Disorganized, dysfunctional, and disbelieving, the wets had watched the approach of Prohibition, said the San Francisco Wholesalers’ and Retailers’ Review, “in a dumb stupor.” Now they had to adjust. Industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who did not employ men who drank but who had long owned an interest in the Old Overholt rye distillery, thoughtfully began to distribute his own reserves of Overholt to his pals while it was still legal; Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania, who had voted in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment, took receipt of twenty cases. In St. Louis, the Busch family stepped up production of a nonalcoholic “cereal beverage” called Bevo; by 1919 state laws and the various wartime codes had already cut sales of their intoxicating brands by 80 percent. In New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt had four cases of Old Reserve delivered to his townhouse on East Sixty-fifth Street—which, he told a friend, “is for the time being at least on the ‘wet’ list.”
But perhaps more important than the celebrations of the drys or the adjustments of the wets was the stirring of activity in some quarters that had remained untouched by the decades of debate. Consider, for instance, the bustle in the Canadian prairie town of Yorkton, Saskatchewan, where Harry Bronfman, the thirty-three-year-old operator of the local railroad hotel, opened something called the Canada Pure Drug Company in a ramshackle warehouse building next door at 29 Front Street. Now, on Christmas Day 1919, only twenty-two days before the Great Dry Future was to begin 160 miles to the south, Harry and his younger brother Sam prepared to stock the shelves of the “drug company.” Across Front Street, in the Canadian Pacific Railway freight shed, five carloads of Scotch whiskey were waiting to be unloaded.
In 1921 Andrew J. Volstead, who was a realistic man, told his House colleague John Nance Garner that although “we will gradually work out the machinery that will, with the cooperation of the states, make the country dry, we cannot hope that this law can be enforced so as not to be violated. All laws will be violated.”
If he had only known. Over the next decade, the product of eighty years of marching, praying, arm-twisting, vote trading, and law drafting would be subjected to a plague of trials, among them hypocrisy, greed, murderous criminality, official corruption, and the unreformable impulses of human desire. Another way of saying it (and it was said often in the 1920s): the drys had their law, and the wets would have their liquor.
* Because the lower house of the legislature was apportioned by population, New Jersey found itself in the odd position of having its senate voting to ratify, its lower house against. This wasn’t resolved until the latter body came around in 1922, ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment two years after it had been put into effect.
* The most prominent of the early Detroit smugglers were the Billingsley brothers of Oklahoma, a family of criminal operators who had set up operations in Michigan shortly after statewide Prohibition was established. The youngest of the Billingsleys, Sherman, opened one of the plushest New York speakeasies, the Stork Club, a few years after his release from a fifteen-month sentence in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Among the suspected smugglers arrested during the Toledo frenzy was a young Detroit delicatessen owner, Sam Boesky. Sam’s son Ivan, who would become the most notorious stock market operator convicted in the insider-trading scandals of the 1980s, called one of the firms he set up to handle his market activity Farnsworth & Hastings Ltd.—a name he took from the location of the deli Sam ran (and from which the police believed he sold contraband liquor) at the corner of Farnsworth and Hastings streets in Detroit’s East Side Jewish ghetto.
PART II
THE
FLOOD
The prohibitionists say that the liquor issue is as dead as slavery. The wet people say that liquor can be obtained anywhere. You’d think they’d both be satisfied.
—Marjory Stoneman Douglas, in the Miami Herald,
October 7, 1920
Chapter 8
Starting Line
O
N FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 1920, at the First Congregational Church in Washington, the luminaries gathered in front of the buzzing crowd didn’t look like they’d command the sort of frenzy that had greeted Billy Sunday that day at his tabernacle in Norfolk, Virginia, when he declared that “Hell will forever be for rent.” Andrew Volstead’s drooping mustache, James Cannon’s antediluvian high-buckle shoes, and Wayne Wheeler’s resemblance to a small-town clerk were material for a caricaturist, not for a victory party. Josephus Daniels, the navy secretary who had dried up the American fleet, was at the First Congregational, too, and so were Howard Hyde Russell, the sixty-five-year-old founder of the Anti-Saloon League, and Anna A. Gordon of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The WCTU would soon be launching a campaign “to help protect the woman worker.” One of the slogans Gordon and her colleagues cooked up for the effort, “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” would be unveiled in a week and would resonate for decades.
