Oddly, though, it wasn’t Boo Boo Hoff or other criminals who brought down Old Gimlet Eye. His career crashed because of a more influential group—the bootleggers’ customers, especially those who might have been among Hoff’s business associates at the Reading Railroad or Union National. He had had it, Butler said, when Mayor Kendrick refused to allow him to raid the Ritz-Carlton and Bellevue-Stratford hotels. The Philadelphia elite that held its functions at the Ritz and the Bellevue may have had more respectable suppliers than Boo Boo Hoff. But Butler knew that even the finest of smuggled goods had one very important characteristic in common with the booze bubbling out of Hoff’s toilet water factories, the booze cooking in tenement stills and backwoods moonshine plants, the booze leaking from synagogues and churches, or the booze flowing south from Canada, north and east from the Caribbean, and across thousands of drugstore counters from East Coast to West: it was going wherever there was a thirst for it.
* Remus eventually did a few years’ time in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, first in a cushy part of the prison that a frustrated Mabel Willebrandt called “Millionaires’ Row,” and later in his own apartment in the prison’s hospital building; he ate dinner each evening with two other well-connected bootleggers in the peaceful hush of the prison’s Catholic chapel. After his release he shot and killed his wife, who had been having an affair with the federal agent who had put him in prison. For that act, Remus served no prison time at all.
Chapter 14
The Way We Drank
A
SAMPLE OF THE coming literature of Prohibition, as predicted by the humor magazine Life in 1919: “She sipped her buttermilk slowly and calmly noticed the effect. After the second bottle, she was a woman emancipated. She reached across the table and untied her handsome admirer’s cravat.” The magazine predicted this was the style that would inevitably characterize American literature under Prohibition. “The Hero may still flick the ashes from his cigarette,” Life explained, “but when the time comes for him to take a drink, he must order a chocolate soda.”
In fact the hero of the 1920s did nothing of the sort, except perhaps in the work of Upton Sinclair, the one prominent American novelist who began the Prohibition era as a dry and ended it drier. (Sinclair even wrote a novel about “a conscientious Prohibition agent”—evidence, said Time, of the author’s enduring habit of picking “preposterous prigs” for his heroes.) It was F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, who cued the downbeat for the literary bacchanal of the 1920s. Three years before The Great Gatsby, in The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald introduced Gloria Patch, who “drinks excessively, drives recklessly” and “declares brazenly, ‘I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me.’” Gowan Stevens, in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, discovers how “to drink like a gentleman” at the University of Virginia but develops a new skill when he returns home to Prohibition Mississippi: learning to add enough lemon, sugar, and water to a glass jar of moonshine to neutralize at least some of its explosive toxicity. Ernest Hemingway managed to have alcoholic drinks of one kind or another show up on more than half the pages of The Sun Also Rises.* And why not? Hemingway said in 1923 that “a man does not exist until he is drunk.”
That was the same year that H. L. Mencken experienced the rapid depletion of his well-stocked cellar, wrote William Manchester, during “a devastating visit” from Sinclair Lewis. For a drunk of such prodigious appetites, Lewis was nonetheless able to maintain a sharp focus on the drinking around him—in his description of the women of Main Street outside the Sauk Prairie saloons, “waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home”; in George Babbitt’s leering suggestion to his guests, “Well, folks, do you think you could stand breaking the law a little?”; and in the very first words of Lewis’s celebrated portrayal of a moralistic hypocrite: “Elmer Gantry was drunk.”
That drinking became a sine qua non of American fiction in the 1920s is inarguable; that it was a reflection of what was going on in much of American life was a safe bet as well. What remains dubious is the suggestion that it was the prohibition of liquor that led the young, the stylish, or the Babbitts to ingest it so avidly. No one who has read the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, soaked as they are in the fizzy frolics of England’s Bright Young Things, could possibly attribute short skirts, hot music, and hip flasks to Prohibition, nor could anyone who paid attention to the frantic pursuit of the new and the daring in Weimar Germany. By 1927 Edmund Wilson was able to enumerate ninety-seven different colloquial terms for drunkenness, ranging from “squiffy” and “zozzled” through “corned” and “scorching,” and finally culminating in “ossified,” “embalmed,” and “buried.” Some of the more extreme terms, Wilson noted, had become less common because “this kind of fierce protracted drinking has now become universal, an accepted feature of social life instead of a disreputable escapade.” It was World War I that ripped western civilization from the lingering embrace of the nineteenth century—that had, said the dry progressive Senator George Norris of Nebraska, brought about the “almost universal change which had overtaken civilization.” Prohibition was an accelerant, not a cause.
