The ASL leaders were wise to be worried. The only thing that seemed to be multiplying faster than federal power was criminal violence. No sooner had the flow of liquor from Rum Row in the Northeast been stanched than it began to gush in unprecedented quantities through the sluiceway that was Detroit, where an overmatched prosecutor said, “The greatest obstacle to the attainment of Prohibition is the Constitution of the United States, the instrument that decreed its birth.” Corruption and incompetence had metastasized throughout the Prohibition bureau to such a degree that Wayne Wheeler had been forced to capitulate and allow bureau agents to be placed under the protection of the Civil Service, even at the cost of ceding the ASL’s rich garden of patronage. On the Supreme Court, William Howard Taft, who had once feared the destructive power of Prohibition but had since become its most influential defender, sensed the looming breakup of his coalition as Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone increasingly abandoned pro-enforcement positions.
The tightrope that Wheeler and the ASL walked—the one suspended between its hunger for stiff enforcement and its wish not to offend public sensibilities with federal overreaching—had first threatened to snap in early 1927. Several New Yorkers died and hundreds had been rendered gravely ill during the 1926 holiday season; all had consumed industrial products that had been denatured with poisonous wood alcohol. Wheeler’s response was chilling. “The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable, when the Constitution prohibits it,” he told the press. “The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide.”
Reaction was swift, and enraged. Senator Edward I. Edwards of New Jersey said Wheeler was condoning “legalized murder.” Andrew Mellon declared his opposition to the use of toxic denaturants, a practice he considered “inexcusable.” Morris Sheppard, trying to bail Wheeler out, argued that overindulgence in alcohol was the real killer. But wets who’d endured years of lectures about the dangers of alcohol easily punctured this argument. “If the Senator’s theory is that alcohol is so poisonous,” asked wet Senator Edwin S. Broussard of Louisiana, “then why put poison in it?”
Such was the prelude to Wheeler’s appearance on the stage of Carnegie Hall three months later, his most widely noticed public appearance since the disastrous Reed hearings. Now he was stepping into the den of a lion who was every bit Jim Reed’s equal. Wheeler had agreed to debate Clarence Darrow in front of a sure-to-be-hostile New York audience, despite his own increasingly ill health and Darrow’s certain invocation of the still-simmering poison controversy. Darrow did not disappoint, ripping into Wheeler and other drys who, he said, believed that “any man who takes a drink of alcohol today may be poisoned without a trial by a jury, without anything, just be poisoned because he dared take it!” For this one time Darrow was on the prosecution’s side, and the prisoner in the dock was Prohibition itself. Vigorous and theatrical, alternating between corrosive sarcasm and heaven-shaking grandiloquence, the seventy-year-old Darrow deployed all his courtroom skills. It was as if he were addressing a jury, but in this case a jury composed of twenty-five hundred New Yorkers, the overwhelming majority of whom had come to Carnegie intent on delivering a conviction. So intent, in fact, that those in the first-tier seats had paid $11 apiece—the 2009 equivalent of $135—for the privilege.
Wheeler’s arguments were sharper than Darrow’s, and his command of the facts he had invoked so many times over the preceding quarter century was firmer. But he didn’t stand a chance. He was steamrollered by his opponent’s rhetorical power, overwhelmed by the audience’s hunger for blood, and disabled by his physical condition. Wearing his finest uniform—full evening dress, complete with white tie—Wheeler nonetheless looked pale, withered, somehow empty. He didn’t even present his opening remarks himself; instead, his colleague Scott McBride read from a prepared text while the audience booed and hissed and jeered. Even the ferociously anti-Wheeler New York World expressed sympathy. He was, the paper said, “engaged in a one-handed fight against 2,000 booing, hooting, caterwauling New Yorkers, who tried all at once to tell him where to get off.”
But, the paper continued, “the small, spunky, bespectacled, baldish man in the clawhammer coat didn’t get off at all.” Freeing McBride from his ventriloquist duties during the rebuttal, speaking in a voice that could barely be heard beyond the first few rows, Wheeler presented a logical, acute, and shapely response that took into account every familiar argument for Prohibition and a few others besides (“Did you ever hear of a man eating so much pie or cake or anything of that kind that he’d go home and shoot up the family?”).
