The AAPA’s embrace of the tax issue was to some extent the inevitable outgrowth of the group’s composition, largely plutocrats, aristocrats, and the politicians who served their interests. (Drafts of AAPA form letters that turned up in a Senate investigation were addressed “Dear Mr. Multi-Millionaire.”) James Wadsworth, for one, argued against a broad membership campaign; that would increase “the danger,” he said, that “we might get some undesirables.” In the lexicon of the AAPA, “undesirables” was a rather loose term. William Stayton told colleagues, “I simply went sick” upon learning that the membership department “had recommended that we go after licensed automobile owners.” He wasn’t speaking about those who owned automobiles and hired others to drive them around. “You may have ridden some Saturday or Sunday from Annapolis to Baltimore,” Stayton explained, the italics apparent in his voice if not on the page, “and have seen a parade of the auto owner in his shirt sleeves.” An organization with this sort of worldview wasn’t likely to tailor its appeal to the broad electorate. Replacing a graduated income tax with an excise tax, as Irénée du Pont proposed—specifically, a three-cent tax on every glass of beer—would be of substantial value only to the wealthy. The working poor and the unemployed would finance tax relief for the rich.
The AAPA’s publicity campaign was centered on pamphlets with such titles as What Price Prohibition? (answer: with the return of legal alcohol, “the necessity of levying income taxes would be eliminated”), Does Prohibition Pay? and The Cost of Prohibition and Your Income Tax. The last, which was the organization’s most widely distributed piece of literature, was perfect for its year of publication, 1929. By 1932, as the Depression plunged toward its devastating nadir, it was superseded by an AAPA handout that spoke more urgently to the historical moment: The Need of a New Source of Government Revenue. The authors didn’t have to look far to identify one, as Pierre du Pont made clear in a radio address that summer: “The income tax would not be necessary in the future,” he said, “and half the revenue required for the budget . . . would be furnished by the tax on liquor alone.”
That was for public consumption; privately he was even more direct. “The Repeal of the XVIIIth Amendment would permit Federal taxation in the amount of two billion dollars,” Pierre du Pont wrote to his brother Lammot in April 1932. After four years of active engagement in the Repeal cause, he didn’t mention states’ rights, individual rights, or any similarly lofty notions. “Such taxation would almost eliminate the income taxes of corporations and individuals,” he concluded. “I feel sure that you will agree that this is of great importance.”
IN LATE 1928 E. B. White wrote an essay that touched on the amount New York City was spending “to enforce prohibition, which does not exist.” A few months later the New York Telegram posed the question “Where on Manhattan Island can you buy liquor?” The paper’s answer: “In open saloons, restaurants, night clubs, bars behind a peephole, dancing academies, drugstores, delicatessens, cigar stores, confectioneries . . .” It went on with thirty-one other suggestions, including paint stores, malt shops, and moving-van companies. “Times certainly are different,” a housewife in lower Manhattan told an interviewer. “In the old days you never would have thought of buying your wine at the fish store.”
New York was distinctive, but by 1930 it was not nearly as distinctive as it had been. The Wickersham Commission reported, “As things are at present, there is virtual local option” throughout the country. The editor of the Hutchinson News in Kansas, a longtime dry, acknowledged the tenth anniversary of Prohibition by admitting that “there is ten times as much drinking in Kansas today as there was ten years ago . . . and consumption is increasing rather than diminishing.” The following year, when the Saturday Evening Post declared that the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1920s was dead, Malcolm Cowley knew why. “It was dying,” he wrote, “because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha, and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown.” The Greenwich Village way of life—the pleasurable mingling of both sexes, usually accompanied by music, always accompanied by alcohol—had been taken up, Cowley said, “by salesmen from Kokomo and the younger country-club set in Kansas City.” He almost sounded disappointed.
