by Behr, Edward
Delegate after delegate rejoiced in (usually mercifully short) emotional addresses. The tone was set by James A. White, superintendent of the Ohio ASL (the state that witnessed the initial Oberlin College conferences that brought it into being in the first place): “God has wrought wonders in Ohio!” he proclaimed. The Reverend Sam Small, D.D., a favorite keynote speaker, indulged in the type of oratory that had been popular in the past, but was largely irrelevant now that the United States was on the verge of nationwide Prohibition: “From the Great Lakes to the Gulf a militant majority of American people are crucifying that beastly, bloated bastard of Beelzebub, the liquor traffic. . . . Yet a few months more, and we will bury the putrid corpse of John Barleycorn.”
William Jennings Bryan, the former Secretary of State and Democratic veteran — who a year later would suffer considerable embarrassment with the press revelation that he had long been on the ASL payroll (at a stipend of $11,000 a year) — intervened twice, at considerable length. By now a somewhat passé figurehead who had never recovered from his policy differences with the ASL (until he was overruled by Wheeler and the majority of his party, he had systematically opposed the ASL’s “nonpolitical” policy and insisted that Prohibition should remain an exclusively Democratic issue), Bryan could not resist a sly dig at Republicans. He told the conference:
I have a joy as a citizen and I have a joy the Democrat has, which is more than any Republican can possibly have. Now the fight is almost over, a prediction: we will have prohibition by universal assent! [He was as wrong about that, as he was about ASL nonpartisan strategy.] Is the fight ended? No. We must give the people an understanding of what alcohol means, so that back of these laws we will have a total abstinence nation and boys and girls will be taught that alcohol is a poison, for after we have won this victory, it will have to be guarded by eternal vigilance.
He did, however, accurately reflect the ASL’s new internationalist militancy: in the light of its amazing successes of the last few years, it was now imperative “to export the gift of Prohibition to other countries, turning the whole world dry.” In a tub-thumping speech (that fully endorsed H. L. Mencken’s comment about him that “He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits”) he urged his fellow Prohibitionists to conquer even more distant goals.
We must turn our energies to other countries until the whole world is brought to understand that alcohol is man’s greatest enemy. Thus it is a fortunate thing that the abdication of the Kaiser and the fall of arbitrary power came in the same year as does the fall of the brewery autocracy and that these two evils came down together. . . . Now we can go out for the evangelization of the world on the subject of intoxicating liquor.
His call was taken up by Ernest Cherrington, the ASL’s president, who stigmatized “the power of the French Bourse” as an “important factor in the propagation and protection of the wine industry and traffic.” He continued: “Our imperative demands are not limited to the [Versailles] Peace Conference. The important need for temperance reform must be recognized in the reconstruction program of the several nations of Europe.”
What he then outlined was no less than a blueprint “for universal, world-wide prohibition . . . for now is the psychological time to strike.” With considerable naiveté, the final resolutions of the conference reflected this missionary zeal.
“The time has come,” they read, “for the formation of an international league for the extermination of the beverage traffic throughout the world.” ASL field agents were to be stationed abroad and there was to be an international Prohibition press association, “with the launching of a prohibition periodical with a worldwide editorial policy.”
The ASL was also mandated to “get in touch with American Consulates to bring directly to the attention of official foreign representatives of the U.S. government the facts as to the success and benefits of prohibition in the U.S.” The ASL also pledged financial assistance to foreign temperance movements and announced that ASL lobbyists would attend the forthcoming Versailles Peace Conference.
It all reflected a new arrogance. American entry into the war had made it a world power, and the ASL delegates naively assumed that their all-powerful lobby could impose their views not only on vote-hungry American politicians but on the rest of the world. The Conference unanimously called on the governments of Great Britain and France to “issue an order prohibiting the sale of intoxicants to American soldiers and sailors in uniform. . . . We insist there should be no hesitation and no delay in issuing this order, for prompt action will prevent the formation of the wine drinking habit by our soldiers and sailors.” Wheeler himself, always a political realist, doubtless knew what the Allies’ answer would be, and there is no trace of an official follow-up. But with Prohibition a virtual certainty in the near future, the ASL showed it really believed — in the words of the communist hymn, the “Internationale” — that in a short space of time, Prohibition was fated to be the destiny of mankind, “Sera le genre humain.”
AMERICA GOES DRY
Prohibition turned Andrew J. Volstead, an otherwise obscure Republican congressman from Minnesota, into a household name. It was commonly assumed that because the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution introducing nationwide Prohibition bore his name it was largely his doing. In fact, Volstead was its facilitator rather than its architect. Wheeler himself, as he would later boast, conceived, drafted, and copiously rewrote it. Its many weaknesses, and omissions, are largely attributable to him.