The WCTU could look ahead to its next campaign because its last one was now completely, irrevocably over. Secretary Daniels told the crowd, “No man living” would ever see the Volstead Act modified. Other notables offered similar declarations. Then, around 11:15 in the evening, after several hours of speechifying, the warm-up speakers receded into the immense shadow of the man now moving toward the lectern. William Jennings Bryan would have no victory in his long public life greater than this one. Freeing the nation from the death grip of alcohol even obliterated some of the remnant pain from his three failed presidential candidacies. He had spent the early part of the week delivering speeches in Nebraska, four on Monday alone, but still had the energy to make the twelve-hundred-mile trip to Washington. Nothing could have kept Bryan from participating in this event, in this city, in this church where Frederick Douglass had once been a congregant, and where the end of a different form of slavery would be memorialized at midnight.
The crowd had waited three hours for Bryan’s speech. Some, it could have been said, had been waiting for decades. If the long service had made anyone’s attention waver or diluted anyone’s passion, Bryan restored them with the rolling rhythms of his oratory. For forty minutes he spoke, the great bald dome of his head gleaming with sweat, the trumpetlike sonorities of his broad vowels filling the room. At midnight he paused so that the congregants could rise and sing the doxology. Then, as they took their seats, Bryan gathered himself for a fiery conclusion. Drawing from the gospel of Saint Matthew, he yoked the liquor trade to those who would have killed the infant Jesus. “They are dead that sought the young child’s life!” he boomed. Then again, even louder: “They are dead!” And once more, his arms raised, his eyes aglow, a saint in the grip of ecstasy: “They are dead!”
THE LIQUOR INDUSTRY wasn’t dead, of course; a new version, this one illegal, underground, and nearly ubiquitous, would emerge with the birth of the dry utopia. Not two hours after rapture swept the First Congregational Church, halfway across the country agents from the Bureau of Internal Revenue apprehended two truckloads of whiskey departing a warehouse in Peoria, Illinois—“stolen,” it appeared, by officials of the distillery that had produced it. It was the first recorded arrest made under the Prohibition laws—the first of hundreds of thousands to come.
Still, many Americans greeted Prohibition with due respect: they began to drink less. A significant portion of the population either felt duty-bound to take the constitutional strictures seriously or found the procedural roadblocks erected by the Volstead Act too daunting. Alcohol-related deaths fell in 1920, as did arrests for public drunkenness. Generally speaking, the closer one lived to the middle of the country, especially in towns and cities inhabited by Protestants of northern European extraction, the more likely it was that drinking was down. Helen and Robert Lynd reported that in Muncie, Indiana—the real Middletown—where there had once been a saloon for every 140 adults, drinking declined because civic and social leaders chose to go dry, thereby setting an example for their neighbors. Still, the big cities of the coasts were
not unscathed, as hotels and restaurants dependent on bar business shut their doors. One of the first to give up the fight was Holland House, on Fifth Avenue in New York. It closed during Prohibition’s very first month, its celebrated Bamboo Cocktails (sherry, dry vermouth, orange bitters) gone forever.
Evidence of the drying-up came from many sources. Welch’s Grape Juice began to set new sales records. Diminished criminal behavior led Grand Rapids, Michigan, to abandon its work farm. Chicago closed one of its jails. “We were all elated by the marked decrease in so-called disorderly conduct,” Jane Addams would recall. “Our neighborhood registered a general lack of street disorders and also of family quarrels, which had so often put a mother and little children into the streets, turned out by a drunken father, sometimes in the middle of the night.” Songwriter Albert Von Tilzer, who had taken America out to the ballgame in 1908, was cashing royalties from a new song called “I Never Knew I Had a Wonderful Wife Until the Town Went Dry.”
