Another barrier fell with the arrival of the “black and tans,” integrated cabarets and nightclubs, usually in black neighborhoods and usually featuring leading African-American jazz musicians. Some night spots, like the Cotton Club in Harlem (partially owned by the bootlegger Owney Madden), practiced an especially bizarre form of segregation: all-black neighborhood, all-black entertainment, all-white clientele. But blacks and whites mingled comfortably at places like the Catagonia Club and the Club Ebony, and the predawn “breakfast dances” at Small’s Paradise (they started when other nightspots closed) were completely biracial. Detroit saw its first stirrings of racial integration in the Harlem Cave and the Cozy Corner, two nightspots in the all-black neighborhood known as Paradise Valley. In the African-American magazine The Messenger, coeditor Chandler Owen called the black-and-tan “America’s most democratic institution,” where “we see white and colored people mix freely. They dance together not only in the sense of both races being on the floor at the same time, but in the still more poignant and significant sense of white and colored people dancing as respective partners.” In New York’s black daily, the Amsterdam News, a columnist argued that “the night clubs have done more to improve race relations in ten years than the churches, white and black, have done in ten decades.”
This being the age of ballyhoo, the ways of Sodom-on-the-Hudson were broadcast through the rest of the country by radio, by the tabloid press, and most of all by the glowing beacon of Hollywood. Many in the entertainment business had welcomed Prohibition, believing people who once filled the saloons would gravitate to the movie houses. But glamour, illicit or not, was the motion picture industry’s most reliable product, and few settings were more glamorous than the uptown New York speakeasy. The advent of talking pictures put the sound—and the attitudes—of New York on display for the entire country. Ravenous demand for material for the talkies, wrote Raymond Moley, led to “the frenzied filming of Broadway plays,” which in turn “brought the clink of highball glasses, the squeal of bedsprings, the crackle of fast conversation to a thousand Main Streets.”
For a while Hollywood production codes dictated that actual drinking could not be shown on screen, so there was a lot of bottle pouring, glass holding, and back-to-the-camera chugging. Still, the ladies of the WCTU created a Motion Picture Department to agitate for “the production of clean films.” A self-described “Christian lobbyist” named Wilbur Fiske Crafts declared his intention to “rescue the motion pictures from the hands of the Devil and 500 un-Christian Jews” who were corrupting the nation. But the box office was voting for the speakeasy and its liberated women. A scholarly survey of 115 films released in 1929 established that drinking—virtually all of it illegal, of course—was depicted in 66 percent of them, more often than not favorably. In After Midnight, a shy and virginal Norma Shearer takes her very first drink and bursts into bloom. Joan Crawford became a star by hoofing on a speakeasy tabletop in Our Dancing Daughters. It was a self-sustaining cycle: Hollywood showed stylish characters drinking, moviegoers (a hundred million of them were attending pictures every week by 1930) mimicked the characters, and Hollywood thereby justified providing more of the same.
“We took the position that motion pictures should depict and reflect American life,” said director Clarence Brown. “And cocktail parties and speakeasies were definitely a part of that life.”
“TO THE HIGH SCHOOL INTELLECT,” the Detroit News editorialized in 1924, “it is chic and charming to have an intrigue with a bootlegger, to carry a flask on the hip, to produce it where its possession may enhance a reputation for derring-do, and to imbibe from it in the presence of lovely and impressionable femininity.” This pursuit of chic, the paper surmised, was what had motivated the young men at a high school dance at the Hotel Statler, a dance that made headlines when it was shut down because of excessive drinking.
