Because of the Teapot Dome scandal and various other outrages that brought dishonor to his administration and that for the most part became known only after what Samuel Hopkins Adams called Harding’s “timely death,” there’s much about this least respected of presidents that has been sifted out of his historical image. He began his administration by throwing open the gates of the White House, allowing average citizens to roam the grounds of this highly symbolic piece of public property. He brought black citizens back into federal positions (Woodrow Wilson had all but purged them during his administration), implored Congress to pass an antilynching bill, and forthrightly denounced the Ku Klux Klan. On October 26, 1921, in one of the boldest speeches ever delivered by an American president, he traveled into the heart of the South to tell an enormous crowd in Birmingham, “I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.” Wilson had refused to pardon Eugene V. Debs, who had been imprisoned on a preposterous espionage charge arising from the domestic hysteria that accompanied World War I; Harding pardoned him on Christmas Day of the first year of his presidency, with the probably unprecedented proviso that the recipient of the pardon had to come visit him in the White House.
But there was this persistent thing about Warren Harding, however enlightened (if ineffectual) some of his statements might have been: his inability to make a decision. He told one of his speechwriters, “I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right.” He both smoked and chewed tobacco, and at times would grow so desperate to calm his raging anxiety that he’d grab a cigarette, rip it open, and stuff its contents straight into his mouth. The New Republic said Harding had none of “those moral or intellectual qualities which would qualify him even under ordinary circumstances for statesmanlike leadership.” That was accurate but not really the point. What Harding lacked was the courage of his convictions—which, practically speaking, meant he had no convictions at all.
WAYNE WHEELER HAD two primary responsibilities once the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified: keeping Congress and the president in line. This took vigilance but little heavy lifting. Congress was no problem at all; the ASL had effectively seized control of both House and Senate in the 1916 elections and had only tightened it since. The feckless Harding would have required more attention had he not been so inherently complaisant. Wheeler’s grip on the short leash he allowed Harding was so firm that when he wanted something from the president, Harding would respond with the eagerness of a puppy. When Wheeler objected to the pending Supreme Court appointment of Senator John K. Shields of Tennessee, who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment but against the Volstead Act, Harding capitulated instantly. On one occasion, hoping “to see you briefly concerning some matters of mutual interest,” Wheeler heard back from Harding by return mail: “I need not tell you,” the president wrote, “that I will always try to make it possible to see you when you find occasion to call.” Not that it was always a pleasant prospect for Harding. When Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announced his permissive interpretation of a particular Volstead Act provision, Harding parried Wheeler’s speedy complaint with a doleful response: “Somehow,” Harding wrote, “I had rather expected your letter.”
But Wheeler never complained publicly about anything Harding did; to do so, wrote his ASL colleague Justin Steuart, “might be construed as evidence that he lacked influence with the administration.” If so, that would have been virtually the only such evidence extant. When the president was about to appoint a chief Prohibition enforcement officer, the Harding administration took pains to assure Wheeler that “no one would be appointed for this position who was unacceptable” to the ASL. This was how the nation won the services of Roy A. Haynes of Ohio.
If you can judge a man by his friends, then Haynes could be convicted on the basis of the wild enthusiasm in his behalf displayed by Representative W. D. Upshaw of Georgia, the driest dry in the House. Upshaw had given himself the nickname “Earnest Willie.” Having lost the use of his legs in an accident, he was also billed from time to time as “the orator on crutches” or “the Rolling Chair Evangelist.” Sometimes he was called “the Georgia Cyclone.”* He signed his mail “Yours very dry.” A religious fundamentalist and political naïf, Upshaw was an object of perpetual mirth to wets, who loved to bait him, and of substantial consternation to the ASL, which couldn’t control him. Said one league official, “No one questions Mr. Upshaw’s sincerity, but he is ranting and intemperate.” Indiscriminate, too: Upshaw’s single-minded devotion to the Prohibition cause led him to support both the Ku Klux Klan and woman suffrage, believing that both abetted the dry movement. Even more avidly, he endorsed Roy Haynes’s appointment as Prohibition commissioner. Upshaw applauded Haynes’s “unsullied integrity” and “amazing genius and energy,” and said “the story of [his] victories reads like a revised edition of the Acts of the Apostles, with Scottish Chiefs and the Arabian Nights thrown in.”
