* The unnaturally cheerful Doran was adept at finding positive signs in the crumbling edifice of Prohibition. In 1928 he had told a convention of the National Beauty and Barber Supply Dealers Association that the Eighteenth Amendment had done wonders for male grooming: “Under Prohibition the average man has more money to spend,” Doran said, “and since he cannot spend it legally for liquor he spends it for shaves, facials, haircuts and manicures.”
* In one of the surpassing (and at times tragic) ironies of Prohibition, the tax-dodging Canadian distillers had some competition: American liquor shipped north to Canada, similarly out of reach of the Dominion tax collectors. It was vastly inferior to the Canadian goods, in fact almost corrosively raw, but the cutting plants that created it (there were an estimated 150 in the cutting racket in Detroit alone) made few claims in its behalf beyond its sheer potency. This was not a new business; back in 1926 a batch of northbound wood alcohol originating in Buffalo left forty-one people dead on the other side of the Niagara River.
* Roosevelt had waffled on the issue for years, but once he embraced the wet cause he was unstinting in his support for it. On the other hand, his wife was a committed dry who had been outspoken in her advocacy of the Eighteenth Amendment for years. The daughter of an alcoholic, Eleanor Roosevelt did not allow wine to be served at her dinner parties, disapproved of her husband’s indulgence in cocktails, and in 1927 wanted the state police to raid the Hudson Valley farm of an uncle who was overly free with his liquor.
Chapter 21
Afterlives,
and the missing man
O
N WAYNEB. WHEELER’S DEATH in 1927, the Washington Post didn’t hold back: “No other private citizen of the United States has left such an impress upon national history.” Six years later, after Prohibition crashed to earth in the storm of Repeal, his impress vanished with his creation. Wheeler’s name popped up in the New York Times a few times in the wake of the ASL’s final defeat, in references to “Wayne Wheeler tactics” and the like, and then, from 1935 until 1975, it appeared in the paper exactly twelve times. Four of those appearances were in obituaries of various dry associates, three others in reviews of books recalling Prohibition. Then, after 1975, nothing at all. American history texts tell the story of Prohibition, but they leave out the name of its author. Wheeler’s legacy may have been present in nearly every single-issue political movement that arose in the eight decades after his death, but the person was not. The very fact of Wayne Wheeler’s existence disappeared from the national memory.
In the years immediately after Prohibition, Wheeler’s allies and heirs followed a variety of paths. On the morning of December 6, 1933, James M. Doran, who had spent the previous six years as director of the Prohibition Bureau and then commissioner of Industrial Alcohol, leapt over the wall that divided the regulators from the regulated, becoming the top official of the liquor manufacturers’ trade organization. Seven years after he had lost his job, Izzy Einstein was still publicly defending Prohibition when he dedicated his 1932 autobiography “To the 4,932 persons I arrested, hoping they bear me no grudge for having done my duty.” But in 1935, celebrating his son’s wedding with 93-proof rye, California sauterne, and a claret-based punch, Einstein said, “If you want my opinion, the quality you get these days is not so hot. The bootleggers sold better stuff in Prohibition days than you can get now.” Mabel Willebrandt failed in her effort to obtain a federal judgeship, instead becoming one of the leading lawyers in the entertainment industry. Her client list ran from Clark Gable and Jean Harlow to Frank Capra, who said his “first meaningful action” as president of the Screen Directors Guild was “acquiring the wisdom, experience, and brilliant legal talents of that great lady of the law, Mabel Walker Willebrandt.” In 1954, sponsored by her old friend John Sirica, the woman Al Smith had blamed for bringing religion into the 1928 presidential campaign converted to Catholicism.
One who didn’t change much at all was Andrew J. Volstead. Three years after losing his reelection bid in 1922, the author of the era’s signature law went to work as a staff attorney in the Prohibition Bureau’s Northwest Region office in Minneapolis. After returning to his private practice in a small second-floor office in Granite Falls, Volstead spoke to a journalist just four weeks before Repeal. “Mr. Volstead said he wishes people would learn that Prohibition and all its developments are all in the past for Andrew Volstead, private citizen,” the reporter wrote. Volstead himself added, “Anything I might say could do nobody any good. All it would do would be just to bring ridicule upon me.” Late in life he expressed regret that he was remembered for the National Prohibition Act. He’d rather be known, he said, as coauthor of the Capper-Volstead Act, which exempted certain farmers from antitrust regulation so they could organize voluntary cooperatives. He did not get his wish.
