At the league’s annual convention in Columbus in November 1913, the public campaign for the amendment was launched with a decision to petition Congress formally the following month. Addressing the delegates, Wheeler sounded more like the clergymen who ran the ASL than the political operative who would turn their faith into law. “As Moses said to the children of Israel that they should go forward,” he told the zealous assembly, “just so the time has come for the moral forces of this great nation to march on against the last bulwarks of the enemy.
“I do not know how you may feel about this,” he concluded, “but I would rather die than run from such a conflict.”
LIFTED BY LAW, by numbers, and by the buoyant tide of history, the amassed forces of the Anti-Saloon League descended on Washington on December 10, 1913. In the preceding ten months the state legislatures, in ratifying the income tax amendment, had liberated the Prohibition movement from the burden of the revenue problem. Congress, with the Webb-Kenyon override, had demonstrated its willingness to accept—or perhaps its fear of disobeying—the ASL’s commands. The league had even been granted an entirely fortuitous gift to its publicity efforts when a useful, if risible, document fell into its hands: a letter on the stationery of the Kentucky Distillers’ & Distributing Company addressed to the Keeley Institute in Dwight, Illinois. Keeley’s was the leading drying-out sanatorium of its age, where alcoholics were given four injections of gold chloride daily to suppress “the irresistible craving of nerve cells for alcohol.” The distilling company’s letter proclaimed, “Our customers are your prospective patients,” and offered Keeley’s the chance to buy 40,000 names for $400. The only revelation that might have been worse for the wets was the statement made by a liquor dealer at an industry meeting the year before: “We must create the appetite for liquor in the growing boys. . . . Nickels expended in treats to boys now will return in dollars to your tills after the appetite has been formed.”
Wet newspapers would later contest the genuineness of the distillers’ letter, and the authenticity of the liquor dealer’s grotesque argument would not be confirmed until many years later. But no one could challenge the impact of the spectacle that unfolded in Washington when the ASL presented its petition. Washington in the late autumn of 1913 was filled with mendicants seeking the charity of Congress. Two weeks after a national meeting of suffragists was convened in the capital (the Washington Post had headlined its front-page story “Fair Cohorts Meet”), and just two days after the International Antivivisection and Animal Protection Congress was gaveled to order (featured speaker: William Jennings Bryan), Washington was occupied by the dry armies. From one mustering point fifty young girls dressed in white led a long column of women from the WCTU; from another marched the men of the ASL, representing all forty-eight states. After the two parades merged on the steps of the Capitol they presented a petition demanding a constitutional amendment to the men who would introduce it in their respective chambers: in the House the flamboyant Richmond Hobson of Alabama, and in the upper chamber Morris Sheppard of Texas, a Shakespearean scholar who was one of the Senate’s leading progressives. Thousands of bystanders had left the city’s sidewalks to follow the two parades to the Capitol. Apart from presidential inaugurations, Capitol guards told reporters, it was the largest crowd ever to gather on the building’s steps. It may have been the only one to break out into a full-throated “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Afterward, the ASL leadership gathered across the street in the Bliss Building in “a council of war” to establish the order of battle. As Wheeler would remember it years later, their mission was simple: “Open fire on the enemy.”
THE MERGED CHORUS of male and female Christian soldiers singing on the steps of the Capitol that December day was an expression of the drys’ most valuable alliance. The adoption of the income tax amendment and subsequent passage of the Revenue Act of 1913 may have confirmed the virtue of tacit collaboration with other interest groups, but the ASL’s partnership with women who backed a suffrage amendment proved the value of a far more active embrace. The social revolution that was the suffrage movement would bring the Prohibition movement to the brink of success.
A congressional resolution calling for a Prohibition amendment to the Constitution had been introduced in every Congress since 1876, but none had ever emerged from committee. No version of the universal suffrage amendment had gotten as far as floor debate since 1890. Back then, the two measures had occasionally been linked in the holy advocacy of politicians who perceived both as expressions of moral virtue—for instance, thirty-year-old William Jennings Bryan, running in his first campaign for public office. But in the twenty-four years leading up to the congressional session of 1914, when both measures were reported out of committee on the same day, they had become welded to each other, not because of any moral congruence, but because of an expedient relativism that might have made a purist like Bryan wince.
Among the more forthright exponents of this relativistic connection was one of America’s least likely advocates of Prohibition, the novelist Jack London, who once said that the fact he had lived to be twenty-one was a miracle. An early life of crime had something to do with London’s self-appraisal, but so did the dangerous charms of liquor. “Alcohol was an acquired taste,” he wrote in 1913, looking back. “It had been painfully acquired.” H. L. Mencken saw virtue in this. “London, sober, would have written nothing worth reading,” Mencken told Upton Sinclair eight years after London’s death. “Alcohol made him.”
