It was quite a time to be a rabbi looking for a supplement to his income—or to be someone who merely claimed to be a rabbi. “To the Prohibition bureau,” wrote Herbert Asbury in The Great Illusion, “any man who dressed in solemn black, possessed a Jewish cast of countenance, and wore a beard was automatically a rabbi.” But Asbury’s mention of the Jewish cast of countenance was gratuitous, for Izzy Einstein encountered rabbis named Patrick Houlihan and James Maguire, and Major Mills said he “found two Harlem Negroes posing as rabbis, claiming to have ‘got religion’ in the Hebraic persuasion.” Mills said he suspected that their conversion dated from some time after the arrival of the Eighteenth Amendment.
IN THE AGE-OLD PHRASE, this was not good for the Jews. The fact that some of the malefactors weren’t Jewish was no comfort. The regular tom-tom beat of newspaper stories was a daily agony, each one attributing widespread lawbreaking to regulations specifically crafted for the benefit of Jews. It was a situation that summoned another long-established idiom, this one in Yiddish: it was “a shande for the goyim”—a communal embarrassment, suffered in full view of gentile America. A Hebrew phrase was invoked as well, this one directly from the Talmud: the sacramental wine scandals, wrote Rabbi Leo M. Franklin of Detroit, president of the CCAR, were becoming a hillul ha-shem, a desecration of the name of God.
For Franklin and the Reform rabbis, the illicit fountains of sacramental wine turned Prohibition—once “beneath the dignity of this conference”—into an obsessive concern. The problem had become especially acute when Henry Ford found in the Jewish use of sacramental wine a fortuitous merger of two of his most loathed enemies: Jews and alcohol. In his notoriously anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent, the ultra-dry Ford seized on the rabbinical wine scandals as evidence of Jewish perfidy. The advent of Prohibition was “Jewish luck,” the Independent said. Conflating the sacramental wine business with the undeniable Jewish presence in the bootlegging industry, the paper proceeded to enumerate “certain illegitimate commercial advantages” bestowed by Prohibition: “The Jew is the possessor of the wholesale stocks; he is the director of the underground railways that convey the stuff surreptitiously to the public. . . . The bulk of the liquor permits—a guess at 95% would not be too high—are in the hands of Jews, [for] if you can sign a Jewish name to it, you can get it.” The rant continued: “ ‘Rabbinical wine’ is a euphemism for whiskey, gin, Scotch, champagne, vermouth, Absinthe, or any other kind of hard liquor.” What was most horrid about Ford’s diatribe was how much of it was accurate.*
But in some ways the worst part of it was the portion of the Independent article that was not in Ford’s voice or in the words of the hate-mongering hirelings who wrote his screeds. This was a direct quotation from someone who said he had been in contact with “not less than 150 men in all parts of the country” who called themselves rabbis and were in the business of distributing wine for the Jewish sacraments. “They were men without the slightest pretense at rabbinical training or position who, for the purpose of getting into the wholesale liquor business, if you will, organized congregations.” Their technique was straightforward: “They simply gathered around them little companies of men; they called them congregations; and then, under the law as it now exists, they were privileged to purchase and distribute wine.” The man the Independent chose to quote was Rabbi Franklin himself.
For a man of Franklin’s prominence and probity, this was a double agony. The spiritual leader of Detroit’s aristocratic Temple Beth El, Franklin happened to be a friend and neighbor of Ford. Starting in 1912 the automaker had given the distinguished rabbi a new car to drive every year. Though Franklin declined the gift once Ford began his anti-Semitic campaign in the Independent in 1920, the two men had maintained cordial relations. At the same time Franklin was convinced that even uninflected reports about the wine-dealing rabbis—the kind appearing daily in the newspapers—could only foment more anti-Semitism. “We must . . . do what we can to clean our own skirts of the scandal that will come and I am therefore urging you to take rather drastic measures,” he wrote to Rabbi Edward N. Calisch, his successor as CCAR president. Franklin’s solution: petition Congress to rescind the sacramental exception.