In places where anything but neutral grain alcohol was hard to come by, grocery stores offered a flavoring substance called Peeko, available for seventy-five cents in rye, gin, rum, cognac, crème de menthe, and several other varieties. Just add these “perfect, true flavors” to your grain alcohol, the advertisements said, and drink up. On a far greater scale, the moonshine industry made some legitimate businesses vastly successful. Production of corn sugar, as essential to moonshine as grapes were to wine, soared from 152 million pounds in 1921 to 960 million pounds eight years later. In one four-year period Standard Brands Inc. sold 64,000 packages of Fleischmann’s Yeast in Richmond, Virginia, population 189,000. But in Franklin County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, where the population was only 24,000 (and, the Wickersham Commission reported, ninety-nine out of a hundred residents were involved in the moonshine business), Fleischmann’s moved 2.25 million packages in the same four years. It was not just a southern phenomenon. A single wholesale grocer in Rockford, Illinois, took delivery of two to three railroad carloads of corn sugar every week. Prohibition officials announced that they had seized 35,200 illegal stills and distilleries in 1929, plus 26 million gallons of mash, but judging from the amount of liquor washing over the country by that point, it was as if they had plucked a few blades of grass from a golf course.
Another source of liquid refreshment popped up around this time—the Vino Sano Grape Brick, a solid, dehydrated block of grape juice concentrate mixed with stems, skins, and pulp. The size of a pound of butter, it came in a printed wrapper instructing the purchaser to add water to make grape juice, but to be sure not to add yeast or sugar, or leave it in a dark place, or let it sit too long before drinking it because “it might ferment and become wine.” For those a little slow on the uptake, newspaper ads indicated the choice of flavors: port, sherry, Tokay, burgundy, and so on. The gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond told the New York Times, “It sounds like a good racket to me.”
The big-time California grape producers thought so, too. After the makers of Vino Sano survived a court challenge—what they sold contained no alcohol, and home manufacture for personal use remained legal—they were joined in the market by Vine-Glo. Produced and marketed by Fruit Industries Limited, a consortium of five of the largest pre-Prohibition wineries, Vine-Glo was a much more sophisticated product. A Fruit Industries agent would deliver a varietal grape juice (the accustomed Tokay, burgundy, “claret,” and so on) to the buyer’s home in five-, ten-, twenty-five- or fifty-gallon cans, add yeast and citric acid, and insert a tube to vent off gases. Every few weeks the agent would stop by to monitor progress; after sixty days he would arrive with bottles, foil capsules, corks, and labels, even tissue to wrap the bottles in.
As refined as Vine-Glo’s service was, its advertisements were no more subtle than Vino Sano’s: “Barreled in charred kegs . . . from the presses of the wineries in California . . . What will you have?” A trade ad said, “Vine-Glo has delivered a new message to the American public. A message it has been awaiting for ten years.” It even had its own celebrity endorser. Arthur Brisbane, the Hearst editor who had bought the Washington Times with brewery money during World War I, provided a blurb for a Fruit Industries handout: “The Grape Growers are not held responsible for the laws of nature, which seem to have no sympathy with Prohibition, and turn innocent Grape Juice into Wine.”
Outside the home, especially in the big cities, public drinking places became more civilized. “Speakeasies have run away with the cream of the dinner trade,” according to Harper’s. Restaurants that stayed dry were doomed not just because of public tastes, but also by labor economics: because tips in speakeasies were so much larger, so was the earning power of their waiters and chefs; this attracted the best
in the business. Hotel traffic was up a bit, as a lawyer for the American Hotel Association told a Senate committee, because of customers who “sought refuge from this law behind the guest’s door.” But hoteliers found that “our furniture and rooms were being damaged and destroyed.” The solution to one form of furniture abuse was an invention born of Prohibition necessity: the “combination corkscrew–bottle opener, which may be fastened to a door jamb in the bathroom or otherwise.”
Another child of late Prohibition was the “cruise to nowhere,” aka the “booze cruise,” aka the “weekend whoopee cruise.” Whatever its name, it was the precursor of the luxury cruise business. These out-and-back trips, their destination a spot in the sea just beyond U.S. territorial waters, were among the first offerings of the United States Lines after American ships were privatized in 1929. The Leviathan, which ran cruises of four days’ duration when it wasn’t on a transatlantic crossing, had its own shipboard brewery. So did the George Washington, a fact that became slightly embarrassing after the U.S. delegation to the 1930 Arms Conference in London (secretary of state, secretary of the navy, three ambassadors, two senators) booked passage on it. Both the Grace Lines and the International Mercantile Marine Company built large liners accommodating as many as 750 revelers strictly for what was euphemistically called “the intercoastal trade.”
