During the weeks before and after enactment of the Jones Law, and against the backdrop of the campaign Hearst conducted on the front pages of his twenty-eight daily newspapers, excessive or misguided enforcement efforts also won the attention of an increasingly disapproving public. The Chicago Tribune was particularly aggressive in its coverage of dry malfeasance. Customs agents, said the Tribune, employed “terroristic enforcement methods,” including the boarding, in New York harbor, of a private yacht belonging to the family of railroad tycoon Stuyvesant Fish. The paper terrified (or titillated) its readers with a report on a twelve-year-old girl, accompanied in court by neither a lawyer nor any friend or family member, who was nevertheless sentenced to thirty days’ imprisonment for carrying a quart of liquor across a street in Greenville, South Carolina.
An incident that took place just forty miles west of Chicago provoked the Tribune’s editors to indulge in an orgy of coverage that in its frequency, its prominence, and its amplitude suggested that Armageddon was at hand. In the town of Aurora, local officers handed the Tribune (and the dozens of papers nationwide that glommed on to the episode) a story it rode for months. In “the peaceful green valley of the Fox River,” the Tribune sighed, Mrs. Lillian DeKing “lay bleeding to death in the kitchen of her home.” She had been shot “over a few bottles of liquor in the DeKing basement,” the paper added. If her husband was indeed a small-time bootlegger, his were hardly the sort of crimes that should bring to the family doorstep “six officers of the law, armed with sawed off shotguns, pistols, machine guns, bulletproof vests, and tear bombs.”
A Tribune editorial headlined “The Massacre in Aurora” fretted that “we have become accustomed to outrageous excesses” in enforcement, but “the cold-blooded cruelty described in this case” was beyond comprehension. Another story claimed that Mrs. DeKing had been shot “while she was telephoning a lawyer to protest against the raiders’ invasion of her home.” The paper capped its coverage with the creation of that tried and true guarantor of public sympathy, a fund for the education of twelve-year-old Gerald DeKing. Not only had little Gerald witnessed the tragic events, he had heroically grabbed his father’s revolver and returned fire, hitting a deputy sheriff in the leg. Concerned Chicagoans responded to the Tribune’s organ music, and the paper saluted them by publishing their names and the sums they had donated (“V. E. Healy and friends, $200 . . . W. P. Cooney, $10 . . . ‘Disgusted Citizen,’ $2”).
But the case that drew the most intense response, in Chicago and elsewhere, unspooled in Lansing, Michigan, just miles from the state capitol building, where dry legislators had outdone Congress with a law mandating a life sentence for a fourth violation of the liquor laws. A couple of men had already been imprisoned under this draconian statute, but the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of Mrs. Etta Mae Miller—all of which occurred while Wesley Jones was carrying Bishop Cannon’s pet bill through Congress—became the apotheosis of enforcement excess. Mrs. Miller was forty-eight. She had ten children. Her husband was already serving time on a Volstead conviction. But her fourth violation was her fourth violation, and the state law requiring a life term was indifferent to the fact that Etta Mae Miller’s crime was the sale of two pints of liquor to an undercover cop.
Three comments—two made directly in response to the Miller case, one uttered around the same time in reference to the general state of the Prohibition laws—embodied the general reaction. Time magazine said, “In the same court on the same day” that Miller was sentenced to prison for the rest of her natural life, “a bellboy had pleaded guilty to manslaughter [and] had been fined $400 and freed.” Dr. Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals said, “Our only regret is that the woman was not sentenced to life imprisonment before her ten children were born.” And the new president, just one month into his term, told a group of editors that if a law is appropriate, “its enforcement is the quickest method of compelling respect for it.” But Herbert Hoover also said, “If a law is wrong, its rigid enforcement is the surest guarantee of its repeal.”
