Reports on the speech appeared on front pages across the country. Republicans responded by blaming Smith for introducing religion into the campaign. Willebrandt, addressing another group of Methodists two days after his Oklahoma City speech, said the Democrat was “afraid to come out and face the record that he has made as a champion of the liquor traffic.” This election, she and other dry Republicans insisted, was a referendum on Prohibition.
Except it wasn’t. “Available evidence suggests that opposition to Smith’s Prohibition policy served as a cloak for opposition to his Catholicism,” wrote Allan J. Lichtman in Prejudice and the Old Politics, his exceptionally careful statistical reading of the Hoover-Smith race. But after the polls closed in 1928, the raw numbers made the exultant drys declare the election their greatest victory since the Eighteenth Amendment itself. Hoover, candidate of the drys—he had declared in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention that Prohibition was “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose”—amassed a landslide margin in the Electoral College of 444–87, the largest majority in more than sixty years. Bishop Cannon’s ad hoc Conference of Anti-Smith Democrats was strong enough in the South to peel five eternally Democratic states from their shared history and hand them to Hoover. An exultant Scott McBride of the ASL—which had, for the first time in its history, endorsed a presidential candidate—said that the rout of Al Smith guaranteed that the Democrats would never again nominate a wet. Even more gratifying to the ASL and its allies, Americans had elected the driest Congress ever, with top-heavy margins of 80–16 in the Senate and 329–106 in the House. Of the forty-eight governors, forty-three were drys.
Yet these numbers were impressive only insofar as they threw up a smokescreen; in Lichtman’s phrase, it was a “phony referendum.” Not only had anti-Catholic prejudice been a much more potent issue than Prohibition, but neither mattered as much as the eight years of Republican prosperity that would have ensured a Hoover victory over any Democrat. Buried beneath the landslide was a stack of data suggesting that the drys had counted the wrong ballots. In states where the issue could be separated from such complications as party, personality, or the pope—when it was simply a matter of voters choosing whether to live under the protection of the dry law or break free of the hobbles it imposed on their lives—the news for the drys was not good. While only 40 percent of Montanans voted for Smith, 54 percent voted against a statewide Prohibition enforcement law. In Massachusetts, where Smith won barely 50 percent of the vote, a state enforcement repeal measure passed by nearly two to one. Nor was this countertrend confined to the first Tuesday in November. Five months before the presidential election, statewide repeal had captured 48 percent of the vote in North Dakota—North Dakota!—where Prohibition had been embedded in the state constitution for four decades. Six months after Hoover beat Smith by nine points in Wisconsin, a 63 percent majority tossed out that state’s enforcement law. Americans may have voted against Al Smith in 1928, but that didn’t mean they were voting for Prohibition.
The most meaningful consequences of Smith’s campaign lay just beyond the vision of the drys who celebrated his defeat. Soon they would realize that, if anything, his devotion to the disembowelment of the Volstead Act had initiated what would become a major realignment of the parties. Catholics flocked to Smith, of course, but so had other wets who finally had a candidate willing to fly their banner. In an era when Republican machines controlled Chicago, Philadelphia, and other urban centers, the Democrats for the first time ever carried the nation’s ten largest cities. A candidate appealing to new citizens and other hyphenates drew nearly twice as many votes as had either James Cox in 1920 or John Davis in 1924—two Democrats who hadn’t dared embrace the wet cause.
Historian Daniel Boorstin once wrote, in another context, that there is a difference between a political machine and a political party. He could have been writing about the Democrats of 1928. A machine, wrote Boorstin, “exists for its own sake; its primary, and in a sense its only, purpose is survival.” A party, on the other hand, “is organized for a purpose larger than its own survival”—by way of example, for a cause. There were several reasons why the ideological coloration of the national Democrats began to change so rapidly starting in 1928, but a critical one was rooted in the campaign of Al Smith. By openly waving the wet flag, a man who had emerged from the nation’s most notorious machine had initiated the radical reinvention of his soon-to-be-dominant party.
* The creation of these gardens was emblematic of the spare-no-expense construction of the Sabin dream house. Convinced that Bayberry Land did not have sufficient topsoil for the elaborate plantings she envisioned, landscape designer Marian Coffin purchased an entire nearby farm, harvested its fertile soil, and hired a convoy of trucks to transport it to Bayberry Land.