This triggered a sectarian war. Reform rabbis offered learned disquisitions arguing that Talmudic law allowed the ceremonial use of unfermented grape juice instead of wine “in the case of necessity.” It was as if they had picked up the tune the WCTU’s Department of Unfermented Wine had been trying to insinuate into Christian liturgy. The WCTU’s solution to the Communion issue was an unfermented, pasteurized product first bottled in 1869 by Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister/dentist from Vineland, New Jersey, and initially marketed as “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.” It achieved its first great success after Welch’s son, Charles, was appointed to the Methodist committee that formally authorized Communion use of what was by then called “Welch’s Grape Juice.” The Reform rabbis seemed to be suggesting something similar.
The Orthodox rabbis soon responded theologically with their own treatises and emotionally with cries of pain. The Reform rabbis and their supporters, according to an article in an Orthodox publication, had ignored “the sentiments of Jews who for two thousand years attached a sanctity to the use of wine in connection with festive celebrations.” A respected Conservative Talmudic scholar who endorsed the Reform interpretation received threatening letters. It did not help when the use of sacramental wine was conflated with other aspects of Orthodox practice that did not meet the approval of assimilated Reform Jews. “Ask Jews to Drop Yiddish and Wine,” read a New York Times headline over a report on a 1923 convention of Reform laymen. To the Orthodox, this was like asking them to deny who they were.
In the end the petition to Congress failed, and the sacramental wine privilege enjoyed by American Jews stayed in place. But the relentless headlines (“Jewish Rabbis Reap Fabulous Sums by Flouting Dry Laws”) and the Orthodox-Reform tensions continued until civil authority intervened. In 1926 the Prohibition Bureau tightened regulations by closing down the wine stores, revoking hundreds of rabbinical permits, and slicing the maximum family allotment from ten gallons a year to five. Total legal withdrawals of wine for Jewish religious rites plummeted in some cities by as much as 90 percent.
But the real effect of the Volstead Act’s sacramental wine exception on the American Jewish community could be calibrated by measuring the difference between statements made by two rabbis, one before the controversy began and one after it concluded.
Rabbi Gotthard Deutsch of Cincinnati in 1914, quoting the 104th Psalm: “ ‘Wine is made to gladden the hearts of men,’ and in rabbinical teachings it is a sin to reject the gifts of God.”
Rabbi Louis Wolsey of Philadelphia in 1926: “Prohibition is an Anglo-Saxon–Protestant issue that we Jews ought to keep out of.”
* The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.
* When the friars of the Christian Brothers were beginning to develop their own wine business at their property on Napa’s Mont La Salle, they guarded against theft by shipping half barrels of wine packed inside flour barrels labeled “Mr. La Salle Products.”
* De Latour distributed some of these same wines under the medicinal exception in the Volstead Act, with one definitional difference: in his contract with agents handling the drug store business, they were described as “medicinal preparations . . . unfit for beverage purposes.”
* Charles H. Randall served three terms, from 1915 to 1921, and was later elected president of the Los Angeles City Council.
* Ford also reached into the past in his frenzied assault, reminding readers that Lee Levy’s gin had been responsible for the rape
and murder of fourteen-year-old Margaret Lear.
Chapter 13
The Alcohol That Got Away
H
E OWNED SOME DRUG-STORES, a lot of drug-stores,” Daisy Buchanan said. “He built them up himself.” To Daisy this was a perfectly reasonable explanation of her new neighbor’s wealth. To her husband, more knowing about the world beyond the boundaries of East Egg, it was evidence that Jay Gatsby had made his money as a bootlegger. Modern readers in the grip of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose may not recognize the meaning of Tom Buchanan’s explanation, but Fitzgerald knew his contemporaries would understand. In 1925, when The Great Gatsby was published, the meaning of “drug-stores” was as clear as gin.
