Conn could not have found a more newsworthy way to indicate that his product was aimed at those looking for an intoxicating kick from their grape juice. He underscored the point by apparently telling some newspapermen he had hired bodyguards to protect him from Capone gunmen. “Here was an announcement from the California housetops for all the country to hear,” wrote Carlisle Bargeron for the front page of the Washington Post. “There must be something in that California grape juice if it could compete with Al Capone’s beer and alky.” An apoplectic Willebrandt shot off a telegram to Conn: EFFECT OF THIS DISTORTION IS TO CREATE IMPRESSION THAT FRUIT INDUSTRIES . . . IS STOOPING TO COMPETE WITH BOOTLEGGERS SUCH INFERENCES BY WET PRESS UNFAIR AND DAMAGING.
Unfair, perhaps; damaging, definitely. A California pharmacist began advertising his stock of Vino Sano as “Mabel’s Grape Bricks.” Three weeks later angry members of the National Temperance Council, a coalition of the leaders of the major dry organizations, attempted to bar Willebrandt from even addressing them. At a time when the dry forces could have used someone with Willebrandt’s grasp of the issues and her command of the podium, she effectively disappeared from the public debate. Drys instead found themselves lining up behind hysterics and haters. At that same meeting of the Temperance Council, the group’s president, longtime ASL stump speaker Rev. Ira Landrith, exceeded even Bishop Cannon’s frothing rhetoric. The wet movement, he thundered, was “a greater danger than open rebellion.” Metropolitan newspapers, overwhelmingly wet, were promoting “heresy.” Members of the AAPA were “traitors.”
The more extreme the ASL’s stance, the greater the flight of its supporters. Even Richmond Hobson, whose perorations against the “Great Destroyer” had started the Eighteenth Amendment on its way back in 1914, quit the dry movement altogether. “When people are ripe for reform, the laws will take care of themselves,” he told a reporter. “Until then, they are useless.” Other allies were hounded out of the dry camp: although Senator George Norris of Nebraska had been loyally pro-Prohibition for more than a decade, drys opposed his reelection in 1930 because Norris, believing other issues more crucial to his state, had backed Al Smith two years earlier. Worried that association with the league was hurting his business in major cities, S. S. Kresge finally withdrew his support.
With the large checks disappearing, the ASL became more dependent on small ones. But these had disappeared into the same canyon that had devoured the economy. While the deepening Depression had made the Repeal argument stronger—it would bring not just more tax revenue but, in reborn breweries and distilleries, more jobs as well—it brought the ASL to the edge of collapse. In the summer of 1931 the Washington office had to cancel its newspaper subscriptions because it was unable to pay the bill. Management and staff took salary cuts or forwent payment altogether. National superintendent Scott McBride, “greatly embarrassed in my account at the bank,” pleaded with the accounting office for a half-month advance on his salary. Ernest Cherrington told McBride in August that payment obligations were “almost staggering.” By November, rent on the Washington office was four months overdue and the landlord was threatening eviction. By January, at its headquarters in Ohio, the ASL’s last lifeline was severed when the Bank of Westerville, long the league’s source of short-term credit, became insolvent and locked its doors.
Back in 1920, with Prohibition firmly situated in the Constitution and the Volstead Act already embedded in the law, the Anti-Saloon League spent $2.5 million in support of its cause. In 1933, as both that cause and the ASL faced a desperate emergency, it brought in a total of $122,000 to fund its activities, a brutal 95 percent decline. The most powerful pressure group the nation had ever known had been reduced to looking for nickels under the couch cushions.
