So evident was the corruption that saturated the Prohibition force from the very beginning that President Harding was moved to say, “There are conditions relating to [the Volstead Act’s] enforcement which savor of nation-wide scandal. It is the most demoralizing factor in our public life.” Coming from Warren G. Harding, this was saying quite a lot.
IT’S UNCLEAR WHETHER Mabel Willebrandt, assistant attorney general of the United States from 1921 to 1929, began the practice of starting her day with an ice-cold bath before or after she left her husband. That happened in 1916, around the time she determined that unhappy marriages resulted from “letting the whole relationship just drop to a dead level of bodily contact.” Though she was not without suitors, including one wealthy man known as “the Alaskan Reindeer King” and another who built Hollywood’s glamorous Chateau Marmont, Willebrandt never married again. But after she became, without question, the most powerful woman in the nation, Willebrandt did adopt a two-year-old girl. The child learned to endure the daily ritual in the icy bathtub in Willebrandt’s home in the Columbia Heights section of Washington, D.C., just as she learned to sleep outdoors, protected only by a tent, even in the Washington wintertime. “Life has few petted darlings,” Willebrandt said, and as her biographer, Dorothy M. Brown, wrote, her daughter “would not be one of them.”
Of course not. Mabel Willebrandt, aka “the Prohibition Portia,” possessor (said the New York Times) of “one of the keenest legal minds in the United States,” did not achieve her eminence by being soft. Born in a sod hut on the lonely plains of southwestern Kansas, she eventually found her way in the early part of the twentieth century to Southern California. When she applied for a position as a schoolteacher in South Pasadena, she reported that she’d studied “trigonometry, physics, chemistry, Greek, rhetoric, elocution, public speaking, European history, ethics, sociology, political science, physical science, physical culture, commercial law, commercial geography, freehand drawing, domestic science, household economy, clay modeling, and gymnastics.” The courses she was qualified to teach included “English language, grammar, American history, modern history, civics, geography, arithmetic, and nature study.” If needed, she indicated, she also stood ready to teach “algebra, geometry, botany, zoology, biology, physiology, physiography, Latin, English literature, English composition, pedagogy, penmanship, and public school music.” And baseball.
Is it a surprise that barely ten years later, this protean individual attained the highest position any woman had yet reached in the federal government, and that she did it before her thirty-third birthday? Not to anyone who would watch Willebrandt inscribe her name across the history of the 1920s. “Who is the outstanding woman in American political life today, among those holding appointive positions?” Better Homes and Gardens wondered in 1928. “I have asked dozens of women all over the country,” the writer said. “Dozens of men, too, for that matter! And the answer in every case has been the same . . . Mabel Walker Willebrandt.”
Mabel Walker Willebrandt? Eight decades later it’s a name that’s utterly obscure. But Willebrandt was as well known in her time as Wayne Wheeler, and if she was just as quickly forgotten, it wasn’t because she hadn’t left her mark. Had the Better Homes and Gardens question used “most important” or “most influential” instead of “outstanding,” the dozens who offered Willebrandt’s name could as easily have been thousands. For eight years under Warren G. Harding and his two immediate successors, Willebrandt served as the assistant attorney general responsible for Prohibition enforcement policy, for the prosecution of Volstead Act violations, and for the defense of the act before the Supreme Court. If the government’s battle on booze had a face, it was Mabel Willebrandt’s—“the delightful luncheon companion,” said the Atlanta Constitution, “who neither paints, powders, nor uses lipstick.”
Willebrandt said she hated “that girly-girly stuff”—the strongly scented garlands of prose inevitably draped on the few women in public office during the 1920s. The Constitution commented on her blue eyes, while the New York Times described them as “wide, earnest, truthful [and] brown.” Frances Parkinson Keyes, on the brink of her long career as a popular novelist, said Willebrandt’s “invariable costume during the day is a strictly tailored suit, worn with a simple and immaculate blouse.” But Keyes hastened to point out that at home, Willebrandt favored “dainty and exquisite dresses . . . with a flower at waist or shoulder.” For readers of the era’s women’s magazines, that was a much more appealing image than any strictly tailored suit.
