Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Behr, Edward

  The ASL was now in danger of splitting into pro-Wheeler and pro-Moran factions, and had lost the cohesion that had made it so powerful. The crisis was compounded by a growing cash crisis: affluent sympathizers were now more reluctant to give as much to the ASL as they had in the past. For the first time, the league’s public relations and publishing budget had to be trimmed.

  Wheeler returned one last time to Oberlin, his alma mater, for graduation exercises, to bask in the adulation he knew he would always find there. This was where his ASL career had begun, and he was still an icon to present and past students. He then decided to rest up in his small summer house in Little Point Sable, Michigan, to prepare for the grueling 1928 presidential campaign that lay ahead.

  Tragedy continued to dog him. A few weeks after his holiday began, a gasoline stove exploded in the kitchen, inflicting horrible, lethal burns on his wife. At the sight of her in flames, his father-in-law, Robert Candy, dropped dead of a heart attack. Wheeler attempted to resume his ASL career, but he was a broken man.

  In early September Wheeler lapsed into a coma and died. The “dry boss” was duly eulogized by the very ASL personalities who had turned against him. There would be “no successor to Wheeler,” the ASL pledged. This was deliberately ambiguous praise, for though it consecrated his role in bringing the Volstead Act into being in the first place, it also implied that Wheeler, especially in the last few years, had misused his powers, overstepped his role, and offended too many people. Bishop James Cannon, the head of the Methodist Church and a prim hypocrite who had frequently clashed behind the scenes with Wheeler, immediately did his best to assume the “big boss” mantle.

  Wheeler had been looking forward to the 1928 presidential nomination campaigns. He wanted to make sure that — as in 1924 — he would prevent Al Smith, still the veteran governor of New York State, from gaining the nomination. But times were changing, and so had the party’s mood. Its delegates to the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston were well-behaved, with not a drunkard in sight. William Jennings Bryan, the indefatigable Democratic Prohibitionist, was dead, and Cannon lacked Wheeler’s political skills.

  In a series of ASL meetings and press articles just before the convention, Cannon did his best to imply that Al Smith, if elected, would turn out to be a “cocktail President.” Again and again, he quoted an article in the Nation. “Do you believe in electing to the Presidency a man who drinks too much for his own good, and is politically a rampant wet? Does Al drink, and does he drink too much? I am reliably informed that he drinks every day, and the number of his cocktails and highballs is variously estimated at from four to eight.”2

  Slurs of this type were only moderately effective: public opinion was now far more blasé. Besides, though it was known that Al Smith was no teetotaler, he had been a popular, competent governor, and unlike many politicians — some of them toeing the dry line — had never been seen the worse for drink.

  With the support of up-and-coming Democratic personalities such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, to say nothing of Tammany Boss George Olvany — a rough, tough, hard-drinking Irish thug — Smith easily won the nomination.

  Almost half of his telegram accepting the Democratic nomination dealt with Prohibition — proof that it remained America’s most crucial political issue. Whoever won, he wrote, would have to deal with a situation “entirely unsatisfactory to the great mass of our people.” Without formally calling for its repeal, he urged a return to “democratic principles of local self-government and state’s rights” — in other words, a return to pre-1920 local option laws. There were reports that Smith himself would have preferred a stronger statement but was advised against it by Roosevelt, aware of the lasting importance, especially in rural areas and in the South, of the dry vote.

  Once the presidential contest between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith began, Bishop Cannon concentrated all his efforts on another issue he knew prejudiced, narrow-minded (and as they were then called) “nativist” voters would respond to — the Democratic candidate’s Catholic faith.

  Because the Vatican’s Observatore Romano had referred in an editorial to Prohibition’s ineffectiveness (“it has become so useless not to say dangerous that it would be better to abolish it”), Cannon argued — first in an article for Outlook magazine, then in innumerable speeches around the country — that should Smith become president, “he is likely to be tremendously influenced by the views of the Pope and the Romish cardinals,” even suggesting that, if elected, he would turn part of the White House into a permanent guest house for the Pope.

