1920s, per capita alcohol consumption may have dropped by two-thirds from its prewar level, but it rebounded later in the decade until it was about one-third below the prewar rate. Much of the lower consumption during prohibition was due to the high price of alcohol, which particularly affected working-class drinkers. The generation that came of age at that time drank little in later years, and per capita alcohol consumption did not regain its prewar peak until 1973.33 At the same time, prohibition had failed to dry out America, as supporters had promised that it would. In mid-decade, prohibitionists believed that the dry dream would be realized if only more effort was put into the cause. Thirst, however, never ceased, and allowing thugs like Al Capone to murder and rob to supply liquor seemed like a dubious price to pay for pursuing what Hoover had called the “noble” experiment. Nobility and Capone were words unlikely to be linked. Then there was the matter of the lost taxes, not just Capone’s untaxed millions but the amounts that could be raised from alcohol taxes and license fees. As the Great Depression worsened, government revenues slumped at all levels, demand for public services increased, and the possibility of alcohol revenues became increasingly attractive.
Chapter 4
Repeal
Organized opposition to prohibition crystallized even before the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. In 1918, irate business leaders founded the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). These wealthy conservatives drank socially; they opposed high personal income taxes, disliked federal police power, and worried about greater regulation of business. The AAPA wanted to replace income taxes with alcohol taxes, but this goal had little appeal except among the rich. In the early 1920s, the AAPA shoveled campaign contributions to wet politicians to offset the Anti-Saloon League’s contributions to dry politicians, but they had indifferent results. This elite organization restricted membership to significant donors, such as the chemical corporate executive Pierre du Pont and his top aide John Raskob. The AAPA’s Freedom magazine was circulated to leading country clubs in the East. Membership was 150,000 in 1930. In contrast, Al Smith’s wetness was rooted in mass appeal and his close ties to Tammany Hall, the corrupt Democratic political machine that ran New York City. When Raskob joined Smith’s campaign, he was unable to bring along many AAPA leaders. They were wealthy Republicans who did not fully trust anyone tied to Tammany Hall.
Throughout the twenties, the Republican Party was identified with prohibition, but two prominent wet Republicans undercut that image. Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, gave the wet cause a respectable champion who was a formidable public debater. Representative Fiorello La Guardia, a wet reformer from East Harlem, constantly ridiculed the Prohibition Bureau, which raided his poor Italian immigrant constituents while ignoring wealthy drinkers who frequented fancy clubs. He held a press conference in his Capitol Hill office at which he demonstrated how to mix near-beer with flavored malt tonic to make homemade beer. He also argued that 2.75 percent beer should be legal. La Guardia taunted law enforcement to arrest him for making beer, but no one took the bait.
By the late 1920s, Americans increasingly recognized that prohibition could not work, but getting the political system to tackle the issue was hard. Part of the problem was a three-way split: In 1930 an unscientific Literary Digest mail-in poll of 4.8 million respondents showed 30 percent backed prohibition, 29 percent favored modifying the Volstead Act to bring back beer or beer and light wine, and 40 percent wanted to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the shift against prohibition was clear. In 1930, members of the American Bar Association voted 2 to 1 for repeal. Wet converts included Alfred P. Sloan Jr., president of General Motors, and the billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had financially backed the Anti-Saloon League. Rockefeller’s recantation in June 1932, just before the Republican National Convention, made big news. He argued that prohibition had to go to save civilization from outlaws. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Federation of Labor also backed repeal.
Savvy politicians estimated that it would take a decade to organize a successful campaign to repeal the amendment, and some doubted that it could be done at all, considering the way rural America dominated the state legislatures that were required for ratification of a new constitutional amendment. As late as September 1930, the dry senator Morris Sheppard (D-TX), author of the Eighteenth Amendment, boasted, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”1 Few people disagreed. If prohibition had been created by the national crisis of World War I, it would take another national crisis, the Great Depression that began in 1929, to end prohibition. As the economy declined in the early thirties, government officials at all levels faced falling revenues while the demand for public services increased. This appetite for revenue, along with changing public opinion, forced reconsideration of alcohol policy. In early 1932, the Literary Digest reported that 73 percent of 4.7 million mail-in ballots wanted to end prohibition; Americans who had previously favored modification now embraced repeal.