Ranting, intemperate, indiscriminate—and, judging by his appraisal of Haynes, Upshaw was also either profoundly disingenuous or just plain stupid. Roy Haynes had three characteristics (“qualifications” would be a gross overstatement) that might have led Wheeler to choose him for the job of supervising a national force of federal agents. He had been editor of a daily newspaper in Hillsboro, Ohio, where Mother Thompson had launched her Crusade back in 1873. He was a Harding crony. And, crucially, he was willing to be the ASL’s hand puppet—or, as the head of the New York State branch of the ASL called him, “Wheeler’s special pet.”
A large, doughy man whose sunny nature was as expansive as his waist and as predictable as the bow tie he wore every day, Haynes was convinced that leading the federal enforcement effort was a swell assignment. He seemed equally convinced that he was good at it. The evidence? In the first full year of Prohibition, he said, church membership in the United States had grown by 1.2 million, and if that wasn’t a sign of the nation’s turn in a moral direction, what was? And how about the wonderful “fact” he cited the following year—that 85 percent of the nation’s drinkers had sworn off the stuff since the dry regime began? This was an assertion so patently at odds with reality that critics found it as humorous as the admonitory fables Haynes liked to cite. Once, warning against the perils of bootleg liquor, he told the story of “a young woman on a Hoboken ferry-boat who took a drink from a flask carried in the pocket of her escort. Almost immediately, she staggered to the stern, plunged into the Hudson and was drowned.” The lesson was clear, Haynes concluded: “Who drinks bootleg drinks with Death.”
This sort of thing gave Haynes a second constituency beyond Wheeler, Upshaw, and other dry consuls—namely, vaudeville comedians who could get a laugh virtually by mentioning his name. These same satirists considered Haynes’s boss, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, less useful, which surely disappointed any dry with a sense of humor. The drys considered Mellon their most influential enemy, the one ranking member of the Harding administration least in sympathy with the ASL’s goals, its methods, and its membership.
Mellon’s Treasury Department housed Haynes’s Prohibition Bureau and his field agents, just as it had always been home to the federal agents in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Frequently described as the second- or third-richest man in the United States after John D. Rockefeller and perhaps Henry Ford, except when he was described as richer than either of them, Mellon was a man of refinement (his collection would become the foundation of the National Gallery of Art) and an austere, even forbidding manner. In addition to the powerful Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, he controlled Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum, a hefty chunk of U.S. Steel, and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. He affected no interest in how he was perceived by the public—Mellon once asked a journalist “just why should the secretary be expected to talk to the reporters?”—except when he had something to hide. About to sue his wife for divorce in 1911, he first arranged to have the tame Pennsylvania legi
slature pass a law allowing the trial to proceed in private, before only a judge—no public, no reporters, not even a jury.
His son referred to Mellon’s “ice-water smile,” but even that chilly facsimile of gaiety rarely appeared in public. Taut and contained, his 145 pounds stretched over a nearly six-foot frame, his white hair and gray mustache offsetting a sharply angular, even cadaverous face, Mellon looked as if he had been carved from chalky stone. And if the personal connection with his flabby, backslapping Prohibition commissioner was hard to discern, the philosophical bond between Mellon and Haynes was nonexistent. In fact, that Andrew W. Mellon was secretary of the treasury to some extent revealed how little Harding and his inner circle must have cared about enforcing the Volstead Act. Mellon drank and didn’t apologize for it. He made no apparent effort to hide his disapproval of the law and the amendment that had spawned it. He loathed the income tax and believed that the best means of supporting what he believed should be very limited government were the sharply regressive excise taxes of the sort that had once been levied on liquor, beer, and wine. He even owned, with his brother Richard, a company that was the pride of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, where the Whiskey Rebellion had begun in 1794: the Old Overholt rye distillery.
