In other words, Pauline Sabin was making it respectable to say things few women felt comfortable saying in public. When she assailed the “scandalous intrusion of the church into matters of legislation,” the fact that it was Pauline Sabin—elegant, refined, fabulously wealthy Pauline Sabin—doing the saying enabled other women to find their voices. A leader of the Missouri chapter of the WONPR described the phenomenon well. Not so long ago, said Mrs. Clifford W. Gaylord, being a dry “seemed to have such an overwhelming blanket of responsibility and being a Wet seemed to have quite the opposite. You know, there are a lot of women who may be morally courageous and socially without courage. In other words,” she concluded, with a knowing sense of the crowd she had joined, “if Mrs. Perdoodle who stood for certain social standards will take a definite stand out in the open, all the Mrs. Dusenwackers will follow.”
With every Sabin appearance or press interview, the aura surrounding the WONPR grew brighter. In one twelve-month span Sabin proselytized in thirty-one states—no picnic for a woman who, on an earlier cross-country trip, had called Kansas “very uninteresting,” declared the wealthy town of Aiken, South Carolina, a bore, and pronounced San Francisco’s social elite “provincial.” But while Vanity Fair celebrated “the Sabine women,” whom it considered “beautiful, cultured, and practical to their finger-tips,” the drys had other descriptions for them. D. Leigh Colvin of the Prohibition Party picked up Vanity Fair’s mythological theme and called them “Bacchantian maidens parching for wine” who “would take the pennies off the eyes of the dead for the sake of legalizing booze.” The American Independent, a dry publication in Kentucky, eschewed classical references. The women of WONPR were “no more than the scum of the earth, parading around in skirts, and possibly late at night flirting with other women’s husbands at drunken and fashionable resorts.”
Obviously, something was working; the drys wouldn’t waste ammunition like this on an unworthy target. An early demonstration of the group’s clout emerged in the District of Columbia in 1930. A severe enforcement bill was pending before the Senate committee that governed the district when the women of WONPR came calling. “No more unusual gathering was ever seen at a Capitol hearing,” the Washington Post reported in its lead story on page one. “Women whose names stand out prominently in the social register . . . outnumbered the men in the room four to one. These were grandmothers, matrons and debutantes, all pledged to a war on prohibition.” When their testimony concluded, the paper said, “there was every evidence that the bill was dead.”
And so it went around the country. Unlike their counterparts in the AAPA—many of them their husbands—the Sabine women did not restrict membership. By 1933 the WONPR claimed more than 1.3 million members. In Evanston, Illinois, where the WCTU was headquartered near Frances Willard’s hallowed Rest Cottage, a special WONPR campaign signed up 1,500 new members in a single week. The WCTU, which continued to maintain that the woman suffrage amendment guaranteed the permanence of Prohibition (“As long as the Nineteenth Amendment stands, the eighteenth will stand also!”), instead watched the political empowerment of women become Prohibition’s undoing. “The real strength of the Sabin organization,” said Time, “lies in the desire of the small-town matron to ally herself, no matter how remotely, with a congregation of bona fide, rotogravure society figures.”
When a member of the Lynbrook Women’s Republican Club on Long Island denounced Pauline Sabin as “a traitor to her country” and demanded withdrawal of a speaking invitation that had been extended to her, the club’s president would have none of it. “I would rather resign my office than withdraw the invitation,” wrote Mrs. John T. Gibbons, “for that would reflect on our breeding.” She directed this harrumph to Herbert Hoover himself. “I have always been in the ranks of the Drys,” she told the president, “but sentiment is changing.”
THE SAM BRONFMAN who rose to address the stockholders of Distillers Corporation-Seagrams Limited at their annual meeting in 1930 was not much different from the Sam Bronfman who had traveled by dogsled across western Ontario fourteen years earlier. At forty-one, his hairline had receded some more, and there’s no question that he had acquired a little more polish. But Bronfman had always spoken with more eloquence than most high school dropouts, just as he had always been more combative than most prizefighters and cockier than most roosters.