“We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation,” wrote William Hazlitt in 1823. A century later, drinking was not one of them. No extrinsic impulse or appeal was needed to get people interested in liquor. In fact, that was the whole point.
OF THOSE FEW NOVELISTS of the 1920s who did not seem particularly interested in drinking, either as a subject or as a pastime, Willa Cather was among the most prominent. Liquor was not absent from her work, even in the books set in earlier decades; in A Lost Lady the presentation of “a glittering tray” of cocktails was “the signal for general conversation” in the prairie town of Sweet Water. Although she was not an abstainer, Cather tended to avoid the liquor-saturated world of the other writers who lived near her in Greenwich Village. (When novelist Dawn Powell gave parties at her apartment on East Ninth Street, she would fill her aquarium with gin.) Still, she could not help but notice the dizzying rearrangements of daily life spinning around her. “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Cather wrote many years later in an essay looking back at the decade. Generations of historians have used the phrase as an epigraph for the era, suggesting as it does the disjunction between the proprieties of a more settled time and the lubricious behavior that characterized urban life in the twenties. But something Cather said in an interview in 1924 defined the era with more precision: “Nobody stays at home anymore.”
To critic Malcolm Cowley, this was evident in the invention of “the ‘party,’ conceived as a gathering of men and women to drink gin cocktails, flirt, dance to the phonograph or radio and gossip about their absent friends.” For the first time, men and women were drinking together outside the home, at events where dinner wasn’t served. Vanity Fair published an instructive article explaining “how to bait your social hook in these trying days of drought”—in other words, how to write an invitation that suggested that lawbreaking would be abided but did not say so outright. One suggestion: add a note telling your guests “Bring your corkscrew.”
Even more than at the house parties that became commonplace, Americans learned to drink in new ways at a new/old institution. The speakeasy was a substitute for the saloon that would prove to be much more than a saloon. Mencken traced the word’s origin to “speak softly shop,” a nineteenth-century Irish phrase used to define any illegal drinking place—where, presumably, voices were kept lowered to avoid attracting attention.* As a catchall term in Prohibition America, it came to denote any publicly accessible place where one could buy a drink. By 1930 the U.S. speakeasy was so ubiquitous, so indelibly part of American culture, that H. I. Phillips, a columnist for the New York Sun, was led to declare that “the history of the United States could be told in 11 words: Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.”
It didn’t take much more than a bottle and two chairs
to make a speakeasy, but once those requisites were in place the permutations were endless. In black neighborhoods like Harlem, many private apartments—called “hooch joints,” “buffet flats,” or “beer flats”—took on a semipublic aspect, open to virtually anyone who happened to be black; whites were suspect, as they might be from the Prohibition Bureau, which was a virtually all-white force. Italian rooming house proprietors on Federal Hill in Providence invited nonresidents into their parlors, where they could purchase platefuls of pasta accompanied by the bottles of homemade wine and grappa that adorned the red-checkered tablecloths; culinary historians attribute the American fondness for southern Italian cuisine to the exposure it received in similar places from Boston to San Francisco. In downtown Detroit, a block from City Hall, customers of the Bucket of Blood were offered decent food, ample drink, and, for the newspapermen who used the Bucket as an auxiliary press room, a series of telephone lines, including one connected directly to the phone of Mayor Frank Murphy’s secretary. In Boston, where Mayor James Michael Curley’s car horn played the opening notes of “How Dry I Am,” four speakeasies were located on the same block as police headquarters. Of the 113 establishments licensed to sell soft drinks in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the two that actually confined themselves to nonalcoholic beverages went out of business.