That was Mencken being Mencken; in truth, it’s hard to imagine that one man, even one as protean as London, could both drink to excess and write to excess (twenty-one novels, three story collections, three memoirs, one play, and uncounted essays and occasional pieces—all in the space of barely fifteen years). You also have to consider the dramatis personae in the Sinclair-Mencken exchange: the former was so dry he was Saharan, while the latter, who liked to call himself “ombibulous,” was the single most effusive publicist for booze the Republic has ever seen. (Mencken once bragged that “I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.”) But there’s no question that London, who had a friendly Oakland bartender ship premixed cocktails in bulk to his Sonoma County ranch, drank enough to qualify him to write a book about booze.
John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs opens with a description of London’s horseback trip into town from his ranch to cast his vote on a California woman suffrage proposition in 1911. “Because of the warmth of the day I had had several drinks before casting my ballot, and divers drinks after casting it,” London wrote. “Then I had ridden up through the vine-clad hills and rolling pastures of the ranch, and arrived at the farm-house in time for another drink and supper.” London had opposed women’s right to vote years earlier, and though he had lately acknowledged that its coming was inevitable, he had shown no enthusiasm for it. But now, he told his wife, he had found an excellent reason to cast his ballot for suffrage. London believed that “the moment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is close the saloons”—and, therefore, “when no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable,” he would finally be able to stop drinking. London wanted the suffragists to vote him into sobriety.
London’s insight into the dry campaign’s dependence on the suffrage movement was incontrovertible. Not only had the suffrage movement found its most effective generals among women who had first developed their political skills in the temperance ranks; additionally, thousands of women in the WCTU had come to realize that no antialcohol weapon could be as potent as the franchise. What had changed by the time London cast his wishfully opportunistic suffrage vote was the nature of the connection between the drys and the suffragists: comfortable affinity had been transformed into absolute interdependence.
This was not a relationship easily arrived at. Like the leaders of the Anti-Saloon League, most prominent suffragists perceived that their movement’s power resided in undiluted devotion to one cause. “My personal belief as to prohibiti
on, pro or con, is nobody’s business but my own,” Susan B. Anthony wrote to the Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway in 1896. She was “glad to see women awakened from their apathy” by the liquor wars, but she had chosen by this point in her career to stick to the position she had adopted on all political issues except the one to which she had dedicated herself. Until she was granted the vote, Anthony said, she would not offer her opinion on any other public question.
But it wasn’t hard to guess Anthony’s position—after all, she had entered political life as a temperance worker, and her link to the Prohibition cause was periodically reinforced by fruitful collaboration with the WCTU. Anthony boldly introduced Frances Willard to a congressional committee in 1888 as “the commander-in-chief of an army of 250,000 women,” and “Do Everything” Willard, whose thirst for suffrage was almost as strong as her loathing for alcohol, provided Anthony a forum at the WCTU’s national conventions. But Anthony was seventy-six when she sent her steely letter to Abigail Duniway, and a constitutional amendment granting women the vote remained some distance beyond the horizon. She had chosen to expend her remaining energies on suffrage alone.
Yet even a commitment like Anthony’s could yield to urgent opportunism. By 1899, as the ASL prepared for its annual convention in Des Moines, her resolve had weakened. “I wish to ask a great favor,” she wrote to the ASL’s secretary, James L. Erwin. Would the league consider adopting a resolution “declaring for the enfranchisement of women”? Noting that drys were still a minority in the body politic, she made the point that Jack London would later offer as common wisdom. “It must be evident to every logical mind that what is needed is an additional balance of power . . . sure to throw itself into the scale against the saloon,” Anthony told Erwin. This led to her obvious conclusion: “The only hope of the Anti-Saloon League’s success lies in putting the ballot into the hands of women.”
The brewers certainly knew the connection. The great suffragist’s thoughts, even her language, echoed a resolution the United States Brewers’ Association had adopted several years earlier. The resolution declared, “When woman has the ballot, she will vote solid for prohibition.” Consequently, the USBA made it official policy to oppose woman suffrage “everywhere and always,” a matter of conviction so deeply rooted it could only have been motivated by financial self-interest. It was no different for the distillers. In 1912, at a convention of the National Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association, the industry’s position was made clear when the organization’s president issued this call to arms: “Gentlemen, we need fear the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the ballot in the hands of women; therefore, gentlemen, fight woman suffrage!”
The brewers’ antisuffrage position was fortified by their millions of dollars. Their reach into the streets and alleyways of many cities was further lengthened by a previously unexampled instance of labor-management amity, as self-interest placed tens of thousands of brewery employees (not to mention barrel makers and wagon drivers and ice haulers and scores of other working legions) at the ready for the next antisuffrage rally or referendum. But, even more, the cravenness of the brewers’ campaign was betrayed by their wish to hide it from public view. In 1906 a state suffrage amendment in Oregon was defeated when the brewers secretly enlisted Oregon’s saloonkeepers and hoteliers in an elaborate get-out-the-vote operation. Secrecy also prevailed when the USBA paid the nationally known suffragist Phoebe Couzins to repudiate her previous position and mount an ostensibly independent campaign as an antisuffrage speaker and writer. (Couzins explained her shocking switch with bland opacity: “Observations made during my struggle to get the privilege of the ballot for my sex convinced me I was wrong.”) Adolphus Busch, who had personally promised Couzins a lifetime annuity on top of her monthly stipend from the USBA, told a colleague, “if ever should it become known that she is in the pay of the brewers . . . all of her work would be in vain.”
