Michaelson’s was not the last of the leaking luggage cases, or even the one that provided the wet press with the most piquant opportunity to indulge its appetite for exposing dry deceit. That honor went to the case of Representative Edward E. Denison of Illinois, who had demonstrated his aptitude for dry constituent services back in 1924, when he persuaded Roy Haynes of the Prohibition Bureau to deputize the Klan-affiliated vigilantes who had been terrorizing the Italian-American mineworkers of Williamson County. Denison’s imports from Panama—eighteen bottles of Scotch, six of gin—made it all the way to his office in the Capitol Building. According to the New York Times, “he explained [to Prohibition agents] it was not liquor but a set of dishes from Panama that was in the trunk. The agents were skeptical.” It was liquor, all right, and only the adroit maneuvering of Denison’s lawyer kept him, like Morgan and Michaelson, from conviction under the Jones Law—which all three had voted for.*
Each time a prominent dry was dragged dripping into court, the wet press reveled in it. Each time the accused dodged the law’s bullet, the wet press vented. When George L. Cassiday, a bootlegger known as “the man in the green hat,” was arrested inside the Senate Office Building, reporters suggested that the ensuing prosecution would reveal a lengthy list of drys among his Capitol Hill customers, and they were crushed when it didn’t. But the case of dry errancy that most excited the wets, most thoroughly discombobulated the retreating drys, and most rewarded the scandal-hungry press, didn’t involve liquor at all. This was the furor that brought down the Anti-Saloon League’s most potent operative, James Cannon Jr. In the summer of 1929 the Lynchburg News in Virginia, which was owned by Senator Carter Glass, charged that while Bishop Cannon was principal of the Blackstone Female Institute during World War I, he had been guilty of . . . hoarding flour.
On its own, the charge didn’t make for the most exciting reading. According to the paper, Blackstone had secured an allotment of 425 barrels of flour for its 385 students, while nearby Randolph-Macon Women’s College had needed only 175 barrels for 806 students. Similar figures from five other women’s schools established that each young lady at Blackstone had enjoyed 309 loaves of bread per year, while the average at the other colleges was a mere 48. The Blackstone women did not look overfed, so the flour under Cannon’s control must have ended up elsewhere—presumably converted to cash and deposited in Cannon’s pocket.
Carter Glass was every bit as dry as Cannon, but for twenty years he had been the bishop’s sworn rival for control of the Democratic Party in the Commonwealth, and in 1928 he had remained loyal to Smith and the national Democrats. Glass had been husbanding the flour-hoarding information for a decade when Cannon’s pious image was defaced in June 1929 by the New York World. The paper revealed that the bishop was a hard-core stock speculator. Stolen documents that the World had purchased for $4,000 established that over the course of two years, Cannon had traded nearly $500,000 worth of securities through a fraud-riddled brokerage firm whose principals were on their way to jail.* To the devout among Cannon’s followers, market speculation was gambling and therefore sinful. The flour-hoarding accusation confirmed the taint of greed that was settling around Cannon, and, worse yet, it allowed his enemies to label him unpatriotic.
Finally, followers of this unfolding catalog of sins arrived at the clincher: lust. Cannon and his second wife had conducted an illicit affair in New York’s Union Square Hotel before his first wife’s death. A sort of clubhouse for actors, producers, and other figures in the Yiddish theater, the Union Square was the perfect venue for Cannon’s trysts, a friend believed, for there were few places in New York where the bishop and his paramour were less likely to be recognized.
The revelation of sexual errancy was juicier than flour hoarding. William Randolph Hearst waved the bloody flag in his newspapers. A group of Methodist clergymen, including the chaplain of the U.S. Senate, accused Cannon of “gross moral turpitude and disregard for the first principles of Christian ethics.” The College of Methodist Bishops convened a formal tribunal to investigate the charges. Newspapers in two Georgia cities compared Cannon to Al Capone. In the end, even though neither civil nor ecclesiastic authority convicted Cannon of anything, the public humiliation of the nation’s most prominent Prohibitionist was complete. Discredited by the wets and disowned by the drys, James Cannon was through. The man H. L. Mencken had once called “the most powerful ecclesiastic ever heard of in America” had become, wrote historian Michael S. Patterson, “a non-entity both to his church and to the general public.”
