Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Behr, Edward

  It was not just that disposable income shrank to such an extent that people could no longer afford bootieg liquor prices, and that many speakeasies lost their clients — though fashionable clubs such as the Twenty-One and the Stork Clubs still enjoyed affluent show business crowds. Far more important was the growing awareness among economists and business leaders, as well as private citizens, that by banning liquor, the government had, since 1920, cut itself off from extremely valuable tax revenue. In the affluent 1920s, this had not been of overriding importance. But as one depression year followed the next, with no sign of an upturn, with rival government departments scrambling for shrinking federal funds, and with states cutting back on essential expenditures because widespread unemployment was leading to huge shortfalls in tax revenues, the folly of it all struck home.

  The irony was that some of the new sponsors of repeal had been, in the past, the staunchest advocates of a totally dry America. The Du Ponts, one of America’s most powerful families, had been as uncompromising as Henry Ford in enforcing a “no drink, no saloon” rule wherever there were Du Pont munitions factories. New converts in their wake included Elihu Root, a prominent corporation lawyer, the CEOs of Standard Oil and Macy’s, and influential bankers such as Pauline Sabin’s husband. Their membership in the AAPA — the American Anti-Prohibition Association — was not simply another nail in what was fast becoming an ASL coffin: it signified that the pendulum was in motion, and that the “establishment” was preparing to burn what it had worshipped for so long.

  The Depression accelerated the swing away from Prohibition — it did not initiate it. The change of mood among the Du Ponts, and other like-minded ex-Prohibitionists, had been gradual. Moral and religious considerations were conspicuously absent, and an altruistic concern for the new unemployed was farthest from their minds. What motivated them was exclusively self-interest. Taxes had increased dramatically between 1916 and 1921, and had continued to rise since. Canvassing heavily taxed fellow millionaires, Pierre Du Pont now spoke for many disgrunded CEOs when he claimed that if Britain’s liquor tax system were applied to America, this would “permit the total abolition of income tax, both personal and corporate.”

  A number of millionaires fell for this unlikely, simplistic thesis — and their new anti-Prohibition zeal got a new boost when Prohibition Commissioner James M. Moran told Congress that any attempt to enforce the Volstead Act would cost at least $300 million. Nor were the new zealots all wealthy: newspaper polls, from 1927 on, revealed a growing majority (from 75 to 81 percent) in favor of repeal.

  If any single public statement sounded Prohibition’s death-knell, it was John D. Rockefeller’s open letter to Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Buder, published in the New York Times on

  June 6, 1932, announcing his endorsement of repeal in almost tearful terms. “I was born a teetotaler,” he wrote. “All my life I have been a teetotaler on principle. . . . My mother and her mother were among the dauntless women of their day, often found with bands of women of like mind, praying on their knees in the saloons.”

  He described his enthusiastic support of the Volstead Act (he had been a major ASL contributor for many years before that, though he did not mention this). But “drinking has generally increased,” as had crime. “The speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale.” For all these reasons he now favored immediate, total repeal. His arguments were all moral ones. The tax issue was unmentioned. Hypocrisy takes many forms.

  The 1932 presidential contest between Hoover and Roosevelt illustrated the American propensity to downgrade the importance of issues once regarded as of the utmost gravity when newer, more dramatic issues come to the fore. There had been several historical precedents, the most important swing of the pendulum occurring just before the outbreak of the Civil War. In the mid-1800s, as the debate on abolitionism became more critical, with the threat of a Southern breakaway increasingly dividing the nation, the seemingly unstoppable Prohibitionist movement had faltered, and then practically disappeared as a vocal force in politics. Prohibition would not become a serious issue again until long after the Civil War had ended.

  What happened then was happening again in 1932. Jungians might argue that while history never repeats itself, archetypal behavior patterns do not go away, even if they may fade into the woodwork for a long, long time. There is a simpler explanation: leaving psychological jargon aside, let’s say that in both centuries Americans had belatedly realized that there were more important things to worry about.