New York, which according to its police commissioner accommodated thirty-two thousand illegal drinking spots by the end of the 1920s, of course offered the greatest variety. The most famous of the New York speakeasies was the “21” Club, which opened its doors on West Fifty-second Street in Manhattan on New Year’s Day 1930. But “21” was really just the latest in a series of places operated by its founders, Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns, beginning in 1922. First the partners operated an illegal establishment in Greenwich Village called the Redhead, which was followed by an illicit operation called the Fronton, which was in turn succeeded by a lawbreaker at 42 West Forty-ninth Street, the Puncheon Club—also known as the Grotto, the Iron Gate, “42,” and Jack & Charlie’s. Short-term leases were generally the only kind available in the speakeasy business, as few landlords were willing to become dependent on their tenants’ ability to manage their bribe portfolios; so were name changes, to confuse tax authorities. It was at the Puncheon that Berns and Kriendler suffered their only arrests for what would be a decade of nightly Volstead violations. At “21,” at last settled in a building they owned with a name they would keep, they decided to stop paying bribes and invested instead in an elaborate system that made them effectively raidproof. On an alert from the doorkeeper, the bartender could press a button that sent the entire contents of the back bar tumbling down a shaft, past a series of bottle-breaking metal grates, and finally onto a pile of rocks in the basement. Any remaining liquid drained into a sump. All that was left behind were shards of glass and a lingering aroma, but an odor was not admissible evidence.
Apart from “21,” which was sui generis, Manhattan speakeasy style ran from O’Leary’s on the Bowery (“Not for the squeamish,” according to a contemporary description, “. . . for the sight and smell of a dozen sodden derelicts is none too pleasant”) to the Bath Club on East Fifty-third Street (its decor, wrote the same commentator, was “all marble and gold. Flunkies in droves. Hat boys who won’t touch a coat, and coat boys beneath whose station it is to handle a Borsalino”). At the Bath, an orchestra played chamber music in the dining room; at O’Leary’s, “A bum in the back room howls like a wolf in the night.” The Stork Club and the Country Club, the Hyena and the Ha! Ha!, the Beaux Arts and the Club Pansy and the Cave of Fallen Angels—the names alone suggested that New Yorkers had options for every taste.
The speakeasies witnessed drinking habits and practices notably different from the rituals of the old saloons. However caustic some of the liquor handed across the bar in pre-Volstead days had been, most of it was distilled by professionals, was unlikely to be poisonous, and usually bore a label that honestly reflected its origin. Speakeasy liquor could have been anything from single-malt Scotch smuggled by way of Nassau to diluted embalming fluid. Most of the good stuff entered a tightly circumscribed market dominated by well-connected bootleggers, like the polo-playing LaMontagne brothers of New York, purveyors to their own social circle. The LaMontagne business crumbled after the brothers were convicted of supplying champagne for a bachelor party at the Racquet & Tennis Club, but an even more precipitous collapse befell Sir Broderick Hartwell, “the rum-running Baronet,” who had promised British investors in his bootlegging operation a 20 percent return every sixty days but lost fifty-six thousand cases of liquor in a mutiny aboard one of his ships. Mutinies, hijackings, even shifts in the weather were likely to affect the prices reported in periodicals read by LaMontagne or Hartwell customers. From The New Yorker, January 16, 1926, under the standing head “The Liquor Market”: Gin is selling for $36 a case, and Scotch is “up slightly (after a post-holiday drop” at $59). From another notice several weeks later: “Chianti market practically cornered by restaurant trade, but small quantities, high grade, offered @ $4.50 per bottle.” Variety also published running reports on bootleggers’ price lists. The daily papers generally stayed away from this sort of service to readers, although the New York World occasionally hinted at market conditions, as in the December 24, 1923, headline over a story describing how delivery boats from Rum Row had made it ashore despite a thick fog the night before: “Rum Kings Assure Wet Christmas.”