Mellon had purchased his original one-third interest in Old Overholt from his friend Henry Clay Frick in 1887 (Frick’s maternal grandfather Abraham Overholt, né Overholtzer, had founded the distillery in 1810). The transaction could only have been an act of sport or love; the $25,000 that Mellon had paid Frick for his shares was small change for the Mellon family. To the drys, though, it was palpable evidence of Mellon’s unfitness for running the federal department responsible for implementing the Volstead Act. When Mellon’s impending appointment first became known, William H. Anderson, the ASL’s New York state superintendent, sent out alarmed notice of his involvement in Old Overholt to hundreds of daily newspapers. Senator Matthew M. Neely of West Virginia said that “a thief will never enforce the law against larceny; a pyromaniac will never enforce the law against arson; a distiller will never enforce the Volstead Act.” But for once even Wheeler was unable to persuade Harding to cleave to the ASL catechism.
ANDREW MELLON CERTAINLY didn’t set out with great enthusiasm to apply the law. Even apart from his personal distaste for Prohibition, he considered the Volstead Act extreme, impractical, and essentially unenforceable. The odd thing was that Roy Haynes, his unlikely lieutenant, didn’t entirely disagree. Yes, the hymns he sang about increased churchgoing and other examples of post-Volstead moral uplift may have been filled with assertions about the decline of drink. But how could he justify keeping a force of twenty-five hundred men in the field if there was no booze to chase down? Nobody may have been drinking it, Haynes seemed to say, but for some reason there was plenty of stuff out there.
The force Haynes commanded was inept and venal. Dry politicians had all but guaranteed this when they exempted enforcement agents from the job protections provided members of the civil service, asserting that it would be all too easy for a wet applicant to pass a civil service examination and then, once hired, subvert the law. Unflinching sympathy with the Volstead Act, drys insisted, was the most important qualification, both for getting an agent’s job and for keeping it. The real sine qua non for any aspiring agent was endorsement by the ASL, which had added to its other assets the ripe fruits of political patronage. In most of the country hiring power effectively belonged to the ASL, in league with its congressional allies. The more upstanding national officers and state superintendents of the ASL may have earnestly desired a skilled national police force that would enforce the law, but earnestness (compounded by naïveté) was easily snuffed out by expedience. The league used enforcement jobs to reward their faithful troops; dry politicians went along to ensure their own incumbency; and together they guaranteed the bureau’s corruption and incompetence.
Some prohibitionists did keep their hands clean. Senator George Norris of Nebraska, whose dryness was a direct extension of his righteously progressive principles, recognized the perils of a politicized appointment process and refused to have anything to do with selecting agents. Andrew Volstead claimed a similar position. But when Attorney General Daugherty (who also happened to be the president’s chief political operative) declared that the civil service was a “hindrance to the government,” as he told Congress in 1922, the signal was unmistakable. In the increasingly corrupt Harding administration, where political exigency was holy writ, the Prohibition Bureau became, as one historian of the civil service would describe it, “a chaos of spoils.”
George Norris’s Senate colleague John W. Harreld of Oklahoma was typical of congressional drys. Harreld openly admitted that his reelection prospects were directly tied to his ability to appoint the enforcement agents in his state, and he acted accordingly. But this was not a moral defect that afflicted only the drys. Many wet members of Congress were just as craven, as they took their all-you-can-eat turns at what the despairing Norris called “the political pie counter.” Drys charged that the very wet representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York presided over appointments in his city, and the all-wet senatorial delegations from saturated New Jersey and soaking Maryland handed out enforcement jobs to the like-minded. An officer of the National Civil Service League suggested that, at least on this issue, wet and dry could come together not as enemies but as coconspirators: “The plain fact is that the congressmen wanted this plunder,” he said.
