by Behr, Edward
In Norfolk, Virginia, Billy Sunday, the most famous evangelist of his day and a lifelong campaigner since his “conversion” (in earlier days he had been a noted song writer, baseball player, and an even more noted drunk), staged a mock funeral service for John Barleycorn. With his usual showmanship, he had a troupe of mimes, impersonating drunkards and devils, accompany the 20-foot-long coffin to its final resting place. “The reign of tears is over,” he told a huge crowd. “The slums will soon only be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.” Ominously, in Chicago, within an hour of the Volstead Act taking effect, six armed, masked men made away with whiskey earmarked for “medicinal use,” worth $100,000.
The delay between the passing of the act and its implementation was no humane measure that let Americans enjoy one last year of legal drinking. The intervening year had been spent setting up some of the new law enforcement machinery, for which Congress had earmarked a meager $3 million. Some 1,500 agents of the new Prohibition Unit (soon to be called the Prohibition Bureau) were recruited, and the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Internal Revenue Service trained in their new duties.
The decision to put the Prohibition Bureau under the authority of the Treasury Department — instead of the Justice Department — was Wheeler’s idea, and he had personally lobbied (then) Senator Warren Harding, soon to succeed Wilson as president, to that effect. Very early on, it proved to be a disastrous decision, but not nearly as disastrous as the other decision, made concurrently, to exclude the new Prohibition agents from the Civil Service and to exempt them from its rules. In every state, their recruitment was political, an integral part of the spoils system, in the hands of local politicians whose careers depended on patronage. All that was required on the part of an aspiring Prohibition agent was the endorsement of the ASL, a congressman, or other prominent local politician. No other qualifications or character references were needed; some of the new recruits even had criminal records. The job paid a maximum salary of $2,300 a year, barely enough to live on — almost inviting corruption. The ASL later justified this decision on the grounds that had it insisted on Civil Service status for the new recruits, “to have forced the issue would have been to jeopardize the passage of the bill.” But in a reply to the ASL, a National Civil Service Reform League spokesman wrote that “the plain fact is that the congressmen wanted the plunder and you let them have it.” In the first few months of Prohibition, the agents were mostly Democratic appointees. When the Harding administration took over, almost all were dismissed and replaced by Republicans. The turnover was huge: in any one year, there were 10,000 applicants for 2,000 jobs, and the average length of service was only a few months — most agents being “let go” for corrupt practices that could not be satisfactorily proved or prosecuted.
Although Prohibition had been in the cards for several years, many Americans simply did not know what to expect. Whereas Colonel Daniel Porter, a New York supervising revenue agent, announced that he was confident “there will not be any violations to speak of,” New Jersey Governor Edward I. Edwards said he hoped to keep New Jersey “as wet as the Atlantic ocean.” In truth, the Volstead Act was flagrantly broken from the moment it became law, and continued to be flouted for the next thirteen years.
The nation’s legislators and law enforcers professed to be completely taken aback, after 1920, by the extent of Prohibition-related lawbreaking — and the concomitant, almost immediate proliferation of speakeasies, bootleggers, rumrunners, moonshiners, and hijackers, all bringing violence in their wake. They need not have been so surprised. Had they bothered to look at those towns and states where Prohibition had already become law before 1920, they would have realized what was in store. In 1916, for instance, Prohibition had finally become a reality in Washington State, and immediately the new law there (very similar in content to the Volstead Act) had been totally ignored or subverted. A month after Spokane, then a town of 44,000 registered voters, became dry, 34,000 liquor permits had been issued, and soft-drink shops selling under-the-counter liquor were doing a roaring trade, with sixty-five brand-new drugstores — all selling liquor — competing for business. Moonshine liquor was freely available, there was a constant stream of smuggled liquor from across the nearby Canadian border, and a drugstore-owning couple whose establishment was, Carry Nation style, “hatchetized” by Prohibition vigilantes, promptly went into another line of business, running a company shipping rum from Cuba to Canada, but in fact smuggling it back into the twenty-eight dry states.
