For many southern politicians the stand they took on constitutional Prohibition was tactical—in effect, they had to decide which position was likeliest to preserve the iron segregation that had set in with the enactment of state Jim Crow laws. In his maiden House speech in 1914, thirty-one-year-old Carl Vinson of Georgia grandly declared, “The principles of State rights are as sacred [as] the virtue of the vestal virgins.” Former senator Joseph Bailey of Texas put it more crudely but also more frankly: handing the federal government authority over liquor control, he said, would establish a precedent that would in time guarantee that “there will not be a square foot of territory in the United States where it will be unlawful for negroes and white people to intermarry.” Alabama’s flamboyant “Cotton Tom” Heflin, who once shot a black man on a Washington streetcar (and considered it one of his major professional accomplishments, along with the role he played in establishing Mother’s Day), used the same image that southern drys had been brandishing for decades to explain his reluctance to vote dry: it was the state and not the federal government, Heflin said, that “protected our women from the lust and carnality of the brutes in our midst.” Every county in Heflin’s district was dry. His state was largely dry. But Heflin and others like him were consistent: they valued genuine racism more than false temperance.
In the end, though, when the Eighteenth Amendment was brought to a vote in the House of Representatives in December 1917, James Cannon and his colleagues were able to pry from the wet column nine southern and border state House Democrats who had voted against the Hobson Amendment in 1914, and they lost none going the other direction. Although the final vote of 282–128 seemed a landslide, in requiring a two-thirds majority the Constitution demanded a landslide; without the nine who had migrated from wet to dry, the resolution, which had passed the Senate with ease, would have died in the House. The promising young Sam Rayburn of Texas was among those who made the switch, and even Carl Vinson, despite his poignant regard for southern virtue and vestal virgins, jumped to the dry side. There proved to be little political peril in testing the elasticity of the states’ rights argument: Vinson would remain in Congress for another forty-seven years, and Rayburn would serve another forty-four, for seventeen of them as Speaker of the House.
AS IT TRAVELED its path from the Hobson Amendment of 1914 to the Sheppard Amendment of 1917, Prohibition leapt ahead of universal suffrage in the reform queue. It also underwent substantial legislative tinkering but little discussion of its core substance. Some dry leaders continued to lean on the coy argument that the entire matter was merely procedural. The debate wasn’t about Prohibition, these Drys tried to say, it was only about “submission” of the amendment to the states—that is, attaining two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress so the states would have a chance to decide for themselves in the ratification process. This was like a prosecutor in a death penalty state charging someone with murder but disclaiming any responsibility for the consequences of a conviction. The Senate judiciary committee hadn’t even bothered with hearings; neither had its House counterpart. Floor debate in the Senate was largely given over to an argument over timing. The House crammed its discussion of the resolution into a single afternoon. Who could object? The real debate had been taking place for more than sixty years.
But there had indeed been negotiations that took the form of debate, largely within the councils of the Anti-Saloon League and its allies. Five issues had arisen after Hobson had crafted his resolution, and four were resolved through changes in the language of the proposed amendment. By decree of Wayne Wheeler, the fifth went unresolved and remained live ammunition for both wets and drys for as long as the Eighteenth Amendment lived.
The most significant of the changes was the deletion of four iterations of the words “for sale.” The Hobson Amendment had proscribed not just the sale of intoxicating beverages but also their “manufacture for sale, transportation for sale, importation for sale, and exportation for sale.” “We do not say that a man shall not drink,” Hobson had told the House in his dramatic floor speech of December 1914. “We ask for no sumptuary action. We do not say that a man shall not have or make liquor in his own home for his own use.” He said that in the phrasing of his resolution, “The liberties and sanctity of the home are protected.” The hobson Amendment was aimed solely at the saloon, the distillers, the brewers—in a word, the liquor traffic. To Hobson of the Merrimac, any amendment that appeared to infringe on personal liberty would grant “the choice of battleground to the enemy.”
