The notion of national emergency also handed the drys the keys to an arsenal of practical arguments easily draped in patriotic rhetoric. The month the United States entered the war, the distinguished (and passionately dry) Yale economist Irving Fisher assembled a group of famous Americans, few of them previously associated with the movement, to endorse the need for national Prohibition; the lineup included novelists Upton Sinclair and Booth Tarkington, aviation pioneer Orville Wright, and E. H. Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel. Then Fisher parlayed his (and their) renown by issuing an analysis of the damage being done to the war effort by the wanton waste of food resources. The same amount of barley used in American breweries could instead yield eleven million loaves of bread a day, Fisher said. Distinguished though he might have been (Fisher’s Theory of Interest is still considered a milestone in economic thought nearly eighty years after it was published), his numbers didn’t always parse; in Fisher’s writings, the eleven million figure sometimes denoted a wildly inflated count of American soldiers at the front, and his associates sometimes said the daily loaves of bread left unbaked by the brewers’ disloyalty numbered five million, not eleven. Whatever the precise figure, it was certainly sufficient to nourish the army and to feed the starving Belgians as well. “How can we justify the making of any part of our breadstuffs into intoxicating liquor,” Bryan asked, “when men are crying out for bread?” Anticipating the end of the war, the advent of Prohibition, and an inevitable grain surplus, Billy Sunday took a more cheerful approach. “The problem of what to do with the farm surplus will be solved in a jiffy,” Sunday said. “The children of drunkards will consume this surplus in the form of flap-jacks for breakfast.”
The brewers tried to counter with statistics, asserting at one point that the entire industry used less than three-quarters of 1 percent of the nation’s grain production. Even if accurate, it was a futile defense. The dry assault included attacks on the alcohol industry’s use of railroad stock, fuel oil, and other war necessities. “The people have been requested to have heatless days, meatless days, wheatless days,” Wayne Wheeler said in a letter to President Wilson. But, he continued, “the breweries and saloons of the country continue to waste foodstuffs, fuel and manpower and to impair the efficiency of labour in the mines, factories and even in munitions plants near which saloons are located.” In a full-page ad in the New York Times, Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek said that the liquor interests, who “use more fuel than all schools and churches combined,” were “conspirators against the public welfare.”
Their political power catalyzed by these appeals to patriotism, congressional prohibitionists used the emergency to enact measures that didn’t require constitutional sanction. Wilson, who needed the drys’ support on a variety of his war initiatives, by and large stayed out of the way. Between April 1917 and November 1918—the length of the U.S. involvement in World War I—a series of “for the duration” laws, proclamations, and executive orders first outlawed the sale of alcohol to soldiers, then proscribed the importation of distilled spirits, and, in the landmark Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, forbade their manufacture as well. Dry zones were established around naval bases (sale of liquor was forbidden within five miles) and around coal mines, shipyards, and munitions plants. In the name of the war effort, Food Administrator Herbert Hoover (who at this point in his career opposed Prohibition) ordered the amount of grain available to the brewing industry reduced by 30 percent. Legal beer was limited to 2.75 percent alcohol by weight. Even Theodore Roosevelt, who had long dismissed prohibitionists as “extremists” and believed that they suffered “a particularly annoying form of egoistic lunacy,” sounded the dry trumpet: “When we must feed our army and help the armies of our allies,” Roosevelt wrote to the head of the Methodist Church’s Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, “not a bushel of grain should be permitted to be made into intoxicating liquor.”
All this was concurrent with another product of war that served dry interests: the radical reshaping of the powers and perceptions of the federal government, a process that would further diminish the shock of constitutional Prohibition. Distrust of federal power had, of course, made even some dedicated drys oppose the idea of a constitutional amendment. But Wilson’s expression and exaltation of national purpose, which provided a noble soundtrack for the federal government’s sudden leap into countless aspects of American life, would make the idea of federal enforcement of Prohibition no more alien than, say, the military draft. The war emergency handed proponents of government activism a hunting license. As Charles Merz put it in The Dry Decade, the wartime emergency enabled Wilson, with scant public opposition, to “seize railways, requisition factories, take over mines, fix prices, put an embargo on all exports, commandeer all ships, standardize all loaves of bread, punish all careless use of fuel, draft men for an army, and send that army to a war in France.” Compared to all that, closing down distilleries and breweries didn’t seem so radical at all.
THE WAR’S CLINCHING contribution to the dry cause arrived in February 1918, as the Eighteenth Amendment was beginning its journey through the state legislatures. “We have German enemies across the water,” a dry politician named John Strange told the Milwaukee Journal that month. “We have German enemies in this country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.”