What had happened in Spokane four years before national Prohibition became law was to become the norm all over America. “A staggering increase in liquor prescribed as medicine occurred during the first five months throughout the country.”3 In Chicago alone, as soon as the Volstead Act became law, over 15,000 doctors and 57,000 retail druggists applied for licenses to sell “medicinal” liquor, and in the next three years there would be 7,000 (mostly new) “soft-drinking” parlors, actually dispensing liquor. Scores of clandestine breweries also set up shop, and small fortunes were made by printers supplying fake whiskey labels, carpenters making fake wooden crates for brand-name whiskey, and pharmacists selling ingredients for homemade stills (yeast, juniper oil, fusel oil, iodine, and caramel). Americans bought huge quantities of malt syrup, essential for turning “near-beer” into the real thing, and the Prohibition Bureau estimated that several hundred million gallons of homemade 2.5-degree beer were consumed every year. There was a run on anything containing alcohol that could be used as a basis for homemade liquor — embalming fluid, antifreeze solution, solidified and rubbing alcohol, bay rum — often with horrendous consequences, for, inexplicably, old rules requiring denatured alcohol to bear the POISON warning were discontinued.
The ingenuity of clandestine liquor manufacturers was considerable. In the Midwest, the liquid residue of silos was collected and turned into liquor. New brands sprang up: Panther Whiskey, Red Eye, Cherry Dynamite, Old Stingo, Old Horsey, Scat Whiskey, Happy Sally, Jump Steady, Soda Pop Moon, Sugar Moon, and Jackass Brandy, supposedly made of peaches. In the South, a brand called Squirrel Whiskey got its name because it was so strong it was supposed to make consumers climb trees. In the ghettos, a popular drink was known simply as nigger gin. “Sweet whiskey” was made with nitrous ether — alcohol mixed with nitric and sulfuric acid. Yack-yack Bourbon, a popular Chicago drink, was made with iodine and burnt sugar. From Mexico came “American” whiskey, made from potatoes and cactus, and from Jamaica a 90-proof alcohol concoction known as Jamaica ginger, or Jake. Colliers reported that victims of Jake paralysis lost control of their extremities: “... the victim has no control over the muscles that normally point the toes upward.”
Although some Californian vineyards were ruined by Prohibition, certain Napa Valley wine-making families became exceedingly wealthy. In fact, grape production, far from declining, increased tenfold between 1920 and 1933, the main reason being the manufacture of dried grape and “raisin cakes.” These were allowed, under a provision of the Volstead Act, to prevent farmers from going under entirely. The aim was, officially, to allow householders to make “nonintoxicating cider and fruit juices for home consumption to the extent of 200 gallons annually.”
The raisin cakes were easily turned into something else. Wholesalers used demonstrators (often attractive, well-spoken young women) in large stores to draw attention to the wine-making possibilities of their cakes (or “bricks”) while ostensibly warning against fermentation — their straight-faced cautionary patter urging buyers “not to place the liquid in a jug and put it aside for twenty-one days because it would turn into wine . . . and not to stop the bottle with a cork because this is necessary only if fermentation occurs.” The bricks were sold with a label that read “Caution: will ferment and turn into wine.” The biggest beneficiary of all was Beringer Vineyards in Napa Valley, whose owners
, Charles and Bertha Beringer, were the first to take advantage of the obscure Volstead Act loophole. Bertha Beringer, only 32 when Prohibition began, and recently wedded to Charles, was the real brains behind the scheme, saving the family business — and inspiring countless later competitors.
The year 1917 was a record vintage year for California wines, in terms of both quality and quantity. For the first time, owing to a wartime manpower shortage, Mexican workers were recruited for the harvest. The threat of Prohibition was already very real — thanks to Wheeler, servicemen in uniform were not allowed into bars or saloons — and Bertha saw the writing on the wall. But unlike many Napa Valley owners, who ploughed up their vineyards to plant fruit trees rather than be caught with large stocks of unsellable wine, she devised the “raisin cake” in advance of the Volstead Act. “Instead of converting their grapes into either grape juice or sacramental wines, Beringer Brothers will dry most of them,” the Saint Helena Star reported in September of 1919. The Charles Krug winery also beat the Volstead Act, investing in nonalcoholic grape juice and extract-making plants.
