Other states had already told the feds they would have to go it alone. Massachusetts voters had rejected its state enforcement law. Symbolically, at least, the Maryland Free State remained forever free, its legislators never once approving an enforcement law, its police and courts thumbing their noses at the feds. But New York was different—not just because it was the nation’s largest state, but because the repeal of Mullan-Gage was the first time a legislature and a governor eliminated enforcement laws already in place. For all the virtue inherent in the rule of law, Smith had seen plainly that this law, by this time, did not in fact rule, except on paper. “Al is really a very stupid man,” an admirer once said. “All he can see is the point.”
AS THEIR QUADRENNIAL national convention was about to begin in New York in June 1924, the Democratic Party called upon its faded knight, William Jennings Bryan, to draft a formal tribute to the Republican president who had died the previous summer. “Our party stands uncovered beside the bier of Warren G. Harding,” Bryan’s memorial statement began—until he realized how that would sound when read aloud. In Bryan’s next draft, “bier” became “grave.”
Bryan had been brought into discussions of the impending convention by his party’s 1920 vice presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1923 Roosevelt wrote Bryan about the “hopeful idiots who think the Democratic platform will advocate repeal of the 18th amendment” and wanted to hold the convention in soaking-wet New York. The hopeful idiots won on the geography but hadn’t a chance with the platform. Nor did Bryan, who wanted a ringing endorsement of Prohibition nailed into place. Four years into the reign of constitutional Prohibition, the Democrats were so evenly, ferociously, and irretrievably divided over the subject that it turned the convention into a nightmare, the party’s presidential chances into dust, and, for the first time since ratification, the debate over Prohibition itself into live political ammunition.
New York, awash in booze, was the perfect place for the story to play out. In his memoirs Izzy Einstein said he and Wheeler discussed plans to keep the convention dry, but such an outcome was hardly likely. The city’s taps had been opened wide, warned the federal Prohibition director for New York and Northern New Jersey, “in anticipation of the convention and the expectation of resulting appetitive demands.” The director, Palmer Canfield, added another decorative element to his baroque phrasing when he said the increased “liquoral humidity” was inevitable. Canfield also said, “It will be no better and no worse, no wetter and no dryer.”
That was certainly true. Official “reception committees” could direct the visiting delegate to Manhattan’s five thousand speakeasies; unofficial hosts—hotel bellmen, cabbies, prostitutes—knew where to get a bottle a delegate could enjoy in his room. “Good rye is hardly obtainable,” Variety had said in one of its regular market reports, so Democrats made do with lesser merchandise. Wet operatives kept dry leaders entertained at endless social events, almost as if trying to seduce them with the wonders of Sodom. The favored presidential candidate of the drys, former Treasury secretary William G. McAdoo, complained to a friend, “Some of my best men have been hopelessly drunk since they landed in New York.”
But none of this got in the way of the speedy resolution of the Prohibition plank in the Democratic platform. True to his pattern, Wayne Wheeler opposed Bryan’s wish for a strong dry statement and enlisted the support of his emissary to the Democrats, Bishop Cannon. Neither man was willing to risk the possibility of losing in a direct confrontation with the wets. The platform committee quickly agreed on an anodyne promise to “respect and enforce the constitution and all laws.” What some feared would blow up the party had turned out to be a hiccup. The heavy artillery was instead expended on another platform issue and on the presidential nomination—two inevitable battles between wet and dry that had led one journalist to say that the Democrats could avert disaster only if they could keep the convention from starting. “Old wounds will be torn open and new ones will be inflicted,” Stanley Frost wrote in Outlook. “The battle will have a violence and deadliness which may lead to almost any result the most active imagination can conceive.”