THREE OTHER CRACKS threatened the once-sturdy walls of the dry fortress in 1929. The first, which passed by with surprisingly little notice, showed up early in the year, when Congress finally got around to addressing the nagging little matter of reapportionment. More than eight years had passed since the last census, eight years during which rural (i.e., largely dry) representation had remained inflated out of proportion to rural population. The Senate sponsor of the successful reapportionment bill, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan (his state would pick up four seats), noted that not only were twenty-three seats in the House misallocated, but in the next presidential election this would place twenty-three electoral votes in undeserving hands as well. Failure to reapportion, said Vandenberg, would not only “taint the validity of Congress, it taints the validity of the Presidency itself.”
Cotton Tom Heflin did not miss his cue, invoking the “refuse of foreign countries” who would take over Congress if the reapportionists had their way. His Alabama colleague Hugo L. Black, infinitely more civilized but no less protective of his state (and, by extension, of the dry laws both men supported), called reapportionment “unjust and unrighteous,” for favoring the cities over the countryside. But by this point it was no longer tenable to resist the arguments for its passage, including an especially provocative one offered by retired admiral William W. Kimball in a letter to the Washington Post. Taking Vandenberg’s argument one unsettling step further, Kimball maintained that any action taken by a constitutionally malapportioned Congress was itself, by definition, unconstitutional. Regarding the similarly deformed Electoral College, Kimball wrote that Herbert Hoover “has been formally elected . . . as the de facto president of something, perhaps of the de facto nation with a de facto government occupying the territory of what was the United States.”
At the same time the apportionment bill was up for debate, a tremor shot through the executive branch: Herbert Hoover fired Mabel Willebrandt. Newspaper reports indicated that “the professional drys” had been lobbying to get Willebrandt appointed “Prohibition generalissimo,” with authority over not only the Justice Department prosecutors but over the Prohibition Bureau agents (and possibly the customs officials, coast guardsmen, and other enforcement troops) who remained under the nominal control of the loathed Andrew Mellon. To drys who had misread the 1928 election results, Willebrandt’s dismissal should have been evidence that the president did not feel he owed his election to the Anti-Saloon League.
Reapportionment wouldn’t by itself turn Congress around. The departure of a dry partisan from a position as critical as Willebrandt’s should not have weakened enforcement, at least not in the administration of a man who had based his presidency on “respect for all law.” It was only the last of the batterings that Prohibition endured in 1929 that truly signaled its impending collapse. The devastating stock market crash in October may not have caused the Great Depression, but it certainly sounded the alarm that terrible economic times were around the corner. (The alarm didn’t awaken everybody; Andrew Mellon’s diary entry for Black Thursday read, “Stock market crash in New York. Dinner Belgian Embassy.”) When the Depression did arrive, bringing with it massive unemployment, diminishing respect for the federal government, a dizzying collapse in federal tax collections, and wide distaste for the Republican Party, Prohibition was on the ropes. No constitutional amendment had ever been repealed, but the Eighteenth—already threatened by the excesses of its supporters, the resources
of its opponents, and the disillusion of virtually everyone else—was beginning to look like a candidate.
* Denison’s testimony about swapped luggage, misplaced keys, inept shipping clerks, and the malevolent intent of investigators could have provided a plotline for a stage farce. “You’ve got a fairy story in this case,” the frustrated young prosecutor shouted during closing arguments. “It’s the fairy story of those dishes!” The prosecutor was Mabel Willebrandt’s friend, the future federal judge John J. Sirica.