Language also mattered. The AAPA’s problem was clarity: what the organization opposed was clear, but it lacked any specific plan to replace prohibition. In the 1920s, few Americans favored the return of the raunchy
, prewar all-male saloon, and the formerly powerful brewers remained in disrepute. Many people would have been satisfied with home or restaurant use of legal beer or beer and light wine. Whiskey had few friends, because it had been associated with vice, wife beating, child abuse, and public drunkenness. To oppose prohibition was to promote a negative idea, which seldom works in politics. To rally support, a campaign for positive change was needed. Only in the late twenties did opponents begin to describe what they wanted by using the word “repeal.” Repeal was a catch-all concept that linked those who favored saloons to those who preferred only retail sale of beer and wine for home use to those who desired tight government controls on alcohol. As a positive concept, repeal offered several possible wet visions distinct from the dry paradise imagined by prohibitionists.
Pauline Sabin, the wife of a wealthy Wall Street banker, decided to act. Mrs. Charles Sabin, as she was known socially, entered politics when women gained the vote. In 1920, she had believed in prohibition, and she had worked strenuously for the election of Warren Harding as president. Harding’s corrupt and mediocre Prohibition Bureau had disenchanted Sabin, but in 1924 she campaigned for Calvin Coolidge with his promise of better enforcement. During the twenties, Sabin served as the Republican national committeewoman from New York, one of the highest party offices open to a woman at that time. In 1928, she backed Herbert Hoover, but she did so with the hope that Hoover would recognize the failure of enforcement. After the election, she quickly gave up on Hoover as an agent of change. Hoover’s wife was dry, and he had been elected with the open support of the ASL and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, so perhaps he was incapable of adopting any new policy.
Sabin’s own views about prohibition shifted during the twenties. She and her husband lived in a twenty-eight-room oceanfront mansion on Long Island. The house had a built-in vault used as an alcohol repository. She served exquisite liquors and fine wines, all bought legally before prohibition, at their frequent dinner parties. Sabin herself was a light drinker. Guests often included members of Congress, who rarely turned down a drink, even while they explained that they continued to support both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. The hypocrisy infuriated Sabin. In addition, she worried that her two adolescent sons would be enticed into drinking deadly moonshine. Sabin decided to attack prohibition in order to end hypocrisy and to save her sons.
An educated, gracious, poised, and articulate woman who had a magnificent radio voice, Sabin began to campaign for repeal in 1929. “There was a large group ready to be organized, wanting to be organized,” she later recalled.2 To attract attention and rally support, she created the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). She used lists from the Red Cross, the League of Women Voters, and the Parent-Teacher Association to recruit local leaders. An inclusive organization, WONPR welcomed Democrats, Republicans, Independents, women of all races, wealthy society women, middle-class housewives, and union leaders. To gain support, Sabin argued, “Telling citizens what they must or must not do in their strictly personal conduct, as long as public safety is not affected, is a function which the government should not attempt.”3
For decades, the WCTU had claimed that all women supported prohibition. After women started voting in 1920, elected officials avoided offending the WCTU, which might mobilize a massive bloc of women opposing them at the next election. Playing upon this fear, Ella Boole, the president of the WCTU, testified before Congress in 1928, “I represent the women of America.” Boole’s claim offended Sabin. “Well, lady,” she recalled thinking, “here’s one woman you don’t represent.”4 Unlike the upper-class Sabin, Boole, the wife of a Methodist minister, was middle class. The two women exchanged a number of radio barbs, which enhanced the visibility of the WONPR and undercut Boole’s claim that she represented all American women. Boole then retreated to the older WCTU line, which was that she represented all respectable women. Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance called the WONPR a “little group of wine-drinking society women.”5 Sabin’s radio addresses, however, showed that she was not empty-headed, and she never drank in public, so the WCTU looked foolish.