Strange’s call to arms was the preface to the Senate investigation of the German-American Alliance conceived, directed, and brilliantly exploited by Wayne B. Wheeler, an extravaganza that played out as the perfect accompaniment to the ratification campaign. Wheeler arranged for the appointment of the subcommittee that conducted the inquiry. He recruited the witnesses and bankrolled their expenses. But the stage for this final act of dry dramaturgy had been prepared by journalist George Creel, whom Wilson had placed at the head of a malignant propaganda body officially called the Committee of Public Information but known to critics as the “House of Truth.” Employing a tactic it may have borrowed from the ASL, Creel’s organization spread seventy-five thousand “Four Minute Men” throughout the country to advance the war cause in brief and usually inflammatory orations before every conceivable audience. Said Creel, “People do not live by bread alone; they live mostly by slogans.” He also told his men that fear was “an important element to be bred in the civilian population.” When the fear was attached to all things German, it proceeded to breed like an out-of-control virus.
Soon Red Cross leaders were claiming that German-Americans had penetrated their organization and were putting ground glass in bandages meant for U.S. troops. Addressing the members of the Union League Club in New York, Elihu Root—former secretary of state, former secretary of war, Nobel Peace Prize winner, recently retired U.S. Senator—said, “There are men walking about the streets of this city who ought to be taken out at sunrise and shot for treason.” In his infamous “Babel Proclamation,” Governor William L. Harding of Iowa declared speaking German in public or on the telephone unlawful. German books were burned in Wisconsin, playing Beethoven in public was banned in Boston, and throughout the country foodstuffs and street names of German origin were denatured by benign Anglo-Saxonisms. Nearly ninety years before french fries became freedom fries during the Iraq War, sauerkraut became liberty cabbage and, in an odd homage to the president, Cincinnati’s Berlin Street became Woodrow Street. “Cotton Tom” Heflin of Alabama, who could always be counted on to transcend the limits of ordinary, everyday bias, said, “We must execute the Huns within our gates. The firing squad is the only solution for these perverts and renegades.”
The most horrifying single example of anti-German hysteria was described by historian David M. Kennedy in Over Here, his history of the home front during World War I:
Near St. Louis in April 1918, a mob seized Robert Prager, a young man whose only discernible offense was to have been born in Germany. He had, in fact, tried to enlist in the American Navy but had been rejected for medic
al reasons. Stripped, bound with an American flag, dragged barefoot and stumbling through the streets, Prager was eventually lynched to the lusty cheers of five hundred patriots. A trial of the mob’s leaders followed, in which the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons to court, and the defense counsel called their deed “patriotic murder.” The jury took twenty-five minutes to return a verdict of not guilty.
As anti-German passions raged, Wheeler married them to his own cause. The German-American Alliance made it an easy coupling. Founded in 1901 to promote unity among Americans of German birth or extraction, it had been transformed by the Prohibition issue into the brewers’ most prominent and powerful ally. The GAA held the line on suffrage as well: “Our German women do not want the right to vote,” the Nebraska chapter asserted in 1914, “and since our opponents desire the right of suffrage mainly for the purpose of saddling the yoke of prohibition on our necks, we should oppose it with all our might.” By 1914, GAA membership approached two million, and its political clout in some places, especially the large cities of the Midwest, was commensurate with its size. But then the guns of August rang out, and by 1917 the GAA had been identified by Wheeler as an organization whose “leaders urge its members to vote only for those who stand for Germanism and oppose Prohibition.” “Germanism” meant anti-Americanism, and by Wheeler’s conflation, it also meant “wet.”
Wheeler knew he had scored a kill from the moment the Senate hearings opened with his star witness, Gustavus Ohlinger. A Toledo lawyer of Swedish and German extraction, in 1915 Ohlinger had published Their True Faith and Allegiance, a tract that had identified first- and second-generation German-Americans as “prophets of disunion.” (His own family, Ohlinger boasted, had “been in this country for 250 years.”) “Before he had testified 20 minutes the committee was on fire,” Wheeler told Purley Baker. Baker must have been thrilled. He believed Germans were “a race of people . . . who eat like gluttons and drink like swine.”
From that moment forward a steady sequence of congressional reports and administrative rulings initiated and then publicized by Wheeler and the ASL consigned the brewers to their final defeat. The first set of hearings alone produced more than seven hundred pages of subpoenaed documents. It was conclusively established that the United States Brewers’ Association had funded the Washington office of the German-American Alliance and that annual support for the GAA was the third largest item in the USBA’s annual budget, after salaries and publications. When the brewers captured control of the American Association of Foreign-Language Newspapers, they provided prepackaged editorials attacking Prohibition and implicitly supported a 1915 editorial campaign against war-preparedness spending. When the names of the brewers who had staked Arthur Brisbane to the Washington Times and had funded other wet papers were revealed, the list read like a page from the Munich telephone book. During the war, it turned out, the Anheuser-Busch Company had cabled nearly $300,000 in cash to Adolphus Busch’s widow, who remained at Villa Lilly with her daughter Wilhelmina, caring for wounded German soldiers. News that the Busch family held a million dollars in German war bonds was not mitigated by the fact that they had been purchased before the United States entered the war. The blacklist of American corporations the brewers had boycotted was duly subpoenaed, leaked, and then published, along with reams of other documents from the USBA’s files that had nothing to do with Germany and the war, but everything to do with the chronic depravity of the beer kings.