Had one of those accused of misbehaving not been Howard C. Kresge, son of the retailing titan S. S. Kresge—believed to be the single largest financial backer of the Anti-Saloon League—it’s doubtful the event would have attracted press attention. Similar spotlights would illuminate the alcohol-related arrests of Carroll Hepburn, son of the ASL’s Virginia superintendent, and Thomas Heflin Jr., namesake, heir, and embarrassment to the ranting Alabama senator. (“It’s like this,” young Tom told New York reporters. “If one state wants booze, no other state should have the right to prevent it from getting it.”) But as much as they liked to leer at the transgressions of fallen drys, it was difficult for most newspapers to get excited about the drinking habits of Prohibition-era youth. In Sonny Kresge’s case, the News’s dudgeon climbed no higher than a tut-tutted warning: more refined people might be inclined to “keep him out of the best society.” He might be labeled a “bounder.”
American youth’s turn toward drink was inevitable. When F. Scott Fitzgerald said the 1920s were “a children’s party taken over by the elders” who had “discovered that young liquor will take the place of old blood,” he had it backward. “This is not a case of the revolt of the youth,” said W. H. P. Faunce, president of Brown University, “but a case in which youth is led by the revolt of middle age.” The day before the Detroit News called out Sonny Kresge for getting too frisky at the Hotel Statler, it reported on “a veritable Babylonian revel” of older citizens taking place not three miles away. From Moriarity’s on East Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan (“almost a Yale-Harvard-Princeton club,” wrote one of the regulars, the Treasury secretary’s son, Paul Mellon) to the roadhouses of Meaderville, Montana (which served the “best gin fizzes in the world,” recalled Josephine Weiss Casey of Butte), drinking among American young people was exactly as ubiquitous as it was among their elders. That was part of the appeal; one of the things Josephine Casey liked about the roadhouses was that they weren’t just for “kids like us.” In the absence of laws governing age limits (or closing hours, or distance from schools, or any of the other stipulations that button down a regulated liquor trade), drinking was not simply a way to imitate adults but an entry pass into their world. Stanley Coulter, dean of Purdue University’s School of Science, attributed the excessive drinking on his campus to the example of “idiotic alumni.”
Although some of the enterprising young indulged in beer (at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, students brewed their own in the college’s science labs), like their parents they mostly drank gin. It was so easy to flavor industrial alcohol with oil of juniper and a dash of glycerin, dilute it with tap water, and slap a fake Gordon’s label onto the bottle that it became the favorite product of industrial-scale bootleggers and backroom hustlers alike. According to one expert on the homemade variety, “The gin is aged about the length of time it takes to get from the bathroom where it is made to the front porch where the cocktail is in progress.”
Ready availability being the most precious of Prohibition virtues, gin was lifted above the historical pedigree that led Willa Cather to call it “the consolation of sailors and inebriate scrub-women.” Fortune, which helpfully (and repellently) explained, “before prohibition, Gin went into Martinis and Negros [sic],” said that Prohibition made it an acceptable drink for the presumably better bred. Not that these new gin connoisseurs knew much about it: the Philadelphia banker Gardner Cassatt (nephew of painter Mary Cassatt) patronized Walnut Street bootlegger Joel D. Kerper for five years and swore by the quality of Kerper’s gin in testimony before a grand jury. In fact, Kerper was a major client of Philadelphia’s industrial-alcohol distillers and a beneficiary of their counterfeiting. When he shipped liquor to the Maine summer homes of Philadelphia’s elite in boxes labeled “varnish” or “floor paint,” he was being more honest than his customers knew.
“The beverage known in Prohibition times as gin,” as Herbert Asbury called the fake variety, begat another innovation in American drinking habits: the mixer. Whiskey cocktails of various types had existed for decades, and so had the martini, but the dubious quality of Prohibition liquor compelled further innova
tion, usually in a highball glass. Quinine water, or tonic, originally developed in India as an antimalaria nostrum, became a masking agent for gin of dubious origin. Ginger ale replaced soda water as the standard mixer for whiskey because its flavor could smother the laboratory odors of fake rye. William Grimes, in his history of the cocktail, Straight Up or On the Rocks, pointed out how the triumph of ginger ale was complete when Greta Garbo uttered her first on-screen lines, in Anna Christie: “Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.”