* One of them, Harry Goldhurst, né Herschel Goldhirsch, emerged from his five years’ imprisonment for mail fraud under yet another name. More than twenty years later, as Harry Golden, he published the huge bestseller Only in America, a collection of columns from his weekly paper, The Carolina Israelite.
Chapter 20
The Hummingbird That
Went to Mars
T
HE FOUR-YEAR MARCH from the stock market crash to Repeal would turn out to be steady and irresistible, but that wasn’t what most wets expected. As late as January 1932 many wet leaders and sympathetic journalists were still unconvinced that it was possible to secure a Twenty-first Amendment to unravel the Eighteenth. For one thing, in more than 140 years of constitutional history, not a single amendment had ever been repealed. Beyond that, as Charles Merz of the New York Times’s editorial board wrote, the imposing math faced by advocates provided “a devastating argument against the possibility of repeal.” On top of the two-thirds vote needed in each house of Congress (which could be stopped by just thirty-three dry senators), the requisite concurrence of three-quarters of the states was beyond daunting. Ratification would require the positive action of both houses in each of thirty-six state legislatures. Thirteen of those seventy-two separate entities “could block repeal forever,” Merz wrote in March 1931. “These thirteen bodies, rightly apportioned, could exist in states containing approximately 5 per cent of the country’s population.”
That same winter, the eloquent James Montgomery Beck, who had come to refer to Prohibition as “this ghastly farce,” asserted that “the Eighteenth Amendment cannot be repealed within a decade and possibly not within a generation.” Clarence Darrow pointed out in November 1931 that thirty-four U.S. senators represented states that were “hopelessly dry,” and another twenty came from the “likely” dry, including such unpromising states as Alabama, Texas, Indiana, and Georgia.
Darrow and Beck both believed that the “ghastly farce” could be ended only through revocation of the Volstead Act. That would require simple majorities in Congress and a presidential signature, which were daunting prospects in themselves. The possibility of achieving the much higher thresholds required by a Repeal amendment was a delusion. This grim reality, said Darrow, “should convince the most stupid and optimistic Wet that if he can never buy a drink without repealing the 18th amendment, he had better start right in learning to make his own.” Someone who saw Repeal as the only solution is “not against Prohibition,” he concluded. “He’s in favor of liquor, but against getting it.”
Drys were no less convinced of the impossibility of Repeal. Gifford Pinchot, William G. McAdoo, and Jane Addams loaned their names to a new organization so certain of the continued popularity of Prohibition that members confidently called for a national referendum on the subject. (Just in case, a few drys tried, with some success, to persuade African-American voters that repealing the Eighteenth Amendment could open a path to revoking the Twelfth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth.) In September 1930 Morris Sheppard, author of the Eighteenth Amendment, said, “There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.” Few argued.
It was one of those moments when all the experts are wrong and wisdom arises from unlikely sources. Like, for example, from the members of the Union League Club in Manhattan, who were building a new clubhouse on Park Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street and had placed a bet on the future by including a “large, sumptuous bar” in their plans. “We hope and expect to see Prohibition end very soon,” a member of the club’s house committee said in February 1931. “Prohibition cannot die any too soon for us.”
THE SEERS CONTEMPLATING Prohibition’s future were not the only people making predictions as the dry era entered its late stage. In October 1929 Irving Fisher, the Yale economist who had remained Prohibition’s leading intellectual defender, offered a comment that would earn him a place in American memory far more enduring than would his groundbreaking work on interest rates or even his loopy statistical analyses of beer’s effect on the ability to memorize poetry. “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Fisher on October 15, nine days before the earth gave way on Black Monday. At least he truly believed it: his considerable fortune, invested in the market, followed the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a death spiral.