Near the end of his talk Wheeler landed, like Chief Justice Taft, in Prohibition’s best-defended fortress: the rule of law, as established by the will of the people. He declared that the people had placed the Eighteenth Amendment in the Constitution, and only the people could remove it, and everyone in the hall knew that to accomplish that, anti-Prohibition forces would have to muster the support of two-thirds of a dry Congress and three-quarters of a collection of states that were very dissimilar to New York. This was something the night’s only other speaker, Mayor Jimmy Walker, had acknowledged. Arriving midway through the event, Walker addressed the audience in his characteristically jovial fashion. To this crowd of knowing New Yorkers, most of whom might have come to Carnegie Hall either on the way to or from a speakeasy, the mayor proclaimed that although he was a confirmed wet, “Prohibition might be a good thing—but I don’t know who is going to arrange it.”
Yet even Walker knew when it was time to stop with the wisecracks and address the real issue. “Those of us who don’t like Prohibition,” he concluded, “ought to stop complaining and organize and get rid of it, or shut up.”
* The Dwyer trial involved sixty defendants, including thirteen Coast Guardsmen and a rising young hood named Francesco Castiglia, who were charged with a conspiracy that reached as far as the Gulf and the Pacific Coast, and was alleged to have been responsible for millions of dollars in smuggled liquor, official corruption on a grand scale, and twelve deaths. Dwyer served barely a year in prison; Castiglia, who would soon become known as Frank Costello, was the beneficiary of a hung jury.
* The very few dry papers in major cities included the Des Moines Register, the Los Angeles Times, and the Brooklyn Eagle. Another, the Detroit Free Press, started off dry but in 1925, wishing to “save the youth of the nation from its present position,” declared its earlier stance “a fearful error.”
* McReynolds, who had been appointed by Woodrow Wilson, hated Prohibition—but hatred was his defining characteristic. Unembarrassed by his virulent anti-Semitism, he not only refused to speak to Justice Brandeis (and, later, Justice Benjamin Cardozo), but he turned his back to them when they spoke during oral arguments. He displayed his consuming misogyny by doing the same to Mabel Willebrandt and other female attorneys who appeared before the Court.
* This case, United States v. Manly S. Sullivan, became the foundation of the government’s eventual conviction of Al Capone for income tax evasion. It also provoked from Justice Holmes a bemused consideration of the defendant’s argument that requiring the filing of a return for illegal income would logically entitle the filer to deduct illegal expenses, such as bribery. Wrote Holmes, “This by no means follows, but it will be time to consider the question when a taxpayer has the temerity to raise it.”
Chapter 18
The Phony Referendum
D
ESPITE POLITICAL DIFFERENCES that might have divided less compatible people, Pauline Sabin had no trouble supporting James Wadsworth Jr., the senior senator from New York, when he ran for reelection in 1926. Wadsworth was as wet as they came, and Sabin had not yet abandoned the dry cause. Wadsworth had made his political reputation attacking woman suffrage, and it was the suffrage movement that had propelled Sabin into politics. But a commonality of background prevailed over any divergence in philosophy. Like Sabin, her friend Jimmy was an aristocrat of vast wealth: Skull and Bones at Yale, devoted foxh
unter, fourth-generation owner of a fifty-five-square-mile chunk of the fertile Genesee Valley in upstate New York. Also like Sabin, he was Republican down to his genes. His grandfather had been one of the party’s founders, and his father had served nine terms as a Republican member of Congress. Wadsworth himself had tightened the bond by marrying the daughter of John Hay, who began his own political career as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and concluded it as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state.
In 1926, though, New York Republicans were an unhappy family. The Democratic nominee for the Senate seat, Judge Robert F. Wagner, was no less wet than Wadsworth. Left without a candidate it could support, the Anti-Saloon League chose to punish Wadsworth (and simultaneously issue a warning to other wet Republicans) by putting forward its own candidate, a former state senator named Franklin W. Cristman, on a third-party line. The party regulars lined up behind Wadsworth, the drys fled to Cristman (his key platform plank: the Volstead Act wasn’t strict enough), and Wagner squeezed through the gap between them. During the campaign Pauline Sabin had advised Wadsworth to move a scheduled rally from Madison Square Garden to Carnegie Hall. Her reasons reflected both her political instincts and her upbringing. Carnegie would be easier to fill, she told the senator. And, she added, more dignified.