  His blatant bigotry emphasized the gulf between “old” and “new” Americans and the latent hostility of the former. In Cambridge, Maryland, he told a rally that Smith courted

  . . . the Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles and the Russian Jews. That kind has given us a stomach-ache. We have been unable to assimilate such people in our national life, so we shut the door on them. But Smith says “give me that kind of people.” He wants the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York.3

  Mabel Willebrandt also joined in the fray, though she avoided any racist invective. Addressing mass meetings of her own Methodist Episcopal church, she urged Protestants to show their support for Hoover by writing in and pledging their vote to him.4

  Prohibition and the Catholic issue dogged Al Smith’s campaign from start to finish. In Oklahoma City, a dry stronghold, he expected a hostile reception, for Ku Klux Klan crosses had lined the railroad tracks of his campaigning train. The KKK was almost as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black, and was one of the most uncompromising advocates of a dry America.

  Decidedly nervous, he met the challenge directly. “An effort has been made to distract the attention of the electorate and fasten it on malicious and un-American propaganda; I specifically refer to the question of my religion,” he told a large crowd inside the Oklahoma City Coliseum. “I can think of no greater disservice to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines. It is not only contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, but of the Constitution itself.”

  Referring to Mabel Willebrandt’s canvassing of Methodist voters, he asked the overwhelmingly Protestant crowd: “What would the effect be upon these people if a prominent official of the government of the State of New York under me suggested to a gathering of the pastors of my church that they do for me what Mrs. Willebrandt suggests be done for Hoover?” Contrary to his expectations, he got a rousing reception from the Oklahomans present.

  In cities with large ethnic minorities, especially where Prohibition had made brewery and distillery workers obsolete, the public response to Smith was ecstatic. In Milwaukee, his last major electioneering venue, he focused almost exclusively on Prohibition. “If there is any one subject above all others concerning which the welfare of the country requires plain speech and constructive leadership, it is the Volstead Act,” he told the crowd. He not only suggested that it be amended “to allow each state to determine for itself what it wants to do about the question of local habits,” but for the first time proposed a referendum on Prohibition. “The cure for the ills of democracy,” he told them, “is more democracy. Hand this back to the people. Let them decide it.”

  He also got in a sly dig at Mabel Willebrandt. “I shall let the Republican campaign managers worry about her. From comments in the public press all over the country, they have abundant reason to do so. We all have something to be grateful for. I haven’t got Mabel on my hands.”5

  Herbert Hoover, in his memoirs published twenty-three years later, claimed that “the Prohibition issue was forced into the campaign by Governor Al Smith” but made no reference to the religious polarization that was its most distinctive feature. Whatever his private misgivings may have been (in his memoirs he also claimed, with hindsight, “a reverse of enthusiasm” for the Volstead Act), he knew that in the eyes of the dry rural voters he was one of them — he had spoken out often enough on the evils of alcoho
l (“one of the curses of the human race”) to gain their lasting support.

  In the last resort, the anti-Catholic, anti-minority, nativist themes proved compelling. Hoover won by 22 million votes to Al Smith’s 15.5 million, and by 444 electoral votes to 87. The election also resulted in the highest percentage of acknowledged drys ever returned to Congress. Even in New York, America’s wettest state, up-and-coming Democratic star Franklin D. Roosevelt only won the New York governorship (which Al Smith had vacated) by a small (25,000) majority.

  Mabel Willebrandt was right: once again, the Prohibition issue had proved a deciding factor in politics. For all the needless tragedies it provoked, the corruption and damage to the body politic it generated, the myth of a God-fearing, prosperous, hard-working dry America was more attractive to a majority of voters than Al Smith’s realistic, more tolerant approach.