Of course, the soft-drink industry enjoyed a further boon from the patronage of those who chose to obey the laws, an outcome predicted at the start of the decade by enemies of “the soft-drink trust.” This was a term wet propagandists had found convenient in their effort to stamp the mark of greed on Prohibition supporters like Asa Candler of Coca-Cola. It turned out to be a misnomer: companies trying to cash in on the rapidly expanding market included such unlikely coconspirators as the shell-shocked Anheuser-Busch, which introduced coffee-flavored Caffo and something called Buschtee. (Another soft drink, called Kicko, apparently never made it out of the Busch test labs.) But even though the brewers who moved into soft drinks or de-alcoholized “near beer” sold enough to keep their doors open, none benefited nearly as much as Coca-Cola, which saw its sales triple during Prohibition. Astute marketing enabled Coke to position itself, as one of its advertising slogans had it, as “The Drink That Cheers But Does Not Inebriate.”
The men who ran the soda-pop business couldn’t lose. Americans who violated the Prohibition laws required the bottlers’ product to make liquor palatable, and those who obeyed the laws needed it to quench their thirst. As a result, said Louis Steinberger, president of a New Jersey soft-drink trade association, his industry found business “so good under Prohibition that [we] are determined to offend neither the Wets nor the Drys, and let the fight go merrily on.”
IT’S SOMETHING OF a surprise that with all the illegal liquor sloshing around the United States, there apparently still wasn’t enough to satisfy demand. But sometimes illegal behavior can be no fun if it doesn’t have an element of excitement attached to it, and it did not take long for Americans in search of spirits to add some adventure to the hunt.
The Montreal Gazette suggested one of the possibilities. By 1925, the paper reported, the city’s tourism business had grown exponentially—numbering “hundreds of thousands of tourists a year . . . due in considerable part” to Prohibition. Seventy miles to the southeast in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, a collection of roadhouses and dives known as “line houses” sprouted along the U.S. border. The tiny town of Abercorn, population three hundred, soon had five hotels catering to Americans arriving after a seventy-five-cent taxi ride from the train station in Richford, Vermont. The line houses branched into bootlegging as well. At Labounty’s, a line house east of Abercorn in a hamlet called Highwater, young men from Vermont searching for legal booze also found lucrative work. Bootleggers hired the Vermonters to drive cars loaded with liquor seventy-five miles south to Barre. All were instructed to leave the cars in a designated garage, go for a walk, and return an hour later, when they’d find $125 waiting on the seat. The drivers never touched the goods or met anyone involved at the American end of the trip.
More than 3,100 miles across the continent in Victoria, British Columbia, a columnist described the American “refugees from Volstead” pouring into the city. These masses were neither tired, nor poor, nor huddled. “Their appearance does not at all suggest privation . . . ,” C. D. Smith wrote in the Daily Colonist. “They are mostly clothed in plus-fours and their one look is of assured triumph and anticipation.” After addressing a hostile American Bar Association convention in Seattle, Mabel Willebrandt acknowledged that it had been a difficult assignment talking to the lawyers “when a great many of them had spent that day over the Canadian line.” Even Windsor, Ontario, so close to the twenty-four-hour party that was Detroit, benefited from the cross-border larking. New hotels went up to accommodate the rush; so did a warehouse on the Windsor riverfront, built at government expense expressly for the storage of the hotels’ liquor stocks.
It took a little more effort for Volstead refugees to find fun in the sun, but the adventure only added to the sense of sport that characterized liquor tourism. Within three months of Prohibition’s onset, a travel agent in Coconut Grove, Florida, had established a private seaplane service direct from a Miami-based barge to the Bimini Rod and Gun Club. Reaching for the irony that characterized much reporting about Prohibition, Samuel Hopkins Adams, in Collier’s, noted that one Bimini-bound operation even managed to make the return flight with a full load of liquor aboard: “This was quite without prejudice to the law,” Adams wrote, “since there is no restriction upon the importation of alcohol when the human stomach is the container.” A steward on the Hamburg-American passenger liner Reliance said his U.S. patrons “learned about Daiquiri cocktails at Havana, rum swizzles at Trinidad, and punch at Kingston.”
