A New York Herald reporter, trying to convey to his readers a sense of what had happened in the Bahamas, explained that outbound ships “were loaded after nightfall by negroes to whom a shilling a day once was affluence” but who now consider the “night lost [if it] does not enrich them by $10, $20 and even $50.” The latter figure seems unlikely, but the sudden riches were evident everywhere. According to a dispatch in the Times of London in March 1920, just two months into the Prohibition era, the liquor business had already “transformed the Bahama Government’s financial condition as if by magic from a deficit to a comparatively huge surplus.” A government economic development brochure attributed this to “the conditions supervening in the United States early in 1920.” Translation: the colony’s revenue from its export tax—the small price bootleggers were asked to pay for their use of the Bahamas as a depot—brought Nassauvians into the twentieth century. After the completion of a sewage system, a 2,300-volt diesel generator, a modern wharf some two hundred yards long, a newly dredged harbor, and miles of resurfaced roads and streets, the colony’s British governor, Sir Bede Clifford, said it would be appropriate to erect near the statues of Christopher Columbus and Queen Victoria a third one: a monument to Andrew J. Volstead.
The stone likenesses of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the Grandmother of Europe stood a few blocks apart, in front of confectionery-pink government buildings in downtown Nassau. As for the Patron Saint of the Bahamian Economy, his monument could have been situated roughly halfway between them, in front of the Lucerne Hotel, a white wooden structure set behind an eight-foot wall on Frederick Street. The stolid Volstead would not have felt very comfortable at the Lucerne, but its habitués would have been happy to salute his statue daily. The royal palms in the hotel’s courtyard, its three stories of broad verandas, and the bougainvillea and hibiscus in its gardens (home to a tame pelican named Nebuchadnezzar) provided a congenial marketplace for the principals of the Bahamian bootlegging industry and their clients.
“The men who made the greatest fortunes in Nassau never sailed a ship nor sold to any person in the United States a pint of booze,” a local historian wrote in 1934. These entrepreneurs were largely the agents, importers, and freight forwarders who turned the wheels of the business, abetted by representatives of the Royal Bank of Canada and other respectable financiers. The bankers were ready to extend loans secured by collateral as safe as a U.S. Treasury bond: the next shipment of booze coming into the port. By 1923 Roland Symonette, an ordinary seaman from the island of Eleuthera who had become a Bronfman family partner, had already earned $1 million U.S. from the Bahamian liquor trade.*
The Lucerne was where the financiers and middlemen convened for both business and pleasure, dining and drinking with the men who actually put their hands on the liquor. They were a spicy mix of sea captains, adventurers, and freelance opportunists. The best known among them was Bill McCoy, skipper of a series of twin-masted schooners that conducted an illegal liquor trade for much of the 1920s. According to the American consul in Kingston, Jamaica, McCoy was “the chief liquor smuggler operating from Nassau.” Contrary to the legend fostered by the teetotaling McCoy, the quality of the goods he delivered up and down the Atlantic coast did not give birth to the phrase “the real McCoy,” which dates back to the nineteenth century. However, the quantity he moved—175,000 cases by some estimates—went a long way toward confirming his place in the popular mythology of the time. McCoy possessed many other attributes that lent themselves to mythmaking: he was tall, he was good looking, he was a fine seaman, and he had an excellent ghostwriter.
Although Frederick F. Van de Water published The Real McCoy under his own name, he wrote it in McCoy’s first-person voice, and there’s every reason to believe the book’s description of the people who hung out at the Lucerne: “slit-eyed, hunch-shouldered strangers, with the bluster of Manhattan in their voices and a wary truculence of manner.” The publisher of the Nassau Tribune referred to the bootlegging crowd and the business they conducted as “the orgy of the Lucerne.” But apart from the notorious Bootleggers’ Ball that rocked the hotel for more than thirty-six champagne-spilling, chair-busting, knife-brandishing hours in late July 1921, this was an orgy driven not by carnality but by greed.
