From Battle Creek, Wheeler traveled to the pious summer resort of Little Point Sable in western Michigan, where several dry leaders kept summer cottages (from its advertising: “Homes for Christian families. Happy Childhood, Clean Youth. Strong Young Manhood”). There, with his wife, Ella, and her parents, he took several weeks away from his dry labors to rusticate on the Lake Michigan shore. His well-off father-in-law, Robert Candy, had made it possible for Wheeler to work for a salary that never exceeded eight thousand dollars a year; according to one of the Wheeler grandchildren, Ella “kept the family organized so [Wayne] could go off and save the world with Prohibition.” At Little Point Sable, Wheeler stepped away from the pressing business of the Anti-Saloon League for the first time since he’d joined the temperance movement at Oberlin thirty-four years earlier. “He kept in touch with the trend of prohibition affairs throughout the nation,” wrote Justin Steuart, Wheeler’s research secretary, “but instead of the steady stream of letters and telegrams issuing from his cottage, there was now only a bare trickle.”
Wheeler was to some degree becalmed by his weakened constitution and possibly by a genuine wish to cast off the burdens of three decades. But on August 14 he was wrenched from his reverie by unspeakable horror. This is how the Associated Press described the catastrophe: “A large drum of gasoline near which Mrs. Wheeler was working exploded, igniting her clothing. Mrs. Wheeler ran screaming into the living room, where her father, who recently suffered a severe heart attack, was reclining on a couch. At the sight of his daughter, her clothing aflame, [her father] arose, clutched at his heart, and toppled over dead.”
The following morning Ella Wheeler died as well. Less than a week later her husband, who had extinguished the flames, departed for a meeting of the World Congress Against Alcoholism in Winona Lake, Indiana. “Wheeler’s calmness under the shock of this tragedy amazed even his most intimate friends, who knew the strength of his will and courage,” Justin Steuart wrote. “To all expressions of sympathy, [he] returned a simple assurance that this loss would merely mean an increased devotion on his part to the cause in which he was enlisted.”
His assurances could not be fulfilled. Two weeks later Wayne B. Wheeler, crippled by a chronically enlarged heart and a lately diminished spirit, was himself dead. He was fifty-seven.
TO THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE, no victory in the 1926 congressional elections had been as gratifying as the defeat of James Wadsworth in the New York Senate race (“the greatest loss the wets could suffer,” said the league’s newspaper). But to Wadsworth, nothing could have been more liberating. He might miss the campaign trail, particularly the amusement devised by the newspapermen who had traveled with him: at every stop, no matter how tiny the town or how brief the stay, the reporters raced to see if they could get a drink. (Not once did they fail, even though some stops were as short as half an hour.) But it wasn’t likely that Wadsworth would miss the Senate and its smothering cloud of duplicity. In his final speech he excoriated those senators who either drank or kept company with drinkers yet continued to support the Volstead Act. “Is hypocrisy to be established as the national trait?” he asked. He provided his own reply: only one thing could save the nation from its epidemic of cant and falseness—Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.
No wet as prominent as Wadsworth had made so bold a declaration. But Wadsworth enjoyed the freedom of a condemned man. Having been denied reelection, he had nothing to lose. Emancipated by defeat, he spent 1927 traveling the country, from Boston all the way to Honolulu, making the case not for the legalization of wine and beer, or for a redefinition of “intoxicating,” but for outright Repeal. Yet Wadsworth’s impact on the status of the Eighteenth Amendment registered most firmly within the walls of his home in Washington. There, on December 12, 1927, in his mansion on the rim of Rock Creek Park, two dozen men gathered to address issues that were, said the letter of invitation, nothing less than “vital to the very existence of our government.”
The author of that trembling phrase was William H. Stayton, the admiralty lawyer who in 1918 had sent out invitations to six hundred men he knew by first name, asking them to join his new Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (probably a better name than another he had considered, the Association Against Fanatical Minorities). Failing to stop or even to slow the amendment’s march, Stayton stayed true to his cause even after ratification, largely financing the AAPA out of his own pocket. He began his days at 4 a.m. and worked ceaselessly, sending out letters, trying to raise additional money (he made a point of eschewing donations from people who had made their money in brewing or distilling), and recruiting prominent supporters. He did not allow himself to be distracted by irrelevancies: when he needed clothing, Stayton would buy half a dozen identical suits (all of them custom-made) and a dozen identical ties so he didn’t have to waste a single instant of his day deciding what to wear.
