IN 1922 BILL MCCOY put a northern exclamation mark on his claim that he’d invented Rum Row when he sailed into port on the North Atlantic island of St. Pierre. McCoy knew at least two things about this unlikely place: its harbor remained ice-free in winter, and its business was conducted under the flag of France. For a rumrunner, these were auspicious qualities. For the rest of the world, Damon Runyon provided a more measured appraisal. “Now if you are never in St. Pierre,” he wrote in the unmistakable syntax of the guys, dolls, and other suspects who sidle through his stories, “I wish to say you miss nothing much, because what is it but a little squirt of a burg sort of huddled up alongside some big rocks off Newfoundland, and very hard to get to, any way you go.”
The French were the first Europeans to get there, stumbling across St. Pierre and the adjacent island of Miquelon in 1536. The British booted them out in 1713, and for the next century control of these scraggy, barren outposts bounced back and forth between Paris and London. After the French took permanent possession in 1815, St. Pierre became a depot for the French fishing fleet and eventual home to six thousand souls trying to pull their livelihoods out of the cold ocean fifteen miles south of Newfoundland. The larger Miquelon was more thickly populated, but only if you were counting the purple sandpipers, snowy egrets, and Atlantic puffins that were its primary residents.
But then the Eighteenth Amendment came along and the eastern seaboard developed a thirst. When the Bahamian government raised its import duties, Bill McCoy led a stream of rumrunners who shifted at least part of their business north from the Caribbean. On July 8, 1922, just months after McCoy’s first visit, the Sable Island sailed into the harbor, 12,000 cases of whiskey in its hold. Within weeks the St. Pierrais economy was transformed. In mild weather teams of oxen dragged the bounteous cargo away from the docks to be stored in basements and toolsheds; when the snows arrived horse-drawn sleighs did the toting. “The modest docks of St. Pierre’s toy harbour were buried in an avalanche of freight, pungent with the smell of superior liquor,” wrote the Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman. “The odor grew so strong that at times the fog that rolled up St. Pierre’s steeply inclined streets with the nightly tides would carry a distinct Scotch flavour.”
Bill McCoy always considered his opening of the St. Pierre rum-running business a gift to the local population, who could now sustain themselves on a commodity more valuable than fish (and easier to land, too). As the growth of the business accelerated, the island’s fishermen abandoned their nets and became longshoremen, except for those who climbed aboard the whiskey fleet. More than a thousand vessels departed the tiny port for Rum Row in 1923 alone. Every basement, barn, and shed was turned into a stockroom. The six million bottles that passed through that year worked out to a thousand bottles for every man, woman, and child on the island. Although the island’s four-cents-per-bottle tax was less than one-tenth of the Bahamian levy, customs income ran to three times St. Pierre’s annual operating budget.
The bon temps rolled during what became known in later years as le temps de la fraude. New offices for importers and négociants replaced the fish processing operations on the street facing the dock. To make room for the vast quantity of bottles and cases overflowing from every roofed structure on the island, fish were evicted from St. Pierre’s refrigeration plant, which was converted into a liquor warehouse. The grand—for St. Pierre—L’Hotel Robert opened for business, its guest rooms occupied by English-speaking men sporting double-breasted overcoats, broad-brimmed fedoras, and fat billfolds. The Robert’s three-story facade was topped by an ornate wooden cornice, which was itself an exciting phenomenon on treeless St. Pierre. But wood soon became a common building material, as residents ripped up shipping cases to make shingles for their roofs, sills for their windows, and walls for their sheds. One especially resourceful islander built a brand-new home out of a matched suite of Scotch cases. The stenciled logo of a ship, repeated on each of the panels that lined the house’s walls, gave the place its name: Villa Cutty Sark.