What once was hidden had burst into the open. The term of art for what was happening across the nation was “social nullification.” Coverage in the increasingly wet press flaunted evidence of the changing ethos. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, waxed enthusiastic about the Mounds Country Club across the river in Illinois. The Mounds was described by its promoters as “a high-class night club to take care of a long-felt want.” The crowd was “strangely inclusive,” running from ex-cons and professional gunmen to “Social Register folk” and “the newly rich.” Winking broadly to its readers, the paper reported that “wealthy St. Louisans on occasion smuggle champagne into the bone-dry interior of the club, and, miraculously keeping it a secret from the waiters, pop corks against the ceiling, and toast the cock-eyed world.”
The new openness spread beyond the news and editorial columns. Ads for Vine-Glo and Vino Sano ran in tiny type in papers as small as the Havre, Montana, Daily News Promoter and with bold headlines on full pages in papers as substantial as the Washington Star (where Fruit Industries said it wanted to take “a product that has always been available on the farm and place it within the reach of the city dweller”). In 1930 Vanity Fair ran a cigarette ad featuring a stylish woman with marcelled hair accepting hors d’oeuvres from a waiter while holding a martini—you can see the olive—in her other hand. Books of cocktail recipes came from respectable publishers, including one who offered former senator Jim Reed’s own formula for “pumpkin gin.” (Cut a hole in pumpkin, remove seeds, pack with sugar, seal top back in place with paraffin. In thirty days, the sugar and the meat of the pumpkin would be “transformed into a high-powered gin.”) One of these books named its various concoctions for their impact—for instance, the Bridge Table (gin, brandy, apricot brandy, and lime juice), which was “so named because after a few of these your legs will fold up.”
BACK IN 1927, when Major Maurice Campbell was named federal Prohibition administrator for the New York district, he made it clear that he believed in the Eighteenth Amendment, that he was a teetotaler, and that he intended to conduct a “dignified and just” enforcement effort. He did not approach the open drinking culture of Manhattan timorously. In the ensuing three years Campbell led raids on nightclubs belonging to Texas Guinan and the torch singer Helen Morgan; on the Ritz-Carlton and Manger hotels; and on Mayor Jimmy Walker’s favorite playpen, the Central Park Casino, in each instance either arresting waiters and bartenders or shutting the place down. In April 1930 Campbell appeared to cap off his career when he and his men swept through the Hollywood, a stylish nightclub at Broadway and Forty-eighth Street, and arrested twenty-seven people—sixteen employees and eleven patrons, all of them in evening dress, who happened to have liquor in their possession. Campbell said the “Hip Flask Raid,” as it would become known, “is the first instance in which persons in possession of intoxicating liquor in public places have been arrested. But if the practice is not discontinued in New York,” he warned, “it will not be the last.”
The raid turned out not to be the biggest moment in Campbell’s public life after all. That came five months later, after he had either resigned because of lack of support from the Justice Department or had been fired for what was characterized as “nonfeasance” (the evidence supported the former interpretation). Campbell soon became the first high-ranking Prohibition official to make a public airing of the corruption, hypocrisy, and political sleaze permeating the federal enforcement program.
In a series of articles commissioned by the New York World and syndicated in several other papers, Campbell revealed that Assistant Treasury Secretary Seymour Lowman had asked him to resume the distribution of more than two million gallons of “sacramental” wine as part of a Republican effort “to obtain the Jewish vote in New York City.” Lowman had also told him, Campbell said, that New York had become “too dry” in 1928, that it was a presidential election year and “we mustn’t do anything to antagonize the voters.” Campbell even fingered Vice President Charles Curtis for trying to aid an industrial alcohol scheme cooked up by Curtis’s 1928 campaign manager; a month later the man—a former saloon owner, as it happened—was indicted for trying to import “sheep dip” from the Netherlands that turned out to be 95 percent alcohol. Lowman and Curtis made the customary denials and countercharges, but Campbell had copies of memos that confirmed many of his accusations. Summarizing his own situation, Campbell said, “I am out of it all, and it is like coming out of a cesspool and breathing fresh air.” He then became the editor of a magazine called Repeal.