Any skipper hanging around the Lucerne and wanting to run liquor up the eastern seaboard had no problem acquiring the goods. The easiest way was to make arrangements with the owners of a vessel like the Dreamland. “Vessel” may not be the right word; a child’s bathtub toy traveled greater distances than the Dreamland. It was a hundred-foot-long barge permanently anchored near North Cat Cay, a dot on the map near Bimini, westernmost of the Bahama Islands, only fifty miles off the Florida coast. The Dreamland had no sails, no engine, no means of propulsion at all, but it did have lights, refrigeration, and extensive storage facilities. In Nassau, finding someone prepared to sell you smuggling-worthy liquor—which is to say, any liquor at all—was no more difficult than finding your way to, say, the Market Street establishment of Gertrude Lythgoe, “Queen of the Bootleggers.” A thirty-five-year-old former stenographer from Bowling Green, Ohio, Lythgoe happened to find bootlegging more rewarding than office work, and life at the Lucerne more stimulating than life in Bowling Green. “She says she is no smuggler,” a Wall Street Journal correspondent told his readers, and consequently she “is not responsible for what happens to the liquor after she sells it.”
The nature of the financial responsibility taken on by the men like McCoy who ran the merchandise up the coast was suggested by two procedural maneuvers they all had to execute. The first required a change in a ship’s legal status. Because any vessel flying the American flag was subject to American law anywhere in the world, a prudent captain sailed under foreign colors. Nassau being British, that meant figuring out a way to sail under the Union Jack. Nassau being Nassau, it wasn’t hard for an American buccaneer to find someone who would buy his vessel, obtain British registry, and then sell it right back to him for the same price, minus a suitable commission for his trouble. Between 1921 and 1922 the net tonnage of vessels registered in the Bahamas increased tenfold.
Changing registry was something you had to do only once; that’s how the swift, twin-masted, 114-foot American fishing schooner Arethusa, which Bill McCoy acquired in Gloucester, Massachusetts, became the swift, twin-masted, 114-foot British rumrunner Tomoka. The other procedural maneuver had to be repeated on each voyage out of Nassau: payment of the export tax that would dredge Nassau harbor, build a water system, and bestow upon the town all those other municipal goodies. The $6 per case export duty, said McCoy, meant that “each time [I] took 5,000 cases of Scotch [out of the harbor], I left $30,000 in the hands of the customs authorities.” Then he’d sail up the Great Whiskey Way to Montauk or Block Island or Nantucket, where he’d earn back the cost of the goods, the duty, the wages and provisions for his crew—and twice as much again.
Until they were beset first by modern pirates and then, in mid-decade, by a greatly enhanced Coast Guard effort, life for the smugglers was remarkably congenial. In August 1921, the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts, reported that a schooner lying off the uninhabited island of Nomans Land, about twenty miles away, was “dispensing refreshment in a truly hospitable manner to all drought-ridden individuals who can sail, row or swim out to the trim-looking fisherman.” The “genial captain”—Bill McCoy, making one of his first press appearances—told the paper to advise its readers, “Come out any time you want to; the law can’t touch us here, and we’ll be very glad to see you.” Near Miami small boats dropped anchor and hung poster-sized price lists over the gunwales no more self-consciously than if they’d been selling potatoes.
Early on, the buyers coming out to the ships were retail customers, people with access to a boat able to traverse the three miles separating the mainland from international waters. Along the south shore of Long Island, in an area known to bootleggers as “the Rendezvous,” a cruise near, say, Fire Island Light was a waterb
orne version of big-city shopping. An officer on the Cask, a four-masted schooner that had been diverted from its prior duty in the timber trade, described how people in motor launches would pull up alongside, inquire after the prices the captain had placed on the ship’s offerings, and then scoot away to do some comparison shopping at the next ship bobbing on the coastal swells. Customers less sensitive to price and more inclined to build a relationship with a single, reliable supplier were every captain’s ideal. “It was like going to a supermarket,” said an officer on a schooner that worked northern waters. “We had a good reputation and lots of customers. They would carry your mail ashore and bring you anything you wanted.” Cruising the New Jersey coast on his own yacht, Robert Wood Johnson II, of the pharmaceutical Johnson & Johnsons, got into the habit of pulling up alongside a rumrunner, buying a bottle or two, and enjoying his evening cocktails at sea.