In 1914 Wayne Wheeler agreed with him; in fact, Wheeler and Purley Baker were among the acknowledged coauthors of the Hobson Amendment. But so much had changed by the time the Sixty-fifth Congress convened in March 1917 that Wheeler was emboldened. Before the end of the month word had gone out by telegram from ASL headquarters: the moderating “for sale” was being junked. Any manufacture, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating beverages, for any purpose and from any source, would be covered by the amendment.
The second linguistic adjustment, added as a separate section of the amendment, was the grant of “concurrent” powers of enforcement to the states. Hobson proposed this change himself at the ASL’s convention in 1915, and it mollified some of the states’ rights advocates. He argued that allowing the states to share enforcement responsibility would maintain “the balance of power between the Federal government and the states.”
The last two tweaks of the Sheppard Amendment were connected to each other. In addition to the congressional wets, a few moderate drys whose votes were still somewhat in question wanted to provide compensation to the distillers and brewers, much of whose property was about to become worthless. At the time the Sheppard Amendment was pending, thirteen million gallons of bourbon were aging in Kentucky warehouses alone. Nationwide, the liquor and beer industries represented nearly $1 billion in invested capital, by that measure making the combination the nation’s fifth largest industry. The New Republic said any dry who argued against compensation was “exactly as mindful of property interests . . . as the Russian Bolsheviki.”
But hard-line drys countered with an argument that was more theological than political or economic. According to officials of the Methodist Church, the alcohol interests’ “day of grace has been sinned away.” Less holy was the breathtakingly disingenuous no-compensation argument Representative Daniel E. Garrett of Texas had offered when Congress first debated the Hobson Amendment. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, he said, four billion dollars’ worth of “property” had been rendered valueless. “I doubt if any man deplores more than myself that the institution of slavery ever existed in this country,” Garrett claimed, and “as it has been with human slavery, so shall it be with alcoholic liquors.” Therefore, he argued, the liquor and beer interests “must pocket their loss just as our fathers had to pocket theirs when you took their niggers away from them. That is all there is to it.” The Congressional Record noted the response from at least part of the House: “[Applause and laughter.]”
One of the conciliatory drys who had supported the idea of compensation was Warren G. Harding, the junior senator from Ohio. Harding was about as moist as a dry could get, both in his attitude (he said he preferred to think of temperance not as a moral issue but as a political one) and in his personal life (he favored Scotch and soda, and owned stock in a brewery). The most authoritative student of his prepresidential career, historian Randolph C. Downes, captured Harding’s posture on the issue perfectly: “Let there be no mistaking the fact that Senator Harding was both opposed to national prohibition and in favor of it, depending on whom he was dealing with.” In the summer of 1917 he was dealing with Wayne Wheeler.
To a large degree Harding owed his election in 1914 to the support of Wheeler and the ASL, who had backed the malleable and affable Republican over a Democrat who was a confirmed wet. As the Sheppard Amendment came up for Senate debate, Wheeler was in his usual seat in the gallery, which had become a sort
of second headquarters for the ASL. Harding requested a meeting, and what eventually emerged from their conversation in the Capitol lobby was both a compromise and a ruse. Harding not only believed that the liquor interests deserved compensation, but also felt there should be a cap on how much time the states were allowed for ratification, a constraint that had never been applied to previous amendments. Harding suggested five years. Wheeler stretched it to seven, in exchange giving Harding and other moderates a new opening clause to the amendment, stipulating that its provisions would not take effect until one year after its ratification. This gave twelve months’ grace for the brewers, the distillers, the wholesalers, the saloon owners, the bartenders, the barrel makers, the bottlers, the teamsters, the ice dealers, and all the other people dependent on the American taste for alcoholic beverages—twelve months to find another use for their facilities and another line of work. This was not compensation; it was the facsimile of compensation. Four years later, Herbert Hoover would call Congress’s failure to seriously consider compensation “an insult to private property.”