ASK CONSUMERS OF popular culture who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century what the term “Prohibition agent” connotes, and most will conjure up an image of actor Robert Stack as Special Agent Eliot Ness, from the 118 episodes of The Untouchables that ran on ABC Television between 1959 and 1963.* The real Eliot Ness was named after the novelist George Eliot, had almost nothing to do with the conviction and imprisonment of Al Capone, once ran for mayor of Cleveland (losing by a two-to-one margin), and died a semidrunk in 1957.
Asked the same question, the parents of those who grew up watching The Untouchables would likely recall the real-world New York duo of Isidore Einstein and Moe Smith. As early as 1922 this picaresque pair was so well known that headlines in the Times could refer to the corpulent Einstein and the lumbering Smith solely by their nicknames (“izzy and Moe raid thespian retreat”; “Izzy and Moe Pour Whisky Into sewer”; “sees Izzy and Moe, Bartender Faints”). That Izzy and Moe spent only four years in the Prohibition Bureau before they were fired in 1925 did not obscure their accomplishments or lessen their renown.
Ness, Einstein, and Smith were not the only agents who achieved fame through the popular media. During the 1920s and early ’30s tabloid newspapers in particular amplified the mythmaking by coining dramatic epithets for publicity-friendly members of the Prohibition service. M. T. Gonzaulles became celebrated as “the Lone Wolf of Texas,” William R. Hervey was “the Kokomo Schoolmaster,” and Samuel Kurtzman, working the Canadian border, was “the Plague of the North.” Al “Wallpaper” Wolff, in Chicago, got his nickname from the thoroughness of his raids: “We’d get a warrant, go in and arrest them, call the trucks and move ’em out. We’d move everything but the wallpaper.” Female agents made especially good copy. “Tall and slender” Daisy Simpson was “the Woman with a Hundred Disguises,” who feigned illness outside illegal establishments and busted proprietors when they offered her a restorative sip of brandy.
Less well known, at least until they began showing up in court on the wrong side of the witness dock, were the agents, officers, regional directors, and all the other functionaries low and high who joined the service out of loyalty to something more negotiable than Volsteadian orthodoxy. Some, like “Stewart McMullin”—the name turned out to be as fraudulent as his stated credentials—were simply goons. The first agent to kill a suspected bootlegger in the line of duty, McMullin turned out to have killed another man when he was fourteen, had served one prison term for altering checks and another for armed robbery, and at the time he was
given his badge was still incarcerated at Dannemora State Prison in upstate New York. S. Glenn Young, who as a marauding vigilante in southern Illinois eventually wrote his way onto the front pages with a submachine gun, was a wife beater, a hireling of the Ku Klux Klan, and an uncontrollable bully. In Norfolk, Virginia, agent Layton H. Blood tried to open what he called “a pool room in the nigger part of town,” funded by the ASL and designed to entrap black bootleggers. “By the way,” Blood asked his supervisor in Washington, “does the Treasury Department have any appropriation for fumigating their representatives? You know our colored brethren have a smell all their own [and] I’ll need delousing more than any bird you ever saw.”
But one didn’t need to explore McMullin’s murderous mind, Young’s deep thuggishness, or Blood’s loathsome racism to locate the rotten core of the Prohibition Bureau in its early days. That could be found, as the hallowed phrase would later have it, where the money was. Emory Buckner, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the $1,800 a year paid to Prohibition agents was not a living wage in his jurisdiction, yet “men clamor for the jobs.” It was as if the willingness to accept a meager salary (equivalent to slightly more than $20,000 in 2009) guaranteed you the lucky number in a fabulous sweepstakes. The universal prize: a piece of the millions upon millions of dollars in bribes and blackmail that even a moderately adept agent could extract from the lawbreakers operating within his jurisdiction. New York editor Stanley Walker said most Prohibition agents “were fairly decent fellows, and their demands . . . were never extortionate.” They didn’t need to be; there was enough dirty money for everybody.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 18