Of all the brewers’ secret efforts against suffrage, a campaign that began in Texas and then went national may have been the most brazen. Distributing scores of free articles to hundreds of rural newspapers through a false front called the Farmers’ Educational and Cooperative Union, the brewers’ publicists-in-disguise promised country editors that the articles would provide a “discussion of both sides of important questions confronting the farmers of this nation.” What they actually supplied, without rebuttal, was the bogus testimony of bogus farmers, who offered such sentiments as “God pity our country when the handshake of the politician is more gratifying to woman’s heart than the patter of children’s feet.” Another favored form was the rhetorical puzzler that required no answer: “Is it not sufficient political achievement for woman that future rulers nurse at her breast, laugh in her arms and kneel at her feet?”
Apparently not. With a common enemy as bellicose, as deceitful, and as powerful as the brewers, the hardening of the prohibition-suffrage alliance was inevitable. Did it matter that the success of the Prohibition movement was not foremost in Susan B. Anthony’s constellation of desire? No more than the fact that voting rights for women was not the passionate ideal of ASL superintendent Purley A. Baker, who sidestepped the league’s single-issue policy in 1911 to declare himself in favor of suffrage, which he called “the antidote” to the efforts of the beer and liquor interests. (It was this sort of elasticity that won for Baker the nickname the wets hung on him: Purely A. Faker.) When the brewers’ Texas campaign was uncovered, it was the ASL’s formidable propaganda machine that brought it wide public attention. Eventually, in 1916, the Anti-Saloon League would formally endorse woman suffrage—the only time in its history it violated its single-issue pledge.
The brewers’ tactics had been self-defeating almost to the point of idiocy. The more they fought female suffrage, the more they guaranteed the antipathy of millions of American women, a large segment of whom might otherwise have been opposed to, or at least neutral on, Prohibition. And when the tide finally began to race in the direction of suffrage, women who had endured decades of unabated and frequently dishonest assault from the brewers, the distillers, and their allies in the hotel, restaurant, and tobacco industries carried Prohibition along with them.
“The fanatical and misinformed women,” as Adolphus Busch called them, would rout the brewers and their allies with stunning efficiency. In one three-year stretch in the 1910s, seven western states adopted Prohibition—all of them states where women had achieved the vote. Michigan’s entrance into the Prohibition column was helped along by the revelation that the Macomb County Liquor Dealers’ Association had been financing the state’s antisuffrage forces. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman member of Congress, felt compelled to endorse the Prohibition cause in her state because of “political exigency.” In 1918, when Texas women were granted the right to vote in the state’s Democratic primary, they supported the dry candidate over the wet ex-governor James E. “Pa” Ferguson by a ten-to-one margin.
As clueless about what had happened as the brewers who had supported him, the defeated Ferguson called the women’s votes “illegal.” But those votes were indeed legal, they were growing, and by the end of the decade both suffrage and Prohibition would enter the Constitution virtually as brothers. Or, it might have been said, sisters.
Chapter 5
Triumphant Failure
M
ANY YEARS AFTER the most glorious day in her husband’s political career, Grizelda Hull Hobson received a letter from one of his old friends from the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1889. The friend, a retired admiral, recalled something that Richmond Hobson had said as a freshman at Annapolis, a sentence that “became almost a classic at the Academy.” Unwilling to abide the verbal hazing hurled at every plebe, Hobson confronted a midshipman who had been tormenting him. “Sir,” he declared, “I do not desire nor will I tolerate your scurrilous contumely.”
Coming from most sixteen-year-olds, Hobson’s baroque rhetoric would have been as preposterous as it was precocious. Coming from Hobson,
it was both those things, but it was also an augury of the man he would become—bold, eloquent, offended by impropriety, and a bit mad. The first three, at least, were qualities that would enhance his huge importance to the Prohibition movement. So were the calluses he developed to repel the censure of others. Not long after the encounter with his contumacious tormentor, Hobson’s meticulous observance of regulations prompted him to report his classmates’ slightest violations to academy authorities. His fellow midshipmen responded by applying a less official but equally rigorous code of conduct—the young Alabaman was placed “in Coventry,” and with the single exception of one classmate, no one spoke to him for two years. Hobson barely flinched. As an admirer put it, he “got along without their society so well that he saw no reason for resuming it.”
Hobson would later celebrate his ostracism in his bestselling gosh-and-gee-whiz novel for boys, Buck Jones at Annapolis. Its hero just happened to be an upright and courageous son of the South who not only suffers his own term in Coventry (“the most terrible punishment possible on this earth”) but, like Hobson, graduates first in his class. Of course it was a bestseller: by the time Buck was published, in 1907, Hobson had been a national figure for nearly a decade. He had won his renown as a Spanish-American War hero, for his bravery while commanding a failed mission aboard the USS Merrimac in Cuba; on emerging from a Spanish prison, he then advanced it with a spasm of self-promotion that anticipated the publicity rituals of a latter age.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 9