* Wheeler was somewhat milder here than he had been a few months earlier, when he claimed that Butler supported a program “soaked in avarice, lust, and rum,” and that he belonged “with the boot-leggers, rum-runners, owners of speak-easy property, wet newspapers, underworld denizens, alcoholic slaves and personal liberty fanatics in his fight to bring back booze.” Informed of Wheeler’s comments, Butler replied, “It sounds as if something had happened to trouble him.”
* Some might argue that less self-interested reasons—religion, ethnicity, political attitudes—explained this phenomenon. But inland counties similarly composed of English and Scots-Irish Protestant stock, and also equally Republican in politics, voted against the enforcement law.
* Another potential wet candidate who stepped aside for Smith was Jim Reed of Missouri. Reed had probably not helped his chances when he accepted a $100,000 retainer, plus $1,000 a day, to defend the superdry Henry Ford in a libel suit.
PART IV
THE BEGINNING
OF THE END,
THE END,
AND AFTER
“As was said before upon a memorable occasion when the very incarnation of morality was about to be sacrificed, ‘What thou doest, do quickly.’ ”
—Malcolm C. Tarver, a Georgia dry, in the House
of Representatives, December 5, 1932
Chapter 19
Outrageous Excess
O
N DECEMBER 12, 1928, just five weeks after he learned that his investment in Al Smith’s campaign had not enabled him to purchase a president, John J. Raskob made a simpler acquisition: 14 cases of gin, 7¼ cases of Scotch, and 3 cases of rum. The $1,651 price tag was pocket change for Raskob, but still impressive. In 2009 dollars it worked out to about $70 a bottle, which was presumably enough to provide his bootlegger a reasonable profit after the cost of manufacture, bottling, shipping, transfer from a mother ship to an inshore boat, more shipping, probably another transfer or two, and several bribes, protection payments, and related gratuities along the way. Unless Raskob was a connoisseur with discerning taste buds, it might have covered the cost of counterfeit labels and bottles as well.
“I am not a drinking man. Drinking means nothing to me,” Raskob told the readers of Collier’s a few years later. He was still chairman of the Democratic Party at the time, and still trying to impress upon the voting public that a position against Prohibition was not necessarily a position in favor of liquor. He was equally disingenuous in his attempt to suggest that his vast wealth did not make him any different from anyone else. “Ours are simple pleasures,” he continued, strumming homespun chords. “Sports out of doors, family talks and games indoors, no smoking, drinking or running around at all hours of the night.” Such, apparently, were the earnest days and hearthside evenings Raskob spent at Archmere, his twentieth-century version of a fifteenth-century Italian palazzo on the banks of the Delaware River; at Pioneer Point Farms, his summer estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore (whose manor house he liked to call “Mostly Halls”); at his winter retreat in Palm Beach; or at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, where an entire floor was reserved for his and Pierre du Pont’s use.
But R
askob was in fact a drinking man—he favored dry martinis—and he liked to have his drink close at hand. In Palm Beach “liquor is being sold as openly as ever,” he told a friend in 1924. He sometimes wished he were abroad, he wrote on another occasion, so he could “forget between drinks that there is such a thing as the Volstead Act.” A few years later, he was sharing bootleg connections with his friends and stocking his various yachts with enough cocktail shakers, highball glasses, champagne glasses, cases of tonic water, and containers of cashews to suggest, said a scholar who cataloged Raskob’s voluminous papers, that his boats were “floating speakeasies.”