Tom did have it wrong when he identified the millions of gallons of liquor that moved across pharmacy counters during the 1920s as mere “grain alcohol.” Price lists for “medicinal whiskies” told a fuller story. The brochure distributed by the Frankfort Distillery of Louisville—“for physician permittees only”—informed pharmacists that, for sums ranging from $19.50 to $30, they could acquire twelve pints of Paul Jones Rye, Old Pirate Rum, Red Star Gin, White Star Brandy, or top-of-the-line Broad Ripple bourbon. Of course, the fortunate pharmacist wasn’t meant to drink any of this (although who was to say he didn’t?); he was to make it available to customers bearing prescriptions from licensed physicians, who had suddenly discovered a new and unexpected income stream.
The legal distribution of alcoholic beverages for medicinal purposes was the third of the main exceptions enumerated in the Volstead Act. But unlike the stipulation allowing sacramental uses and the farmer-friendly waiver exonerating cider and homemade wine, it was the one exception that authorized the legal distribution of hard liquor. Fifteen thousand physicians had lined up for permits before Prohibition was six months old. For most of the 1920s a patient could fill a prescription for one pint every ten days, and a doctor could write a hundred prescriptions a month on numbered, government-issued forms that resembled stock certificates and were as dearly cherished. Although there were many regional differences, the tab was generally $3 to purchase the prescription from a physician and another $3 to $4 to have it filled. Dentists were similarly licensed, as were veterinarians who believed their patients could use a belt of Four Roses. Congress had been very obliging to the healing professions.
American doctors knew that pharmacists (and grocers and mail-order merchants and carnival shills) had been selling alcohol for decades. The outstanding figure in the alcohol-as-curative industry was Lydia Estes Pinkham, a housewife from Lynn, Massachusetts. The daughter of prominent abolitionists and herself an active campaigner for women’s rights, Pinkham suddenly needed to earn a living after her husband’s real estate investments evaporated in the Panic of 1873. Cooking up a hash of roots and herbs in her kitchen, she packaged the result as a catchall remedy for “female complaints.” Soon Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound achieved one of the great marketing triumphs of the late nineteenth century. Some attributed this to her innovative use of national newspaper advertising or the way she turned her name into a brand by placing it on a range of products, among them sewing kits, recipe collections, and a “Private Text-Book for Ailments Peculiar to Women.” Others thought the secret to Pinkham’s success was the 20.6 percent of each bottle that was pure alcohol.
This was odd, for Pinkham was not only an abolitionist and a feminist but also a devoted temperance worker. She maintained that the alcohol in her elixir was necessary to keep its unicorn root, fenugreek seed, and other ingredients soluble, and this may in fact have been the case. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when saloons were closed to women and social drinking was rare, a bottle of Pinkham’s tonic was a welcome presence in many homes and socially respectable as well.
Not everyone—maybe no one—was fooled by this. It did not take an advanced degree in mathematics to determine that a single 14.5-ounce bottle of Pinkham’s contained the equivalent of 7.5 ounces of 80-proof whiskey. Nor did it take a physiology class to realize that this was more than enough to make a large person pleasingly high, and a small one—a typical American woman, say—flat-out drunk. Among nineteenth-century wets, Pinkham’s was so prominent a signifier of dry hypocrisy that it spawned a popular drinking song set to the tune of “I Sing of My Redeemer.” A sample verse: “Mrs. Jones she had no children / And she loved them very dear. / So she took three bottles of Pinkham’s / Now she has twins every year.”
More convincing evidence that the power of Pinkham’s did not emanate from the miraculous properties of unicorn root could be found in the flood of products that tried to compete by incorporating even more alcohol in their formulas (not to mention the occasional dash of cocaine or opium). In 1902 testing by the Massachusetts board of health determined that Whiskol, “a non-intoxicating stimulant,” contained 28.2% alcohol. Hoofiand’s German Tonic registered at 29.8 percent, Warner’s Safe Tonic Bitters at 35.7 percent. At least the makers of Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters—the champ, weighing in at a nuclear 47.5 percent, or 95 proof—used the word “wine.” The people behind Kaufman’s Sulphur Bitters were rather less ingenuous, proclaiming on the label that their product “contains no alcohol,” when in fact it contained 20.5 percent alcohol (and, as it happened, no sulphur). But the nerviest of the peddlers of all this crypto-booze were the people behind Colden’s Liquid Beef Tonic, who didn’t say that it contained 26.5 percent alcohol, but did say it was “recommended for treatment of the alcohol habit.”