This was a grave setback for the credibility of the dry movement’s favorite scholar, but the effect of the Crash and the Depression on dry goals extended beyond personal humiliation. As businesses came apart, as banks folded, as massive unemployment and homelessness scoured the cities and much of the countryside, any remaining ability to enforce Prohibition evaporated. President Hoover, trying to balance the budget while a hurricane rattled the scales, slashed funding for the already overburdened federal court system. The Prohibition Bureau cut agents’ per diem from six dollars to five, and live training sessions were replaced with correspondence courses. The new Prohibition commissioner, a chemist named James M. Doran, had begun his tenure insisting he needed $300 million to enforce the law. But with no more than $12 million made available to him, Doran defaulted to the reflexive optimism pioneered by his predecessor, Roy Haynes. Here’s the good news, said Doran: in Prohibition’s first nine years, the government had spent some $141 million on all forms of enforcement while collecting more than $460 million in fines, penalties, and taxes—a profit, he boasted, of precisely $319,323,307.76.*
With an argument like that, it’s a wonder Doran didn’t get his $300 million. A government running on fumes could have made good use of a humming, for-profit business on the side. It had not taken long for the Depression to corrode the inflow of federal tax collections. Revenue based on 1930 incomes was down 15%; the following year saw a 37% drop, and the year after that another 26%—compounded, it was a vertiginous 60% plunge in just three years. Capital gains taxes that had brought $1.5 billion into the treasury between 1926 and 1929 dove into negative territory over the next five years as the allowance for capital losses piled up. At the same time demand for government spending—for relief, for reconstruction projects, for anything to restart the comatose economy—was soaring. Al Capone poked his finger in the eyes of both the drys and the feds when he opened a soup kitchen on South State Street, serving five thousand meals to hungry Chicagoans on Thanksgiving. He apparently had more resources, and more heart, than the people who ran the country.
BESIDES CAPONE AND his fellow mobsters, one other cadre of Americans saw a way to turn the economic catastrophe to their advantage. For decades historians of Prohibition have debated the motivations of Pierre du Pont, John Raskob, and their colleagues in the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. The argument that they backed Repeal to slash their own tax liabilities was first offered by embittered drys and was consequently dismissed as desperate partisanship. It is also undeniably true that du Pont, Raskob, et al., had other reasons to despise Prohibition, specifically its intrusion on individual liberties and its evisceration of states’ rights. These were, in fact, the same arguments many of them employed in their across-the-board opposition to woman suffrage, direct election of senators, the income tax amendment itself, and a pending amendment that would give Congress the power to prohibit child labor. As far as John Raskob was concerned, every one of those measures was “a mistake,” and collectively explained why “strong men” didn’t get involved in politics.
Still, the rec
ord clearly establishes that the strong men who ran the AAPA—“almost a Du Pont subsidiary,” said Senator Arthur Robinson of Indiana—clearly intended to maim, or possibly even murder, the income tax, and the Depression handed them a weapon as potent as World War I had been for the drys. Or, to invoke another historical analogy: the organized drys had supported the income tax back in 1913 in order to breathe life into Prohibition. Now, this group of powerful and well-funded wets sought to kill Prohibition so that the income tax might die as well.
The idea did not emerge from the AAPA itself. As early as 1923 Wall Street Journal publisher Clarence W. Barron, in one of the homespun “Wall Street Seminars” he periodically published in his newspaper, said giving up on Prohibition would enable the government to “collect $2,000,000,000 per annum from drink [and] abolish the income tax.” (Barron also insisted that throughout human history only “regulation and taxation” had been successful in the fight against intemperance.)
By 1925 the pre–du Pont AAPA had tentatively picked up a sliver of the idea for its recruitment letter. The pitch was direct: “You will save in reduced taxes, after the Volstead Law is modified, whatever sum you contribute now.” The next year Irénée du Pont told William Stayton that General Motors would save $10 million in taxes each year with the return of the alcohol levies. Stayton determined that if Americans consumed the same amount of alcohol they had in 1914, and if it were taxed at the same rate used in Great Britain, net revenue to the government would reach $1.32 billion.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 44