The Campbell series, appearing just weeks before the 1930 congressional elections, didn’t help the dry cause. Neither did a second newspaper blockbuster by bootlegger George Cassiday (aka the Man in the Green Hat), who maintained that he had regularly sold liquor to “a majority of both Houses [of Congress]” and that his typical congressional customer “had a capacity of two or three quarts a week.” The risible reelection candidacies of the Leaky Luggage caucus—Representatives Morgan, Michaelson, and Denison—didn’t help either; all three were defeated. But much of the huge wet gain that November (in the House alone the wet roster jumped overnight from 76 to 146) could be attributed to the Depression. The Republicans were held responsible for the economic catastrophe; the Democrats were the beneficiaries of the public’s anger; and, outside the South, the Democratic Party (John J. Raskob, chairman) was now demonstrably wet. Traditionally Republican states like Ohio and Illinois sent wet Democrats to the Senate in 1930. Even Kansas—Kansas!—replaced a dry Republican with a wet Democrat.
At the same time, a wet rebellion had been bubbling on the Republican side. Most of the men of the AAPA were Republicans, and the party organizations in some of the eastern states where they had the greatest influence (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) endorsed Repeal in 1930. So did the Republicans of Wisconsin. When the Washington state party declared itself wet, it was a repudiation of the state’s leading Republican, Senator Wesley Jones, sponsor of the notorious Jones Law. Republican drys were routed in Michigan, where the former head of the state ASL was denied a fifth term in the House by a wet primary challenger. And just six days before the general election, members of the Women’s National Republican Club, founded by Pauline Sabin in 1921, had voted 1,391–197 for Repeal. After the wet victories a week later, Sabin said, “I do think our little organization did something to perfect this wet landslide.”
Her “little organization,” however, was not the WNRC; it was the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, the child of Sabin’s meeting with eleven friends in the days after Herbert Hoover’s disappointing inaugural address. Her departure from the Republican Party had been big
news. The New York Times ran it above the fold on the front page, and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Washington Post. Even the Los Angeles Times, faithfully dry, gave Sabin’s defection page-one display. The people she soon pulled into the WONPR guaranteed that the group would not stay out of the papers very long—socially prominent women whose names defined them better than any adjectives could: Mrs. Archibald B. Roosevelt and Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll, Mrs. E. Roland Harriman and Mrs. Cornelius M. Bliss, Mrs. Cummins Speakman and Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer.
At first it appeared that the women’s pedigrees would subject them to ridicule, and in some respects their customs and habits did work against them. At the initial national organizational meeting, in the Drake Hotel in Chicago, the minutes suggested something out of a Helen Hokinson cartoon in The New Yorker: “Mrs. Stuyvesant Pierrepont gave a most interesting and satisfactory report of her progress in the State of New Jersey.” Volunteers who signed up in the District of Columbia were described in the press as “the inner circle of exclusive Washington society.” Sabin was discussed in terms that likely had never before been used to describe the leader of an American political movement. A profile in McCall’s reported that she was “fond of sports suits, wears purple and blue well, and usually affects pearl lobe earrings.” It said her “color sense is unfaltering,” as evidenced by her office walls of “pale green, harmonizing with salmon pink curtains.” The Atlanta Constitution informed its readers that “she plays golf and dances, but swimming is her favorite recreation, indulging to her heart’s content in this latter exercise at The Oaks, her plantation near Charleston.” Vogue ran a piece headlined “Anti-Prohibitionette.”
Sabin knew that this was exactly the sort of thing that would help her movement succeed. In the early days every speech, every interview, every piece of congressional testimony was publicized in a way that gave her words extra weight simply because of the unlikely identity of the speaker. When the Chicago Tribune quoted one particular Sabin attack on Prohibition, it explained: “These vehement words were spoken, you must remember, not by the old fashioned type of platform termagant, but by a lady sitting in her beautifully appointed drawing room—rare books, good pictures and rich tapestries all around her. They were spoken by . . . a ‘society woman’ who . . . might with clear conscience be playing around at Miami Beach or on the Riviera, instead of directing 15 secretaries, planning nation-wide campaigns, answering bundles of letters and speaking twice a week at public meetings.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 45