Unlike Wheeler, who devoted his life to a single issue and spent what little leisure time he allowed himself among a tightly circumscribed set of associates, Mabel Willebrandt got around. Her closest female friend may have been Andrew Volstead’s daughter Laura, but she had unlikelier pals as well, among them the record-breaking aviator Jackie Cochran, and the man who “will do most anything for me,” motion picture baron Louis B. Mayer. But her tilt toward Hollywood shouldn’t suggest that Willebrandt had turned frivolous. She especially enjoyed dinner parties at the home of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, she wrote, because at the Brandeis table, “the conversation is guided into stimulating excursions of research. The guest partakes of the eager enjoyment of pursuing truth at intellectual frontiers.” Willebrandt was instrumental in launching the career of a young lawyer named John J. Sirica, who would confirm her faith in him half a century later as the presiding judge in the Watergate trials. Her most notable friend might have been the fellow she urged Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone to name as director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of investigation in 1924—Laura Volstead’s old law school classmate, twenty-nine-year-old J. Edgar hoover.*
Mabel Willebrandt did not win her position in the Harding subcabinet through passionate commitment to the Eighteenth Amendment. In fact she hadn’t particularly supported its passage. She openly acknowledged she’d been a social drinker before 1920, when she was still working as a public defender representing women dragged into Los Angeles police court. (She had indeed won that teaching job in South Pasadena, but all those academic skills were deployed only to keep her afloat financially while she completed night law school at the University of Southern California.) Her police court clients were a collection of prostitutes and drunks who might have offended Willebrandt’s lingering Victorian sensibilities had they not excited her blossoming progressive impulses. Senator Hiram Johnson, the shining knight of California’s dry progressives, heard about Willebrandt from one of her law school professors. This was around the time that the new Harding administration, nodding in the direction of recently enfranchised women, began casting about for a symbolic appointee. Johnson, who especially liked the fact that Los Angeles conservatives deprecated Willebrandt’s progressive fervor, sponsored her ascension.
When Willebrandt took her oath of office in 1921, one might have gauged the depth of the Harding administration’s commitment to the Eighteenth Amendment by examining the bona fides of the men alongside whom she was expected to lead the war on liquor: a secretary of the treasury (Andrew Mellon) who loathed Prohibition, an attorney general (Harry Daugherty) who flouted it regularly, and a Prohibition commissioner (Roy Haynes) who was a punch line. For chief prosecutor of Volstead violators, a thirty-two-year-old woman only five years out of law school probably seemed just right.
What happened next, of course, was something devotees of dime novels, fairy tales, or other ritualized clichés could have predicted: she became a terror. The division of authority spelled out in the Volstead Act was based on longstanding protocols arising from the enforcement of the tax code. The treasury secretary, through the director of Prohibition, was responsible for a field force of agents who uncovered violations of the law; they, in turn, handed the offenders over to the Justice Department—to Willebrandt and the U.S. attorneys in every federal judicial district—for trial. The nicest thing she had to say about the risible Haynes was that he was “a politician in sheep’s clothing.” She felt those Hard
ing appointees who actually believed in the idea of a dry America were no better. They comprised “a regime of preachers,” she said. “Many of them are well-meaning, sentimental and dry, but they can’t catch crooks.”
Then there were the Prohibition department’s own home-grown crooks, the grafters, extortionists, and thieves in the agent force who would lead Willebrandt to say, “I refuse to believe that out of our one hundred and twenty million population . . . it is impossible to find four thousand men in the United States who can not be bought.” And she said that after eight years of trying.