But energy did not translate into effectiveness. In the beginning, Stayton’s perception of upper-class manners, coupled with an innate timidity, led him to keep the names of his supporters private. This accomplished little besides suggesting that there was something disreputable about the whole endeavor. In 1922 Stayton did manage to fill Carnegie Hall with an anti-Prohibition rally that drew “some of the best known men and women in the city,” but in Manhattan a wet crowd was about as remarkable as a sidewalk. In 1924 his fumbling effort to help wet candidates crashed when the AAPA endorsed seven congressional candidates in Pennsylvania, including three incumbents—and all seven, regarding public support from the AAPA as if it were a social disease, repudiated the endorsements.
By late 1927, though, the list of men Stayton invited to the meeting at James Wadsworth’s house suggested that the status of the AAPA had changed. It included three sitting U.S. senators (Blaine of Wisconsin, Broussard of Louisiana, and Bruce of Maryland); one recently deposed one (Wadsworth); the Standard Oil heir Edward S. Harkness, whose philanthropy had inscribed the family name on buildings at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown; private banker Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, who sat on the boards of Anaconda Copper, Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear Rubber, and five other equally blue-chip companies; and a number of others whose names appeared often in the nation’s news pages, regularly on the society pages, and almost daily on the business pages (including Pauline Sabin’s husband). “In 1917 the chief spokesman of the [wets] was the president of the United States Brewers’ Association,” wrote Charles Merz. “In 1927 the leadership of the opposition had passed to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad or to the chairman of the board of the General Motors Corporation.”
General W. W. Atterbury, president of the Pennsy, was an active soldier in the AAPA. But it was the chairman of GM, Pierre S. du Pont, who had become the association’s indisputable commander in chief by the time the conferees emerged from two days of meetings at Wadsworth’s house. Du Pont was also chairman of the Du Pont Company, unchallenged head of his old and distinguished family, and lord of Longwood, a private paradise of gardens and greenhouses and fountains arrayed across a thousand acres surrounding his thirty-room mansion, twelve miles northwest of Wilmington. His reign over the AAPA was comparably dominant. In the year following the meeting at Wadsworth’s house he became the organization’s largest single contributor; ranking second, fourth, and sixth were his brothers Irénée and Lammot, and his closest professional colleague, John J. Raskob. Two years after du Pont took control of the AAPA, an associate said his interest in the organization and its mission was “greater than it is in anything else in the United States.”
Pierre du Pont was exceptionally wealthy, his net income in a single year at times topping $50 million. He was also exceptionally capable. At first with two cousins, then increasingly on his own, he had built the family’s gunpowder business into an industrial colossus. Assisted by the financially astute Raskob, he took effective control of General Motors (the du Pont family owned 36 percent of its stock) in 1920. Ideas developed by the two men concerning capital allocation, acco
unting methods, and the development of differentiated business units operating within a single corporate structure became the standard for American industry.
Du Pont’s aptitude for leadership had emerged at an early age, after his father was killed in an industrial accident. Although he was only fourteen, as the eldest son among ten children Pierre became not just the nominal head of the family but the actual one. His siblings—even his sister Louisa, older by two years—marked his role by calling him “Dad” and its variants, a familial habit that would survive the passing decades. It’s both jarring and somehow touching to encounter, in Pierre’s vast correspondence, a letter from his brother Irénée addressed “Dear Daddy.” At the time—1920—Pierre was fifty; Irénée, president of the world’s largest manufacturer of explosives and other chemicals, was forty-four.
Pierre had handed the job to his younger brother the year before, not long after the conclusion of the war that had transformed the family business. In 1913 Du Pont had produced 8.4 million tons of smokeless powder. By the time the United States entered World War I four years later, annual production capacity had surpassed 450 million tons. Profits were enormous. But along the way, as the Wilson administration prepared for war, it financed the buildup through the Revenue Act of 1916, which took three swings at the du Pont family’s wealth: doubling the income tax rates on those in the highest brackets, creating the nation’s first peacetime inheritance tax, and assessing a 12.5 percent levy on the profits of munitions manufacturers (no small amount, considering that du Pont stock dividends would increase sixteen-fold between 1914 and 1918).