And why not? Despite a few spasms like the raids Mabel Willebrandt had supervised on the night of Smith’s nomination, by 1929 drinking among the privileged in New York and other major cities was no longer conducted in the closet. (At least not among the publicly wet; Raskob liked to tease his publicly dry pals, auto executives Walter P. Chrysler and Alfred P. Sloan, about the “vintage champagnes, rare old wines and selected brands of old whiskeys” they stored in their club lockers.) A Park Avenue company that rented out bars—“set up right in your home, completely installed for dashing gay usage, gleaming chromium foot rail and all”—advertised unabashedly in The New Yorker. So did speakeasies that had once required passwords, membership cards, and a careful eyeballing through a peephole in the door. Out-of-state visitors to “21” who didn’t trust their providers back home needed only to ask to have the speakeasy’s operators ship their fine goods to them directly. The relatively furtive imbibing at private men’s clubs gradually grew more open, too, and if it ended in the sort of embarrassment that befell the members of the Pendennis Club in Louisville, when a raid on their neo-Georgian mansion turned up enough illegal liquor to fill six Prohibition Bureau vehicles, so be it: although much of the booze had been stashed in members’ private lockers, the only people arrested by the agents were four employees, including the hapless fellow who ran the club’s cigar stand.
At least it could be said of the men of the AAPA that they were not, for the most part, hypocrites. It was true that James Wadsworth, while still a senator, publicly refused to take advantage of his power to name Prohibition agents, yet privately complained that too many of the jobs were going to Democrats. It was also true that the mise-en-scène implicit in Raskob’s self-portrait—a cozy fireplace after some brisk tobogganing, cups of cocoa, maybe a round of Chinese checkers for the whole goshdarn family—was rather at odds with his adventures aboard the Flying Fox (monthly cost of provisions: $1,000) or his inveterate Broadway theater hopping. Still, Raskob, Wadsworth, and their colleagues were willing to venture their reputations when they decided to oppose Prohibition actively and in public. Contrarily, Andrew Mellon, who loathed the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, was actually in a position to do something about Prohibition enforcement—he was, it was said, “the only Treasury Secretary under whom three presidents served”—but he evidently valued his influence too highly to imperil it. When his son Paul brought some Yale friends home to Pittsburgh one winter, Mellon didn’t stop them from having a blowout drinking party; he just asked them not to throw their empties out the window. After the snow melted, he explained, the neighbors might notice.
PAULINE SABIN HAD been among those wet and wealthy Republicans who had stayed loyal to Hoover during the 1928 race. Many of them either had not yet placed Prohibition ahead of other issues at play in the campaign or had chosen to believe that a man as worldly and as educated as Hoover couldn’t possibly be a genuine dry. In June 1928 Sabin had announced her leap to the wet side in a magazine article headlined “I Change My Mind on Prohibition.” Sabin explained the reasoning behind her switch, and went on to criticize dry women blinded by their devotion to this one cause. She could not understand how they could support a dry candidate for, say, the Senate “without taking enough interest to question his stand on other matters of vital importance to our country.” Her loyalty to Hoover throughout the campaign demonstrated that she was not guilty of the same transgression. His favorable words about Prohibition at the Republican convention in August (“noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose”) did not loosen her faith. She put together a group of “wives of financiers” to raise money for the campaign, and at a rally of Republican women she hosted at Bayberry Land early in September, she fell into a virtual swoon, calling Hoover “the greatest humanitarian of this age.” Following his victory she continued to believe this humanitarian spirit would manifest itself in an enlightened approach to the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment.
Then, on March 4, 1929, Hoover shredded her hopes. Standing on the East Portico of the Capitol, his face spattered by a constant rain, the new president opened his inaugural address with the usual formal niceties. Then, in the clipped diction that made his public remarks seem even sterner than he likely meant them to be, Hoover leapt into the Prohibition wars by declaring that “disregard and disobedience of law” was the “most malign” of any danger facing America. This was followed by a rapid series of rhetorical blows that would have caused even the most moderate wet to yelp in pain. Hoover assailed states that did not take their responsibility for concurrent enforcement seriously; he castigated otherwise law-abiding citizens for patronizing criminals; and he effectively declared that anyone who looked the other way when Prohibition laws were being violated was personally responsible for the breakdown in law enforcement. “The worst evil of disregard for some law,” the new president proclaimed, “is that it destroys respect for all law.” And then he revealed his plan to address this vexing problem: he was going to appoint a commission to look into it.
Pauline Sabin, unable to discern in the president’s speech even a suggestion that there might be something wrong with the law itself, was stunned. The next day she resigned from the Republican National Committee. A few days after that, she gathered with eleven other socially prominent women, none of them any more accustomed to political agitation than they were to mopping floors. “We had no name for our organization,” Sabin wrote years later. “We had no definite platform. All that we had was youth, strength, and conviction.” And, she might have added, money, stature, brains, and a determination not to reform Prohibition but to abolish it.