THE BATTALION OF moralizers and malefactors that Roy Haynes led and Mabel Willebrandt suffered did not bear the burden of policing Prohibition violations alone. The peculiar second clause of the Eighteenth Amendment, assigning “concurrent” enforcement power to the federal government and to the states, mandated (or at least encouraged) armies of cops across the nation to stand shoulder to shoulder in the booze wars. The relative strength of the Anti-Saloon League in various parts of the country could be measured by the proliferation of state laws designed to be “concurrent” with the federal strictures. Anyone arrested for insobriety in Vermont was subject to a mandatory jail sentence if he failed to name the person from whom he acquired his liquor. At one point Indiana vested train conductors and bus drivers with the authority to arrest passengers carrying alcohol and made it illegal for retailers to put flasks or cocktail shakers in their shop windows. Mississippi decreed debts related to the acquisition of intoxicating beverages uncollectible. Iowa banned the sale of Sterno, from which alcohol could be extracted by filtering it through a rag or, among drunks with better table manners, through a loaf of bread.
Yet some local police departments that wanted to make meaningful attempts to enforce Prohibition found temptation too tasty to resist. In Indiana this did not take long: in a series of missives that became known as the “Dear Jerry Letters” after they were leaked to a newspaper in 1921, the newly installed federal Prohibition director for the region instructed Indianapolis police chief Jeremiah Kinney to distribute any confiscated liquor to the director’s associates. In Chicago a brief spasm of serious enforcement efforts collapsed shortly after the revelation—by the city’s mayor, no less—that an estimated 60 percent of the city’s police force was in the liquor business.
When Mabel Willebrandt charged that these nonfederal policing efforts were beset by “sleeping sickness,” she may have been referring to the states’ stuporous response to funding requirements. Only eighteen states bothered to appropriate as much as a dollar for enforcement. In some jurisdictions this reflected a distaste for the whole business; New York repealed its state enforcement code in 1923, and Maryland never even bothered to enact one. An ASL publication solemnly declared, “Any state that fails to . . . pass enforcement legislation [should] become a ward of the nation, and be considered one of the backward states in loyalty to the Union.” New Yorkers and Marylanders seemed to bear the obloquy without much pain.
Some of the demurring legislatures that chose not to support the enforcement effort were not necessarily motivated by wet sentiment. Even where ASL-backed officials were in the majority, dry passions were usually not as intense as the tightfistedness that shaped the era’s fiscal policies. In a decade that witnessed the overnight evaporation of alcohol-derived excise taxes; suffered a drastic plummeting of income tax rates following the end of World War I; and endured the prevailing government parsimony that hovered like a scowl over the administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—in such a time, legislatures did not appropriate public funds eagerly.
In some states, notably Pennsylvania, the disconnect between the laws and the means to enforce them approached the surreal. The state’s dominant Republican Party was divided into an archconservative (and hence largely wet) faction controlled by the wellborn, wealthy, and imperious senator Boies Penrose, and a progressive (and thus mainly dry) bloc led by the wellborn, wealthy, and crusading Gifford Pinchot. Penrose, in state politics a confederate of Andrew Mellon, led a powerful political machine built on a dazzling use of patronage and a belief that government was a weapon to be wielded in the interests of the moneyed classes. (He once said, “I’d rather dictate to damned fools than serve them.”) Pinchot, a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s inner circle who had first attained prominence as the conservation-minded director of the U.S. Forest Service, was a progressive who believed government was an implement designed to improve the lot of the people, whether or not they wanted their lot improved.
When Penrose died in 1922, Pinchot took advantage of disarray within the state party to win the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Elected in November, he pledged to bar liquor from the governor’s mansion (itself a startling proposal), to appoint only those judges who swore fealty to the Eighteenth Amendment, and to lead “the first honest-to-God attempt made in this state” to bring Pennsylvania into line with the Volstead Act. Pinchot detested Andrew Mellon and, according to one Mellon family biographer, gave credence to preposterous rumors that the Mellon-controlled Gulf Oil Company had been importing liquor in oil drums and parceling it out from roadside gas stations.