But the front-page headline in the January 17 edition of the ASL’s American Issue—CONSTITUTIONAL PROHIBITION IS IN EFFECT / ALL LIQUOR STAINS WIPED FROM THE STARS AND STRIPES—would prove a gross overstatement. In fact the best estimates by authoritative scholars indicate that in the decade after the arrival of the Eighteenth Amendment, alcohol consumption dropped only 30 percent.
After the house of Prohibition had begun to crumble in the late 1920s, Deets Pickett, a publicist for the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, paused in fond recollection of those early, slightly dry days. “We learned to drink milk as never before,” he sighed, “and our tables were loaded with fresh vegetables and fruits . . . and the young people became taller and healthier and more vigorous.”
AMONG THOSE WHO had feared the arrival of Prohibition, the legendary oenologist A. R. Morrow was hardly characteristic, except insofar as he considered the new regime both unpleasant and disruptive of a way of life. Morrow, who knew the wines of California better than any other living being, had a palate so refined and a nose so sophisticated that he spurned all highly seasoned foods in order to protect his sensory acuity. Needless to say, he never smoked. He also never swallowed the wines he tasted, fearing that even a hint of inebriation could dull his edge. But the onset of Prohibition brought to Morrow’s life what he thought would be a radical change. Convinced that his career was over, he discarded all caution and, for the first time, swallowed a mouthful of wine.
What shocked Morrow was not the effect, but the absence of effect: his taste buds remained as keen as ever. He was one of those millions who believed in the miracle of the grape, the wonders of the hop, or the marvels embedded in a bushel of corn or rye, and then discovered that the arrival of the dreaded day changed their lives much less than they had feared. However much the population at large cut back on their alcohol consumption, from the very beginning those who really wanted to drink inevitably found a way. Take Baron M. Goldwater of Phoenix, who arranged to have the bar, back bar, and brass rail of his favorite saloon installed in the basement of his house, where his son Barry, ten years old at the advent of Prohibition, would soon be making beer. Or consider the father of another future U.S. senator. Joseph P. Kennedy sold off much of the stock from his father’s East Boston liquor business to grateful friends and associates, and cellared several thousands of dollars’ worth of wine in his Brookline house.
The wine in Joe Kennedy’s basement was there legally, courtesy of the clause in the Volstead Act that legitimized alcoholic beverages already stored in an individual’s residence as of midnight on January 16. Like Kennedy, most beneficiaries of this provision were wealthy. They had money to invest in an inventory they might not consume for years, and they owned residences large enough to store it. The propertied (and bibulous) classes, who were not shy about exploiting their advantage, had won an exception that was nearly as broad, and nearly as focused on a single constituency, as the gift of cider that Congress had bestowed on the nation’s farmers. The wealthy took advantage of both the exception and the lead time to buy and store as much as they wished, even after liquor and wine dealers began shutting their doors in late 1919. By January 16, 80 percent of the merchandise stored in the cellars of the Union Club at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street in Manhattan had been transferred to the members’ homes. In New Orleans civic leader Walter Parker, a member of the Stratford Club, built two new wine cellars in his house, purchased a stock of more than five thousand bottles, and proceeded to dip into it daily for the next fourteen years. In Los Angeles, Charlotte Hennessy, mother of actress Mary Pickford, simply bought the entire inventory of a liquor store and had it relocated to her basement.
Despite the ease with which they could satisfy their thirsts, many of the well-off chose to devote considerable energy to disputing the legitimacy of the Eighteenth Amendment. It would not be inaccurate to say that the eventual repeal of Prohibition was born in 1920 in the clubs and salons and dining rooms of the American aristocracy, who considered constitutional Prohibition an affront to republican (and Republican) principles. The first public manifestation of this phenomenon was a legal challenge orchestrated by that most distinguished of American lawyers, Elihu Root.
