Roy Haynes’s force of federal agents may have been just as corrupt, but unlike the city cops they at least had to go through the motions to keep their jobs. The thousands of Volstead violators left unmolested by the NYPD were instead rounded up by Haynes’s men, who delivered them by the wagonful to the badly degraded Federal Court in downtown Manhattan. This led an exasperated Buckner to concoct an opportunity that quickly became known as “Bargain Day.” Publicly promising to request light fines in exchange for guilty pleas, he invited defendants to the Old Post Office Building south of City Hall, where his staff, working with two cooperative federal judges, could process five hundred cases at a time and clear up the backlog. This early example of plea bargaining was cemented into American legal practice when the Supreme Court affirmed its constitutionality in 1930—in the words of legal scholar Jason Mazzone, writing in 2009, a “momentous development” in American criminal law.
Buckner also perfected a widely used procedure that enabled him to avoid the criminal court process entirely. Under the federal civil code, any structure identified as a “common nuisance” could, upon issuance of an injunction, be seized under the legal doctrine of civil forfeiture and closed for an entire year. Buckner reached into his pocket for $1,500 of his own money, handed it to four young lawyers on his staff (including John Marshall Harlan, who would be appointed to the Supreme Court thirty years later), and sent them out to collect evidence at the city’s speakeasies. After buying a few drinks, they needed only swear to a judge they had done so, and they’d instantly have an injunction in hand. Within hours court officers would visit the offending establishment and clamp a padlock on the door. Although Buckner’s “Four Horsemen,” as they were inevitably called, succeeded in closing down such high-end establishments as the Colony Club and the Club Deauville, they were shut out when Judge John C. Knox told Buckner he didn’t much like the idea of padlocking the Hotel Astor. Buckner obligingly withdrew that request, but the procedure soon became so familiar that Billy Rose produced a Broadway revue called Padlocks of 1927, with a cast that included a young hoofer named George Raft and the raucous speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan. Guinan, who famously greeted her customers with a loud “Hello, suckers!,” took to wearing a necklace of padlocks from time to time.
Emory Buckner knew that padlock raids were never going to dry up New York. According to historian Michael Lerner, they just changed the nature of speakeasies: when Buckner’s men were on the prowl, speakeasy operators stopped investing in fancy interiors and fixtures, opting instead, as The New Yorker put it, for “the informal conjunction of a back parlor and a bucket of paint.” But even if padlock cases didn’t stop the flow of liquor, they consumed very little time or effort. When coupled with the efficiencies achieved on Bargain Day, they enabled Buckner’s men to turn their attention away from petty cases and toward the big-time bootleggers who were exercising increasing control over the New York market.
This was what concerned Buckner most. Reluctant dry he may have been, but he could not disguise his alarm at the growing muscle being wielded by large-scale criminal enterprises that were fueled by liquor money. To go after them, he believed, it was necessary for law enforcement officials to forget about the raw numbers of arrests and convictions that were longed for by the dry establishment. “It seems an impossible thing to persuade those who want law enforcement that what is required here in this district is less enforcement,” he told friends. His goal, Buckner said, was to “make an effort to stop 49 arrests out of 50, and yet mak[e] the fiftieth more effective than all combined.”
Buckner’s plan made sense. It was endorsed by Mabel Willebrandt, who had long thought the Prohibition Bureau would be far more effective if it aimed its efforts at the generals instead of the foot soldiers, mess cooks, and camp followers clattering along behind the big bootlegging syndicates. But when Buckner gave an interview to an inconsequential new magazine—it was the nine-month-old New Yorker—he made the mistake of saying, “The man who buys liquor when he is thirsty for it is not a criminal in the sense that a check forger or thief is a criminal.” He was further reported to have said, “I have no particular quarrel with him.”
