by Behr, Edward
Remus turned Death Valley Farm into a fortified enclave. He installed floodlights and hired a permanent contingent of armed men to guard it. Conners found a mobile polling booth on wheels and turned it into a sentry box at the gate entrance, staffed twenty-four hours a day by two armed men. They had a buzzer to activate a warning signal in the main building whenever anyone approached the farm. Another buzzer turned on the floodlights installed on the main building’s second floor, illuminating the entire area.
These security precautions were essential. To bona fide bootleggers such as Remus and Conners, the real enemy was not the army of bureaucrats and Prohibition Bureau agents, but hijackers. Although a convoy of Remus’s liquor did fall into their hands once, no “pirates” ever succeeded in breaking into Death Valley Farm, though they tried. One night in 1920, an armed gang did manage to creep up to the gate undetected. They fired volley after volley into the building, expecting its inhabitants to flee or surrender. Remus’s men fired back, with devastating effect, and the gang left, taking their casualties with them. Although the battle went on for some time, no police ever showed up. There was a tacit understanding, on all sides, that encounters such as these were part of a private war between bootleggers and hijackers, not the responsibility of the police.
The sheer size of Remus’s operations required him to expand in other directions. He hired a Cincinnati-based American Express employee, Harry Stratton, to act as his shipping manager, who began moonlighting for Remus while holding down what his American Express employers believed was a full-time job. It was a lucrative arrangement for all concerned: Stratton moved Remus’s liquor, crated up and bearing innocuous labels, all over the United States by “American Express” for several months — until his official employers discovered what he was up to and fired him.
This compelled Remus to set up his own delivery system. He bought twenty trucks, and had them armor-plated and redesigned to carry crates securely, without risk of contents breakage. This alone cost him $20,000 — over $200,000 today But once they left Death Valley Farm, the “pirate” predators were on the lookout for them, so he also purchased a fleet of fast cars: six armor-plated Marmots, and Packards, Locomobiles, Dodges, a Cadillac, and a Pierce-Arrow to carry squads of heavily armed men to accompany the trucks and fend off possible attacks. There were also “runners,” whose fast cars were designed to carry whiskey, on a fixed-fee, per-case basis. Because Prohibition Bureau road patrols were on the lookout for sagging springs, their chassis were reinforced. At one stage, Remus even invested in some railroad cars.
Eventually, the traffic became two-way: carefully selected bootlegger middlemen from all over America (including faraway Texas, Florida, and California) were allowed to enter Death Valley Farm in their own vehicles, to carry away their merchandise themselves. The private customers even arranged for barter deals. Those driving in from the north, for instance, came with champagne and scotch whiskey smuggled in from Canada, departing with rye and bourbon. Remus’s organizational talent turned Death Valley Farm into a huge liquor supermarket. Soon, he acquired five similar “halfway houses” in other parts of the country.
As a routine precaution (for he knew law enforcement patrols were watching out for suspicious-looking trucks and cars), the trucks were hosed down, washed, and waxed while the whiskey was being loaded and paid for, so that when they left the farm they looked brand new. Ever attentive to detail, and eager to keep his “respectable” bootlegger clientele, Remus provided the truck drivers with beds, meals (cooked by a reluctant Mrs. Gehrum, who complained that her employer was far too generous), and even free whiskey tots.
While at first Remus’s modus operandi was so foolproof it attracted little attention, the scale of his operations was such that local and regional Prohibition directors rapidly became aware that only a fraction of the withdrawals from his newly acquired distilleries ended up as medicinal whiskey. In return for a fee — usually $3,000 per permit issue — they looked the other way. “I never handed over the money personally,” Remus told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Usually the go-between was the politician who had got the official his job. In that case, he sometimes got more out of it than the official himself. ... a greedier lot of parasites never existed. ... A few men have tried to corner the wheat market only to find that there is too much wheat in the world. I tried to corner the graft market, but I learnt there isn’t enough money in the world to buy up all the public officials who demand their share of it.
Among the “parasites” were many local politicians who attended his parties. Government store keepers, known as gaugers, were also systematically bribed. An unofficial “permit” market eventually sprang up all over America, with the high-level connivance of Washington-based politicians. Blank forms, already signed, made their appearance. A standard fee, Remus later reported, was $42,000, but for that money he could withdraw unlimited quantities of liquor from distilleries he did not even own, as well as government-run bonded warehouses. There was also a traffic in practically undetectable forged blank “B permits,” as the authorizations were called.
The area around Death Valley Farm was regularly patrolled by mounted police, who were fully aware of its activities. “We never paid the police, there were simply too many of them,” Conners told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but “a couple of mounted police came every day. We gave them a couple of quarts a week and $10 or $15 spending money. They also had a few customers of their own in town. We let them have the stuff at $80 a case.”
