In at least one instance, though, Coolidge felt compelled to act. During the summer of 1924 he mobilized the full might of the federal government to crack down on a bootlegging operation that had provoked his concern. The investigation, initiated by the president himself, was conducted under the personal supervision of his closest friend in Washington, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, who had been his classmate at Amherst College. It was advanced through the efforts of the newly appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation,* J. Edgar Hoover; at least four members of Hoover’s staff; the agent in charge of the bureau’s New York office; and Stone’s brother-in-law, John D. Willard, a western Massachusetts clergyman. Convictions, the attorney general told Willard, “would be personally gratifying to the president.” Stone issued a series of personal directives. To avoid exposing details of the delicate inquiry to telegraph operators, alternative means of communication were employed. Stepping across a commonly recognized ethical line, Willard solicited privileged information about a criminal defendant from the defendant’s own attorney. Finally, four months after the operation was launched, indictments were issued. The defendants: four men in Holyoke, Massachusetts, who were found in possession of thirteen bottles of liquor and thirty-seven cases of beer—barely enough alcohol to keep a self-respecting speakeasy stocked for a weekend. But the Holyoke men had been selling liquor to students at nearby Amherst, specifically to the young men of Phi Gamma Delta. As Stone had told his man on the ground in Amherst, Coolidge had been “concerned about reports of bootlegging in his fraternity.”
AMBIVALENT ABOUT PROHIBITION, but absolutely devoted to the Republican Party, Pauline Sabin quickly lined up behind Coolidge to support his election in 1924. On the other hand, Gifford Pinchot’s absolute devotion to Prohibition stimulated his growing ambivalence toward the Republican Party. His roots in the progressive movement and his labors for the dry cause shaped the Pennsylvania governor’s lopsided public persona, sort of a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Savonarola. Pinchot was among a large number of drys who considered Coolidge a wimp and a closet wet, and in 1924 he flirted with challenging the president as the candidate of the Prohibition Party.
Would that it were so clear for Wayne B. Wheeler. He could neither give his unqualified support to the inconstant Coolidge, nor could his familiar array of electoral threats intimidate a very popular president. But Wheeler was not so constrained in his dealings with Congress. Influence on Capitol Hill was calibrated regularly in roll calls, and he owned those no less than he owned his own name. He bragged that he could unseat any senator or representative who was an “enemy of the Constitution,” and joked that he would have them “shot at sunrise on the next election day.” In the congressional elections of 1920, 1922, and 1924, the Anti-Saloon League continued to dominate by controlling the margins, handing its 10 or 20 percent of the electorate to candidates willing to lash themselves to the dry mast. Senatorial wets like Atlee Pomerene of Ohio and Augustus Owsley Stanley of Kentucky fell to ASL-sponsored candidates who had little in common other than an enduring obligation to the angels of their electoral deliverance—Wheeler and the league.* Pomerene lost to Simeon D. Fess, “the Driest of the Drys,” who considered anyone who would violate the Volstead Act “an anarchist and . . . an enemy of the government”; Stanley fell to Frederic M. Sackett, an aristocratic Republican from Louisville who was known to brag about his richly stocked cellar but who promised not to drink a drop so long as Prohibition lasted. Some people may have believed him.
To Wheeler, who dispatched his top assistant to Kentucky to guarantee Stanley’s defeat, Sackett’s personal habits were of no consequence. “Prohibition was not voted into existence by total abstainers,” Wheeler said, nor was the abstinence of elected officials essential to its maintenance. What mattered was Sackett’s vote on the Senate floor, and had he (or any other dry) been inclined to wander during the nose counting, it would not have been for lack of discipline. Wheeler’s baleful presence in the Capitol Building was a visible manifestation of his muscle. Morris Markey, in The New Yorker, called him “the frowning Nero in charge of local destinies [who] sits heavily in the gallery,” offering a definitive thumbs-up or thumbs-down during Prohibition-related debates. Representative John Philip Hill of Maryland, a leader of the wet forces in the House, called Wheeler the “generalissimo” whose every order could muster an instant majority.