Volstead, a dour Lutheran of Norwegian origin, with a huge bristling mustache, was not even part of the hard core of dry advocates in Congress and, in his long political career, had never used the Prohibition platform as part of his election campaign strategy. On two occasions, his unsuccessful challengers to his House of Representatives seat had even been Prohibition candidates. As county prosecutor in his earlier days, he had prosecuted many cases involving illicit liquor because Minnesota had been a dry state long before 1917, but he had done so routinely, with no dogmatic belief in Prohibition’s inherent virtues. It was in this same spirit, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that he oversaw its passage, after the Supreme Court had narrowly (by five votes to four) validated its constitutionality.
Introduced on May 27, 1919, the bill was passed (255 to 166) after a three-month debate. The Senate vote followed on September 5, and, as part of routine procedure, it then went back to the House, to be adopted on October 10 by 321 to 70 votes. An already desperately ill President Wilson, further weakened by his losing fight to keep America within the League of Nations, vetoed it, on both constitutional and ethical grounds. “In all matters having to do with personal habits and customs of large numbers of our people,” he wrote, “we must be certain that the established processes of legal change are followed.” But that same day, the veto was overridden in Congress, and the act became law. Henceforth, the act determined, “No person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorized in this act.” The act replaced all previous dry legislation measures in force in the various states.
On the face of it, the Volstead Act was both all-encompassing and foolproof, though it did contain specific exemptions — regarding industrial alcohol, sacramental wine, certain patent medicines, doctors’ prescriptions (but no more than a pint at a time per patient within a ten-day period), toilet preparations, flavoring extracts, syrups, vinegar, and cider. Brewers could remain in business provided they confined themselves to making “near-beer,” with a maximum 0.5 percent alcohol content. Penalties for improper use were to be fines and prison terms — $1,000 or 30 days for the first offense, rising to $10,000 and a year for further convictions.
The act also banned liquor advertising, and the use or sale of anything that might lead to its manufacture. “Any room, house, building, boat, vehicle, structure or place where intoxicating liquor is manufactured, sold, kept or bartered in violation of this ti
de ... is hereby declared a common nuisance,” it said, outlining the scale of fines and jail sentences for transgressors. Liquor stored for sale or vehicles used for transport were to be seized and destroyed. But the act was mute concerning the actual consumption of liquor in private homes — the one concession to individual liberty. The day before Prohibition came into effect, the New York Daily News gave its readers the following invaluable advice:
You may drink intoxicating liquor in your own home or in the home of a friend when you are a bona fide guest.
You may buy intoxicating liquor on a bona fide medical prescription of a doctor. A pint can be bought every ten days.
You may consider any place you live permanently as your home. If you have more than one home, you may keep a stock of liquor in each.
You may keep liquor in any storage room or club locker, provided the storage place is for the exclusive use of yourself, family or bona fide friends.
You may get a permit to move liquor when you change your residence.
You may manufacture, sell or transport liquor for non-beverage or sacramental purposes provided you obtain a Government permit.
You cannot carry a hip flask.
You cannot give away or receive a bottle of liquor as a gift.
You cannot take liquor to hotels or restaurants and drink it in the public dining rooms.
You cannot buy or sell formulas or recipes for homemade liquors.
You cannot ship liquor for beverage use.
You cannot manufacture anything above one half of one percent (liquor strength) in your home.
You cannot store liquor in any place except your own home.
You cannot display liquor signs or advertisements on your premises.
You cannot remove reserve stocks from storage.
In retrospect, the Volstead Act was hopelessly inadequate, because it grossly underestimated the willingness of the lawbreakers to risk conviction, the degree of human ingenuity displayed to get around its provisions, and the ease with which the lawbreakers would be able to subvert all those whose job was to enforce it. Above all, its failure resulted from a naive American belief in the effectiveness of law: the drys, whether ASL or church activists, politicians, law enforcers, or simply individuals of strong moral convictions, were convinced that Americans, as law-abiding citizens intensely respectful of established authority, would obey the provisions of the Volstead Act, even if, as drinkers and as advocates of personal, individual liberty, they deeply resented it.
One of the few hard-headed realists who felt otherwise, immediately after the passage of the Volstead Act, was ex-President William Howard Taft. Those who thought that “an era of clear thinking and clean living” was at hand were living in a fool’s paradise, he wrote. The law had been passed “... against the views and practices of a majority of people in many of the large cities. . . . The business of manufacturing alcohol, liquor and beer will go out of the hands of law-abiding members of the community and will be transferred to the quasi-criminal classes.”
The “bond of national union” would come under severe strain, and he warned against “variations in the enforcement of the law.” But even Taft scarcely foresaw the extent of the damage Prohibition would inflict on the American body politic.