  There were other reasons for Smith’s defeat. Hoover had been a popular secretary of Commerce, untainted by scandal. America was unprecedentedly prosperous, riding a stock market boom. More important, as Al Smith himself noted shortly afterward, “the time hasn’t yet come when a man may say his Rosary beads in the White House.”

  Not only was the leading anti-Prohibitionist contender beaten, and removed from the presidential race for all time, but dry advocates were able to claim that a new millennium was at hand, that after nine fumbling years the Volstead Act would at last come into its own.

  Newly elected President Hoover did nothing to disappoint them. “I do not favor the repeal of the 18th Amendment,” he said in his acceptance speech. “I stand for the efficient enforcement of the laws enacted thereunder.” He described Prohibition as

  a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. It must be worked out constructively. Common-sense compels us to realize that grave abuses have occurred — abuses which must be remedied. . . . There are those who do not believe in the purposes of several provisions of the Constitution. No one denies their right to seek to amend it. . . . But the Republican Party does deny the right of anyone to seek to destroy the purposes of the Constitution by indirection.

  The day after Hoover’s victory, anti-Prohibitionist Pauline Sabin resigned from the Republican party. In fact, repeal was only four years away.

  Although the grounds for this dramatic change in mood would be overwhelmingly economic, one reason for the continued decline of the ASL involved Wheeler’s self-appointed propagandizing successor and perennial rival for ASL leadership, Bishop James Cannon. Doubts began to be cast on his fitness for the role even before Hoover became president.

  A Virginian, nominal Democrat, prominent member of the Methodist Episcopal church, and member of the ASL executive since 1902, Bishop Cannon was a difficult man to like. Even his closest Methodist colleagues considered him a cold fish who had never been known to laugh and seldom smiled. This puritanical Protestant Ayatollah disapproved of most if not all pleasurable activities, including gambling. He was against dancing, theatricals, and any games, sports, or art that provided glimpses of “the female person.” He inveighed against Sarah Bernhardt (“an actress of brilliant powers but unsavory moral ideals”) when she came to America to perform Camille, and against Marie Curie, the world-famous physicist, for allegedly living in sin with her equally famous scientist companion (to whom she was in fact married), claiming that “she has lost forever her claim to a place among the great men and women of the world.” And, of course, he considered Roman Catholicism “the mother of ignorance, superstition, intolerance and sin.” New York, his pet hate, was “Satan’s beat.”6

  A scrutiny of Bishop Cannon’s financial dealings, begun in the press almost accidentally following routine inquiries into the failure of a brokerage firm with which he was associated, revealed questionable, and perhaps indictable, practices on his part. The firm, a bucket shop, had bought $477,000 worth of stocks for him, selling them for $486,000, and Cannon’s profit — $9,000 — had been nearly four times what he had actually invested ($2,500). In pre-crash America, this would normally have attracted litde attention — but Bishop Cannon was one of the nation’s foremost anti-gambling scourges, and his own investment had been nothing less than a prodigious gamble.

  As always in America, once the media had trained their sights on a target, they started delving into his past. Reporters discovered that while administering a girls’ school during the First World War, Bishop Cannon had hoarded flour, then sold it on the black market at a considerable profit, narrowly escaping prosecution. His biographer, Virginius Dabney, the Richmond Times-Dispatch editor, would also show that he had made false income tax returns to conceal the transaction.

  Reporters now embarked on a full-scale investigation of his private life, and what they found was hilarious: the narrow-minded bigot turned out to have feet of clay. The scourge of innocent pleasure-lovers was a modern equivalent of Molière’s Tartuffe.

  On one of his frequent trips to New York during the presidential campaign, Cannon had made the acquaintance of Helen McCallum and Joan Chapman in the lobby of the McAlpin Hotel in New York, where he was staying. He introduced himself as “Stephen Trent, writer,” gave McCallum twenty dollars, and would subsequently pay her rent.