A superb organizer, Sabin used radio, public speeches, magazine articles, and mass mailings to reach her audience. Rallying millions of younger urban women, she asked them to join WONPR and to help sign up new recruits; by 1930, the organization claimed 400,000 members. The WCTU, in contrast, was in decline; under Ella Boole it had sunk to 381,000 members. WONPR continued to grow and topped 1 million in 1933. The large size of Sabin’s group gave cover to politicians who had long recognized that prohibition had failed. “When women entered the fight for repeal,” Al Smith noted, “sanity began to return to the country.”6 Elected officials who opposed prohibition often used Sabin’s arguments. WONPR cited hypocrisy, lost revenue, bootlegger thugs, and dangerous illicit alcohol. When queried, politicians frequently said that America’s women had caused them to change their views.
No longer terrified of the WCTU, numerous candidates for Congress in 1930 promised either to legalize beer and light wine or to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment and return the issue to the states. Surveying the election results, Sabin accurately called the 1930 midterm election a wet landslide, which in turn helped WONPR gain even more support. “I know of nothing since the days of the campaign for woman’s suffrage,” Sabin said in 1931, “to equal the campaign which women are now conducting for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.”7 To avoid the charge that it favored saloons or drunkenness, the WONPR stressed that it wanted rigorous government regulation of the alcohol industry. By 1932, Sabin was determined to use the WONPR to support a wet presidential candidate regardless of party.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that most masterful of politicians, had narrowly won election as governor of New York in 1928. He was no friend of Tammany Hall, and the New York City machine had given him only tepid support, while it pushed Al Smith for president. In the summer of 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt, a committed dry whose father and brother had died of alcoholism, campaigned among upstate dry groups, and Franklin Roosevelt benefited from the support of progressive Republicans who had backed Eleanor’s uncle Teddy in earlier years. As governor, Roosevelt forced out the corrupt Tammany-backed mayor, Jimmy Walker, who was replaced with a wet Republican reformer who backed Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia. Bootleggers had a lot to do with Walker’s corruption. Tammany vowed to back Smith over Roosevelt for the 1932 presidential nomination, which deprived the new governor of his large home-state delegation. Facing reelection in 1930, Roosevelt dodged prohibition as much as possible. He said that he favored law enforcement, a hollow promise considering that Smith had repealed New York’s state enforcement law in 1923. Roosevelt won reelection.
As the economy worsened, Governor Roosevelt passed imaginative social programs, and to pay for them, he was prepared to raise taxes. Roosevelt also moved to line up backing around the country for the presidential nomination in 1932. To win that nomination, he needed strong support from southern delegations in states where drys were strong. While the other Democratic candidates called for repeal, Roosevelt remained wishy-washy in early 1932, and Eleanor continued to speak to dry groups. Whenever Franklin Roosevelt was asked about prohibition, he stressed that the economy was a far more important issue. He believed that the Great Depression required federal action. His activist policies as governor suggested that he was serious.
When the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago in June 1932, Roosevelt was the leading candidate, but he lacked the two-thirds vote needed to win the nomination. His managers found that unless the governor took a wetter position on alcohol, his candidacy was doomed. The delegates had already emptied five thousand liquor bottles. Finally, Roosevelt won the nomination when the wet John Nance Garner delivered the Texas delegation in return for the vice presidency, and the formerly dry but now wet newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst delivered the California delegation in return for a promise to repeal prohibit
ion. In an unprecedented gesture, Roosevelt stunned the convention and the country by accepting the nomination in person. He said, “This convention wants repeal. Your candidate wants repeal. And I am confident that the United States of America wants repeal.”8 The delegates roared their approval. This reaction marked the high point of his acceptance speech.
Although the economy was the main issue in the campaign, Roosevelt also seized the opportunity to mobilize wet support across party lines. He promised to repeal both the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment. Elected officials generally supported the idea because it promised to curb organized crime, reduce corruption, and enable governments at all levels to gain badly needed alcohol license fees and tax revenues. In the South, a number of formerly dry politicians suddenly followed their constituents by switching sides. Pauline Sabin, a lifelong Republican, made front page news when the WONPR endorsed Roosevelt. Hoover, running for a second term, was left with defending a record of failed enforcement by promising that unspecified changes would be made. Thanks to the Great Depression, Roosevelt won in a landslide. He carried wet Templeton, Iowa, 446 to 14. In 1933, the town voted to repeal Iowa’s prohibition law 403 to 11.
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