But in most speakeasies, the shortage of quality goods intensified demand and multiplied deceit. In the saloon era, calling for liquor by brand name was almost unheard of; in the speakeasy era, it became a habit, first as a means of protecting oneself from alcohol of questionable origin, and secondarily as a way of expressing one’s level of taste. Berry Brothers, liquor purveyors to the British royal family, created Cutty Sark in 1923 specifically for the export market, which was largely the American market; Haig & Haig was repositioned as a brand aimed directly at the bootleg trade. Broderick Hartwell’s business, as long as it lasted, was devoted to the proprietary brands his wealthy customers insisted upon. When he was building his own brand, Tommy Dewar publicized the perilous alternative—the liquor of unknown provenance he once characterized as “squirrel whiskey,” so called because, he said, “it will make men talk nutty and climb trees. It will send the average Sunday School teacher walking ten miles through three feet of snow to shoot his own parson.” Naturally, there was an alternative: Drink Dewar’s! Decades later, many of the liquor industry’s best-known brand names owed their prominence to the ubiquity of Prohibition-era rotgut.
Of course, in so robust and so unregulated a market—no state liquor authorities, no tax stamps, no legitimate retail stores—cheating was as inevitable as a morning-after headache. “Overboard stuff” was the generic term used in the trade for blended industrial liquor in counterfeit bottles that were then “soaked in sea water to give [them] an overseas appearance,” according to one practitioner. Joseph P. Kennedy, who was responsible for the liquor served at his Harvard tenth reunion in 1922, told a friend who wanted to buy some that the blended whiskey he had provided—whipped up from 190-proof alcohol—“was perfectly satisfactory to all the fellows in the class who are, of course, used to the best—and the worst.” The federal enforcement director for the New York district reported that “dollar-a-drink clubs with polished brass bar rails and elite customers served precisely the same poison as the dime-a-shot dumps of the wharf sides.” There were exceptions, of course, but in too many places, if you ordered Brand X, you got Brand X; if you ordered Dewar’s or Gordon’s, you paid twice as much—and got Brand X.
AT THE PARTIES and in the speakeasies, in suburban country clubs and inner-city social clubs and the blind pigs, blind tigers, and blind you-name-its stretched across the continent,* Prohibition changed not only where Americans drank, but who drank as well.
Recalling the era, the songwriter Alec Wilder once said, “A pretty girl in a speakeasy was the most beautiful girl in th
e world.” A pretty girl—truth be told, virtually any kind of girl—in a drinking establishment was one of the astonishments of Prohibition, a shock both severe and enduring. Social life in America was changed forever. “Prohibition would do more than close the saloon,” wrote historian Catherine Gilbert Murdock. “It would also let domestic drinking out of the closet.” One didn’t have to agree with Wilder to believe it was more pleasing to see Mother having a drink in a speakeasy than to imagine her furtively sipping from her husband’s supply, or—much worse—to picture her alone in the upstairs bathroom, chugging from the bottle of Mrs. Pinkham’s.
But women didn’t have to be secret tipplers to be attracted to speakeasy culture. Many speaks were set up as restaurants specifically to attract women, just as many restaurants became speaks to avoid losing business to the newcomers. Table service made it unnecessary for women to perch on a barstool or poise a foot on a brass rail. New styles of entertainment—jazz bands, torch singers, dances like the Charleston and the shimmy—emerged to accompany coeducational drinking. As mild as they might have seemed individually, together these innovations “set up conditions peculiarly attractive to women,” a dry publicist acknowledged. The installation of “powder rooms” sealed the deal.
The sexual integration of the drinking culture began as a localized phenomenon in the big cities. In New York, for instance, arrests of women for public drunkenness spiked immediately after the Volstead Act went into effect and remained at elevated levels through much of the decade. Leon & Eddie’s, on speakeasy-jammed West Fifty-second Street, declared the new era with a sign over its entrance: “Through These Portals the Most Beautiful Girls in the World Pass OUT.” Wrote Heywood Broun, “Sex barriers have been burned away. In New York there are not a dozen places run for the patronage of men alone.” Like Alec Wilder, Broun found this generally delightful: “The light laughter of soprano voices rings now where once sodden male wretches stood and sang Mother Machree.” At times, though, the feminization of the drinking experience made Broun long for the pre-Prohibition days, when it was possible, he said, to get a drink without elbowing his way to the bar “through a crowd of schoolgirls.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 28