Those qualities had brought him to a place almost unimaginable for an ill-educated Russian-Jewish immigrant who’d been raised on the prairies of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. His family controlled the largest distilling firm in North America, and Sam controlled his family. The two-year renovation of the brick mansion he had purchased on Belvedere Road in Montreal’s Westmount section had just been completed. The staff attending to Sam, Saidye, and their children included a butler (Saidye called him “the Prince of Belvedere Road”), a cook, three maids, a laundress, a gardener, a chauffeur, a nanny, and a “mademoiselle.” Furnishings, menus, and manners were modeled on the look of the houses and the social rituals of the women Saidye encountered on European trips. Imitation went several steps further in the company headquarters Sam built on Peel Street in downtown Montreal. An unlikely pile of limestone topped with crenellations and turrets, its thick walls punctuated by stained glass, carved figures, and stone coats-of-arms, it was Sam’s idea of a Scottish baronial castle. The entrance featured a spiked portcullis; the interior, a portrait of Robert Burns.
Nicholas Faith, in his history of the Bronfman family, called the Peel Street building “a ludicrous tribute to Mr. Sam’s beloved Scots.” This was a love so great that when Bronfman talked about “the old country,” he had Scotland in mind, not his native Russia. It was a trope he used often. At the 1930 annual meeting, he referred to the Scotch lords of the Distillers Company as “our old country friends.” That was before he got to the main item on his agenda—in Sam’s precise phrasing, “certain legislation enacted by the late government which adversely affected the whole distilling industry by closing one of its most profitable markets.”
What he was referring to was the Export Act of 1930. For nearly nine years the American government had been pressuring the Canadians to cut off the southward movement of liquor. During that period whiskey exports to the United States that were legal under Canadian law—that is, exports on which duties were paid on leaving the country—ballooned from 8,335 gallons a year to more than 1.1 million gallons. This was a very small portion of the illegal liquor available in the States, but to the Justice and Treasury departments it was embarrassing evidence of their ineffectuality. From the Canadian perspective, it was a very big deal: the liquor export taxes accounted for some 20 percent of all Canadian revenue collections, both federal and provincial, and were essentially being paid by American consumers. Pierre du Pont would likely have been pleased to learn that in 1929, Canada’s alcohol export tax brought in twice as much as its income tax. And this fine civic contribution was provided without any assistance at all from the bootleggers who were running the stuff across rivers and lakes and land borders without stopping at the customs office to pay the duty.
With their own government a prime beneficiary of the liquor industry, Canadians saw no reason to support the U.S. government’s enforcement of a law far stricter than Canada’s own Prohibition codes, almost all of which had in any case expired. A few years earlier, when a Coast Guard cutter in hot pursuit of a Lake Erie rumrunner ran aground near Port Colborne, Ontario, it was looted and ransacked by a crowd of locals, its wiring cut, its cylinders filled with sand. If anything, the Canadian public had since grown even less sympathetic to U.S. Prohibition. Were Canada to help the United States enforce its Prohibition laws, a Toronto newspaper suggested, it “would show itself to be the simpleton in the family of nations.” A headline in the Ottawa Journal declared “U.S. Enforcement, Like Charity, Should Begin at Home.” One of the few demurring opinions came from Sir Henry Thornton, president of the government-owned Canadian National Railways. Said Thornton, “I think our policy shou
ld be to assist the Government of the United States in every way to make that country bone dry.” But Thornton’s interest lay in fostering the booming liquor tourism business, which brought more than three hundred million American dollars to Canada in 1929, or nearly quadruple the 1920 figure. “The dryer [the U.S.] is,” Thornton concluded, “the better it will be for us.”
Eventually the Canadians surrendered and passed the Export Act, making it illegal for Canadians to ship alcoholic beverages to countries that banned their sale. Thornton was no doubt delighted—but so, it turned out, was Sam Bronfman, who told Seagram shareholders, “Your Company’s earnings are 50 percent greater than those of last year,” before passage of the Export Act. Even though profit margins were down, he added, “the actual volume of business has been considerably increased.” He did not say this, but the fulcrum of Seagram’s unexpected success had been relocated fifteen miles off the coast of Newfoundland, in the accommodating harbor of St. Pierre. Legal goods could no longer be cleared to depart Canada for the United States, but St. Pierre was part of France. As a result, wrote Canadian journalists James Dubro and Robin Rowland, “the island was used to launder Canadian liquor.”