As a result, Buckner got into a quarrel with a more potent adversary. Two days after the magazine appeared on newsstands, Wayne Wheeler was in the White House. Buckner’s apostasy had led Wheeler to complain formally to President Coolidge and to make sure his displeasure was known to the press. “He is becoming a regular visitor,” the Times reported, oddly surprised, “and today he was the first on the list of White House callers.” Wheeler’s widely publicized visit compelled Coolidge to let it be known that the White House could not possibly countenance a policy that suggested possession of illegal liquor was not a crime. Wheeler gloated. Buckner, whose regard for Coolidge was slight, nonetheless disclaimed his “no particular quarrel” comment, and in the following week’s issue The New Yorker chastised him for allowing Wheeler “to stampede him into half-hearted retreat.”
Not that it made any difference. In that same issue, the magazine’s regular feature, “The Liquor Market,” reported that a case of Scotch could be obtained for something between $50 and $70, imported gin was holding at $65, and champagne was up to $80 to $120, “depending on reliability and brand.” Overall, prices remained “steady, but subject to inflating by individuals.” The price gouging resulted not from shortages brought on by padlock raids or by the crackdown on the syndicates. The higher prices showing up here and there, the magazine concluded, were simply “due to pre-holiday and football demand.”
* Expertise, in general, was his stock in trade. Fisher was coauthor of a bestselling hygiene textbook, inventor of a precursor of the Rolodex, founder (with the support of Alexander Graham Bell) of the Life Extension Institute, and a noted eugenicist. He was also considered an expert on the English language. Asked whether “Yes, We Have No Bananas” could be considered grammatically correct, Fisher replied, “Yes, it would be correct, if the Statement was preceded by the question ‘Have you no bananas?’”
* August A. Busch, whose vast facilities produced glucose, corn oil, infant formula, soft drinks, and a broad variety of other products during Prohibition, entered the ice cream market with a chocolate-coated bar he named Smack.
* Pound followed him six years later, joining the Harvard Law faculty in 1910 and becoming dean in 1916.
* An especially vivid demonstration of this phenomenon was revealed in congressional testimony presented in 1926. A man who apparently made his living as a defendant, standing in for actual lawbreakers, was shocked to learn that a zealous prosecutor had arranged to have him sentenced to three days in jail. “Now, my contract was to appear in court, answer the calendar, and pay a $100 fine,” he told the judge, “but not to go to jail. I was not the man at all. I was never arrested in my life.’ ”
Chapter 17
Crime Pays
W
AYNE WHEELER RARELY had much trouble with congressional committees. When he wanted a change in the law—the banning of medicinal beer, say, or tougher penalties—he could count on one of his Capitol Hill allies to serve up a hearing custom made for a Wheeler star turn. When those hearings were momentarily seized by a wet representative or senator trying to pillory Wheeler and the ASL, he still managed to perform with poise. By nature a polite and cordial man, at times even jovial, he was as cool under pressure as he was hot when applying it. He didn’t even complain in 1922 when Representative George Tinkham, a big-game hunter from Massachusetts, tried to mount Wheeler’s head on his wall.
The superwet Tinkham, who once said he considered Wheeler’s “very presence in the Capitol an offense against decency,” compelled him during a committee hearing to read aloud a lengthy list of wet political committees, by way of demonstrating the alleged breadth of opposition to Prohibition. Wheeler could have been reciting a school honor roll as he tripped amiably through the list: “The American Liberties League . . . the Constitutional Liberty League . . . the Light Wine and Bee
r League of America . . . the National Order of Camels . . .”—no explanation asked, none given—“the Self Determination League of Liberties . . . the Sanity League of America . . . the Auxiliary of Caravans for Women, Order of Camels . . .” It was likely that some of these groups had fewer members than syllables in their names. When the hearing concluded, Wheeler noted that portions of the proceedings were hardly germane. But, he said, he had wanted to demonstrate his willingness to cooperate.
Wheeler’s adroit manipulation of congressional opponents finally failed him in April 1926. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee convened that month ostensibly to consider various amendments to the Volstead Act. No one believed that was its actual mission. For one thing, the likelihood of any moderating amendment getting through the still-dry Senate was nil. For another, one of the five members of the subcommittee was H. L. Mencken’s “supreme artist of assault,” the ungovernable James A. Reed of Missouri, who treated his political enemies as if they were fish he had landed. He’d inflict as much pain as he could as he yanked out the hook.