Because Wheeler was their ticket to reelection, compliant drys had a more benevolent view. Representative Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma spoke for many of his colleagues when he wrote Wheeler to say, “[I] beg to advise you that I shall be pleased to support any bill which you recommend.” Without Wheeler as both enforcer and lodestar, the dry caucus on Capitol Hill might have degenerated into riot—progressives at war with reactionaries, Republicans battling Democrats, country populists assaulting representatives of the mercantile elite. It’s difficult to imagine a coalition that could accommodate, say, both Morris Sheppard of Texas, the passionately earnest, liquor-hating author of the Eighteenth Amendment, and Cole Blease of South Carolina, who openly reveled in the pleasures of drink. Sheppard and Blease were opposites in ideology, in manner, in their very essences. The courtly, Yale-educated Sheppard, whose support for progressive legislation prefigured the New Deal, rose each year on January 16 to commemorate the anniversary of the amendment’s ratification with speeches layered in Shakespearean eloquence and brightened by his sunny optimism. The reactionary, hate-filled Blease, who opposed schools for black people because education could “ruin a good field hand and make a bad convict,” drew on an oratorical armory of insult and attack, among its frequently used weapons such epithets as “pap-sucker,” “belly-crawler,” and, of course, “nigger lover.” Yet Wheeler’s coalition was as ample as his discipline was firm, and the dry caucus on Capitol Hill could accommodate both men.
It was the same outside Congress: the house of Prohibition had many rooms. A sample of the dry rolls circa 1924 would have included the Methodist evangelist Bob Jones, whose catalog of evils extended beyond liquor to dancing and the movies, and the indicted (for bribery) lawyer Thomas B. Felder, a chronic alcoholic who had written Georgia’s Prohibition law—and then acquired a small fortune representing wholesale liquor dealers and rumrunner Bill McCoy. Prohibition made allies of the earnest reformer Dr. Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, whose other favored cause was Simplified Spelling, and “the bootleggers’ terror,” Federal District Judge John F. McGee of Minnesota, who so delighted in locking up Volstead Act violators that he once issued 112 sentences in 130 minutes, an orgy of retribution that required the impressment of a fleet of sightseeing buses to ferry the miscreants to jail. The profoundly pragmatic Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch was a dry (“I believed you could legislate against the abuses of liquor,” he wrote years later in his memoirs, disbelievingly), as was the chronically spacey Henry Ford, who expected Prohibition, in its final triumph, to “have made prosperity universal and . . . [have] abolished poverty.” There may be no clearer demonstration of the drys’ pragmatic acceptance of every variety of ally than a comment made by Mabel Willebrandt—a federal official, a feminist, a progressive—when she was asked about the faithfully dry Ku Klux Klan: “I have no objection to people dressing up in sheets, if they enjoy that sort of thing.”
THE UN-DRY HAD a cobbled-together alliance of their own. By 1924, a vocal wet caucus had formed in Congress. Its numbers were small but the personalities who dominated it were enormous. The untamable leader of Senate wets was James A. Reed, a Democrat who had emerged from Kansas City’s notorious Pendergast machine. When Reed likened Andrew Volstead to “burners of witches” and “executioners,” he was drawing on the milder entries in his vocabulary of abuse. A Senate colleague said that when Reed spoke of an opponent, “it was as if he had thrown acid upon him”—for instance, when he charged that Prohibition was enacted by “half-drunk legislators” suffering from “the leprosy of hypocrisy.” Reed
called suffragists “Amazonian furies” who chanted “in rhythmic harmony with the barbaric war dance of the Sioux.” Supporters of the League of Nations, he said, were evidently prepared to submit to the rulings of “black men from Liberia and voodoo worshipping Haitians . . . wearing rings in their noses as well as ears.” To his friend (and drinking buddy) H. L. Mencken, Jim Reed was “for our time, the supreme artist in assault.” Given Mencken’s own skills, this was like Babe Ruth praising someone for his hitting ability.