  In 1932, the ongoing Depression was the major, perhaps the only, issue at stake, exacerbated by Hoover’s repeated (and increasingly unconvincing) claims that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Unlike the 1924 and 1928 presidential contests, Prohibition was no longer part of the political debate. In fact, it was seldom mentioned as an issue, except by Roosevelt, who told a delighted St. Louis crowd that he would “increase the federal revenue by several hundred million dollars a year by placing a tax on beer,” indicating his support of repeal.

  Much was made of his exchange with Fiorello La Guardia, asking him whether there was a way of enforcing Prohibition in New York. La Guardia replied that not only would this compel disbanding the existing force and recruiting 250,000 men but the raising of a separate force of 250,000 inspectors to monitor police activities.

  As La Guardia well knew, the question had been rhetorical: Roosevelt had already made up his mind. He knew he could promise repeal without losing more than a fraction of the popular vote.

  The leading underworld bootleggers already knew what Roosevelt planned because an emissary had told them. “Lucky” Luciano, in his posthumous “Testament,” even accused Roosevelt of welshing on a deal. New York’s Mafia bosses initially intended to use their considerable clout to get the local politicians under their control to cast their votes for Roosevelt’s rival, Al Smith, in the forthcoming presidential Democratic nomination contest. Luciano claimed that the Roosevelt emissary told them that if they switched their support, Roosevelt would soft-pedal investigations against them being conducted with exemplary honesty and zeal by Judge Samuel Seabury. After the Roosevelt nomination, Al Smith, according to Luciano, told “Lucky”: “You fellas are crazy. I would’ve murdered Seabury for you. . . . He looked me square in the face and shook his head and said: Frank Roosevelt’ll break his word to you. This is the biggest mistake you ever made in your entire life, by trustin’ him. He’ll kill you.”

  Luciano may have twisted some of the facts to suit himself, but Al Smith was right: Roosevelt, as soon as he became president, urged Seabury to get even tougher with the mob. In 1936, “Lucky” Luciano was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail.7

  Even in that dry sanctuary of America, its rural heardand, farmers were beginning to respond favorably to pro-repeal arguments. Here too the reason was self-interest. They were among the hardest-hit Depression victims of all, aware of the grain and hops they could expect to sell to breweries and distilleries. Roosevelt was certainly under no illusion: he knew that for all their new anti-Prohibitionist zeal, the Du Ponts and other members of the AAPA would never vote for someone branded as a “dangerous socialist.”

  Repeal, after Roosevelt’s election, turned out to be a surprisingly easy process. On December 6,1932, a resolution was tabled to void the Eighteenth Amendment, and this took a mere three days, including a one-day filibuster by Texan Senator Morris Sheppard, whose lone voice only emphasized the impotence of the depleted dry lobby. Although it required, as the previous amendment had, a two-thirds ratification by the states, this would occur within a year. Utah, in December of 1933, became the thirty-sixth state to vote for the Twenty-first Amendment, which declared the Eighteenth Amendment null and void.

  In the meantime Roosevelt had already taken steps to placate the AFL, and other advocates of real beer. One of his first decisions, as President, was to ask Congress to modify the Volstead Act to increase its alcohol
ic content to 3.2 percent, and Congress speedily complied. The protests of WCTU spokespersons and once-famous dry propagandists such as Billy Sunday now had a distinctly archaic flavor.

  The two-step repeal — first legalizing real beer, then, a few months later, wine and hard liquor — meant that celebrations, the second time around, were less frenzied than expected. It was the return of real beer in the spring of 1933 that provoked hysteria. There were parades, floodlights, and torchlit processions in St. Louis, home of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, and in Milwaukee, and much ecstatic beer-tasting in packed former near-beer bars, now preparing for their new status, for they would no longer be “saloons” (the word remained anathema).