Prohibition agents knew about Death Valley Farm, but the amount of protection paid turned it into an “off limits” area. One day, Conners later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Paul Anderson, two Prohibition agents blundered into the farm, apparently by mistake. They quickly realized they had made a spectacular catch. Conners immediately phoned their superior in Cincinnati, who apologized for the intrusion and asked to talk to them. “They were supposed to be looking for stills down the road,” he told Conners. After the phone call, they were apologetic. Conners offered them a drink, then another. Eventually Conners sent them on their way with a thousand dollars each and a quart of rye. “They were so drunk I was afraid they wouldn’t be able to drive back to town, and offered to have one of my men act as driver,” he said.
The Cincinnati police were just as venal. “Several city detectives were working for us on the side,” Conners told Anderson. “Each one would dig up a few customers — saloons or private parties. The detective would give us an order, tell us how much to deliver, and what to collect. Sometimes the detective would go along on the truck when the delivery was made. This would protect the truck, and assure the buyer he was getting protection and wouldn’t be raided.”
Altogether, Conners said, there were over a thousand salesmen on the force, working for Remus. In other cities, in other circumstances with other bootleggers, the situation was much the same.
The Cincinnati detectives did not cost Remus much, but in spite of his exceptionally well-organized legal front, his expenses were enormous. (Al Capone, a much smaller operator than Remus as far as liquor was concerned, later told investigators that bootlegging was a losing game: “Too many overheads.”) At every level, in every state where his whiskey ended up, Remus parted with enormous sums to keep the government, the Prohibition Bureau, and the police off his back. He later estimated that half his gross earnings were spent in bribes. Since, at the peak of his activities, Remus was grossing about $40 million a year, this meant that $20 million went into the hands of corrupt officials. The pattern was the same all over America, whether law enforcement officials were dealing with whiskey certificate bootleggers such as Remus or with the more adventurous rumrunners. Remus told Anderson that in his entire career he only came across two people who turned down his bribes — and they were, in time, to contribute to his downfall. One was Burt Morgan, the Prohibition director of Indiana, who “could have had $250,000” to look the other way. The other was Sam Collins, the Kentucky Prohibition di
rector, whom Remus offered $100,000 simply to quit his job and take up a far more remunerative appointment as the manager of a soft-drink plant. As state Prohibition directors, Morgan and Collins earned $4,600 a year each. With his mixture of showmanship and genuine panache, Remus would later pay tribute to the “untouchables.” “You didn’t sell out; I want to shake hands with you, sir,” he told Collins when he met him.
Remus was not the only victim of Collins’s integrity. John Lang-ley, the Indiana State congressman who had appointed Collins Prohibition director in the first place, and expected him to be an obedient pawn, found this out to his cost. Collins had him indicted for protecting bootleggers and taking their bribes. But Morgan and Collins were remarkable exceptions to the rule.
Remus’s money “sweetened” not only poorly paid officials but senior members of the Harding administration, including the very man charged at the highest level with upholding the law — the attorney general himself. Prohibition and all that went with it — corruption, bribery, the complicity of the very people supposed to fight it — can only be understood within the wider political context of1920s America and the iniquitous Harding administration as a whole.
HARDING AND THE RACKETEERS
Prohibition was part of a far larger scandal — the scandal of the Harding presidency. Warren Gamaliel Harding was, if not the worst, certainly the weakest, most indecisive president in American history. This need not have been disastrous — America faced no major external threats between 1920 and 1923 — had not the start of Prohibition coincided with the beginning of his presidency. As it was, “the Harding Administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of Federal Government.”1
Harding was not an evil man, nor was he, personally, exceptionally corrupt by the standards of the time. The abysmal record of his administration was partly due to a “character flaw” inherent in the man — his excessively good-natured, amicable disposition. A former colleague in his early days noted that “he wanted to be everybody’s friend ... a small town play boy.” His entourage was well aware of his craving to be liked and exploited this weakness to the hilt, knowing that he was too dependent on his friends to deal with them harshly even when their corrupt practices led to public scandals. Many judges and law enforcement officers, including those dealing with Prohibition, took their cue from what they saw happening at the top.
The cronyism of the Harding administration was such that for as long as he was in office the white-collar criminals known as “the Ohio gang” who had grown up with him and become his intimate friends knew they were immune from prosecution, that Harding would protect them from the rigors of the law. Harding’s own belated realization of the extent of their corruption in all likelihood contributed to a physical and mental collapse leading to his sudden, early death. His ineptitude could not possibly be ignored, even by political allies out to praise him posthumously. At a Harding Memorial Association meeting in June of 1931, President Herbert Hoover, in a singularly ambiguous eulogy, noted that
Harding had a dim realization that he had been betrayed by a few of the men whom he had believed were his devoted friends. It was later proved in the courts of the land that these men had betrayed not only the friendship of their staunch and loyal friend but that they had betrayed their country.
Harding grew up in the small town of Marion, Ohio, where his father, an unsuccessful homeopathic doctor, earned a supplementary income as a small-time junk dealer. Even as a boy, Warren was hail-fellow-well-met, easy-going — a gregarious youngster who preferred billiards, poker, and small-town gossip to books, but was smart enough to make a good living. His first job — as editor of a small, local paper, the Marion Star — suited him perfectly.