Reed’s counterparts in the House hadn’t quite his aptitude for vituperation but they were not without verbal resources. In addition to John Philip Hill, who once said the Anti-Saloon League was in business “to protect the American Bootleggers’ Union,” House wets were led by Fiorello La Guardia of New York and, toward the end of the decade, James Montgomery Beck of Pennsylvania. Knowing that legislative success on Prohibition issues was probably unattainable, Hill and La Guardia chose to conduct their campaign against the drys in the press. (“He lives by headlines,” Time said about Hill. “If newspapers were abolished, he would curl up and die.”) La Guardia, like Hill, tried to get himself arrested for making illegal booze (he failed because the New York cops ignored him; Hill succeeded, but was acquitted by a genially wet Baltimore jury). La Guardia would do whatever he could to goad, frustrate, and mortify his dry colleagues, most notably when he proposed a hundred-million-dollar increase in the Prohibition Bureau’s budget, which at that point had not yet topped three million dollars. This legislative gambit forced tightfisted drys to vote against beefed-up enforcement, and at the same time underscored the hopelessness of the government’s underfunded efforts. La Guardia also loved to publicize the bureau’s chronic corruption, at one point suggesting that 150,000 Prohibition agents would not be enough to enforce the law—for “you will have to have 150,000 agents to watch the first 150,000.” La Guardia was fond of this trope. A few years earlier, as president of the New York City board of aldermen, he had said that it would take 250,000 policemen to enforce Prohibition in the city, and 250,000 more to police the police.
Although a Republican like Hill and La Guardia, Beck was a different species of public figure. The first two men were raucous, demonstrative characters, and La Guardia in particular veered leftward on most issues. The formal and forbidding Beck was virtually a Royalist, archconservative in politics and style. Looking grimly at the world through his pince-nez, he saw “incredible frivolity and selfishness” everywhere, except when he found himself “in a dark and sombre wood.” The Dante quote was out of character for Beck. He usually relied on Shakespeare, his speech filled, wrote biographer Morton Keller, with “quotations which came cascading forth to edify—or plague—dinner audiences, courtrooms, and readers of his books.”
Keller called his Beck biography In Defense of Yesterday, and “yesterday” covered a lot of ground. Beck was an eighteenth-century man adrift in the twentieth century, a self-invented aristocrat loose among the rabble. Before entering Congress he had resigned as solicitor general because he found even the laissez-faire Harding administration too willing to expand the role of government. Two years later Philadelphia’s corrupt Republican machine handed him a dismal congressional district in South Philadelphia, overwhelmingly comprised of blacks and immigrants. That did not mean he represented their perceived interests. Beck disdained any legislation that was even remotely progressive. He opposed woman suffrage, child labor legislation, the League of Nations, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the income tax, even Morris Sheppard’s bill to reduce infant mortality.
The eastern Protestant elites who controlled so much of the nation’s wealth in the 1920s divided themselves on wet/dry issues along the same lines that divided them on most political issues. Improve-the-masses progressives like John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Gifford Pinchot, who saw Prohibition as a logical undertaking for activist government, were arrayed against wet conservatives like Beck, who believed government existed only to preserve order and protect private property. Pinchot’s wife, Cornelia, an outspoken progressive who had devoted most of her energies to suffrage and improved conditions for factory workers, joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union only after “I found out that the wet lobby was against everything in which I was interested,” including child labor laws and woman suffrage. When she said “the reactionary movement as a whole is 95% wet,” she was not far wrong.