Back when Reed compared Andrew Volstead to “the burners of witches,” he had won the unprecedented censure of the House of Representatives (by a vote of 181–3). Reed loathed the League of Nations, despised woman suffrage, and detested the “snooping spinsters” who supported federal aid to state maternity programs. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, said, “No other public man has such a mastery of bitter sarcasm, or is a better hater” than Jim Reed. If there was anyone in public life Reed hated more than Wayne Wheeler, he managed to keep it a secret.
In the 1926 hearings the “truculent Senior Senator from Missouri,” said the New Republic, “assumed with his usual lordly manner the real leadership of the wet cause in Washington.” As a member of the Senate’s Democratic minority, Reed did not control the subcommittee’s gavel, but he nonetheless dominated the hearings, which the New York Times called “a war of words as bitter as any Washington has known in a generation.” Over three long weeks of testimony he elbowed aside the other subcommittee members, all of them drys. At times Reed demonstrated why he was called “the Bellowing Bull of Missouri”; at other moments he filleted dry witnesses with a stiletto; and when friendly wets stepped up to testify, he displayed the manners of a maitre d’, presented with the charm of your favorite uncle.
The wet witnesses and their sympathizers took the stage first. The opening lines of this tightly scripted drama were delivered by Senator William Cabell Bruce of Maryland, who would soon celebrate the marriage of his son David to Andrew Mellon’s daughter Ailsa at a lavish and evidently dry reception. (This might have been why Bruce called Prohibition “a blight upon the entire joyous side of human existence.”) But he had more practical reasons for opposing it as well: most of the $443,839,544.98 in liquor tax revenues the federal government had collected in the last fully wet year, he said, was now going into “the pockets of foreign and domestic lawbreakers.” Reed gave a great deal of time to the testimony of Emory Buckner, whose criticism of the underfunded and ill-designed federal enforcement effort was both informed and eloquent, and he welcomed twenty congressmen from New York City, Albany, and Buffalo who dropped by en masse from the opposite wing of the Capitol Building to condemn the ASL and make the case for the legalization of light wines and beer.
The wide berth Reed gave wet witnesses turned claustrophobic when it came time to hear the parade of drys summoned by his colleagues. When Patrick H. Callahan, a varnish manufacturer from Louisville, stepped forward in behalf of the Association of Catholics Favoring Prohibition, Reed made certain to find out how many members the organization had (320) and how that compared to the number of Catholics in the United States (an abashed Callahan was forced to admit there were something between eighteen and twenty million). The unprepossessing Fred T. Smith, chairman of something called the Citizens’ Committee of 1000 for Law Enforcement, hardly fared better. Pressed by Reed to state his occupation, Smith said, “I preach law enforcement and patriotism and religion up and down the country, and sell asbestos when I have a little extra time.”
Reed pushed dry witnesses as if they were playthings and pulled them as if they were taffy, taking so much time with his questions, his badgering interjections, and his own speechifying that the briefly rebellious majority members of the committee voted to grant the drys extra time because Reed had consumed so much of it. Bishop Cannon, Ella Boole of the WCTU, a black woman named Marie Madre-Marshall “representing,” said another dry witness, “the 15 million colored people who have suffered from lack of enforcement”—for seven long days the drys took their places at the witness table to offer their fervid testimony, to endure Reed’s unrelenting inquisition, and, happily or not, to adorn the front pages of newspapers across the nation. Each morning crowds lined up hours before the hearing room opened; the small portion that managed to squeeze in—maybe a third of those waiting—were treated to the Jim Reed Show, which they watched either in strangled horror or with unchecked awe. The only light moment came when Reed, his blue-gray eyes wide with theatrical innocence, asserted that he himself was impartial and only trying to find out the facts. The anxious and tired crowd exploded in tension-relieving laughter. Reed immediately reached for the acid; their outburst, he said, was “the laughter of fanatics and fools.”