The brewers had not been unaware of the war’s threat to their welfare. As early as 1914 the Anheuser-Busch executive committee had considered removing German names from their labels (they did remove them from bottles sold in Australia and Canada). August A. Busch, Adolphus’s son and heir, took to wearing a small American flag button in his lapel and ordered the removal of portraits of German heroes that decorated the walls of the company’s plants. More substantively, Gustave Pabst’s son Henry, among many other members of brewery families, enlisted in the marines; the Busch family contributed half a million dollars to the U.S. war effort; and a group of Milwaukee brewers purchased $2 million in Liberty Bonds.
But none of this mattered. The hearings had branded the brewers’ underhanded tactics as outright disloyalty. When the Newark brewer Christian Feigenspan was called before the Senate committee, he could offer only a faint, weary explanation of how it had all gone wrong. A long-serving president of the USBA, Feigenspan was cultured and capable, among the best the brewing industry had to offer. But the ASL’s onslaught against all things German had brought him to his knees. Trying to explain what had led the brewers to engage in their various subterfuges and misdeeds, Feigenspan offered a preposterous, even shameless, explanation. He said Percy Andreae, the brewers’ chief publicist, had “hypnotized our convention one year”—a convention of some of America’s most powerful businessmen—and thereby won the authorization to conduct his covert campaign.
This sounded more like an acknowledgment of defeat than the roar of the powerful enemy Purley A. Baker evoked that fall. “Does anyone doubt,” Baker asked an ASL conference in Columbus, “in the light of the immediate past, that if there had not been a strong, virile Prohibition movement to combat the propaganda of this disloyal but well-financed organization, that America would have been sufficiently Germanized to have kept her out of the war?”
ON JANUARY 8, 1918, the thirty-three members of the Mississippi state senate and the ninety-six members of the state house gathered in Jackson to vote on the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The vote, which proceeded without debate, took exactly fifteen minutes, passing 28–5 in the upper house and 93–3 in the lower one. Mississippi was much more agreeable to this second constitutional amendment ever to place limits on individual behavior than it was to the first one. It didn’t get around to ratifying that one—the Thirteenth, abolishing slavery—until 1995.
As the accumulating ratification votes would soon establish, the rapidly expanding (and usually wet) urban populations were rendered irrelevant by the anti-German hysteria and also by geography and demography. Richmond Hobson had asserted in a strategy brief four years earlier that because the major cities were concentrated in relatively few states, the seemingly daunting challenge of winning approval in thirty-six separate state legislatures would be much easier than winning two-thirds margins in Congress. You could conceivably write off the twelve most urbanized states—the Connecticuts, the New Jerseys, the Pennsylvanias—and still achieve ratification.
But even Hobson could not have imagined how smoothly ratification would proceed—“as if a sailing-ship on a windless ocean were speeding ahead, propelled by some invisible force,” said the New York Tribune. Had the Tribune editors looked more closely, they would have realized that the “invisible force” was actually an obvious one: the universal malapportionment of state legislatures. Forty-four years later, in what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “the most important case of my tenure,” the Supreme Court would decide that legislative seats had to be apportioned according to the principle of one man, one vote. But in 1918 the legislatures, and thus the ratification process, were rigged. The ASL’s demonization of the brewers as disloyal servants of the Kaiser had softened the remaining opposition; the makeup of the state legislatures buried it.
You could find many reasons for legislative malapportionment: the inherent peculiarities of many state constitutions; the intrastate conflict arising from the shrinking population of the countryside and the booming growth of the cities; the eternal unwillingness of those in power to yield it. But in terms of Prohibition, there was only one consequence: this distortion of democracy was a blessing for the dry cause. In New York, for example, the legislature was configured in such a fashion that an urban assemblyman might represent seven times as many people as the rural representative at the next desk. Put another way, in choosing members of the state assembly, the vote of a farmer from upstate Preston Hollow—more than likely native born, Republican, and dry—was equivalent to the v
ote of seven Democratic, Irish-American wets from Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. In New Jersey, where each member of the state senate represented a single county irrespective of population, the man from Cape May County served just 19,640 constituents, while his colleague from Essex County represented 652,089.* The farmers and fishermen who controlled Maryland’s legislature had conspired to avoid any redistricting since 1867; in the intervening decades, while the population of urban, ethnic Baltimore had jumped 175 percent, the population in the rest of the state had increased only 46 percent. By 1918 democracy in Maryland had been imprisoned for half a century.
That these were not necessarily anomalies became clear as the race to ratification accelerated through 1918 and into early 1919. Statewide wet majorities were rendered irrelevant by the rotten-borough legislatures. The very same day the citizens of Missouri rejected a dry amendment to the state constitution by a margin of 47 percent dry to 53 percent wet, they elected a legislature that just two months later would ratify the Eighteenth Amendment by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. In Ohio, the sacred cradle of the ASL, legislative districting and assiduous politicking put ratification over by a combined legislative vote of 105–42; however, when left to their own devices, Ohio voters rejected the very same measure in a referendum.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 14