IN MOST RESPECTS the Jones Law and the other harsh statutes failed. Designed either to intimidate large-scale bootleggers or to lock them away for meaningful prison terms, the laws had the opposite effect. A sentence like the one imposed on Etta Mae Miller was more likely to scare away amateurs than to disrupt the transnational commerce of the criminal syndicates, which had large complements of lawyers, cops, judges, federal Prohibition officials, and other useful associates on their payrolls. In some jurisdictions prosecutors didn’t even bother to bring cases under the law, and in others they saw juries shrink from convicting when they considered the severe penalties that would result. “In attempting to strengthen enforcement,” wrote historian Norman Clark, “the ASL had turned it into an absurdity.”
Herbert Hoover was only barely more effective than the Jones Law. In his inaugural address he had identified “a dangerous expansion in the criminal elements” who were threatening the public welfare, and he acknowledged that the menace was rooted in the liquor trade. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, which left seven gangsters dead on the floor of a Chicago garage just three weeks before Inauguration Day, was vivid evidence of an escalation in violence. Three months later the Atlantic City “peace conference” of mobsters from five cities signified the new level of sophistication that criminals had attained.
Unlike Harding, some of whose highest officials actively abetted the bootlegging industry, and unlike Coolidge, whose lack of interest in enforcement was commensurate with his lack of interest in government activity of any kind, Hoover tried to do something about it. Because he was an engineer, he believed that all problems had solutions; because he was a progressive, he considered an efficient, systematized approach to government reform an article of faith. The earnestness of these convictions, which had won him the derisive nickname “Wonder Boy,” inspired Hoover to appoint the investigative commission whose creation pushed Pauline Sabin into the wet camp. Chaired by former attorney general George W. Wickersham, it came to conclusions so mushy and indistinct that neither wet nor dry knew whether the commission’s final report was a victory or a defeat for their respective positions. Still, Hoover’s belief in rational government did lead to some positive initiatives, including placing enforcement responsibility in the hands of professional managers free of the contaminating influence of the Anti-Saloon League. He also made an effort to remove U.S. attorneys who were not fully committed to Prohibition enforcement. But in one moment of despair, when he concluded that the unchecked lawlessness in Detroit indicated “a complete breakdown in Government,” Hoover briefly considered sending in the army or the marine corps.
He could have chosen an easier target. Gun violence had turned the Detroit River into a combat zone. “Indiscriminate shooting on the river” caused a group of local yachtsmen to make a formal protest to Congress. At any given hour, as many as fifteen hundred boats were dashing one way or another along its eighteen miles, either laden with illegal cargo or returning to the Canadian side for more. During one of the periodic crackdowns that the government bestirred itself to conduct, customs officials somehow managed to seize 366 rum-running boats; 365 of them were subsequently stolen from the government storage facility. The notorious goons of the Purple Gang moved into new enterprises, including a protection racket that erupted into an epidemic of bombings and murders. A breakaway faction that came to be known as the Little Jewish Navy moved in on the Purples’ smuggling business. The violence escalated. Had Hoover gone ahead with his plan to send in troops, it would have demonstrated the utter failure of the law; his decision not to do so suggested the utter helplessness of government itself.
An article in Outlook was headlined “War on the River.” The New York Times elaborated: “Rum War Forces Amass on the Detroit Front.” None of this was helpful to the drys. The depredations of the big-city mobsters became so well known that any doubt about Prohibition’s impact on the spread
of violent crime had melted away. This was especially true once the Chicago newspapers, overwhelmingly wet, latched on to the perfect protagonist for the cops-and-bootleggers saga that had gripped urban America. “Alphonse Capone is, without a doubt, the best advertised and most talked of gangster in the United States,” a federal agent would write, and no one deserved more credit for that than Capone himself.
Referring to the way his organization provided “the light pleasures” to the people of Chicago, Capone once said, “Public service is my motto.” He might as readily have said “public relations.” He made himself endlessly available to the newspapers, feeding them quotable material. When he didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say, he seemed willing to let the newspapermen be his ghostwriters. “When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging,” either Capone or one of his amanuenses said. “When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.” It was a recurrent theme, this shrugging disavowal of evil intent: “Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble,” he said at another time, “and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements.”