In addition to the Scotch coming in from Glasgow, there was Irish whiskey ferried across the ocean by Norwegian steamers and so much bubbly sailing in from Le Havre that newspaper poets began to link St. Pierre with Nassau: the “Isle of Champagne” and the “Isle of Rum.” But the most valuable of the goods—or, better, the goods that made St. Pierre so valuable—was the variety represented in the hold of the Sable Island: all 12,000 of those cases were Canadian Club. To the Canadian distilling industry, St. Pierre might as well have been known as the Isle of Gold.
For all the factors that made St. Pierre so attractive—the ice-free harbor, the low import duties, the willing Catholic population—none was as important to the Canadians as its status as part of metropolitan France. Under Canadian law no duty was owed on liquor manufactured for export; shippers were required to post a tax bond as their goods left Canada, but would have the bond redeemed on the presentation of landing certificates from a foreign port. St. Pierre lay just fifteen miles off Canadian shores, but for duty purposes it was as foreign as the Congo. No longer did Canadian distillers have to supply their agents in Havana and other distant ports with the wads of cash required by local officials before they would stamp fake landing certificates. No longer did they have to use middlemen to transfer their goods to the rumrunners sailing toward Boston and New York. Vessels hailing from Halifax and other Canadian ports could chug into St. Pierre’s harbor and get legal stamps on the landing certificates required to release their tax deposits from bond. Soon a gilt-lettered sign reading “Northern Export Co.” went up on the stone facade of a building across from the St. Pierre dock—the local branch of the growing Bronfman empire. In any given week the Bronfman inventory stashed on St. Pierre was valued at more than $1 million. One of the rum-running ships working the waters between Halifax and St. Pierre might have been named in honor of the Bronfman success: the Mazel Tov.
In time, warehousing the goods became unnecessary. The St. Pierrais government decided to certify landing upon a ship’s arrival in port; duty paid, it could turn around and steam straight for Rum Row, neither crew nor cargo ever touching St. Pierre soil. The sea lanes stretching from St. Pierre to Cape Cod to Long Island became so thick with shippers, hijackers, and Coast Guard patrols that the rumrunners had to devise secure communications systems. Some depended on verbal codes (“chien oiseau” meant “200 cases arrived and landed”), some were numerical (“02716–22699” denoted “boat in trouble”). Many issued lead-covered codebooks that could be tossed safely—that is, irretrievably—into the sea if the ship was boarded by hostile parties. The Bronfman operatives, as always more sophisticated than the competition, relied on codes broadcast over a private radio station they had established expressly for this purpose.
Sometimes, though, the business required very little artifice. One could always proceed in the fashion favored by National Distilleries Limited of Montreal, which sent the following letter to a St. Pierre–based agent: “Dear Sir,” it began, “The bearer, Captain Tremblay, is going to go on the Columbia acting as Pilot and Navigator.” If Rum Row had had a chamber of commerce, it might have used the letter’s concluding sentence as its motto: “His duties are to bring the vessel to a position known to him.”
“RUM RUNNING IS DOOMED,” Roy Haynes declared in the summer of 1923, “and, unless I mistake the clear indications, the day of its doom is near.” Assuming that they did not know that Haynes was wrong about virtually everything, the editors of the Glasgow Evening News would have been surprised by his comment. Just weeks before, the News had described the parade of liquor ships departing the mouth of the Clyde, bound west by southwest across the North Atlantic to the coast of the United States and a rendezvous at the Rendezvous.
Of course, the Scotch whiskey industry was not entirely responsible for the rapid industrialization of Rum Row. The French had a hand in it, and so did the Hamburg-based distillery that conflated two famous brands in a counterfeit Scotch they marketed as “Black & Whi
te Horse Whisky.” American mobsters had also taken a substantial position in the business. “To cut costs and increase efficiency, we chartered our own ships to bring the Scotch across the Atlantic,” Meyer Lansky told an interviewer half a century later. “. . . By the middle twenties we were running the most efficient international shipping business in the world.” But Lansky also noted that the mob’s interest in greater efficiency had not been unprovoked: “Those fine upright men in Britain kept squeezing us for higher prices.”