Root was the beau ideal of the governing class, a brilliant and wealthy man who despised the very idea of Prohibition, both as an intrusion on the rights of the individual and as an assault on the rights of the states. He was broad enough in his thinking to believe that individual rights extended to working people, but in this instance he was sufficiently narrow to frame the workingman’s exercise of those rights as the inevitable by-product of desperation. Prohibition, Root told his friend Everett P. Wheeler, “takes away the chief pleasure in life for millions of men who have never been trained to get their pleasure from art, or literature, or sports, or reform movements.” One imagines that most American workers, confronted with the choice, would opt for their beer even if the infinite joys of reform movements had been available to them. The selfless patriots who financed Root’s legal challenge—the brewers, of course—likely imagined that, too.
The Elihu Root who had gotten so hot under the collar with his anti-German rhetoric during the war (“there are men . . . who should be shot for treason”) was barely less ardent when he took his case to the Supreme Court in March 1920, accompanied by the eminent constitutional lawyer William D. Guthrie. To a degree, this was advocacy suited for a surrealist: Root and Guthrie were trying to persuade the justices to declare a constitutional amendment . . . unconstitutional. Their case was built on three legs and one crutch: the Fifth Amendment; the Tenth Amendment; a belief that the Constitution was an inappropriate vessel for what was essentially a criminal statute; and blind hope. The effort failed, but not without a blaze of rhetorical glory. Root and Guthrie’s friend Nicholas Murray Butler, the wet president of Columbia University, described the closing moments of the argument: “Mr. Root put his glasses in his pocket, and, drawing himself up to his full height, pointing his finger at the Chief Justice, with the whole nine Justices fixing their eyes upon him, he concluded his argument with these memorable words . . . : ‘If your honors . . . shall find a way to uphold the validity of this amendment, the government of the United States, as we have known it, will have ceased to exist.’”
The justices were unconvinced, and somehow the government managed to survive. Root and Guthrie, as well as Butler, would remain opposed to Prohibition. But one month after the Supreme Court defeat, Guthrie was peripherally involved in a lawsuit that concluded much more happily for all involved. His daughter Ella wanted a divorce from Eugene S. Willard, and there remained a final, contentious issue impeding a settlement. It was finally resolved when the parties agreed to divide their supply of legal liquor equally—half to his house in Locust Valley on Long Island, and half to hers on Park Avenue.
THOSE WITH NEITHER means nor storage space resorted to strategies homelier than those available to the wealthy. Within days of the onset of the dry era, portable stills, some with a distilling c
apacity as little as a single gallon, were on sale in cities across the country. That same week illegal liquor began leaking through the border from Canada, much of it into the poor and working-class neighborhoods of eastern and midwestern cities. The long-anticipated arrival of Prohibition—the world had known its starting date for a year—had accommodated establishment of elaborate distribution networks; as the Daily Mail of Fredericton, New Brunswick, reported, even before January 16, “Enough smuggled Canadian stock is said to be hidden in the woods [over the Maine border] to keep authorities busy for over a year.” Before January was out the head of the U.S. Customs Service told Congress that the quantities pouring in from Canada now constituted a flood, and his forces had been able to intercept only “an infinitesimal quantity.” Then a sequence of events in the remote upper Michigan mining town of Iron River established that slaking the thirst of the American working class was not exclusively contingent on Canadian ingenuity.
Of the innumerable headlines that focused the nation’s attention on Iron River in the last week of February 1920, the most dramatic may have been the one in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Stretching across the top of the front page, in two lines of the declarative black capitals generally reserved for wars, presidential elections, and horrible natural disasters, it read ARMED INVASION IS BEGUN TO CRUSH PROHIBITION REBELLION IN MICHIGAN. The unembarrassed use of “rebellion” also featured prominently in the New York Times version, and in Chicago the Tribune took the next and obvious step in its eight-column screamer: WHISKY REBELLION, the paper called the events in Iron River, and added, ARMED FORCE TO DESCEND ON MINING COUNTRY.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 16