To become effective, the Eighteenth Amendment required ratification by a two-thirds majority of states. The result was a foregone conclusion. Many of them were already wholly or partially dry, and Prohibition was clearly a vote-winning issue. For all that, the ASL propaganda machine moved into high gear, and a spate of songs, based on popular tunes such as “Annie Laurie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” were sung in churches and Sunday schools all over America.1 Mississippi became the first to vote for the measure. A year later, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth — and last — state whose voice was needed to make it part of the Constitution. The act prescribed a year’s grace between final ratification and implementation. Twelve months later, on January 17, 1920, at the stroke of midnight, the whole of America officially went dry.
Along with the war, Prohibition had been the most talked-about issue in American homes and editorial columns. Since 1917, the debate had been so acrimonious that everyone knew what to expect. In the months leading up to January of 1920, some distillers moved large quantities of liquor abroad — the Bahamas becoming a huge storage area, which would make it, after 1920, a bootlegger’s paradise. Other, less far-seeing distillers had accumulated huge stocks, for sale while purchases were still legal. But these were not as lucrative as they had expected, for prices had risen steeply, and they decided to advertise. Posters bearing the effigy of Uncle Sam appeared all over America, urging consumers to “Buy now. Uncle Sam will ENFORCE prohibition!”
Most distillers believed Prohibition would prove so unpopular and unworkable it would quickly be repealed. Hardest hit were private investors in distilleries, who held “whiskey certificates,” shares measured in multigallon cases (not much different from today’s coffee futures). There had been some talk of compensation, the government buying up all certificates, for eventual legal use. This was quickly dropped. By 1920, the value of whiskey certificates had plummeted to nearly nothing, their holders almost as penalized as investors holding Russian loan bonds. Failure to compensate the whiskey investors would have huge repercussions.
In the final few weeks before January 17, 1920, Americans did stock up, to the limit of their financial restrictions. Those who could afford it rented space for storage in warehouses and even in safe deposit boxes. But on January 15, 1920, two days before the act came into force, New York judge John C. Knox decreed that all liquor stocks outside the home broke the law and were liable to seizure. All across America, there was a huge panic as millions of Americans carted their liquor stocks back to their homes. The New York Evening Post reported a rush to “hire trucks or baby carriages or anything else on wheels.” “Fair ladies sat in limousines behind alluring barricades of cases,” wrote a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
Surprisingly, though a phenomenal amount of drinking took place all over America on the night of January 16, the occasion failed to live up to reporters’ (and saloon keepers’) expectations. Whiskey had become expensive (only in one bar, the Della Robbia Room in the Hotel Vanderbilt, was it given away free), revelry was muted, and there were no great crowds on the Manhattan streets, perhaps because it was a bitterly cold night. Although mock wakes were a favorite theme (in Healey’s restaurant customers were given small wooden coffins as mementos), the New York Tribune reported “sad scenes” on Broadway, and the Evening Post noted that “the big farewell failed to materialize.” In somewhat hyphenated prose, the New York Times wrote that “the spontaneous orgies of drink that were predicted failed in large part to occur on schedule. . . . Instead of passing from us in violent paroxysms, the rum demon lay down to a painless, peaceful, though lamented, by some, death.” A walk through Broadway at midnight, a Sun reporter observed, “revealed an almost empty thoroughfare.”
There were a few exceptions: a wealthy client took over the Park Avenue Hotel for a large private party. Black cloth draped the walls; tables were covered with black crepe; waiters, musicians, and guests were dressed uniformly in black; black caviar was served; and drink came in black glasses specially ordered for the occasion. In the center of the dining room, in the place of honor, stood a black coffin filled with black bottles. The orchestra played funeral dirges, and at midnight the guests filed past the coffin as though mourning a dead person. “Lights were extinguished, and the orchestra played a few bars of dirge. Then a spotlight picked up the final spectacle — two young men and two girls, all in black, sitting at a black table and pouring the last drops from four black bottles, while they held their pocket handkerchiefs before their streaming eyes. A newspaperman who wandered into this party for a few minutes reported that it was ‘the damndest thing I ever saw.’ “2 In Cincinnati, more decorously, a melancholy beerfest took place under the auspices of the old German-American Alliance, n
ow renamed the Citizens’ League.
In contrast, the following day, the Prohibitionists’ self-congratulatory celebrations were awesome, their oratorical hyperbole more extravagant than ever. “They are dead, that sought the child’s life,” thundered the inevitable William Jennings Bryan at a huge rally in Washington attended by hundreds of Congressmen, the entire ASL establishment, and thousands of well-wishers. “They are dead! They are dead! King Alcohol has slain more children than Herod ever did. The revolution that rocked the foundation of the Republic will be felt all over the earth. As we grow better and stronger through the good influence of Prohibition, we will be in a position to give greater aid to the world.”