The “fine upright men” were the lords of the Scotch whiskey industry, operating their “scheduled area” racket. In 1919, when the United States was turning dry, British distillers were turning peckish. World War I had been rough on them, not only restricting foreign trade but pinching their domestic markets as well. During the war the prime minister—David Lloyd George, who’d famously said that drink was a greater enemy to the United Kingdom than the Germans—hit the industry with new excise levies, redoubling taxes he had already doubled during the war. British temperance advocates, inspired by the American example, appeared to be gaining ground.
One of the whiskey lords who turned his attention to the growing threat was Lord Dewar of Homestall. Tommy Dewar had made his family’s White Label brand an international success, for three decades traveling the world to promote Scotch generally, Dewar’s specifically, and with particular delight a philosophy of living that became known as “Dewarism.” This was a fundamentally hedonist code expressed in upward of 150 aphorisms tinted by Dewar’s sybaritic enthusiasms (“Of two evils, choose the more interesting”) and his Conservative politics (“If we are here to help others, I often wonder what the others are here for”).
But Dewar also invoked more solemn principles of modern business. “Yesterday’s success belongs to yesterday” was a famous example, and never had it applied more than in 1920, as Dewar and his colleagues faced what the Scotch Whisky Association in its annual report called “the prohibition virus.” Dewar railed against the threat posed by British drys, and William H. Ross of the powerful Distillers Company Limited was alarmed as well. “The fact that America has, through a cleverly contrived plot, suddenly voted herself ‘dry,’ ” said Ross, “has been hailed by the extremists of this country as an indication that people here will follow suit.” In a word, the distillers were on the brink of panic.
As it developed, Prohibition wasn’t much of a problem for the Scotch lords. British temperance activists won little public sympathy. Additionally, the nation’s crushing war debt obliged Lloyd George’s government to promote exports, and few British products were as promotable as the millions of gallons of whiskey aging in casks from Speyside to Islay. Nor was there a potential market larger than the millions of Americans, pining for liquor, who were conveniently situated between those tariff-free outposts of empire, Canada and the Bahamas. The American thirst was so great, said the London Evening Standard, that all the decent liquor was “lodged (not too securely) in the cellars of millionaires,” who were compelled to defend their stock “by force of arms.” This wasn’t remotely accurate, but for a Scotch distiller looking to the export trade, it couldn’t help but warm the blood.
If ever there was a seller’s market, this was it. Any faint resistance to exploiting American Prohibition was swept away when the cupidity of the distillers was catalyzed by a combination of imperial pride and the British commitment to freedom of the seas. Sir Auckland Geddes, ambassador to Washington, employed diplomatic understatement when he informed George Curzon, the foreign secretary, that “the enactment of Prohibition has inflicted hardship on the Trade.” British sensitivities were not mollified when William Jennings Bryan threatened invasion of Bimini if the UK continued to tolerate its use as “the base of a conspiracy against the Prohibition law.” As an increasingly marginalized figure in a minority party, Bryan had no authority to act on his threats, but he was a former secretary of state, and his words were widely reported in the London press.
To the British foreign office eventually fell the responsibility of conducting an arduous negotiation with the American State Department regarding the three-mile limit, which had been universally recognized as the demarcation line between national and international waters since the eighteenth century. The Americans wanted to push the line outward, hoping to strain the resources of inshore smugglers who would have to traverse many more than six miles of open seas on a round-trip. To another branch of the British government, the Colonial Office, fell the responsibility of fielding American demands that the British crack down on the bootlegging business that was growing exponentially in the Caribbean colonies. The U.S. consul in Nassau sent his superiors in the State Department a local newspaper’s summary of the Colonial Office response to American pleadings: “We are doing our best for you but cannot be expected to infringe on the prerogatives of our own people to help you enforce one of your fool laws.”
At the same time, U.S. secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes had been under great pressure to forbid all foreign ships, even passenger liners, from carrying liquor inside American coastal waters. The primary advocate of this position was the Justice Department, in the formidable person of Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who seemed to relish a fight like this one. Having sharpened her saber during her assaults on Andrew Mellon’s inconstant devotion to the Volstead Act, she now turned her attention to Hughes, accusing the State Department of failing to enforce the Constitution and electing instead “to ‘give aid and comfort’ to the British Embassy.”