Other, less innovative vineyards went to the wall, in the first few years of Prohibition, after an initial selling spree — for in the first three months of Prohibition, the wineries were allowed to liquidate their stocks to private buyers, which they did at hugely inflated prices. But one famous Napa Valley vineyard, established in the nineteenth century by a French farmer from the Perigord, Georges de Latour (whose French vineyard had been wiped out by phylloxera), prospered for a wholly different reason.
Georges de Latour was a practicing Catholic, and an intimate friend of the archbishop of San Francisco, who instructed all the priests in his diocese to buy their sacramental wine only from him. The amounts were so huge that it is clear that most of the priests must have been bootleggers as well, for the de Latour books show that all sorts of table wines were sold to the churches. Other famous vineyards established equally lucrative contracts with Californian rabbis, many of whom became, in effect, bootleggers for their flocks — the tide of rabbi guaranteeing virtual immunity from prosecution. The Prohibition Bureau’s estimate was that 678 million gallons of homemade wine alone were consumed between 1925 and 1929.
In New York, whereas many great restaurants simply closed down (their owners reluctant to break the law and unwilling to provide meals without vintage wines), speakeasies proliferated on a truly star-ding scale. By 1922, there would be at least 5,000, and by 1927, over 30,000 — twice as many as all legal bars, restaurants, and nightclubs before Prohibition. Some of them — such as the Twenty-One and the Stork Club — would survive repeated closures to become fashionable post-Prohibition restaurants, just as prominent bootlegging personalities such as William “Big Bill” Dwyer and “impresario” Larry Fay would eventually become respected, adulated “café society” figures.
The career of Sherman Billingsley, the owner-founder of the Stork Club — in its day the most famous speakeasy in America — revealed the extent of Prohibition’s “window of opportunity” — and how pre-1920 dry legislation provided bold entrepreneurs with valuable experience in skirting the Volstead Act’s laws. Oklahoma-born Billingsley began selling bootleg liquor in a drugstore when he was twelve. He was sixteen when he was first arrested, in Seattle, for contravening the local liquor laws. Soon afterward, he was running bootleg liquor from Canada and managing three speakeasies in Detroit; at nineteen, in New York, he was running a Bronx drugstore selling medicinal whiskey.
Billingsley opened the Stork Club, with money from Frank Costello, New York’s leading gangster, in 1927, and the nightly presence there of Walter Winchell, America’s most famous syndicated gossip columnist (his drinks, and meals, were on the house), made it the place to be seen. A raid in 1931 led to its temporary closure, but the “right people” soon flocked to the new address on Fifty-third Street, undeterred by sky-high prices (a $20 cover charge, $2 for a carafe of plain water).
There were hundreds of lesser-known private drinking clubs, where affluent members could store their own liquor. According to humorist Robert Benchley (himself a serious drinker), there were thirty-eight speakeasies on East Fifty-second Street alone, and potential buyers were so convinced that every house there was a speakeasy that one householder — rather in the manner of today’s New York car owners, notifying potential burglars of “no radio” — put up a notice on her front door: “This is a private residence. Do not ring.” McSorley’s saloon in Greenwich Village never bothered to reduce its potent beer to near beer — its popularity with the police and local politicians such that it was never raided once. A new type of nightclub became fashionable: the expensive, barely clandestine night spot run by socialites (Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club) and showbiz veterans (Belle Livingstone’s Country Club on East Fifty-eighth Street and “Texas” Guinan’s El Fay Club on West Forty-fifth Street). These typically included cabaret shows, dancing girls, and exotic acts. Prohibition encouraged the emergence of uniquely colorful women, whose wit and toughness attracted huge numbers of admiring customers. Belle Livingstone, a much-married ex-Broadway showgirl (her husbands included a paint salesman, an Italian count, a Cleveland millionaire, and an English engineer), charged a $5 entrance fee and $40 for a bottle of champagne. Mary Louise “Texas” Guinan was a former star of silent westerns, ex-circus rider, and vaudeville singer whose generous disposition was legendary. She even urged Walter Winchell, one of her devoted admirers, to promote, in his columns, speakeasies owned by less fortunate competitors.