  The evening of December 5, 1933 — marking the return of the legal consumption of hard liquor — began as a carnival but soon degenerated into frustration. Owing to the Depression, many of the former speakeasies had closed, and some had not yet obtained their legal licenses. In a sudden excess of legalism, they were unwilling to risk penalties by serving liquor without a permit. All over America, wines and reputable hard liquor were in short supply, and those establishments that had obtained stocks soon ran out of whiskey, gin, and champagne. New Jersey Governor Harry Moore solved the problem by announcing that “liquor has been sold illegally (in the state) for thirteen years and it will not hurt if this is done a few days more.”

  Prohibition had become a joke.

  17

  THE AFTERMATH

  In Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, a Depression survivor recalled the mood of the people on his street when Roosevelt’s first Civil Works Administration paychecks arrived, shortly after his election.

  Everybody was out celebrating. It was like a festival in some old European city. . . . You’d walk from tavern to tavern and see people buying ponies of beer and sharing it. They had the whole family out. It was a warm night as I remember. Everybody was so happy. ... I never saw such a change of attitude. Instead of walking around feeling dreary and looking sorrowful ... it was like a feast day. They were toasting each other.

  It could have been a description of Cincinnati’s pre-Prohibition “Across the Rhine” neighborhood. It certainly proved the fallacy of the narrow-minded extremists who had claimed there was no such thing as moderate drinking. Even on the night of December 5,1933, reporters noted there was very little actual drunkenness on the streets. Even if shortages of supplies — and of cash — were partially responsible, America appeared to have come of age.

  Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped to dissipate memories of the previous thirteen years. In the new, more hopeful ambiance, there was less concern for the immediate past, and more interest in the immediate future. The Prohibition era had been a singularly unedifying, shameful thirteen-year-long hangover. It was as if most Americans were eager to forget it entirely, wiping its memories from their individual consciousness. It is significant that this period has attracted less attention, among professional historians, than almost any other epoch in American history.1

  One of the most consistent critics of the Prohibition era had been H. L. Mencken, the prolific Baltimore Sun columnist and uncompromising scourge of other people’s prejudices (though he was blind to some of his own). Once a humorist as revered by the American public as Will Rogers or Art Buchwald, Mencken has largely gone out of fashion because his Swiftian irony is no longer appreciated, or even understood, by present-day critics. They fail to grasp that when Mencken proposed that defeated presidential candidates be hanged, on the grounds that they would otherwise remain an intolerable nuisance for the rest of their lives, or that the world would be a safer place if the human race remained in a perpetually drunken state, he did not mean this literally.

  What infuriated him most was the mediocrity of all those concerned with Prohibition. William Jennings Bryan had been “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any sense of dignity,” Harding “a numbskull,” Coolidge “a dreadful little cad,” and Hoover “a pious old woman, a fat Coolidge.” Mencken’s distrust of all those involved in good works was total: to him any reformer was “a prehensile Methodist parson, bawling for Prohibition and its easy jobs.”

  On its repeal, he wrote: “Prohibition went into effect on January 16,1920, and blew up at last on December 5,1933 — an elapsed time of twelve years, ten months and nineteen days. It seemed almost a geologic epoch while it was going on, and the human suffering that it entailed must have been a fair match for that of the Black Death or the Thirty Years War.”2

  Was the Prohibition balance sheet that overwhelmingly negative? The answer must be yes. Mencken may have deliberately exaggerated the number of dead and physically maimed — but in all sorts of ways, there was a fatal impact. Walter Lippmann, the famous liberal columnist and critic, whose career began during the Prohibition years, denounced the “circle of impotence in which we outlaw intolerantly the satisfaction of certain persistent human desires, and then tolerate what we have prohibited.”3 His remarks could well apply to certain current by-products of “political correctness.”

  Like ex-President Taft, Lippmann also pointed out the dangerous consequences of attempting to stamp out later “tolerated vices,” thereby “turning over their exploitation to the underworld.” For Prohibition was not the end of organized crime in America but only its beginning.

  Perhaps the most ominous consequence of Prohibition had to do with a change in American attitudes toward organized crime in general. Even today, awareness of its ravages goes hand in hand with a certain passivity. Americans admire the quixotic qualities of a Serpico, the New York cop who waged a one-man war on his corrupt colleagues, but are not surprised that he ended up a loser. In the fight between good and evil, in real life as in “films noirs,” good now seldom prevails over evil, and this is unsurprising, for Americans have been conditioned to believe that criminal vested interests are so powerful that the fight against them is inevitably rigged. In other words, they have lost the capacity to react.