Pennsylvania’s first federal Prohibition director, a former state senator named William C. McConnell, was a soldier in the Penrose army who after less than a year in office was implicated along with forty-six associates, including sixteen enforcement agents on his staff, in a four-million-dollar corruption scheme. Pinchot could not have been pleased when the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting McConnell was fired, or when all the evidence in the case miraculously disappeared. He may not have been surprised, either. “Politics first, law enforcement second, has been the order,” Pinchot said of the Penrose hegemony. McConnell had done what was “expected and intended by the power to which his appointment was due.”
Pinchot expected and intended something altogether different. Confident, efficient, blessed with the mien and manner of a noble warrior—historian Patricia O’Toole wrote that his face “had features so fine he could have modeled for coinage”—Pinchot did not pause before beginning his “honest-to-God” effort to dry up Pennsylvania. In his first month in office he turned the state police into a commando army. A single week saw raids on illegal liquor operations in eighteen counties. Reminding Republican legislators that he was now head of the party, that he had led them to victory at the top of the ticket in November, and that they had pledged their support to his legislative program, Pinchot got all the laws he wanted. Swollen with the pride of a triumphalist, gleaming with the righteousness of a reformer, Pinchot announced that he had achieved his legislative success without making a single promise in exchange for a vote. “This is an unbought victory,” he proclaimed, “and ten times as valuable on that account.”
Unbought, perhaps, but unfunded as well. After Pinchot’s glorious moment had passed, the legislators who had gone along with his program stiffened. It was one thing for the Pennsylvania legislature—any legislature, really—to give militant drys the laws they wanted, but quite another to provide the funds necessary for their enforcement. As a result, the legislators decided that the total appropriation for Pinchot’s ambitious program should amount to precisely . . . zero.
FOR THE DRYS, it never got that bad on the federal level. But Wayne Wheeler, familiar as he was with every hillock and valley on the political landscape, had early on recognized the prevailing resistance to government spending. In 1920 Wheeler told Morris Sheppard that five million dollars would be a sufficient appropriation for all federal enforcement of Prohibition (by way of comparison, the sum wouldn’t even have covered the payroll of Columbia University that year). It is difficult to believe that Wheeler truly thought you could patrol a nation so vast, with its borders so porous and its angry wets so thirsty, on such a minuscule budget. It is not difficult to believe that he knew it was a fool’s errand to risk defeat by demanding sizable appropriations from a Congress dominated by cheeseparers. A Republican Congress in the 1920s w
as more likely to sing a few choruses of the “Internationale” than issue large checks for government activities. Roy Haynes tried to pry some money loose by boasting that the sum of fines, assessments, and taxes collected from Volstead violators was substantially greater than the government’s enforcement expenditures, but Congress ignored the hint and chose not to invest any further even in so profitable a venture.
Consequently, in the first several years of Prohibition, the drys got only as much enforcement as they were willing to pay for. The staff of Roy Haynes’s Prohibition Department initially consisted of only 1,500 ill-trained field agents and 1,500 office personnel tucked into the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The other main component of the federal enforcement effort was the Coast Guard. If Haynes’s 1,500 field agents seemed a thin detachment to spread across the entire country, consider the armada charged with patrolling the nation’s 4,993 miles of coastline: in 1920 the entire Coast Guard fleet consisted of twenty-six inshore vessels, some converted tugboats, and twenty-nine cruising cutters, one of which was based in Evansville, Indiana. Congress did not hand any meaningful additional appropriations to the Coast Guard from the time the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified until 1925, five years into its teetering reign.
Underfunded, ill-staffed, overseen by the indifferent Mellon and the incompetent Haynes, the federal enforcement effort was orphaned by the Harding administration. Dauntless Mabel Willebrandt—the only high-ranking government official who seemed to believe that federal laws were meant to be enforced—did her best. Federal district judges frustrated by overcrowded courts and underenthusiastic prosecutors were adopted as her pen pals and pelted with pep talks. U.S. attorneys who did not commit wholeheartedly to pursuing lawbreakers found themselves threatened with dismissal. She also decided to use other parts of the federal code—tax laws, tariff laws—to broaden her authority beyond the limits of the Volstead Act, which she dismissed as “puny” and “toothless.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 19