The trashing of the Times Square area of New York, once the site of large numbers of respectable bars and restaurants, began with Prohibition, for not all speakeasies were furnished in the Louis XV style like the luxurious five-story Country Club. Most were dark, sordid clip joints haunted by bar girls pushing foul drinks in exchange for the promise of spurious sex to come. In Cincinnati, the attractive Across the Rhine beer gardens soon became a distant memory.
Some Prohibition advocates felt that “wide-open” towns such as New York and Chicago should be brought to heel, and called for more Prohibition agents and harsher laws (which were in fact introduced in 1925). Others became disenchanted for different reasons. Senator Thomas B. Watson (Democrat, Georgia), a lifelong dry, shocked the Senate by drawing attention to “murder and other outrages carried out by Prohibition agents” in his state.
There was an almost immediate, nationwide change in drinking habits. It became the thing to do, among students, flappers, and respectable middle-class Americans all over the country, to defy the law — as much a manifestation of personal liberty as a thirst for alcohol.
Other changes manifested themselves. The saloon had been an almost exclusively male preserve, but the new speakeasies welcomed women. The cocktail was largely born as a result of Prohibition, because this was the only way of disguising the often horrible taste of homemade gin or flavored wood alcohol. And tens of thousands of people would die before Prohibition was over, poisoned by wood alcohol and moonshine.
THE PROVIDERS
With Prohibition, America was all set for a wild drinking spree that would last thirteen years, five months, and nine days. It would transform the country’s morals; alter American attitudes toward law enforcers, politicians, and all those in authority; and herald a new mood of cynicism, along with an often justified conviction that the courts dispensed a form of two-tier justice based on class, wealth, and rank. And even if the Prohibition phenomenon itself, which was largely responsible for this general, unfocused resentment, was soon forgotten, for other reasons the mood of distrust has persisted to this day.
The Prohibition era has been chronicled in hundreds of films and classics, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Underworld figures such as Al Capone, catapulted onto the world scene by Prohibition, became in time mythic heroes, as did the bootleggers’ nemesis, Eliot Ness.
But the political immorality in high places that allowed the lawbreakers to flourish — and that marked the 1920s in other wa
ys — has been largely ignored or forgotten. It is as if those Americans who experienced the Prohibition years were determined to put them out of their minds as soon as it was repealed. Their reaction was understandable. Compared to the years of the Harding presidency, at the beginning of Prohibition (1920-1923), major scandals such as those that brought about the collapse of the Italian Christian Democratic hegemony looked like trifling peccadilloes.
For gangsters, bootleggers, and speakeasies to flourish, the liquor had to come from somewhere. The story of George Remus, the German-born American who became the richest bootlegger of all, shows how simple it was to lay one’s hands on almost limitless quantities of whiskey without resorting to rumrunners or homemade stills — and often without even formally breaking the law.
Remus exemplified the new breed of American. His father, Franck Remus (who dropped the Germanic spelling of his first name after immigrating to America), came from Friedeberg, near Berlin. The history of the Remus family is a textbook illustration of the appalling health hazards prevalent in the nineteenth century. Franck’s parents both died a few weeks after his birth, probably from cholera, and he subsequently became an apprentice in a woolen mill. There, he did well, marrying Maria Karg, the mill owner’s daughter, in 1871. They had three girls, but all died in infancy. Their fourth child, George Remus, lived, and when he was four and a half years old, the three of them left for Milwaukee, then almost a German enclave, where several members of the Karg family had already settled.
In Milwaukee, tragedy continued to dog the Remus family. Maria gave birth to two more sons, who also died in infancy. She then had three more children, all girls, who lived, followed by a third son, Herman, who, as a child, was hit on the back of the head by a flying brick, and as a result became mentally unstable. He died in 1918.