BY 1917, long after Pinkham’s tonic and all the others had been dismissed as quack remedies, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association had permanently ousted alcohol from the approved pharmacopoeia, passing a unanimous resolution asserting that its “use in therapeutics . . . has no scientific value.” But in 1922 the AMA demonstrated how open minds can be changed—or, perhaps, how capitalism abhors a missed opportunity. It took only two years of Prohibition for the AMA to revisit the question it had settled just five years before. The results of a national survey of its members, a “Referendum on the Use of Alcohol in the Medical Profession,” revealed an extraordinary coincidence: the booming prescription trade had been accompanied by a dawning realization among America’s physicians that alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating twenty-seven separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snakebite, lactation problems, and old age. Consequently, the association declared, any regulation of the medicinal use of liquor was “a serious interference with the practice of medicine.” Thus the assertion that medicinal alcohol had “no scientific value,” from the AMA’s unanimous resolution of 1917, no longer had any scientific value.
Doctors did extraordinarily well by Prohibition, but the Volstead Act did little to the actual substance of their practice, other than making the average office visit shorter: it did not take long to write “Whiskey—Tablespoon three times a day,” which was the standard phrase inscribed on the government forms by Dr. Harry P. Taylor of Covington, Kentucky, or “Spiritus Frumenti,” a more dignified Latin term meaning “spirit of grain” that was preferred by Dr. C. O. Gutierrez of Cannonsville, New York. A Detroit physician came up with instructions that were more to the point: “Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated.” Prohibition had a much greater impact on druggists, some of whom did phenomenally well, some of whom were squeezed out of business, and all of whom saw their industry turned upside down.
“I do not believe there will be many drug stores, so called, of the saloon type,” a Fifth Avenue pharmacist had told the New York Times a week before the Volstead Act went into effect. “The druggist is too jealous of his reputation and too proud of his work to be willing to give up either of them for doubtful monetary gain.” In fact, the cash flow from few enterprises gushed with quite the velocity that Prohibition brought to the drugstore business. Almost from the start individual pharmacists devised practices appropriate to their clientele. Those with high-end customers
, mindful of the power (and profit) in brand names, dispensed the prescribed “medicine” in the distillers’ own bottles, which looked exactly as they had before 1920 except for a sober, qualifying phrase on their revised labels: a 100-proof pint of Old Grand-Dad, for instance, still announced that it was “Bottled in Bond,” but just beneath that familiar legend appeared the improbable “Unexcelled for Medicinal Purposes.” Most pharmacists bought the goods in bulk containers, increasing their profits by diluting the liquor before decanting it into one-pint medicinal vials. At the bottom end of the retail ladder were operations like Markin’s, a drugstore on the North Side of Chicago. After police officers apprehended a drunk emerging from the store with bottle in hand, an assistant city attorney informed Mayor William E. Dever in 1923, “The officers testified that [the liquor] burned their tongues and that when they touched their matches to it, immediately there was a flame.”
Some establishments assumed the name “drugstore,” but never bothered with drugs and by no stretch of the imagination could be considered stores. At the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street in Manhattan, the Golden Swan had been operating as a saloon for years and, as its unofficial name—the Hell Hole—indicated, none too glamorously. The site of some of Eugene O’Neill’s most prodigious drinking bouts, the Hell Hole was one of the models for Harry Hope’s hopeless bar in The Iceman Cometh. (“It’s the No Chance Saloon . . . , the End of the Line Café . . . ,” one of O’Neill’s characters says. “No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go.”) When Prohibition arrived, the Hell Hole’s proprietor closed up briefly, claimed on its reopening that it was now a drugstore, and then, having bought off the local cops, continued to operate just as he had before.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 26