  It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Despite the fact that Bishop Cannon’s wife was terminally ill with cancer, he came to New York to see McCallum with increasing frequency, even leaving Washington on November 25, 1928, the day after his wife suffered a paralytic (and eventually lethal) stroke, to be with his new friend, spending the night in New York. He returned just in time for his wife’s death, and funeral, but returned to New York — and McCallum — the following day.

  Subsequently, Helen McCallum became an almost, but not quite, constant companion: she was with him in Jerusalem in 1929, and during an extensive trip to Europe in 1930, both times masquerading as his secretary on all-expenses-paid junkets. Rumors that Bishop Cannon was also dating a friend of McCallum’s, Cary McTroy, and might even have married her secretly, made Helen seek out the press and show them some of the bishop’s intimate letters to her.

  Bishop Cannon and McCallum would eventually marry, but in the meantime he got into trouble of another type: this time he was charged with mishandling Republican campaign funds. He had allegedly received $65,000 but had accounted for only $17,000. Cannon dismissed the allegations as a “popish plot,” but never offered a satisfactory explanation to the investigating Senate Lobby Committee. Nor did its members press hard for an answer: a majority were prominent drys, and several were on the ASL payroll.

  A final indignity was in store: on their honeymoon in Brazil, after a hasty wedding in London, Bishop Cannon learned that members of his own Methodist church had formally accused him of “gross moral turpitude.” He managed to overcome this hurdle as well, but only by invoking irregularities in the way his accusers had invoked the “Methodist Discipline.”

  The Cannon story became a favorite ongoing topic in the American press, and the ASL’s reputation suffered in consequence. An unrelated, but devastating ASL scandal broke with the indictment of the league’s New York state superintendent William Hamilton Anderson, eventually convicted for embezzlement.

  Another prominent Prohibition personality, the incorruptible Mabel Walker Willebrandt, was also very much in the news just after Hoover’s election. For all the new president’s public praise (he kept her on as deputy attorney general), she resigned her post in May of 1929.

  Although there were rumors she had fallen foul of her new boss, Attorney General William D. Mitchell, and that congressmen with bootlegging connections and prominent Catholics had also lobbied for her removal, the truth was far simpler: after eight years on an inadequate government salary as the single mother of an adopted daughter, the “Prohibition Portia,” as Al Smith called her, craved a more financially rewarding life.

  Fruit Industries, Inc., a conglomerate representing most of the California grape growers, promptly hired her as its legal counselor on a
huge retainer. It proved a wise move. Thanks to Willebrandt’s Washington connections, grape farmers, in the first year of Hoover’s presidency, obtained large government subsidies and federal loans.

  Willebrandt was useful to her new employers in other ways. Fruit Industries manufactured raisin cakes called Vine-glo, a popular raw material ingredient for homemade wine. Willebrandt’s appointment was sufficient to deter Prohibition agents from prosecuting the company for infringing the Volstead Act, and Vine-glo sales boomed. A direct competitor — Vino-Sano Inc. — was not as fortunate. Its warehouses were raided and its raisin cakes confiscated, to such an extent that its president asked Willebrandt to be its legal counsel as well. She primly refused.

  Although there was never any proof that Willebrandt herself encouraged her former Prohibition agents to persecute a business rival, she had shown, in her dealings with Remus, a ruthlessness that was peculiarly suited to the business world. She was also among the first of America’s top government servants to set a much-abused precedent: crossing over into a lucrative private sector job to take advantage of expertise acquired in government service.

  For all his public support of the Prohibition status quo, Hoover was fully aware of its destructive potential. To give the impression that he was sensitive to advocates of change, he did what all governments do to avert criticism: he set up a nongovernmental organization to deal with it.

  The Wickersham Commission, named after its president, a distinguished lawyer, was supposed to assess the worth of the Volstead Act. Its terms of reference were, however, deliberately vague, and by the time its ambiguous findings were published, in 1931, America had been shaken by a cataclysmic event that would leave its imprint on the country right up to entry into the Second World War — the stock market crash of October 1929, triggering the Depression.