JAMES CANNON JR. was immeasurably gratified by the thoroughness of the Republican victory in 1928. “The enemies of the Eighteenth Amendment have been ignominiously routed,” the bishop declared in triumphant glee. The Smith-Raskob attempt “to place the national government in the hands of the wet sidewalks of our cities” had failed. So, of course, had Cannon’s ungainly syntax, but that didn’t slow him down. He kept his Conference of Anti-Smith Democrats alive well into 1929, another regiment of reinforcements for the crusade he was about to commence.
Cannon and his allies read the election of 1928 as a signal to assault wet resistance and stir dry complacency. Emboldened by what they insisted was a great dry victory, they pursued an agenda more extreme than anything Wayne Wheeler had ever attempted. Where Wheeler had avoided committing the Anti-Saloon League to openly xenophobic positions, Cannon campaigned for a constitutional amendment that would have removed noncitizens from the tallies that determined the size of congressional districts. He called as well for a radical increase in the Prohibition Bureau budget, “even if it should require $100,000,000.” Wheeler, of course, had always avoided this red-hot wire, aware that many congressional Republicans would sooner tolerate the bad joke that was Prohibition enforcement than they would abide the expenditure of another federal nickel.
Neither the apportionment amendment nor the budget increase got very far. But Cannon soon alit upon a single instrument that would make use of the huge dry majorities in Congress, demonstrate the wrathful intent of the dry vanguard, whip the federal judicial system into line, and not cost any meaningful money. The legislation Cannon devised became known as the Jones Law, after its nominal sponsor, Wesley L. Jones of Washington, who had spent much of the decade carrying the ASL’s water on the Senate floor. It
was a vehicle built for punishment, and so severe it seemed powered by vengeance. The Jones Law turned most Volstead violations, which had been misdemeanors, into felonies. First offenders were subject to five years’ imprisonment plus a fine of ten thousand dollars. For the first time, purchasers—even witnesses to the sale or transport of liquor—could be considered violators, since failure to report a felony was now itself a felony and could send the bystander to prison for three years. Any citizen unable to pay a Jones Law fine could work it off at a rate of a dollar per additional day spent in prison, while aliens were subject to deportation. The Jones Law passed the Senate by a vote of 65–18 and carried the House 284–90.
It may have been the biggest mistake the ASL ever made. Cannon and his associates had been blinded by fog. Reading the 1928 election results as definitive when they were in fact deceptive, they perceived a national mandate that didn’t exist. Although the Jones Law did allow judges some discretion in sentencing—they were allowed to make the distinction between “casual” violators and participants in a “commercial” enterprise—what stuck in the public mind was the idea that the bartender at the local speakeasy, or the widow who ran the mining-camp rooming house, or the farmer who made a few extra dollars peddling hard cider could conceivably be sentenced to five years in federal prison for a single infraction. The original maximum for a first offense had been six months and a thousand dollars. Under the Jones Law, not only had both penalties increased tenfold, but if you couldn’t come up with the cash and instead wanted to work off a ten-thousand-dollar fine at a dollar a day, you could theoretically spend another twenty-seven years behind bars.
The ASL’s rising thirst for retribution provoked the public’s plunging tolerance for it, abetted by the most influential man in American journalism. Motivated either by a genuine conversion—he had begun the decade as a dry—or by a newspaper peddler’s feel for the tilt of public opinion, William Randolph Hearst called the Jones Law “the most menacing piece of repressive legislation that has stained the statute books of this republic since the Alien and Sedition laws” of 1798. Around the same time he launched his version of William C. Durant’s essay-writing competition. In the Hearst contest, however, the object was not to make Prohibition work, but to address the troubles it had provoked. It generated more than seventy thousand entries, including one from a New York lawyer who lamented the change in social habits wrought by Prohibition. Before, he wrote, young women wouldn’t dance with young men who had liquor on their breath; now, though, “they follow the breath to the flask.” The winning entry called for the immediate legalization of beer and wine through revision to the Volstead Act.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 42