There were annoyances, of course—like, for instance, extortion. In The Diary of a Rum-Runner, the pseudonymous “Alastair Moray” of the Cask reported that a tariff amounting to a dollar a case had to be paid to “state police, coast guards, etc.” buzzing around the ship’s anchorage off Long Island. The three-mile limit protected bootleggers from American law but did not shield them from the annoying attentions of dishonest American enforcement personnel. Since all the Cask’s customers would have to make it back to shore through well-patrolled American waters, the ship’s crew was compelled either to buy off the authorities or provide them with other rewards. In his log for July 18, 1923, Moray described an encounter with an army lieutenant, a naval commander, and a Coast Guard captain aboard a patrol boat. “The Coast Guard captain was on duty, but the other two were only joy-riding,” he wrote. Moray welcomed them aboard, took them belowdecks, and offered them whiskey. “We all partook, and waxed merry thereon,” he continued. “They stayed about one and a half hours. When they went, I gave them a small souvenir to remind them of their visit. They have elected themselves the ship’s godfathers, and might prove very useful.”
OF PROHIBITION’S MANIFOLD gifts to American posterity, few were of greater value than its enrichment of the language. The Dictionary of American Slang, published in 1960, listed more colloquial synonyms for “drunk” than for any other word; most of them originated in the 1920s. “He was taken for a ride” was the Chicago-bred euphemism for what mobsters did when they dumped the body of a troublesome competitor or an errant confederate in a distant suburb. The “Maryland Free State” was an epithet that arose not from the liberty-loving ardor of colonial forebears, nor from Maryland’s loyalty to the Union during the Civil War, but from the typewriter of Hamilton Owens, editor of the Baltimore Sun, in a salute to the legislature when it declined to pass a state enforcement act in 1923. “Powder room” was coined to denote the minimal bathroom facilities for women hastily installed in formerly all-male saloons once they had become universally accommodating speakeasies. A dry Massachusetts banker named Delcevere King wanted to find an opprobrious word to describe imbibers who openly violated the Eighteenth Amendment. Publicized in the pages of the Boston Herald, the contest King sponsored drew more than twenty-five thousand entries. Thus did the English language acquire “scofflaw,” winner of first prize and two hundred dollars.
Oddly, the most ubiquitous term to materialize from the long decades of temperance agitation and the subsequent reign of the Volstead Act is one that fell into disuse, at least in its most popular sense, virtually the minute Prohibition came to an end: rum. “Used generically as a hostile name for intoxicating liquors,” says the Oxford English Dictionary, it first popped up in Canada in 1800 and migrated south by the 1850s. By the time it had been captured by the stump speakers and pulpit pounders of the early twentieth century, it had become a common signifier for the loathed item itself, and an all-purpose modifier for everything associated with it: the “rum demon” sold by “rum barons” who ruled a “rum traffic” conducted by “rumrunners.” The OED misses the term’s ironic capture by drinkers, who had no problem calling an illegal drinking place a “rum hole” and a nose reddened by overindulgence a “rum blossom.”
“Rum Row,” though, belonged to everyone—brief, alliterative, and perfectly descriptive of the remarkable phenomenon that evolved out of those early, sunny days of coastal bootlegging. Inevitably, demand grew so great and prices so high that the freelancers were elbowed aside by industrial-scale operators. By 1923, from the Gulf of Maine to the tip of Florida, an enormous fleet of old freighters, tramp steamers, converted submarine chasers, and ships of various other descriptions—“anything with a bottom that could float and a hold that could be filled with booze,” McCoy said—lay at permanent anchor just outside the three-mile limit. No more loitering off New Bedford for McCoy and his competition; the rumrunners now sailed up the coast from Nassau, off-loaded their goods onto the Rum Row ships, and raced back south to pick up another shipment. The vessels on the Row remained immobile for months at a time, functioning as floating warehouses for a second network of seafarers operating locally.