Pierre du Pont was incensed. He increased his donations to the presidential campaign of Woodrow Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, to a staggering $92,500, more than Hughes received from any other individual (2009 equivalent: more than $1.8 million). Du Pont believed that taxation stifled initiative and trespassed on personal freedom. He detested the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, public relief programs, and highway speed limits. When Delaware penal authorities developed a plan to put prisoners to work repairing autos, du Pont bristled: he considered it unfair competition for private repair shops. His faith in the wisdom of democratically elected governments approximated his faith in dancing pixies.
None of this should suggest, however, that Pierre du Pont was without public spirit—only that he believed that decisions about the public welfare belonged in private hands. When du Pont was president of Delaware’s board of education in the early 1920s (he later served as state tax commissioner as well), state law forbade taxing white citizens for the education of blacks. Appalled by the dreadful conditions in the state’s segregated schools for black children, du Pont didn’t call for a new tax, but instead reached into his own pocket for $4 million to build eighty-six new school buildings. He was happy to donate his own money for the public weal if it could be deployed as he saw fit. Yet when he believed that his money was being confiscated by the government and reallocated by the ill-qualified representatives of the ill informed, he seethed.
The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment was made to order for a man who dreamed of a world in which “there would be some chance for intellectually capable people to operate governmental affairs the same way they are permitted to operate corporate affairs.” Du Pont had felt somewhat warmly toward Prohibition at its inception, hopeful that it might make America’s workers more productive. But by the middle of the decade, troubled by increasingly invasive enforcement laws and reports from his factory managers of declining productivity, he had begun to moderate his position. He asked Stayton to send him some books on the subject (seeking balance, he apparently made the same request of Wayne Wheeler). His brothers had already lined up with the AAPA (Irénée, who told their cousin Coleman du Pont that Prohibition was “the opening wedge to tyranny,” believed that the populace had not risen in revolt “only because the average man is rather stupid and rapidly becomes used to his surroundings”). By December 1927, when he arrived in Washington for the meeting at James Wadsworth’s house, Pierre had committed himself to the radical idea his host had put forth in his Senate valedictory: Repeal.
Such was the strength of Pierre du Pont’s rapidly hardening conviction—not to mention the force of his personality and the availability of his millions—that within weeks of the meeting at 2800 Woodland Drive, he had not simply taken control of the AAPA; for all practical purposes, he owned it. He nudged Stayton into an honorary position and brought in an energetic New Yorker named Henry H. Curran, who declared himself dedicated to “cutting this Prohibition cancer out of the nation’s vitals.” Along with his brother Lammot, John Raskob, and two others, du Pont underwrote salaries for Stayton and Curran out of a special fund he controlled. He made it clear to staff and colleagues that he was not interested in the reform of existing Prohibition laws, but in “getting back to first principles”—getting back to a Constitution that did not abide, much less require, government intrusion into the lives of citizens.
By the summer of 1928, when he resigned as chairman of General Motors, du Pont had thrown himself into the wet movement nearly full time. Following the principles of private stewardship he had established when he underwrote the construction of black schools, du Pont even conducted his own version of an election, personally soliciting a pro- or anti-Prohibition ballot from every voter in Delaware; the final tally showed wet opinion drowning dry sentiment by a margin of eight to one. (Nearly half the state’s voters sent in ballots—presumably a self-selected group overwhelmingly composed of people sympathetic to du Pont’s well-known position.) Closer to home du Pont sought the opinions of the three hundred caretakers, gardeners, household servants, and other members of his personal staff, soliciting them with a printed inquiry addressed “To Those Living at Longwood and Interested in Its Welfare.” They didn’t like Prohibition, either.