For the Bronfmans and the other distillers who took advantage of the St. Pierre laundry facilities, the island eventually proved doubly advantageous. Goods could leave Canada, make a pit stop on the island, then head for a revitalized Rum Row. But the bootleggers could also smuggle their goods back into Canada from St. Pierre, avoiding the nine-dollar-a-gallon domestic excise tax.*
For American drinkers and American bootleggers, the Canadian Export Act turned out to be a tiny bump in the road. St. Pierre serviced the East Coast perfectly well. Liquor was also still coming over the land border in the eastern and western states by automobile (in Maine, an American official maintained, bootleggers were even pumping booze into their tires, “alcohol in this manner replacing air”). The booze fleets on Lakes Ontario and Erie expanded. Liquor prices did jump briefly in Detroit, and the U.S. government made one of its periodic announcements that the smuggling traffic had disappeared from the nearby river. But Detroit soon emitted one of its periodic giggles, and was once again drenched in booze as gigantic quantities arrived by train in Windsor and moved onward through the rail tunnel. In December 1930 the American consul general in Halifax informed the State Department that these trainloads were disguised as shipments of lumber, pulpwood, fish, even live lobsters. Customs agents presumably could stop them—but, the consul wrote, sighing the discontented sigh that for more than a decade had been emitted by nearly every government official who had tried to enforce this impossible law, “many of these agents are not as scrupulous as they might be in regard to liquor smuggling.”
THE HOLES IN the dike grew larger, and more numerous as well. Each time the president, the Prohibition Bureau, or any other agency announced a new effort, brought in new resources, or negotiated a new understanding with other governments, the flood of illegal alcohol found a new (and often more efficient) conduit.
Even the biggest, most publicized victories were essentially useless—for instance, Herbert Hoover’s successful effort to put Al Capone in jail. Hoover had received a delegation of Chicago civic leaders two weeks after taking office and was shocked by their description of life in their city. He determined, he later wrote, “that Chicago was in the hands of gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, that the governor of the state was futile, that the federal government was the only force by which the city’s ability to govern itself could be restored. At once I directed that all the Federal agencies concentrate on Mr. Capone and his allies.” Hoover authorized the Treasury and the Justice departments to spend whatever was necessary to put Capone in jail. Another Hoover—the young J. Edgar—was urged to join the Capone posse by his friend and sponsor Mabel Willebrandt “as a personal matter of great importance to me.”
Eliot Ness and his Untouchables did manage to disrupt the Capone organization’s beer trade for a while, chiefly by using a ten-ton truck equipped with a steel ram to smash through the walls of illicit breweries, Ness directing the operation from the passenger seat, wrote one biographer, with a football helmet on his head. Capone was finally imprisoned in 1931, after the IRS won his conviction for income tax evasion (no thanks to Ness, whose involvement in the case was limited to putting Scarface/Snorky on the train to the Atlanta Penitentiary, or to J. Edgar Hoover). But the only palpable result was a rush of delinquent returns suddenly filed by nervous mobsters, hustlers, and other Chicago bad guys—according to the IRS, “more than double the amount collected from that source in the preceding year.” To the extent that the Capone operation was at all weakened, rival mobs soon satisfied Chicago’s thirst. Certainly no diminution of scale occurred: among the establishments serviced by gangster Roger Touhy’s fleet of trucks were two enormous roadhouses that each served more than six hundred barrels of beer every week.