He was nineteen when he first bought shares in the paper, later winning the remaining shares in a poker game. His innate deviousness made him an excellent poker player. Tall, handsome, dignified looking, he stood out in any gathering, and knew it. But he was not what he seemed: the ultimate hollow man, he looked more impressive than he was. “No man could be as much of a Roman senator as Harding looked,” Mark Sullivan wrote in Our Times. According to the Saturday Evening Post, Harding “needed only a toga to complete the illusion he had come out of the ancient world.”
Florence Kling was the daughter of the richest man in Marion. She was 31 and already had a daughter by a first marriage when she married Harding, then 26. His marriage was no love match but a calculated move on his part, a social as well as a financial stepping-stone. She was tall, plain, and square-jawed, “lacking any kind of charm.” Although she dressed expensively, flaunting a wilting kind of femininity, she had huge hands and moved awkwardly. She had also inherited her father’s dictatorial manner and “his determination to get what he wanted out of life.”2 Her household servants, and Harding himself, lived in constant terror of her incessant nagging. Because of her imperious manner, she was known in Marion as The Duchess, and the nickname stuck, right through to her White House years. Not surprisingly, the Hardings’ sex life did not last long, and they had no children — for Harding, a bitter disappointment. His personal charm was considerable: in early middle age he turned into a consistent, if somewhat lazy, sentimental philanderer.
As editor and owner-publisher of a small-town paper, Harding was well placed to enter state politics. “His conception of political progress was to make no enemies,” a friend noted. Partly for this reason, he became a valued member of the Republican party, then, in Ohio, dominated by forceful, unscrupulous “Tammany Hall” type personalities such as George “Boss” Cox and “Fire Engine” Joe Foraker, who ran the state like a private preserve. Harding showed little interest in the world at large: “Books did not enter into his scheme of life in any important sense. . . . He cannot fairly be called illiterate, although some of his verbiage, when he strives to attain the impressive, furnishes a sad example of the grandiloquently inept,” a local newspaperman wrote. The beginning of his speech for Taft as presidential nominee in 1912 (Taft would lose to Woodrow Wilson) — “Progression is everlastingly lifting the standards that marked the end of the world’s march yesterday and planting them on new and advanced heights today” — is a fair example of his rhetoric, which reminded H. L. Mencken, the great satirist and social critic of the time, of a “string of wet sponges” and “dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.... It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” “It is so bad,” he wrote, “that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”
His amiable, conciliatory record in state politics, combined with his impressive good looks and statesmanlike (if spurious) “presence” singled him out as an above-average player, so much so that the Ohio Republican party machine encouraged him to stand as a senator. “It costs such a lot of money to live in Washington,” Florence Harding told a Marion Star employee. “If he was only a corporation lawyer and could pick up a lot of business on the side, I'd say yes. But he couldn’t do anything there. No: I don’t know as we can afford it yet.”3 Harding did finally make up his mind and went to Washington in 1915, as senator for Ohio — and immediately regretted that he had not done so earlier. The Senate, as he discovered, was the most congenial club in the world for pleasure-loving, sports-loving extroverts such as himself. He enjoyed himself immensely, especially when The Duchess was not around, and failing health kept her in Marion most of the time. George B. Christian, his confidential secretary and devoted friend, writing later about these “six years of happiness,” shrewdly noted that “He didn’t like being a Senator, he liked being in the Senate.” Voting records show his attendance was sporadic, to say the least. He was far more often on the golf course, in the Senate bar, in a poker game, or out chasing women than in the chamber itself, and “his contribution to legislation was practically nil.” Like other Ohio Republicans, Harding was a consistent supporter of Prohibition only because it was a sure-fire vote-getter. But though “politically
dry,” he was a steady drinker.
It was during his early political apprenticeship in Ohio that two men far more flawed than he spotted his political potential, and became his faithful aides, fixers, and boon companions. The chief usefulness of Harry Micajah Daugherty, a lawyer and failed politician, was as a veteran insider, fully conversant with the devious workings of Ohio’s notoriously corrupt Republican party machine. Infinitely more cynical and manipulative than Harding, and aware, after his own abortive career in state politics, that his real talent was that of a wheeling-and-dealing, back-room boy éminence grise, he soon became indispensable to Harding as both mentor and strategist. Jess Smith, twelve years younger than Daugherty (they came from the same home town, Washington State House), began handling Harding’s financial affairs in the late 1890s. The pair would play a major role in the Prohibition saga, and the unraveling of the Harding presidency must be laid at their door.
Although both were unprincipled, utterly ruthless operators, temperamentally they were very different. Daugherty had married a beautiful local heiress, but their life together was joyless; her serious health problems soon turned him into a devoted but harassed nurse. Their son, an alcoholic, was in and out of clinics all of his adult life. A secretive political operator, quick to take advantage of the weaknesses of others, he was also on the extreme far right of his party, obsessed with the “Bolshevik peril,” seeing communist conspiracies everywhere. Ideologically, he was a striking forerunner of Senator McCarthy — his smear techniques just as outrageous.