  For all his caricatural exaggeration, Mencken was right when he first spotted this tendency. Writing while Prohibition was still in force, he noted that

  It no longer astonished anyone when policemen were taken in evil-doing. ... If, before that time, the corps of Prohibition enforcement officers — i.e. a corps of undisguised scoundrels with badges — had been launched against the populace, there would have been a great roar of wrath, and much anguished gnashing of teeth. People would have felt themselves put upon, injured, insulted. But with the old assumption about policemen removed from their minds, they met the new onslaught calmly and even smilingly. Today no one is indignant over the fact that the extortions of these new Polizei increase the cost of potable alcohol.

  Mencken went on to argue that there was no such thing as an honest politician, cop, public relations person — or journalist, for that matter. Current American perceptions are not so very different, even if measures have since been taken to limit election campaign contributions. Organized crime no longer openly funds politicians — as it did in Chicago during the Prohibition years. But the log-rolling persists, as do the expectations of major contributors.

  That Prohibition helped to shape such prejudices is not surprising. Those who failed to apply the Volstead Act provisions were not necessarily deeply corrupt: they simply did not regard breaking them to be a crime. But even benign neglect of these provisions had the effect of encouraging organized crime — the financial rewards simply being too huge.

  The major bootleggers rapidly completed their reconversion into the legitimate liquor business. Joe Kennedy, Sr., father of JFK, became the official distributor of Haig and Haig and Pinchbottle whiskey and Gordon’s gin even before Prohibition’s repeal; Samuel Bronfman, Canada’s biggest bootlegger (and “Lucky” Luciano’s biggest supplier) founded Seagram’s; Frank Costello and his underworld partners set up Alliance Distributors, selling the same brands of Scotch (King’s Ransom, House of Lords whiskey) they had smuggled into the United States during Prohibition. They also acquired a controlli
ng interest in J. Turnley and Sons, another Scotch distributor. Meyer Lansky — with Luciano, “Bugsy” Siegel, and others — set up the Capitol Wine and Spirits firm, and became leading importers of vintage French wines, Scotch, and Canadian whiskey. Even in jail — and after (he was deported to Italy in 1946) — Luciano continued to receive a large share of the profits.

  As students of organized crime well know, racketeers simply found new targets. After December of 1933, New York’s underworld bosses began extending their protection activities to bakeries, restaurants, laundries, limousine services, the garment industry, and New York’s Fulton Fish Market. Today, underworld bosses in New York’s Chinatown display a businesslike ruthlessness that Al Capone could well have envied. More ominously, from time to time evidence surfaces of a form of gangland-police collusion (at least in Chinatown) that was so prevalent during Prohibition.

  The relationships forged during those years did not vanish overnight. When Mafia leaders staged their much-publicized conference in the Appalachians in 1957, it was discovered that many of their pistol permits had been signed by New York and New Jersey police officials. In 1958, Paul W. Williams, a U.S. district attorney for the southern district of New York, was the first to refer to “the Invisible Government,” tracing its origins back to the Prohibition era. And just as corrupt law enforcement officials had been able to call a halt when overly zealous policemen and Prohibition agents threatened the livelihood of politically powerful underworld bosses, so a notorious post-Prohibition politician-entrepreneur like New York’s James J. Hines was able to put a stop to the NYPD’s attempt to crack down on gambling operations, using his clout to have honest cops transferred and gambling cases dealt with by “friendly” magistrates.

  Even a hugely respected, influential anticrime crusader such as Mayor La Guardia could not prevent the election of William Copeland Dodge as Manhattan district attorney, whose links with organized crime were an open secret.4 And his repeated attempts to rid the Fulton Fish Market of racketeering elements were only temporarily successful: in 1995, an investigative report in the New york Times revealed that the mob was still as active there as ever.