THERE WAS NO specific signal to indicate that the accumulated frustrations, enmities, and fears that had gathered around the Prohibition debate were finally about to send Morris Sheppard’s hummingbird zooming off to Mars with the Washington Monument as its payload. One could have pointed to the plunge in Coca-Cola’s stock price and the company’s ham-handed effort to convince the capital markets that the return of beer and liquor would not affect its business. Perhaps the rolling chant of “We want beer!” that interrupted Herbert Hoover’s address on the economic crisis at the American Legion convention in 1931 was the turning point, or maybe it was Michigan’s quiet effort to try to solve its fiscal predicament by placing a tax on malt syrup and other home brewing supplies (well they might: tax receipts soon indicated that Detroiters were producing twenty-eight million gallons of homebrew annually). In Washington the Supreme Court that had expanded federal power in the 1920s began to veer the other way, even declaring the warrantless search of a garage constitutionally unacceptable. In the South it could have been the widely publicized discovery by a Kentucky member of the WONPR that Jefferson Davis had written a letter in 1887 declaring his steadfast opposition to the idea of Prohibition. Davis had called it “a wooden horse” harboring “a disguised enemy to state sovereignty.”
But at a time when the nation was mired in the deepening ruts of the Depression, those paying attention to the economy would have recognized the impending shift when the National Distillers Corporation declared its “whiskey dividend” in September 1932. The company, which controlled the rights to more than twenty-five well-known brands, promised shareholders a case of pre-Prohibition whiskey for every five shares owned—deliverable, it said, in the fall of 1934, or earlier if legally possible. The company’s confidence that it could expand beyond the medicinal market arose from the widely shared conviction that Franklin D. Roosevelt, carrying the twin flags of Repeal and relief, was well on his way to election.* A reductionist version of the Democrats’ argument was offered by Representative John C. Linthicum of Maryland, a leading House wet: with Repeal, said Linthicum, the Depression “will fade away like the mists before the noonday sun.” And at the same time, he promised, “The immorality of the country, racketeering, and bootlegging will be a thing of the past.” Even southern Democrats moved toward the wet column, including such previously hard-line drys as Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Hugo Black of Alabama.
More astonishingly, many of the Republican aristocrats who had initiated the Repeal movement came out in support of the Democratic candidate. Roosevelt’s open declaration that the legalization of beer would “increase the Federal revenue by several hundred million dollars a year” certainly pleased Pierre du Pont. Sabin required no persuading. “It has been said that the Democratic candidate is a very recent convert to the cause of Repeal because of political expediency,” Sabin declared. “It cannot be said that up to this date, the Republican candidate is a convert to Repeal for any reason.”
For Sabin 1932 had first been marked by a triumphal tour of the South, where she and some of the other social notables of the WONPR (including Pierre du Pont’s wife, Alice) had dazzled the clubwomen of Charleston and Atlanta. “Mrs. Simons V. H. Waring Gives Tea For Dry Reform Delegates,” read the headline on the society page of the Charleston News and Courier. In Atlanta the Constitution ran stories anticipating Sabin’s visit and then reporting on it. “A woman of fine intelligence and breeding is Mrs. Charles H. Sabin,” the paper said in the first story; unsurprisingly, said the second, le tout Atlanta “packed the ballroom of the Biltmore” for the event.
By summer Sabin and her organization (including new recruit Emily Post) had made the permanent leap from the society pages to the front lines of the presidential campaign. In June, sabin was honored at the Democratic convention when it passed the Repeal platform; in July she persuaded the WONPR to endorse Roosevelt. Time put her on the cover, elegant pearls around her delicate neck. When a splinter group of steadfast WONPR Republicans issued a statement protesting the Roosevelt endorsement, Sabin said, “I can find no comfort in this petition. But perhaps the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, and Bishop Cannon will.”
Soon
dry Republicans fed up with the futility of enforcement, Hoover’s temporizing, and a nearly unintelligible platform plank that Walter Lippmann called “a smoke screen of dry slogans” also began to list toward the wet side. The party’s new recruits to the cause of Repeal ranged from the teetotaling John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose June 6, 1932, abandonment of the drys was one of the year’s biggest news stories, to former representative M. Alfred Michaelson, who had apparently reformed his politics to match his tastes in the years since officials in Florida had apprehended his soggy luggage. Word of Rockefeller’s conversion—motivated, he said, by the “colossal scale” of criminal activity—elicited dry reactions ranging from thrashing anger to excruciating bathos (former representative W. D. “Earnest Willie” Upshaw begged him not to help “DuPont and Raskob destroy the eighteenth amendment that was wrapped in your good mother’s prayers ”). But Rockefeller was followed into the Repeal camp by Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors and tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone. By the end of the campaign, Republicans desperate for anything that might secure their election in the face of the coming Democratic tide clambered to the side of Repeal, among them the senator whose name was attached to the most vengeful of Prohibition laws, Wesley Jones of Washington.