Prohibition stirred conservative members of the privileged classes as had no issue since they had been steamrollered by the populist-powered income tax amendment. For all of Fiorello La Guardia’s antic showmanship and parliamentary razzle-dazzle, it was Beck and other men of wealth and stature who had first begun to mobilize an organized political opposition to the Anti-Saloon League. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment announced its birth late in the ratification process in 1918, when an admiralty lawyer named William H. Stayton sent a solicitation letter to the six hundred men in his address book. Among the AAPA’s earliest members were men whose very names conjured up money and social position, including Stuyvesant Fish, Kermit Roosevelt, Marshall Field, and Vincent Astor (not to mention John Philip Sousa). One of its earliest fund-raising efforts took place at the New York Yacht Club. But the AAPA failed to establish meaningful traction until it won the attention, in 1926, of Pierre S. du Pont—chairman of his family’s chemical colossus; chairman of the du Pont–controlled General Motors Corporation; and soon the dominant figure in an invigorated AAPA.
Before that happened, though, the AAPA’s fumbling efforts in electoral politics would demonstrate to many of the wet Tories that effective opposition to the dry regime would not come from the voting public. Following the Anti-Saloon League model, in 1922 the association endorsed a roster of wet candidates for Congress, whereupon everyone on the endorsement list received a letter from Wayne Wheeler freighted with warning. It was a measure of Wheeler’s might that year, and again in 1924, that many of these candidates ran the other way, rejecting the AAPA’s blessing for fear it would guarantee their defeat.
This would not have troubled Pierre du Pont, who believed he and his friends might foster good government if only they would “refuse to contribute to any party that tries to promote indiscriminate voting.” As he told a Republican colleague, “It is futile for people to dictate government by committing representatives to certain policies, or to know the qualifications of candidates.” Voters, he explained, “must learn to leave these matters to those who do know, trusting them to carry out their work.” In the context, “them” really meant “us.” By the end of the decade du Pont would put his money, his friends, his friends’ money, and their collective reputation where his euphemism was.
OF THE TWO structural elements that shaped the dry regime, only the Volstead Act was flexible. By general acknowledgment, the Eighteenth Amendment was both inelastic and indestructible. Any amendment to modify or revoke the Eighteenth would require ratification by three-quarters of the forty-eight state legislatures, just like the original. “Thirteen dry states with a population of less than that of New York State alone can prevent repeal until Halley’s Comet returns,” Clarence Darrow said. (As of the 1920 census, the total population of the thirteen smallest states was 5.1 million; of New York, 10.4 million.) The great defense lawyer, who was as wet as the Flood, believed “one might as well talk about taking his summer vacation on Mars.” But every provision of the Volstead Act was vulnerable to the whim of congressional majorities—and, to some degree, to the mood swings of voters in specific districts. This became clear in 1922 when Andrew J. Volstead, seeking his eleventh term in Minnesota’s Seventh Congressional District, was defeated for reelection.
Volstead once imagined the perfect epitaph: “He naturally made many enemies, but we love him for the enemies he made.” Some of those were the southerners he attacked in his righteous, unyielding, and futile campaign for an antilynching law. Many more, though, reviled Volstead for his eponymous connection to Prohibition enforcement: for instance, the Milwaukee ma
n who blamed him for the spread of poisonous liquor and believed he should be “convicted of murder in the first degree and punished by death”; or the Philadelphian who said “You made a Bolshevik out of me”; or the New York cop who suggested that “a perfectly good bullet” would be wasted on Volstead. “You are not worth it,” he wrote on New York Police Department stationery. “Even the nit that preys on a cootie’s testicles has a greater sense of shame, of honor and of self-respect than has Andrew J. Volstead!”
Yet the politician who vanquished the author of the Prohibition enforcement laws was himself a dry—dryer, he claimed, than Volstead himself. O. J. Kvale was a Lutheran minister who in a contested Republican primary in 1920 had accused Volstead of atheism. (The evidence: one Sunday morning, while the God-fearing residents of Granite Falls gathered in church, Volstead was seen tending his garden.) Running as an Independent the next time around, the desert-dry Kvale won with the support of Prohibitionists more wrathful than the cautious Volstead. But he had another group in his corner as well: wets eager to display the symbolic scalp of Prohibition’s symbolic enforcer—and to see the next-ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, a Republican wet from Pennsylvania named George S. Graham, assume supervisory responsibility for any modification of the Volstead Act.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 31