To the tabloid press Capone was known as “Scarface.” Inside the mob community he was “the Big Fellow.” To his friends, he was known by the substantially less imposing nickname “Snorky,” a slang term roughly equivalent to “spiffy.” Press photographers couldn’t resist the silk robes and pajamas Capone bought by the dozen from Sulka, the camel-hair coats, the popsicle-colored suits, and all the other lush plumage he favored. Through his avid cultivation of the press, and through the press’s equally avid exploitation of his avidity, wrote Alva Johnston, “Al Capone was a world figure at an age when Napoleon was still a wretched shavetail.”
There should be no doubt: Al Capone was a very bad man. He had a violent streak of terrifying intensity, and he helped establish the ethos of an industry that countenanced murder as a way to end a negotiation (or, in some instances, to begin one). In the brief period he ran Chicago, gunfights and bombings were almost as dependable as sunrises. His racketeers nurtured scores of illegitimate businesses and crippled or devoured legitimate ones. They corrupted labor unions by the dozen and politicians and police officials by the hundreds. The beer the Capone trucks delivered to Chicago speakeasies every Tuesday and Saturday morning wasn’t any good—“lousy was the word” for Capone’s stuff, a competitor said. Capone’s men just happened to excel at a certain kind of violent salesmanship.
In fact, though, the gorillas and gunsels of the Purple Gang were probably more murderous than Al Capone’s thugs. Boo Boo Hoff’s Philadelphia-based industrial liquor empire covered more territory than Capone’s operation. And the Lansky-Luciano combine in New York certainly outdid the Chicago mob in its sophistication and, it would turn out, its longevity. But Capone topped them all in his desire for publicity and his knack for getting it. All those fawning stories, all those bloody headlines, all those wire-service photos of the thick-lipped, jowly, 235-pound Snorky dolled up in outfits that made him look, as a New York reporter once wrote, “like an overstuffed capon”—all of this was very bad for the drys.
“Due to free advertising in the newspapers,” an IRS agent wrote during the government’s investigation of Capone for income tax evasion in 1931, “he became the ‘Big Shot’, Capone the immune, Capone the idol of the hoodlum element.” And, he might have added, “Capone the creature of Prohibition.” Without the one, more and more Americans had come to believe, you couldn’t have had the other.
IN SO MANY WAYS, 1929 turned out to be a rotten year for the drys. Over-confidence had led to legislative overreaching and, at the same time, had provoked the smug complacency that accrues to the self-satisfied. Henry Ford, for instance, imperiously declared he would close his factories if drink ever came back. The more the drys preened, the more material they provided to a growing circle of influential cynics and satirists. It was one thing for The New Yorker to dispose of Ford’s arrogance with mockery (“It would be a great pity to have Detroit’s two leading industries destroyed at one blow”). But when the women of the WCTU, confident of their final victory over alcohol, declared war on Coca-Cola, derision came from the formerly friendly. Wrote the ex-dry William Allen White, “At the spectacle of men returning home, sodden with Coca-Cola, to beat their wives, [or] the sight of little children tugging at their fathers as they stand at the Coca-Cola bars long after midnight . . . we remain unmoved.”