The hearings, said the Times, were “the all-absorbing topic of comment and debate” throughout Washington. By the time the third week began, the coming confrontation between Jim Reed and Wayne Wheeler was anticipated in drawing rooms and on street corners, a heavyweight contest with more explosive potential than any battle the Prohibition debate had produced. Wheeler had been taking his place in the front row of the audience every day, to provide support for his fellow drys and also because Reed refused to let him know on what day he might be asked to testify. Wheeler was not well in the spring of 1926; doctors had diagnosed chronic heart trouble, he told a colleague, caused by “long years of overdraft on my reserve force.” When the committee was not in session, he remained in bed at his apartment near the National Zoo. He “looked like a corpse,” a colleague would recall, “haggard, weary, and spent.”
Finally, on a Saturday that the Times expected to culminate in “a spectacular war of words between Mr. Wheeler and Sen. Reed,” the last half of the last scheduled day of hearings arrived. By then the committee had spent fifteen days taking more than 1,400 pages of testimony from 133 witnesses. It was shortly after the lunchtime recess when Wheeler finally settled in his chair at the witness table and began to read his prepared remarks. He took most of an hour to present his rebuttal of the wet witnesses. He attacked the unfaithful Emory Buckner, he challenged the licentious pro-beer congressmen, and he defended a federal police apparatus that had been assaulted by several witnesses who were part of that apparatus. Crime may have been rampant, and illegal liquor may have been everywhere—Wheeler could hardly deny it. But that did not mean he lacked an explanation. In one sentence near the end of his speech he alit upon a formulation on which one could have balanced the entire war between the wets and the drys. “The very fact that the law is difficult to enforce,” said Wayne B. Wheeler, “is the clearest proof of the need of its existence.”
At least he didn’t have to endure much in the way of questions. Jim Reed had not bothered to come back after lunch.
REFLECTING ON THE two years he had spent teaching school back in the 1880s, Wayne Wheeler once said, “No one can hold the confidence of his pupils or associates who cannot keep a smiling exterior, no matter how disturbed he is inside.” Reed had scratched Wheeler’s smiling exterior and disturbed his insides so severely that he traveled to Battle Creek for a three-week rest cure as soon as the hearings ended. His friend Dr. Kellogg prescribed green vegetables, fig bran, and three or four enemas a week at bedtime. Wheeler was wary when he returned to Washington and told Scott McBride it had proved impossible to “overdraw on [my] health account for twenty years and get it back in [just] twenty days.”
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bsp; Jim Reed, of course, couldn’t have felt better. Writing in 1943, the dry publicist Ernest Gordon described the critical impact of the hearings: they “gave the impression that Prohibition,” for the first time since its enactment, “was not a settled question.” That may not have been Reed’s primary intention—he doubtless would have been gratified simply for having inflicted punishment and provoked humiliation—but there was no question that he had turned Prohibition, six years into its dominion, from a fact into a debate. It was a change of circumstance so delightful he immediately hopped aboard another Senate committee, this one investigating campaign spending, and zeroed in on the finances of the ASL and other dry groups.
Reed’s most gleeful moment in these proceedings may have come when he forced one of Gifford Pinchot’s advisors, whose salary was paid by the Pennsylvania WCTU, to admit that the governor’s WCTU-funded field agents were each spending eight to ten dollars a day on drinks while gathering evidence—all the more impressive when you consider that a shot of rye in a Philadelphia speakeasy went for just fifty cents. But that was sideshow. The earlier hearings had altered the rules of engagement between wet and dry. Where the discussion had previously concerned the evils of alcohol, the Reed Committee forced a change of subject. At issue was not the law itself, or the reasons for the law, but what the drys insisted was the enforcement of the law. Ten years earlier, “submission”—as in, submission to the states for ratification—had been the euphemism congressional drys had used in place of the scarier “Prohibition.” Now “enforcement,” or in formal usage “law enforcement,” became the stand-in for the real issue that propelled the Prohibition wars: who would control the country, the wets or the drys?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 36