The possibility that champagne and whiskey might be stripped from the pantries of their liners brought the British to the negotiating table, and Lord Curzon eventually acceded to an extension of the three-mile limit. The new treaty established that a nation’s coastal waters began at “an hour’s steaming distance” from the shore—as later interpreted by American authorities, twelve nautical miles. Curzon wasn’t happy about the compromise but considered this change in long-established international law a necessary acknowledgment of the prevailing political reality in the United States—a reality that he described as “Puritanism run mad.”
Curzon’s counterpart in the Colonial Office made no concessions at all. Winston Churchill believed that “a State is only responsible for the enforcement of its own laws,” and had no obligation to implement the laws of another nation. He flatly refused to use British influence, authority, or power to interfere in any way with the liquor trade of the Bahamas or any other British colony in the Caribbean. Several years later, summing up his view of the Eighteenth Amendment, Churchill landed on a phrase that went beyond Curzon’s sputtering invocation of Puritanism. Prohibition, Churchill said, was “an affront to the whole history of mankind.”
THE British ROLE in the Prohibition era did not end with the signing of the twelve-mile-limit treaty. The final chapter wouldn’t be written until after the lords of the Scotch industry had established a schedule of price controls, credit requirements, and other rules regulating access to Rum Row; after they had successfully opened an alternative depot on St. Pierre, nearer the population centers of the Northeast; and after they had forged their phenomenally profitable joint venture with Sam Bronfman.
After all that, the enduring epitaph for the British role in the bootlegging business was uttered by Sir Alexander Walker, heir to the firm that had been founded in Ayrshire a century before by his grandfather Johnnie. Summoned before a Royal Commission on Licensing in 1930, Walker was asked if the distillery industry could have stopped the export of liquor to the United States.
“Certainly not,” Walker replied.
The examiner pressed. “You could not?”
Said Walker, “We would not if we could.”
* Like the Bronfmans, Symonette later learned how to erase the stain of bootlegging from his fortune. After four decades spent channeling his earnings into real estate, shipbuilding, construction, and other more conventional industries, Symonette’s success was memorialized by two distinct honors. First, in 1964 he became the premier
of the newly self-governing Bahamas. But he won yet more appropriate recognition in 2001, when his country put Symonette’s face on its fifty-dollar bill.
Chapter 12
Blessed Be the Fruit of the Vine
B
Y ANY OBVIOUS STANDARD, Horatio F. Stoll chose an unpropitious time to start a magazine for the California wine industry. Long before launching California Grape Grower in December 1919, Stoll had been an indefatigable publicist for the growers and winemakers, starting out before the dark cloud of the Eighteenth Amendment had even begun to form on the horizon. He worked in a Napa County vineyard, he wrote about wine for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Argonaut, and he helped popularize the raffia-wrapped chianti of California’s first large-scale winery, Italian Swiss Colony. In 1910 he turned his attention from trying to promote the industry to trying to save it. As chief propagandist for the California Grape Protective Association, Stoll spent the decade leading up to the Eighteenth Amendment—and the seemingly perverse start-up of his magazine—as the voice of the growers and vintners.
That voice was a blend of hand-wringing and hucksterism. The signs he posted along wine country roadways were characteristic: “This vineyard gone after Prohibition.” So was a brochure entitled “How Prohibition Would Affect California,” an unmistakable example of Stoll’s high-stepping jauntiness. There wasn’t a single teetotaler “among the world’s really great men,” Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey. How he knew what he claimed to know about the drinking habits of his Hall of Fame was unclear, but it set up the punch line: “What names can the prohibitionists show to compare with those above?” the brochure asked. “Has there ever been a prohibitionist who was a really great man . . . unless it be Mohammed, the first prohibitionist?”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 23