Although Wheeler had lined up against the Cherrington faction, his accomplishments were so manifest and his magnetic field was so powerful that he had been able to effect a simmering truce between the warring blocs. With his death, the Cherringtonians made a last effort to seize control of the organization. Their cause had not been helped when detectives employed by Kresge’s wife found him in an apartment he maintained under an assumed name on East Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan, in the company of one Gladys Ardelle Fish, identified in the newspapers as a “stenographer.” This revelation received even more press coverage than the reckless-driving charge that Kresge had been hit with a few months earlier. Wet congressmen delighted in discussing the generous contributions of “the Kresge of many matrimonial difficulties,” a man “who has been adjudged a home wrecker in the New York Supreme Court.”
None of this helped the stature of the education-and-enlightenment faction, which saw its chance to steer the ASL away from the hard line slipping away; in fact, with Rockefeller gone and Kresge publicly disgraced, the hard-liners had little reason to accommodate the Cherringtonian point of view. Although Cherrington was the most reasonable, the most lacking in vainglory, and the most temperate—in the generic sense of the word—of the ASL’s leaders, the ascension of Cannon and McBride led him into an elaborate (and futile) conspiracy to tarnish Wheeler and his followers. Justin Steuart, who had been Wheeler’s research secretary, published a biography of his former boss casting him, as Steuart privately promised Cherrington, “in an uncomplimentary light.” It managed to praise his effectiveness while attacking his methods, and concluded with the pointed assertion that there was no successor remotely as capable as Wheeler anywhere in the organization.
Taking part in the assault on Wheeler’s reputation could not have been a comfortable undertaking for the otherwise judicious Cherrington. But no one in the directorate running the Anti-Saloon League in late 1927 and early 1928 was especially prudent in his behavior or showed himself to be particularly capable of leadership. “The Anti-Saloon League has lately shown marked signs of weakness,” a prominent wet lawyer named Julian Codman told Pierre du Pont, largely because “the Prohibition forces have been disorganized by the death of Wayne B. Wheeler.” H. L. Mencken, looking back, would see a deeper problem. Mencken may have loathed everything the ASL believed in, but he knew talent. “In fifty years the United States has seen no more adept a political manipulator” than Wayne Wheeler, Mencken wrote. “His successors, compared to him, were as peewees to the Matterhorn.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of 1928 has long been considered an unfortunate, or at least awkward, episode in American history. Because of anti-Catholic prejudice, Al Smith, the Democratic candidate, lost states that had never gone Republican. Herbert Hoover, his opponent, was elected on a seemingly unstoppable wave of Republican prosperity just months before the economy came crashing down in a rubble of pipe dreams, false riches, and market manipulation. In its own moment, the 1928 election was seen as a huge victory for Prohibition, the openly wet Smith crushed in an antiliquor surge that turned Congress drier than it had ever been. Eventually, though, the 1928 election would have to be seen as catastrophic for the drys, proving that political complications sometimes generate a fog that reduces visibility to zero.
Consider, for instance, the two constituencies that had the greatest stake in the Eighteenth Amendment and were thus implicit allies. No one had a stronger moral interest in Prohibition than the Baptist and Methodist clergymen who were its tribunes, but no one had a greater financial stake than the criminals who daily sought to undermine it. It’s not easy to prove that the big-time mobsters, on-the-take cops, corrupt judges, speakeasy operators, and all the other economic beneficiaries of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act gave their financial support to dry politicians. Researchers are unlikely to discover a canceled check made out to a political campaign and signed “Alphonse Capone.”
But however the dollars found their way from a mobster’s hoard of cash to a pol’s campaign treasury, the connection was inevitable, the logic unimpeachable. Partisans as disparate as Senator James W. Wadsworth (wet), Izzy Einstein (dry), the New York World (very wet), and Senator George Norris (very dry) all insisted this was the case. Said Jane Addams, “Doubtless all bootleggers would oppose a change in the law,” and doubtless Addams was right. In a 1922 Massachusetts referendum, the only counties voting to retain a state enforcement law were Barnstable (Cape Cod), Dukes (Martha’s Vineyard), and Nantucket—one jurisdiction surrounded on three sides by water, the others on all four, and each of them direct beneficiaries of the economic activity generated by the mother ships of Rum Row.* One of Roy Olmstead’s lieutenants gave $6,000 to the 1926 reelection campaign of the U.S. Senate’s most effective dry, Wesley L. Jones, and made at least one financial contribution to the WCTU as well. The bootleggers’ agents in government also collaborated with the drys. Big Bill Thompson, the utterly saturated mayor of Chicago (“I’m wetter than the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” he bragged), threw his organization behind dry Senate candidate Frank L. Smith in 1926, and Thompson’s collection of pet congressmen included M. Alfred Michaelson, an outspoken House dry.