The liquor from these “mother ships,” as the Rum Row depositories were called, found its way to shore much as Canadian liquor made it across the Detroit River from Windsor. Small boats of every imaginable description would dash out to the Row, usually under cover of night, load up, then hurry back to shore. On foggy evenings the smugglers would get their bearings by transmitting international code to a U.S. Navy radio direction-finder station, whose operators had no way of knowing who was doing the signaling. On nights they weren’t taking advantage of services provided by the government’s nautical representatives, the rumrunners sought to abuse them: when a Coast Guard vessel was in the vicinity, the miscreants would send out a distress call to draw the Guard boat to a false alarm miles away.
A telltale dark patch on its port side indicated that a boat had probably spent some time bobbing up against a rum ship, but there was no shame in this. For a coastal fisherman in the Northeast, whiskey was a more valuable catch than cod. “You knew right away when a man stopped fishing and started running rum,” a Massachusetts woman recalled many years later. “In the first place, his family began to eat proper.” In Florida, boatyard operators loyal to the fishermen/bootleggers on whom they depended refused to make wharfside space available to the Coast Guard and declined to repair their vessels. At the northern end of the Row in Maine, Canadian fishermen got into the game as well. A New Brunswick newspaper did not disguise the trade’s appeal: “It beats carrying sardines.”
Local boatmen who knew every cove and bay had no trouble finding places to land their bounty; the names of the most popular drop-off spots in the area of Brunswick, Maine—Halfway Rock, Gun Point—suggest the furtiveness of their activity. In resort areas from fall through spring, smugglers would commandeer the docks of summer houses shuttered for the season. If an inshore runner happened to encounter law enforcement officials waiting for him to pull ashore, he’d toss his cargo overboard in a relatively shallow inlet. This was a nuisance, not a loss. Having first packed the liquor in “hams”—six-bottle burlap bags weighted down with salt for instances like this—the smuggler could return a few days later, after the salt had dissolved, to find his investment bobbing safely on the surface.
With minor local variations this routine was repeated the entire length of the Atlantic coast, as men and women in seaside communities boosted their earning power and the economic health of their communities by collaborating with the large-scale entrepreneurs of Rum Row. “Hundreds of such men” were operating out of every one of the “liquor ports,” noted the New York Times. This was especially true near the enormous New York market, where the greatest concentration of mother ships took up positions in a line running westward from Montauk to the Rockaways and south to Cape May. This traffic, said William E. Reynolds, commandant of the Coast Guard, “was entirely unprecedented in the history of the country.” Just before Christmas in 1924, the Times reported, a flotilla of eighteen steamers stood at anchor southeast of Asbury
Park, New Jersey, “loaded deep with cargoes worth millions.” Other substantial fleets established permanent residence on the seas near Boston, Norfolk, and Savannah. Vancouver-based bootleggers set up similar operations offshore from major West Coast ports, and a tendril of the original Rum Row reached from the Keys along the Gulf Coast, with thicker nodes near Tampa, Mobile, Galveston, and New Orleans. In many places nightfall unveiled a constellation of ship’s lights so dense, recalled a captain who serviced vessels anchored off Highland Light on Cape Cod, “you would think it was a city out there.”
In daylight an innocent beachgoer might have perceived it differently: the long line of hulking ships and the smaller boats flitting among them looked like a fleet preparing to launch an invasion. The less innocent (which is to say virtually anyone who lived within a day’s drive of the coast) knew better. This wasn’t an invasion, but a sort of inverse blockade, an unsiege: the boats were there not to deny Americans something they needed but to provide them with something they wanted.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 22