During that same season of Pierre du Pont’s waxing commitment to the wet cause, he helped his man Curran assemble an entirely honorary “board of directors” for the AAPA—men of stature who were willing to take a public position against Prohibition. While Stayton had kept members’ names secret out of a misplaced sense of propriety, du Pont and Curran saw that names—names edged in gilt and redolent of authority—would lend respectability to the AAPA’s efforts and perhaps induce a little awe as well. The chemical du Ponts and the oil Harknesses were soon joined by financial Harrimans, automotive Fishers, rubber Goodriches. Within two years an AAPA official could assert that the association’s ever-lengthening roster, now numbering in the hundreds, was composed of men who “direct the management of $40,000,000,000 and the employment and occupation of 3,000,000 employees.”
In the promising spring of 1928, though, when the Repeal effort was just beginning, it was victory enough to attract sixty-nine of America’s most eminent business and financial leaders willing to pledge their names to Pierre du Pont’s suddenly vital organization. For decades after, it became a matter of dispute between wets, drys, and historians sympathetic to one side or the other whether the AAPA’s outstanding recruitment campaign could be attributed to the deployment of one simple argument. On March 19, 1928, in a letter to William P. Smith, one of the very few non-family members he addressed by first name, du Pont explained that “the object of the Association is not merely the return of the use of alcoholic beverages in the United States.” He elaborated: “Another important factor is the tremendous loss of revenue to our Government through the Prohibition laws”—the revenue once collected through robust taxes on liquor and beer. With Repeal, du Pont told his friend Bill, “The revenue of the Government would be increased sufficiently to warrant the abolition of the income tax and corporation tax.”
“On the whole,” he concluded, “there is much to strive for.”
THERE HAD BEEN three salient reactions to Wayne Wheeler’s death. His enemies attempted to mutilate his legacy: “He made great men his puppets and they danced to his inexorable commands,” observed the Cincinnati Enquirer. His su
pporters venerated him, rendering him variously as an immortal crusader (“Although he is gone, his method, like John Brown’s soul, will go marching on,” sang the Omaha World-Herald) or as a warrior hero (according to a cartoon in the Ohio State Journal, he was Leonidas, the king of Sparta who held off tens of thousands of Persians with an army of three hundred—an odd image for a man who’d always claimed to represent a majority). But his direct heirs, the leaders of the ASL, immediately went after one another like wildcats before the body of the alpha male was cold.
It was an escalation of an internal battle over the direction of the ASL that had been joined in 1924, when Illinois superintendent F. Scott McBride, Wheeler’s candidate, was installed as national superintendent to succeed Purley A. Baker. Like Wheeler, McBride believed that Prohibition’s success lay in punitive enforcement. Unlike Wheeler, who had the will and the wit to engage his enemies as effectively as he inspired his allies, McBride was a dour, ponderous sort who seemed to have no greater responsibility than allowing the legislative superintendent—Wheeler’s title was never any grander than that—to do whatever he wished. When he read the ailing Wheeler’s opening statement at the Darrow debate in Carnegie Hall, McBride was playing a role that suited him well: ventriloquist’s dummy.
The other faction inside the ASL, led by publications director Ernest H. Cherrington, believed that law alone could not solve the drinking problem and continued to argue that proselytizing through education, publicity, and other means of persuasion was essential to long-term success. The Wheeler-McBride triumph over the Cherrington forces in 1924 was not without consequences. In 1926 John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family had supported the league since its very beginning, shut off the financial tap. Rockefeller was particularly offended by the ASL’s support for a measure that would have required mandatory prison sentences for Volstead violators. The only donor whose contributions to the ASL over the years exceeded the Rockefellers’, merchant S. S. Kresge, also supported the Cherrington strategy. Kresge alone underwrote the expenses of the league’s department of education, which was under Cherrington’s control. But the party of punishment within the ASL was unimpressed by his generosity, unbowed by Rockefeller’s flight, and determined to pursue its retributive policy. Bishop James Cannon, who lined up with McBride, called for legislation that would make drink itself illegal and force buyers to testify against sellers, a proposal even Wheeler had not been able to support. By the summer of 1927, as Wheeler’s health deteriorated, internal friction ignited into open flame. The ASL felt compelled to issue a statement. “As in the case of most movements,” it said, “the League has had its own inside family problems with which to deal.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 40