This was the same Bill Thompson whose portrait hung on the wall behind Al Capone’s desk; who was said to have collected more than a quarter of a million dollars from the Capone organization for his 1927 mayoral campaign; and who, having concluded his mayoral tenure with an annual salary of $18,000, left behind nearly $2 million in cash and cash equivalents at his death. Mob support of a wet like Thompson, and Thompson’s support of congressional drys like Smith and Michaelson, should not suggest a logical disconnect. Bootleggers required dry laws to keep legitimate businessmen out of the booze industry, and they needed wet administrations to keep the cops and other enforcement officials off their backs. The perfect combination: a dry Congress and state legislatures to pass the laws, and wet mayors and governors to not enforce them—in other words, something very close to the lineup in America’s most populous cities and states as the election of 1928 approached.
IN 1926 Rabbi Morris Lazaron polled fellow members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis to gauge their attitudes regarding Prohibition and to learn something about sentiment in their communities. There was a wide range of personal opinion among the 122 who responded, wrote historian Marni Davis, but “nearly every rabbi, from every region, asserted that only two groups seemed to favor Prohibition: evangelical Christians and bootleggers.”
The bootleggers may have sent unmarked bundles of cash to candidates for local and legislative offices every election cycle, but presidential politics was of little concern to them. The evangelicals, on the other hand, were neither disinterested nor shy. In the 1928 presidential race they became directly involved in electoral politics as never before.
It was not the Republican candidate who excited their interest. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had become rich as a mining engineer in Australia and China, and famous as U.S. food administrator during World War I, was suspiciously worldly, and his record on dry issues was spotty. He once said he did not think 2.75 percent beer was an intoxicant, and during World War I he had opposed interim Prohibition measures. Had the Baptists and other fundamentalists in the dry vanguard known about the excellent wine cellar Hoover had acquired from the estate of Senator Leland Stanford, they might not have been mollified even by the knowledge that Hoover’s wife had given it away in 1919. They certainly would not have been pleased to know that on his way home from the Commerce Department, Hoover would stop to have his evening cocktails at the Belgian embassy, a daily ritual he would describe after Prohibition’s end as “the pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.”
Al Smith’s sweeping first-ballot nomination by the Democrats in 1928—he received nearly twelve times as many votes as the top dry candidate, Cordell Hull of Tennessee—appeared to extinguish the flames that had nearly consumed the party during the 103 blo
ody ballots of 1924.* At its Houston convention the party came together around the wet New Yorker at the top of the ticket; Senator Joseph Robinson, an Arkansas dry, as vice presidential candidate; and a platform that put the Democrats unequivocally behind an equivocal statement in support of “an honest effort to enforce the eighteenth amendment.”
But neither the facsimile of party unity nor the platform’s illusion of fealty to the law could make dry fundamentalists support the Democrats. Though Hoover was a semisecret drinker, Smith enjoyed his liquor openly (even if not to the degree asserted by the pro-Smith editor of the Nation, who said the governor enjoyed four to eight cocktails or highballs daily). Though Hoover, as Walter Lippmann wrote, “regards both wets and drys as substantially insane,” Smith made it plain whose side he was on. Though Hoover had the eager public support of Republican wets who were despised by the ultradrys—among them Lammot du Pont, James Wadsworth, and Pauline Sabin—he sent up the right semaphores (for “enforcement,” against “nullification,” and so on) while Smith offered the wrong ones (demanding “local self-government,” attacking “official corruption”). And though Hoover was a Quaker, which gave him little theological common ground with the fundamentalists, at least there was a history of temperance sentiment in American Quakerism. Smith, on the other hand, was a Catholic, and to the fundamentalists of the 1920s no affiliation, religious or otherwise, could have been more poisonous.
Al Smith’s candidacy gave bigots and xenophobes a perfect demon. In 1928 the crude impulses that had earlier ignited the rapid growth of the Ku Klux Klan now exploded among those “pure Americans” who saw themselves losing their nation to the Irish and the Italians and all the other foreigners crowding the big cities. Rev. Bob Jones made frequent use of a startling call to arms that year: “I would rather see a saloon on every corner than a Catholic in the White House.” If this didn’t make his feelings sufficiently clear, Jones’s alternative option certainly did: he declared that he would prefer “a nigger president” to the Catholic Smith.
The boiling hatred directed against Smith was intensified by the identity of his most prominent supporter, John J. Raskob, whom Smith installed as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Some of the more rabid fundamentalists could almost believe it was the other way around—that it was Raskob, who had voted for Coolidge in 1924 and was still listed in Who’s Who as a Republican, who had picked Smith as a stalking horse for a diabolical papist plot. First they would take over the Democratic Party, and then put the U.S. government into the hands of the Knights of Columbus, in behalf of the pope of Rome. It was the sort of speculation that could make a Catholic-hater quiver with the joy that can be induced only by the thrill of loathing.