The high-riding drys of 1929 may have been immune to sarcasm; they may not even have recognized it. But the increasingly wet daily press was influential and vigilant, igniting fireworks that illuminated a sustained streak of corruption and dry transgressions. A fairly large rocket had gone up in August and September of 1928, during the presidential campaign, when a Philadelphia grand jury, supported by a dry mayor, revealed a police conspiracy so vast it had engulfed the entire force and so lush it caught the attention of newspapers across the country. Upon taking office earlier in the year, Mayor Harry A. Mackey had sought to separate the corrupt members of the police department from their accustomed rackets by scrambling their assignments; in one stroke 3,800 of the city’s 4,500 cops were transferred from one part of town to another or moved from headquarters duty to the streets, or vice versa. Ensuing investigations turned up some ranking captains and inspectors who, on annual salaries ranging from $2,500 to $4,000, had amassed bank accounts approaching $200,000. Asked to explain his wealth, one cop said he was lucky at craps and poker. Another said he got rich raising “thoroughbred dogs,” another by “building bird cages for the retail trade.” The most audacious explanation came from the officer who said he had lent money to grateful saloonkeepers who had then died, leaving generous bequests in their wills. One mob operation had become so blasé about bribes that its bookkeepers didn’t bother to disguise a payable they recorded in their ledger book: “Cops, $29,400.”
As detailed as it was, the Philadelphia story was really just a somewhat richer account of the official venality that had been Prohibition’s symbiotic relative since its inception. But 1929 was different, bringing a fistful of stories exposing the hypocrisy of dry politicians sipping—or guzzling—cocktails while voting to slam the pathetic likes of Etta Mae Miller into prison cells. A broad account of this phenomenon appeared in Collier’s in February, under the headline “Bartender’s Guide to Washington.” This romp through a city “so wet that it squishes” chronicled a liquor trade so pervasive, so widely accepted, and so essential to the lives of politicians and federal bureaucrats that the author felt it necessary to assure his readers that “there are, of course, Washingtonians and legislators who do not drink.” Not many, apparently; one senator noted that a Scotch importer had provided the capital’s embassies, which were not subject to American law, with thirteen thousand quarts of “diplomatic whisky” in a single three-month period—the equivalent of twenty quarts for every diplomat, diplomat’s relative, or embassy staff member in town. A prominent Washington bootlegger said that “when Congress recessed and the members returned home, the bottom fell out” of the local market.
One of those who claimed to be a lifetime abstainer made Washington’s first post–Jones Law splash in late March. Congressman William M. Morgan of Ohio represented a district drier than burnt toast. He stuck by his position even after he was apprehended by customs officers in the port of New York on returning from the Canal Zone with his wife and several other couples. The officers said they’d found two bottles of whiskey and two bottles of champagne in Morgan’s bags. They also testified that he had tried to intimidate them, before trying to cajole them, before finally admitting he was bringing the goods back (under the “freedom of the port” granted to members of Congress) as a gift for his father-in-law, a Civil War veteran. When an enterprising reporter reached the old man in Logans Ferry, Pennsylvania, he was of little help to Morgan. “If there was any liquor brought for me,” said eighty-seven-year-old Hugh Logan, “I haven’t seen any of it around here.”
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p; Morgan continued to deny the customs officers’ assertions. But while his story was still unreeling in the papers, another dry Republican, M. Alfred Michaelson of Illinois, earned headlines with similar adventures in the importing business. On a railway platform in Jacksonville, Florida, two trunks Michaelson had brought back from a different trip to the Canal Zone sprang leaks. These bags, like Morgan’s, had also enjoyed freedom of the port; as Time explained it, “many a Congressman during recesses of Congress goes to Panama (wet) for a vacation, pretending to make an official study of the Canal Zone, and thus becomes eligible for ‘free entry’ on return.” According to the indictment, one of Michaelson’s trunks contained six quarts of whiskey, two of crème de menthe, one each of several other liqueurs, and a whole keg of something the indictment identified as “plum barbacourt,” which was almost certainly Rhum Barbancourt, from Haiti. Like Morgan, Michaelson employed the in-law defense. Upon the guilty plea of his brother-in-law, a Chicago coal dealer who had taken part in this important fact-finding trip to inspect the bolts on the Panama Canal, or maybe the water temperature, the presiding judge addressed the man’s lawyer: “I have no desire to punish him for the faults of the escaped congressman—one of those who votes dry and drinks wet,” the judge said. The brother-in-law got off with a one-thousand-dollar fine; the congressman declared himself vindicated.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 43