All told, the linguistic tinkering that shaped the Eighteenth Amendment during its journey through the Sixty-fifth Congress had turned a morally inspired measure into a punitive one (the excision of the limiting “for sale”); provided some balm for the states’ rights caucus (“concurrent” enforcement); closed off the compensation debate (the one-year delay); and, in the case of the seven-year ratification limit, accomplished nothing meaningful relating to Prohibition, but did establish a new precedent. Three of the next four amendments to the Constitution were freighted with Warren Harding’s seven-year-limit innovation, and one—the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972—expired just three states short of ratification when the clock ticked its final mandated second in 1979.
More important than any of these emendations, though, was the word change that didn’t happen. Some very dry-drys wanted the Eighteenth Amendment to proscribe the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of “alcoholic beverages.” Wheeler, however, was determined to stick with “intoxicating liquors,” a vaguer term whose meaning Congress would have to define in later legislation, in the process turning that definition into the subject of political warfare, public debate, learned analysis, and high comedy for the next sixteen years.
AS 1917 DREW to a close, submission had been accomplished. Ratification seemed a more daunting prospect. Though by this time twenty-three states had dry laws of one form or another, very few were as “bone dry” as the Eighteenth Amendment. Looming ahead was the trench warfare of the state-by-state ratification campaign, in which the drys would need to win a minimum of thirty-six separate battles to reach the three-quarters requirement.
In the end, however, ratification sped along with astonishing velocity, fueled by an assault on the German-American Alliance conducted by the U.S. Senate in the form of an inquiry, but organized by Wayne B. Wheeler in the form of an inquisition. “We are not willing it be known at present that we started the investigation,” Wheeler told Purley Baker. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “You have doubtless seen the way the newspapers have taken up the German-American Alliance. They are giving it almost as much attention as the Acts of Congress itself. We could not have bought for $50,000 what we have gotten on this investigation.”
The income tax had made a Prohibition amendment fiscally feasible. The social revolution wrought by the suffragists had made it politically plausible. Now the drys had found the final tool they needed to wedge the amendment into the Constitution: a war.
* The populist-demagogue-turned-racist-demagogue Tom Watson of Georgia, who was a patron of the KKK, expressed the intensity and paranoia of anti-Catholic feeling in a scary document called “What Goes on in Nunneries.” In convents, he said, “bachelor priests keep unmarried women under lock and key” and kill their children. He also said that in the confessional, priests gave married women information on “sexual practices and techniques with [their] husband[s], extra-marital activities, masturbation, homosexuality, and unnatural fornication.”
Chapter 7
From Magna Carta to Volstead
W
ILLIAM ASHLEY SUNDAY of the Philadelphia Phillies, who became world famous for loving Christ and hating alcohol, put away his glove, his bat, and his spikes in 1890. He had just completed a season in which he had stolen eighty-four bases and earned $3,500, roughly nine times the wages of the average American industrial worker. But at last he had decided to turn away from the sporting life and toward Jesus, an inclination that had already set him apart from many of his teammates. Like Sunday, most ballplayers of the day were largely itinerant and marginally educated; unlike Sunday, who indulged in an occasional glass of beer or wine, many drank like champions. Countless careers were ended by booze, and numerous lives lost (notable among these was the great Philadelphia outfielder Ed Delahanty, who attempted a drunken walk one night across a railroad bridge over Niagara Falls). An alcoholic aroma wafted over the stands as well. The original American Association, half of whose founding owners were brewers, was so drink sodden it became known as the “Beer and Whiskey League.” The top row of the grandstand in Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis was an open bar, and in San Francisco’s Recreation Park, where the Seals of the Pacific Coast League played, eight rows of seats stretching from first base, behind home plate, and over to third base comprised the “Booze Cage.” This was where a seventy-five-cent ticket got the fan a choice of two beers or a shot of whiskey, with a ham sandwich and a ballgame thrown in.