Raskob may have been the wealthiest Catholic in the nation. In the minds of dry fundamentalists, this made him the most dangerous. Born poor, the son of a cigar maker in Lockport, New York, his career and his wealth progressed rapidly after Pierre du Pont hired him as a bookkeeper-stenographer at twenty dollars a week when Raskob was twenty-one. Over the next two decades he made tens of millions executing the reorganization of General Motors in Pierre du Pont’s behalf; then, once installed as chairman of the GM board’s all-powerful finance committee, he devised the company’s lending arm, the phenomenally profitable General Motors Acceptance Corporation. Raskob donated a well-publicized million dollars to the Diocese of Washington in February 1928 and gave investment advice to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, the Loretto Foundation, the North American College of Cardinals, and a capable young monsignor from Boston named Francis Spellman. The magazine Commonweal, founded in 1924 to combat populist anti-Catholicism, was to a large degree bankrolled by Raskob. Pope Pius XI memorialized Raskob’s contributions to the church’s welfare by naming him an honorary chamberlain in the Papal Household.
Bob Jones may have been the most quotable of those spewing their bile toward Smith, Raskob, and Catholicism during that 1928 campaign, but the chorus was substantial. Cotton Tom Heflin, sinking to lows even he had not achieved before, ranted on the Senate floor about Catholic priests who killed their babies, Catholic control of the Alabama press, and Al Smith’s plans to annex Mexico, presumably to establish a permanent Catholic majority in the United States. Some anti-Catholics resuscitated the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” slogan that had languished unused since the 1884 presidential election, when Republicans cited this unholy trinity to damn the increasing Irish influence in the Democratic Party. After Raskob arranged to have Smith campaign headquarters moved into the General Motors Building in New York, just an elevator ride from his own office, the haters had evidence of their fancied Catholic conspiracy. (It was probably good for their nervous systems that they didn’t know about the $100,000 worth of RCA stock Raskob had given Smith.) A Klan-connected hate sheet called Fellowship Forum, which gave the lie to its anodyne name in every issue, reached a perverse apogee early in October, when it asserted that a Smith-led America would be “a vassal state of the Vatican and stink-slide of booze and corruption.”
Bingo! This was the magic formula: the conflation of the perfidious disloyalty of the Catholics and the shameless iniquity of the wets. Agents of religious and ethnic prejudice more artful than Fellowship Forum didn’t have to spell out the connection. Even so resolute a Catholic-hater as Bishop Cannon—the man who had famously called the Catholic Church “the mother of ignorance, superstition, intolerance, and sin”—preferred to describe Smith with a stand-in vocabulary. “Wet,” “New York politician,” “Tammany”—these became code for the one word never uttered by Smith’s presumably respectable opponents: “Catholic.”
Following ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, not one of the six men who ran for president on a major party ticket—Warren G. Harding, James M. Cox, Calvin Coolidge, John W. Davis, Herbert Hoover, and Al Smith—had been an unconflicted advocate of Prohibition. Smith, however, was the first who dared to run an openly wet campaign. Funded by an apparently unprecedented personal contribution of $690,000 in campaign funds and loan guarantees from Raskob, he attracted wets, particularly in the Northeast, who had never before voted Democratic. But a candidacy based in part on revocation of the Volstead Act allowed his enemies to gild their ugly religious prejudice with the relatively civilized language of the Prohibition debate. Smith recognized the perils built into the connection when exploitation of anti-Catholic prejudice reached its apogee in the fall, after the Republican National Committee sent Mabel Willebrandt into the fray. Until that point Willebrandt, seven years into her tenure as the most visible face of Prohibition enforcement, had not been terribly active in Hoover’s behalf. Most of what she did for the Republican ticket was subtler than open campaigning: for instance, while the Democratic convention was meeting in Houston, she had personally orchestrated a spectacular series of nightclub raids in New York on June 28, the very day Smith won the nomination. If the Democrat was embarrassed by this coup de theatre staged in his hometown, he did not say so. More likely he didn’t care.
But when the RNC decided to use the high-profile Willebrandt as an offensive weapon, it scored a direct hit. Her charge: address the Ohio convention of the Methodist Church. Her argument: “Tammany . . . underworld connections . . . New York . . . center of lawlessness . . .” Her plea: “There are 2,000 pastors here. You have in your churches more than 600,000 members of the Methodist churches in Ohio alone. That is enough to swing the election. The 600,000 have friends in other states. Write to them.”
There’s no evidence that the ever-zealous Willebrandt was herself anti-Catholic, or that she was conscious that her peroration, which never mentioned Smith’s religion, would be perceived as anti-Catholic; in fact, she would point out that “the speech to the Methodists,” as it became known, had been cleared in advance by the RNC’s general counsel, James F. Burke, who was himself Catholic. But the nature of the audience, and the string of code words, and the attempt to mobilize the gathered Methodists and turn them into an active-duty army for Hoover provoke
d from Smith a response that placed the religious issue at center stage, no doubt satisfying the drys’ most cynical operatives. Smith made his stand in Oklahoma City, where an ominous greeting had been provided by burning crosses in the nearby countryside, and was then spelled out when the pastor of the First Baptist Church declared that a vote for Smith was a vote against Jesus Christ. In his speech Smith assailed the Ku Klux Klan, the Republican Party, a renegade Democratic senator, and Mabel Willebrandt for turning his faith into a political issue. Their conduct, said Smith, was “a treasonable attack upon the very foundations of American liberty.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 41