The volatile platform issue, at least nominally, was the Ku Klux Klan. After the founder of the modern Klan, William J. Simmons, had been expelled from the secret order for chronic drunkenness (he spent his later years in an Atlanta movie house, smelling of bourbon and cloves, as he watched Birth of a Nation over and over), the next Imperial Wizard, a Dallas dentist named Hiram M. Evans, ushered in a new emphasis on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish parts of its program. This enabled the Klan to break out of the race-obsessed South and spread its influence across the map. The Klan of the 1920s “enrolled more members in Connecticut than in Mississippi, more in Oregon than in Louisiana, and more in New Jersey than in Alabama,” wrote historian Stanley Coben. Over half a million Klansmen lived in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Klan-backed candidates, all running on platforms both dry and xenophobic, were elected governor in Oregon, Colorado, and Kansas. In Detroit a Klan candidate whose name wasn’t even on the ballot was nearly elected mayor in an avalanche of write-in votes.
Nativism could find no better running mate than Prohibition. In many towns there was little distinction between membership in the Klan and in an ASL-affiliated church. At the national level the Anti-Saloon League did not overtly incite religious prejudice; Wheeler in fact worked to develop alliances with dry Catholics and Jews, and Ernest Cherrington made a conscious effort to keep the ASL’s public communications ecumenical. But to men like Roy Haynes, the Wheeler acolyte who headed the Prohibition Bureau, the Klan’s vigilant dryness was an exploitable asset.
This became tragically clear in 1923 and 1924 when Williamson County, in southern Illinois, saw its law enforcement apparatus taken over by a vigilante army of between twelve and thirteen hundred Klansmen. Through the intervention of dry congressman Edward E. Denison, the Klansmen had been deputized by Haynes to clean up the county, which had been in the grip of bootleggers. The vigilantes were led by S. Glenn Young, who had earlier been drummed out of his position in the Prohibition Bureau as “a distinct and glaring disgrace . . . unfit to be in government service.” After midnight on February 1, 1924, Young’s marauders raided the homes of immigrant Italian mineworkers, terrorizing women and children, and, if they found wine in the house, hauling their husbands and fathers off to jail. Rev. A. M. Stickney of the Marion Methodist Church provided ideological support, declaring that Catholics and Jews controlled America’s newspapers and insisting that only the Klan could protect America from disaster. Stickney also took pains to note that the assassins of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley had all been born Catholic. Marching behind Young, who carried a submachine gun, Klansmen briefly seized control of the local government. Riots punctuated the ensuing war between Klan vigilantes and bootlegger-supported local officials; by its end, twenty people were dead.
As wets at the Democratic convention in June 1924 prepared to introduce a platform resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan, they did not have to cite the events in “Bloody Williamson.” Although the religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices of the Klan were enumerated in the condemnation resolution, there wasn’t a soul on the hot and crowded convention floor in Madison Square Garden who didn’t know that the fight over the resolution was really a struggle between wet and dry. Southern wets supporting the presidential candidacy of Oscar W. Underwood—the race-baiter who had vanquished Richmond Hobson in the Alabama senatorial primary ten years earlier—voted to condemn the Klan; western drys backing the progressive McAdoo lined up in its support. There were no anomalies, however, in the anti-Klan position of the large cadre of delegates—urban, heavily ethnic, utterly soaked—supporting the third major candidate, Al Smith. But there were not enough Smith and Underwood delegates to carry the day, and the resolution failed by one lone vote, out of 1,085 cast. Asked to explain how the Klan had survived the censure resolution, Imperial Wizard Evans, who had spent the convention monitoring the proceedin
gs from a heavily guarded suite in the McAlpin Hotel, was triumphantly smug: “They were afraid of what we might do.”