Worse, the strain imposed by increased federal police activity led to the next development in the organization of organized crime. Two years after John Torrio’s 1929 peace conference in Atlantic City, at virtually the same time that the warden in Atlanta was preparing for the arrival of his famous new inmate, mob bosses from twenty criminal families gathered in Chicago to formalize a national conglomerate under the authority of a permanent ruling body called the Commission. “Prohibition had been the catalyst for transforming the neighborhood gangs of the 1920s into smoothly run regional and national criminal corporations,” wrote Selwyn Raab in The Five Families. Men who had started out “as smalltime hoodlums . . . graduated as underworld Leviathans. Bootlegging gave them on-the-job executive training.” It had also given them a structure that would dominate criminal activity in the United States for nearly half a century.
WHILE THE AAPA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pressing its antitax case (and, it should be acknowledged, its arguments in behalf of states’ rights, individual rights, the sanctity of the Constitution, and respect for the law); while Pauline Sabin and the WONPR made the Repeal cause respectable, even fashionable; while the government’s enforcement efforts remained pointless and its diplomatic efforts turned futile; while there was more drinking, and talking about drinking, writing about drinking, winking about drinking, more everything about drinking (except, perhaps, for more discretion about drinking)—as all this moved the possibility of Repeal from the realm of the unimaginable toward the province of the conceivable, one last roadblock began to crumble. The ASL and the other components of the dry coalition, already strapped for leadership since Wheeler’s death and Cannon’s disgrace, began to run out of influence, money, and will.
Even Mabel Willebrandt could not be counted on any longer. After leaving the Hoover administration, she picked up a few substantial clients (including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the precursor of American Airlines) and wrote a lengthy series of articles, later turned into a book, reflecting on her years in office. She didn’t waver in her support for Prohibition but did offer despairing words about New York that she might have applied to much of the country: “It cannot truthfully be said that prohibition enforcement has failed in New York. It has not yet been attempted.”
Then she lost control of her own story. The news that Willebrandt had met with the king of the rumrunners, Bill McCoy, while still in office, was marginally embarrassing. (The embarrassment was in fact less Willebrandt’s than McCoy’s. To combat rumors suggesting he had informed on others during their meeting, she agreed to send him a letter asserting that he had not done so, and authorizing him “to use this statement as you see fit.”) It was a more substantive revelation that brought Willebrandt low: the news that one of her clients was Fruit Industries Limited, the California grape conglomerate that made and marketed Vine-Glo.
Mabel Willebrandt was “straight as a string,” said an Alabama official who had gotten to know her during the Mobile prosecutions. But in the fashion of so many former Washington officials, she had turned her intima
cy with the levers of government into a lucrative law practice. When she signed on with Fruit Industries, they were marketing grape jellies, grape juice, grape candy, grape syrup, anything that could be made from the mountainous crops that accumulated each fall as a result of the overplanting of mid-decade. Her greatest coup was helping Fruit Industries secure a twenty-million-dollar loan from the Federal Farm Board—a loan, it turned out, that would help them launch their home winemaking business.
Oh, did this thrill the wets! Al Smith congratulated Fruit Industries for “hiring so competent a person as Mabel,” and saluted her for “collect[ing] a beautiful fee for making the Volstead Act look like 30 cents.” Father Charles Coughlin, the demagogic radio priest, referred to Willebrandt as Fruit Industries’ “legal guardian.” A cocktail recipe book called Noble Experiments described “The Mabel Fruit Punch,” a concoction made from rum, applejack, and “California pure concentrated Grape juice.”
At first drys came to her defense. Ruth Strawbridge of Philadelphia, a wealthy dry crusader whom Willebrandt once said had “made dry parties stylish,” sent a comforting letter. Learning about the Vine-Glo connection, wrote Strawbridge, “led me to say to myself: ‘Well, no matter what it is, it is right, because she did it.’ ” In meetings with Ella Boole of the WCTU, Scott McBride of the ASL, and other dry leaders, Willebrandt insisted that she remained committed to the cause. But in November 1930 a top Fruit Industries official sent out a press release announcing Vine-Glo’s introduction into the Chicago market: “Upon my arrival in Chicago this noon,” wrote Donald Conn, “I was informed that bootleggers and racketeers had served notice upon us that the marketing of Vine-Glo would be resisted.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 46