Sabin had first become active in Republican politics in 1919, when she was thirty-two. The following year the Southampton Press reported that she had been host to a buffet lunch for four hundred New York Republicans, “one of the largest and most enjoyable events of the kind ever held in the county.” It was a rainy day, but the guests fit comfortably inside the reception hall of Bayberry Land, Sabin’s twenty-eight-room manor house in the Shinnecock Hills of Long Island’s South Fork. In kinder weather, her summer parties were usually held outdoors on the enormous terrace, where guests might enjoy the view of Peconic Bay, the four formal gardens,* the eight outbuildings, and the nine distinctive pot chimneys on the imported slate roof. Designed in the style of an English country manor, the house was barely a year old when she welcomed her fellow Republicans, but the society architects Cross & Cross had made the roof sag here and there, to lend a feeling of age.
As intelligent as she was beautiful, as energetic as she was elegant, Sabin engaged the Republican Party with the same vitality she brought to her luminous social life. She founded the Women’s National Republican Club in 1921, when she was thirty-four, and two years later became the first female member of the Republican National Committee. Her husband, Charles, a J. P. Morgan partner who sat on sixteen corporate boards, was a lifelong Democrat and a committed wet. The friends who gathered at Bayberry Land and at the Sabins’ Manhattan residence on Sutton Place were urbane, sophisticated people, and like many of them Pauline Sabin enjoyed a nightly martini before dinner (in this household dinner was always a black-tie event, even in the country, even when the family dined alone). Some of the bottles in the Sabin wine collection were stored in a room hidden behind a movable wall of fake books at Bayberry Land. In the world the couple occupied, among the wealthy and well connected, good liquor and fine wines were plentiful, summoned to hand by a nod to the butler or delivered on request by the chauffeur. At one point, in fact, the Sabins’ chauffeur, unknown to his employers, ran a bootlegging business of his own out of their Manhattan garage.
The fact that the rich could consider themselves immune to meaningful enforcement (by virtue of well-placed connections, good lawyers, and other convenient assets) enraged Prohibition supporters. “The fashionable rich demand their rum as an inalienable class privilege,” the loyally dry Ladies’ Home Journal said in 1923. After former Yale president Arthur Hadley openly called on Americans to nullify the dry laws by ignoring them—a strategy he attempted to dignify by comparing it to Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act seventy-five years earlier—an angered Chief Justice Taft attacked Hadley’s position as characteristic of “the luxury-loving rich.” When General Motors founder William C. Durant (who was as dry as Henry Ford) offered prize money for “the best and most practical plan to make the 18th amendment effective,” the theme came up again and again. “Punishment is asked ‘for the rich and the white as well as the poor and the black,’ ” Durant wrote in his summary of the entries. “There is demand for action and publicity of action against ‘Mr. and Mrs. Prominent Citizen.’ ” In his own entry, Los Angeles police chief James E. Davis said the rich had “no conception of their own support of an outlaw ‘industry.’ Their money gives it power, their known sympathy and patronage gives it prestige in places where it should be shown no quarter.”
In some instances the attitudes of the well-off were shaped by their sheer sense of entitlement, which was intensified by their loyalty to ruthlessly clear class distinctions. Connecticut silk manufacturer Charles Cheney, who was chairman of the influential National Industrial Conference Board, supported Prohibition publicly, enjoyed liquor privately, and saw no contradiction; Prohibition was apparently designed for lesser beings. This view was not confined to the very rich, as Sinclair Lewis demonstrated so vividly in Babbitt. During the “canonical rite” (Lewis’s term) of cocktail hour at George Babbitt’s house, one of the solid burghers of Zenith insists that requiring drinkers to be licensed was a much better idea than Prohibition: “Then we could have taken care of the shiftless workman—kept him from drinking—and yet not’ve interfered with the rights . . . of fellows like ourselves.” Another says, “You don’t want to forget prohibition is a mighty good thing for the working-classes. Keeps ’em from wasting their money and lowering their productiveness.” Some drys saw it this way as well. Henry Ford’s ghostwriter said, “If only the people of larger incomes are drinking bootleg stuff, it is of course unfortunate in a way, but if someone must drink, it is best for the country that those who can afford it rather than those who cannot afford it should do the drinking.”