Al Smith had come to the convention in his hometown as McAdoo’s main opponent for the presidential nomination. His repeal of the Mullan-Gage law had made him, as it was expressed in the heaven-rattling testimony of the Reverend Bob Jones, “the worst-hated man in America”—except insofar as the same action had made him, among the wet half of the Democratic Party (and among not a few wet Republicans as well), one of the best loved. The same knife edge on which the Democratic Party was balanced during the vote on the Klan resolution split it asunder during the presidential balloting. A two-thirds majority was required to win the nomination, and neither side would, or could, give in to the other. For sixteen sweltering, contentious days, while wet delegates rose to sing “The Sidewalks of New York” whenever Smith’s name was mentioned, and dry delegates wired home for more cash to pay for their hotel rooms, and exhausted newspaper reporters sought relief and distraction in Manhattan’s speakeasies and cabarets—during these murderous two-plus weeks, the Democrats went through 103 excruciating ballots before settling on corporate lawyer John W. Davis, a former solicitor general. This was the same man who had once called Wayne Wheeler’s predecessor in the ASL’s Washington office “a goggle-eyed, weasel-faced lobbyist,” but who had also vowed to Wheeler that the Eighteenth Amendment was “a fixed fact” that “has passed beyond the reach of profitable discussion.” John W. Davis was neither dry nor wet, nor remotely capable of defeating Calvin Coolidge in November.
From the perspective of a conservative Republican like James Montgomery Beck, the disorganized and disorderly proceedings had proved that the Democrats were “more of a mob than a party.” The convention led the genial Will Rogers to famously declare, “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” But it was a prophetic and oddly poetic phrase uttered a year earlier by William H. Anderson, an outspoken New York ASL leader, that summarized the lesson of the 1924 convention and simultaneously suggested the future of both the Democratic Party and the Eighteenth Amendment.
“Governor Smith,” said Anderson, “is just the kind of man wanted by those who want that kind of man.”
* The “Federal” prefix was not added to its name until 1935.
* Stanley’s grandson and namesake, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, made his own contribution to the free exchange of banned substances as the first large-scale distributor of LSD, in the 1960s. He later became the soundman for the Grateful Dead.
* Grant’s theory held that northern Europeans—he called them “Nordics”—were “a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers” whose very existence was threatened by intermarriage with the lowly “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans.” And even these lower castes could be corrupted, as “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”
* A study in the late 1920s established that roughly half of the professional Bootleggers were eastern European Jews, another 25 percent Italian, and the remainder a mix of ethnicities, including Polish and Irish.
Chapter 16
“Escaped on Payment of Money”
I
N AN ATTEMPT to memorize poetry,” Irving Fisher wrote in 1926, “Professor Vogt of the University of Christiania found that on days when he drank one and one-half to three glasses of beer it took him 18 per cent longer to learn the lines.” To an extreme dry like Fisher—which is to say, to an extreme dry who also happened to be one of America’s foremost economists—this was a “fact” to fall in love with. Fisher wasn’t going to miss the chance to attribute the strength of the U.S. economy to computations made by Professor Vogt during his attempt to master the Odyssey, in Norwegian, while a little bit in the tank. He had made a similar calculation in 1919, when he extrapolated from a study showing, he said, that “two to four glasses of beer will reduce the output of typesetters by 8 per cent.” From this he determined that withholding those beers from those typesetters, and from everyone else in the American labor force, “will add to the national output of the U.S. between 7½ to 15 billion dollars’ worth of product, every year.”
Fisher loved to express complexities with numbers, but computation wasn’t his only work for the dry cause. He was the drys’ leading expert on virtually any subject, before virtually any audience.* He declared himself dedicated to “the abolition of war, disease, degeneracy, and instability of money,” and considered alcoholic beverages a contributor to each of these plagues. He gave speeches, testified before Congress, and wrote advertisements, pamphlets, and books about the virtues of the dry laws; in 1928 one of the latter, Prohibition at Its Worst, was turned into a movie with the counterintuitive title (for modern viewers) Deliverance. In the years after ratification, Fisher seemed to find evidence for the wonders of Prohibition behind every statistic he encountered—for instance, the discovery, in 1924, that arrests in New York City for the use of “foul language” had dropped 20 percent since pre-Volstead levels. He was not inclined to consider other causes—like, possibly, a wider acceptance of profanity in the Jazz Age city—when he could grab a number and pronounce it evidence. When Fisher determined that a single drink reduced efficiency by 2 percent, he said that this translated to more than a billion dollars of GNP. Dartmouth professor Herman Feldman, bemused by the unlikely exactitude of Fisher’s calculations, said a 2 percent loss in efficiency could instead be the result of “a mere depressing thought.”