Billy Sunday had always been religious. But in 1888, while he sat on a Chicago curbstone with some other players, hymns from a nearby mission caught his ear and his heart. Turning to his teammates, he said he really didn’t want another drink and then went across the street and found shelter in the stainless calm of the mission. Two years later, when he gave up baseball for the life of an evangelist, his verbal facility, italicized by his hyperphysical platform style, put him on his way to becoming the most successful American preacher of his era, perhaps the most successful one ever. The essay on Sunday in the authoritative American National Biography does not equivocate: “Incredible as it may seem, reliable statistics indicate that Sunday preached to more than 100 million people” in his forty years in the pulpit. By his own account, early in his career he had used “sentences so long they’d make a Greek professor’s jaw squeak.” Only after he “loaded my Gospel gun with rough-on-rats, ipecac, dynamite, and barbed wire” did he achieve his extraordinary success. “What do I care if some puff-eyed little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words?” Sunday asked. “I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live.”
Sunday’s speeches were devoted first to his fundamentalist view of Jesus (a contemporary observer said he “flings out the name of Christ as if he were sending a spitball right into your teeth”). His fanatic opposition to the beer and liquor interests came a close second. To Sunday liquor was “God’s worst enemy” and “hell’s best friend,” and he considered those who profited from the alcohol trade earthly Satans. “I will fight them till hell freezes over,” he told a rally at the University of Michigan, where he persuaded a thousand students to join the campaign for a statewide Prohibition law. “Then I’ll buy a pair of skates and fight ’em on the ice.”
“The liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no other man,” an Anti-Saloon League publication said in 1913. This wasn’t strictly because of the size of his following (which was enormous), or its intense devotion (in 1914 a magazine poll attempting to determine who was “the greatest man in the United States” placed Sunday eighth, tied with Andrew Carnegie). In as many as 250 speeches a year, addressing the enormous audiences he could command in the late 1910s, Sunday gave shape to the new attitude—increasingly ferocious, even vengeful—that characterized the Prohibition forces as they stood at the edge of victory. No more tibbly-tibbling, said Billy Sunday: “I have no intere
st in a God who does not smite.”
Cue Kaiser Wilhelm, World War I, and Wayne B. Wheeler.
AFTER THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT was ratified, resentful wets frequently expressed the belief that the Great War that exploded in Europe in 1914 and that America entered in 1917 was especially great for the Anti-Saloon League and its allies. In one of the favored mythologies they would clutch to their bosoms throughout the fourteen years of Prohibition, the wets attributed the amendment’s adoption to the absence of two million soldiers from American shores and voting booths. This argument mistakenly presumed that all of these men were beer loving and devoted to personal liberty. In truth, the missing men and boys—many of them below voting age, in aggregate likely as divided on the issue as the rest of the country—weren’t a factor. Further, the series of War Revenue Acts that Congress passed at Woodrow Wilson’s request, which increased liquor taxes to help finance the war effort, in effect made the purchase of alcoholic beverages in the early days of World War I a patriotic act.
Still, the prohibitionists did find a number of ways to tie their cause to the nation’s defense. Not six months after the first doughboys landed in Europe in June 1917, the ASL officially denounced America’s French allies for their failure to supply pure drinking water to American soldiers, putting them at risk of developing a taste for wine. The populist, antibusiness, Bryan-led wing of the dry coalition, capitalizing on the looming disappearance of liquor tax revenues, used the war crisis to usher in sharply progressive income tax rates (by the time Prohibition took effect, the highest bracket had been jacked up past 70 percent, or more than six times the prewar level). Bryan accused the distillers of harboring a “passion for dollars” that might “make drunkards of the entire army and leave us defenseless before a foreign foe.” This was not simply Bryanesque minstrelsy; Thomas Gilmore, president of the distillers’ Model License League, in fact attempted to persuade Congress to give liquor to the soldiers to “insure the steadiness of nerve that wins battles.” After all, Gilmore explained, “the man who rushes a rapid fire gun should be given the relief from terror that alcohol imparts.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 13