The difference between the very rich and the Babbitts of the world wasn’t just that the former had more money. They also had the freedom to be—take your pick—either more arrogant or less hypocritical. When airplane manufacturer William E. Boeing showed up in court to testify against Roy Olmstead, he had no problem admitting that he had been one of the Seattle bootlegger’s customers. But the greater, and more potent, distinction between the small-time businessmen of Zenith and the nation’s industrial and financial noblemen lay in the acuity of their political perceptions. Unlike George Babbitt’s friends, the men who gathered in December 1927 at James W. Wadsworth’s mansion in Washington, D.C., knew that the anger of the workingman could be exploited. What was odd, if you weren’t looking closely, was how these wealthy men, who had been sailing through Prohibition as if it had never really happened, would soon be willing to put so much time and treasure into bringing about its end.
THE WAYNE B. WHEELER who limped home to Washington after the Darrow debate in April 1927 was greatly diminished physically, but he did not let this dilute his unholy devotion to his holy cause. He had spent the months following the poison controversy pressuring the Civil Service Commission to require new agents to be “in sympathy with the law,” while maintaining his picket duty on Congress, the Treasury Department, and the White House. He had even persuaded Andrew Mellon not to order the removal of fatal denaturants from industrial alcohol until a substance more noxious but less toxic could be developed. Now he turned his attention to the following year’s election. Confident of its ability to bring presidential candidates of both parties to heel, the ASL had always concentrated its energies and its financial resources on congressional races. But Al Smith had emerged from the Democratic wreckage of 1924 as the party’s leading figure. Fearing that Smith would become the Democratic nominee for the first time and make Prohibition an overtly partisan issue in a presidential campaign, Wheeler obtained from the ASL a special appropriation of $600,000 to combat the efforts of “certain prospective candidates.”
But even so grave a threat as a wet at the head of one of the major party tickets did not distract Wheeler fro
m his other efforts. “He literally worked all the time,” said ASL national superintendent Scott McBride, his closest colleague. “On a Pullman or parlor car, he would at once take papers from his portfolio and plunge into drafting of a brief for the Supreme Court, a message for a congregation, a reply to an attack on him by wets, an article for a magazine. In the hotel dining room he would meet with committees while he ate. His [own] room was a beehive, the telephone ringing constantly [and] dry leaders clustering around him.” Critics described his actions a little differently. According to the San Francisco Examiner, “the paid superlobbyist” busied himself “wheedling, threatening, cajoling, bulldozing, promising and browbeating.” What was certain was Wheeler’s mindfulness of something he had said a few years earlier: a minority that has lost something will register its protest, he warned his fellow drys, but “the majority who have won the fight turn to other tasks.” Wheeler truly believed that the dry cause was the majority cause. But he seemed also to believe that only his relentless efforts could make certain there would be no turning away. He told Lord Astor, one of Britain’s leading prohibitionists (and husband of American émigré Nancy Langhorne Astor), “We are having a rather strenuous fight here these days, but are holding the fort as usual.”
In the summer of 1927 Wheeler returned to Battle Creek. At one point he took a break from the Kellogg rest cure to tell reporters that a Smith candidacy could be fatal for the Democrats. “Leaders of the party who are looking ahead,” he explained, “do not want to tie up their political future to a corpse.” He praised Coolidge’s appointment of a new Prohibition boss, a Republican hack from New York named Seymour Lowman (“a well-recognized dry advocate,” Wheeler said), insisted that drinking on college campuses was not as prevalent as some people indicated, and criticized Nicholas Murray Butler, the wet president of Columbia University, for his “unwarranted attacks” on the Eighteenth Amendment.*
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 39