Except that very few mainstream Republicans, and quite a few Democrats as well, actually said they were supporting Repeal. Continuing the chronic chorus of euphemism that had so long afflicted the debate, they said they supported “submission ” of a Repeal amendment to the states. It was the same dodge, employing exactly the same weasel word, that drys had used when the Eighteenth Amendment was pending: they weren’t imposing their will, just giving the people, through their state legislatures, the chance to decide. Back then it was the way a politician could be dry without being dry; now it was the way some of the same politicians, and many others, could be wet without being wet.
Eight days before Roosevelt’s inevitable landslide victory and the expected repopulation of Congress with clear wet majorities, the board of management of the Century Association (including George W. Wickersham of the noncommittal Wickersham Commission) met in their Stanford White–designed clubhouse on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan and voted to appropriate five thousand dollars to the house committee for the purchase of wine. On Election Day an exultant Louis M. Martini tied down the cord to the steam whistle at his Napa Valley winery for fifteen loud and joyous minutes. And on December 28, 1932, the board of directors of Anheuser-Busch authorized fifteen thousand dollars for the purchase of a team of Clydesdales “for advertising purposes.”
THE TWENTY-FIRST AMENDMENT to the Constitution of the United States, which came up for debate in Congress in February 1933, was even more concise than the Eighteenth. The key words were the fifteen that opened it: “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” The remaining two clauses outlawed the transportation of intoxicating liquors into states that chose to forbid it and stipulated a ratification process requiring approval not by state legislatures but by state conventions called for this specific purpose. The latter idea was the contribution of a group of wets, led by New York attorney Joseph H. Choate Jr., who were mindful of the complications of legislative schedules and the continued domination of state legislatures by rural minorities.
On February 14 Morris Sheppard rose on the floor of the Senate and began a one-man filibuster. After eight and a half hours he gave up; senators waiting to vote had resolved to outlast him. The final tally was 63–23 in favor of the Repeal resolution. Of the twenty-two members who had voted for the Eighteenth Amendment sixteen years earlier and were still senators, seventeen voted to undo their earlier work. Two days later the House dispatched the measure after just forty minutes of debate, by a vote of 289–121.
On March 4, the day the new president took the oath of office and declared that the only thing America had to fear was fear itself, the Anti-Saloon League rented out one of the rooms in its hotel suite to out-of-towners who had come to Washington to celebrate the inauguration. The ASL thereby enriched its diminished treasury by two dollars.
On March 16, at Franklin Roosevelt’s request, the new Congress revisited the linguistic debates of 1919 and came up with a reformulated definition of “intoxicating.” The legislation was formally captioned “a bill to provide revenue by the taxation of certain nonintoxicating liquors,” but you couldn’t have the revenue without the redefinition. Effective April 7, except in those states that expressly forbade it, beer that was no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight would be legal. Breweries and bottlemakers, coopers and hop farmers, trucking firms and ice plants and dozens of other businesses immediately began to recruit thousands from the ranks of the unemployed. Coca-Cola, fearing competition, actually considered producing “Coca-Cola Beer,” in both light and dark varieties. When April 7 arrived, the Budweiser Clydesdales made their debut, delivering a case to Al Smith in New York. Another Budweiser team pulled up to the White House only to discover that other breweries had gotten there first. The CBS radio network broadcast beer celebrations across the country. In Milwaukee a blanket license was issued to 4,207 taverns precisely at midnight. In Baltimore, H. L. Mencken lifted a stein to his lips, drained its legal contents, and pronounced it “pretty good—not bad at all.”