Fisher was not alone in his attempts to measure the effects of Prohibition with numbers of dubious precision and indeterminate relevance. From Washington came the pronouncements of Prohibition Commissioner Roy Haynes, as jolly as ever: five times as many new houses were built in 1922 as in the last entirely wet year; three thousand people were joining churches every day; in some cities drunkenness among women was down 80 percent. Other dry boosters credited Prohibition for empty prison cells, longer life expectancy, and increased savings rates, not to mention the growing popularity of bowling, which “undoubtedly absorbs not only some of the time but some of the money that was formerly spent on drink.” Even an increase in gambling reflected well on Prohibition: criminologist Winthrop D. Lane attributed the gambling spike to “the higher wages earned by boys and young men” after the country went dry.
Dry numerologists might have learned their tricks from the wets. Before the Eighteenth Amendment was enacted, the United States Brewers’ Association had been twisting statistics for years. The brewers had smugly noted that per capita savings were lower in states with dry laws, a finding that ignored the obvious disparity in wealth between the wet states of the Northeast and the dry ones of the South and West. The USBA went so far as to argue that the low birth rates in dry states “show conclusively how prohibition lowers the standard of virility.” Roy Haynes, observing from the other end of the telescope, claimed Prohibition was responsible for a sharp decline in “arrests for offenses against chastity.”
The numbers became a jump ball, each side trying to tip them toward its own goal. Arrest rates for drunkenness? If they were up, wets attributed them to increased drinking, drys to more effective enforcement. Frequency of alcoholism? When Dow Jones president Clarence W. Barron, a wet, told his friend J. H. Kellogg that Bellevue Hospital in New York was treating more alcoholics than it had before Prohibition, the dry Dr. Kellogg divined the reason: “because practically all the other alcoholic wards in New York have been closed and so [Bellevue] gets them all.”
Wolcott Gibbs would have had a different take on Barron’s news. The satirist invented the “president of the American Institute for the Dissemination of Trivia” to pass judgment on such data: “These figures can be interpreted in only two ways,” Gibbs’s man said. “Either people are drinking a lot more, or else they don’t hold it too good.” In fact, one can examine every uninflected statistic that emerged from the 1920s—cirrhosis rates, alcohol-related deaths, incidence of alcoholic psychosis—and it’s inescapably clear that Ameri
cans as a whole consumed less alcohol during Prohibition than before. The outstanding work of economists Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel in the 1980s and 1990s established that “alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level,” and by the time of Repeal had risen “to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level.” Tax data collected immediately before and after Prohibition—a precise measurement of alcohol legally purchased—confirms this appraisal.
But national numbers obscure individual behavior. Though many millions clearly lived by the law, those who did not drank more than their share. What Irving Fisher, Morris Sheppard, Ernest H. Cherrington, and other intellectually capable and intellectually honest drys didn’t understand was how much those who drank wanted to drink, either out of biological necessity, psychological weakness, or free choice. Had they paid attention to the post-ratification experience of the brewing industry, the drys might have recognized the limits of law’s ability to defeat appetite.
As in most brewery-related enterprises, Anheuser-Busch had led the way. The technique of removing the alcohol from beer at the conclusion of the brewing process was put to profitable use in 1916 when August A. Busch introduced a “cereal beverage” called Bevo (the name was derived from pivo, the Bohemian word for “beer”). Bevo never made much of an impact in the Deep South, where several states banned its distribution. Alabama’s statute, for example, prohibited the sale of anything that “tastes like, foams like, smells like or looks like beer,” and even proscribed containers that looked like beer bottles, irrespective of what was inside or on the label. But as state Prohibition laws spread through the rest of the country, so did the sales of near beer. By 1918 Anheuser-Busch was producing five million cases a year, and the company built the world’s largest bottling facility, at a cost of $10 million, just for Bevo.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 33