The spectacularly named Inglis Moore Uppercu, a New York–based Cadillac dealer, made his mark in the world of liquor tourism when he founded Aeromarine Airways, the first regularly scheduled, U.S.-based international air service. Aeromarine shuttled Americans from Miami to some of the brighter spots in the Caribbean on three wooden-hulled flying boats named the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, each of them tricked out with wicker armchairs and mahogany veneers. “The Limousines That Fly to Bimini,” as Uppercu’s early ads called them, were also flying to Cuba by November 1920, where their passengers planted the seeds for the stylish, all-night Havana of the coming decades and where the bootleggers who followed them laid the foundation of the mobster-dominated gambling mecca that was soon to blossom. A Newark bartender named Donovan took apart his bar plank by plank and reconstructed it in the lobby of Havana’s Telégrafo Hotel, a home away from home for New Jerseyites who could afford the trip. An advertising campaign offered jointly by the Bacardi rum-making family and the fledgling Pan American Airways featured the slogan “Fly with us to Havana and you can bathe in Bacardi rum two hours from now.” To welcome those arriving by sea, Facundo Bacardi thoughtfully sent wireless greetings to U.S.-based ships as they chugged into Havana’s harbor, inviting passengers to visit his distillery. Bacardi told The New Yorker that business had never been so good.
For William Jennings Bryan, the spectacle of Prohibition-induced tourism was all too vivid. After his humiliation at the 1920 Democratic convention in San Francisco, he had started his withdrawal from political life, moving to Miami and settling in a Spanish-style waterfront mansion he called the Villa Serena. Bryan spent some of his time in Florida holding weekly Bible classes for audiences numbering in the thousands and some of it making a living. In The Perils of Prosperity, William E. Leuchtenberg describes how, during the great Florida land boom, a Coral Gables real estate operator hired Bryan “to sit on a raft under a beach umbrella and lecture on the beauties of the Florida climate.”
But Bryan was less rhapsodic about the view from the lawn of the Villa Serena, where he could watch ships from the Bahamas hook up with the rumrunners of Biscayne Bay. His 1921 call for an invasion of Bimini had gone unheard, so the following year he turned his attention to the perfidy of those American citizens chasing the bottle on foreign soil and in some cases trying to bring it back home. For thus “conspiring” against the Constitution, Bryan told Representative W. A. Oldfield of Arkansas, such malefactors should be stripped of their citizenship.
“AS YOU SAIL AWAY, far beyond the range of amendments and thou-shaltnots, those dear little iced things begin to appear, sparkling aloft on their crystal stems.” This effusion was not the sort of come-on a drinker was likely to encounter in advertisements for places like Sloppy Joe’s Bar on Zulueta Street in Havana (Joe’s slogan was more concise: “Where the Wet Begins”). Those “dear little iced things” were at the center of a sales pitch for the elegant oceangoing ships of the French Line, which competed with Cunard not just for s
upremacy in the transatlantic passenger trade but also, in effect, for designation as World’s Biggest, Fanciest, and Fastest Bar.
The British grabbed the lead early in the decade, perhaps on that day in February 1920, four weeks after Prohibition’s birth, when the Daily Express of London informed its readers that Cunard’s Mauretania “has docked at Southampton with empty bins. A record stock of wines and spirits has been utterly consumed by American passengers.” Many years later E. B. White would recall how the lure of Prohibition-free seafaring tantalized New Yorkers. From their docks on the Hudson, wrote White, “the transatlantic liners sounded their horns of departure, and the citizens listened uneasily to this midnight invitation to revelry, debauchery, and escape.” Aboard ship, smoking rooms doubled as drinking rooms and stewards doubled as bouncers. According to maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, the ocean passage from the United States to the United Kingdom spawned “a new transatlantic stereotype, the drunk American.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 29