Despite all the beer and liquor that had been floating Manhattan for several years, only in the spring of 1933 did “Satan’s seat,” as Bishop Cannon called it, truly return to its pre-Prohibition ways. This happened, said newspaperman Stanley Walker, when “the proprietors of nightclubs and speakeasies began to suggest to the agents who had been their guests over the years that it was about time they began paying for what they ate and drank.”
THE FIRST STATE convention to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment acted on April 10, in Michigan; one of the delegates was Martin S. McDonough of Iron River, the former prosecutor who had stood up to Alfred V. Dalrymple and his armed agents during the “Rum Rebellion” of 1920 . For his part, Dalrymple had just been named the last head of the Prohibition Bureau, a position Roosevelt would abolish four months later. In his final days on the job, Dalrymple would tell reporters that had the ASL been willing to accept legalization of light wines and beer, “the eighteenth amendment would have remained in the Constitution for 100 years.” J. Edgar Hoover refused to bring soon-to-be-unemployed Prohibition agents onto his own force; they just weren’t up to FBI standards.
By midsummer, fourteen more states had ratified. At the New York convention, broadcast live by NBC and CBS, Governor Herbert Lehman saluted Pauline Sabin “and her devoted army of women who have so valiantly fought towards our common goal.” Al Smith presided over the convention, his nomination seconded by the state Republican chairman, who lauded the “distinguished Democrat and statesman.” Elihu Root, now eighty-eight, “enjoyed the Repeal Convention very much,” he told a friend. “Nobody seemed to remember that it was his duty to hate anybody else, and that made the occasion both novel and refreshing.”
There were a few hitches. Mississippi balked, some of its anti-Repealists summoning familiar tropes from the turn of the century. Because of Prohibition, said Judge William M. Cox at a Jackson rally, “many a white woman has been saved from the polluting touch of lustful vengeance, and many a Negro man has been saved from the gallows or the flames.” But the South was not solid, and when Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee all ratified during the first two weeks of August, any lingering uncertainty ceased to linger.
Businesses both licit and not took note. National Distillers, whose stock had traded as low as $17 a share in 1932, saw its price leap to $115 in July 1933. Grain prices on the Chicago Board of Trade soared. On St. Pierre the Bronfmans had already told their local négociant they would no longer lease warehouses for any period greater than ninety days; in July the island was drained of 973,000 cases of liquor by the last of the rumrunners, racing toward their final payday. In October a Napa County newspaper reported that not a single railcar had departed the val
ley for the East. The entire harvest was being turned into wine.
On December 5, at 3:31 p.m. local time, Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Repeal amendment. At the age of thirteen years, ten months, and nineteen days, national Prohibition was dead. (The Mormon Church wasn’t happy, but it was accepting; when the president of the church addressed the convention, said the Salt Lake Tribune, he resembled “Marc Antony at the burial of Caesar.”) The official bootlegger in the Maryland State House was formally dismissed the same day. Pierre du Pont and the men of the AAPA celebrated in the Jade Room of the Waldorf in New York, where du Pont presented his fellow Repealists with commemorative highball glasses filled with “cocktail material,” as his instructions had specified, ladled from a sterling silver bowl.
Pauline Sabin and the women of the WONPR marked the occasion with a dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. No alcohol was served, but that didn’t mean that attitudes toward alcohol were retreating toward the furtive tippling of the pre-Prohibition decades. There could have been no clearer demonstration of the domestication of drink than the appearance of brewery advertisements in the Delineator, a popular women’s magazine mostly known for bringing the famous Butterick sewing patterns into hundreds of thousands of American homes. One ad showed a curly-headed little girl serving a foaming Pabst to a man who is evidently her grandfather. Fifteen years earlier a similar pair might have been portrayed in a rather different scene: the grandfather at the bar of a saloon, slumped over in a stupor; the little girl in tears, begging him to come home.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 47