Unlike the sponsor of the Volstead Act, the author of the Eighteenth Amendment was hardly remembered at all. Morris Sheppard of Texas, the courtly, Shakespeare-quoting progressive who may have been Prohibition’s most sincere political advocate, did not give up the fight after his failed filibuster of early 1933. That summer, as his state prepared to vote up or down on ratification, Sheppard got into a small Ford truck, loaded a speaker’s platform and sound equipment into the back, and traveled more than five thousand miles of Texas roads, speaking against Repeal in fifty cities and towns. But after a late August referendum, when a majority of Texans voted to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, Time invoked Sheppard’s infamous prediction of just three years earlier. “Last week,” the editors wrote, “humming bird and Washington Monument were well on the way to Mars.” For the remaining eight years of his life Sheppard continued to address the evils of alcohol in his annual January 16 speech on the Senate floor. By 1935 he was calling for the repeal of Repeal. On his death in 1941 a Senate eulogist said the end of Prohibition had been “the one great disappointment and abiding sorrow” of his life.
Sheppard’s never-say-die dedication to the cause wasn’t shared by all of his fellow drys. Less than twenty-four hours after Utah’s ratification made Repeal official, waitresses at the Dearborn Inn outside Detroit were serving beer in the dining room. Since the hotel was one of Henry Ford’s pet projects, the new addition to the menu, said the New York Times, “caused many of those present to speculate on what Mr. Ford’s future policy would be.” It was a reasonable question, given that Ford had vowed only four years earlier to shut down his factories if drink ever came back. A definitive answer arrived less than three months later, when he began an advertising campaign touting the suitability of Ford trucks for the booming brewery business.
But reformist passions less influenced by commercial exigency did not abate. Instead, time altered them. By 1933 the WCTU had diminished to such an extent that its national convention had to concern itself with pennies, voting to allocate all of $300 to fighting Repeal in Missouri, $150 for an antibeer campaign in Oklahoma. Ella Boole, who in 1947 would step down as president in her ninetieth year, turned the WCTU’s attention to international activities and brought Frances Willard’s “Do Everything” doctrine (without, of course, Willard’s effectiveness) to such issues as disarmament and the status of women. In later years the organization veered right. In 1998, for instance, the Maryland chapter “continued our work against abortion [and] homosexuality . . . and praised women who are home raising their children.” In one respect the WCTU did not change: that same year, the organization “celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Frances Willard’s Heavenly Birthday”—that is, her death. It also maintained Willard’s Carpenter Gothic–style Rest Cottage in downtown Evanston as a memorial and a museum, but had the resources to keep it open only six hours a month.
The ASL fared no better. Within a year of Repeal the Michigan chapter, for one, went into receivership. Scott McBride blamed “repeal drinking” for riots, disorder, industrial strikes, and an increase in the number of deaths by sunstroke. Bishop Cannon “continued to write and speak,” a biographer wrote, “but found
few interested in the message.” Part of Cannon’s message was his abiding anti-Catholicism; in 1939 he criticized Congress for adjourning in acknowledgment of the death of Pope Pius XI. One of his last public statements of any sort was a letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch protesting the disappearance of Prince Valiant and the Phantom from the paper’s comics pages.
Eventually the ASL tried an identity change, reemerging first as the Temperance League and then as the American Temperance League. That didn’t stick, either, and in 1964 it was finally reincarnated as the American Council on Alcohol Problems, promoting “a philosophy of abstinence.” From its two-person headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama, the ACAP (né ASL) continued to publish the Union Signal. At its peak the ASL newspaper had been the mainstay of the league’s around-the-clock Westerville printing plant, a robust weekly published in a national edition and several different state editions. In 2008 it was a four-page newsletter, published quarterly.
NOT EVERYONE ON the other side fared better than the drys, but the people who made their living selling alcoholic beverages certainly did. For the big brewing families—the Pabsts and the Busches, the Millers and the Coorses—Prohibition cleared the field. Of the 1,345 American brewers who had been operating in 1915, a bare 31 were able to turn on their taps within three months of the return of legal beer—primarily the big companies that had kept their doors open producing ice cream or cheese or malt syrup during the dry era. Several hundred firms returned to the business in the ensuing years, but the head start seized by the big breweries triggered a consolidation of the market that would never end. (By 1935 five companies controlled 14 percent of the market; by 1958 their share had reached 31 percent; by 2009 the three survivors owned 80 percent.) The brewers didn’t just get richer; they also grew smarter. When war arrived in 1941, the men who controlled the dominant brewing families—still almost exclusively German-American—did not make the mistake their fathers and grandfathers had. Anheuser-Busch redrew its logo, putting an American bald eagle where a German version had earlier stretched its wings, and the family purchased the maximum legally authorized quantity of war bonds. Their loyalty was rewarded when the federal government authorized draft boards to grant deferments to brewery workers. Ten years earlier beer had been illegal; now the men who made it were considered essential to the war effort.
The wine industry reconstituted itself more haltingly. Beer could be made quickly, but the gestation time of even halfway decent wines meant that salable inventories were virtually nonexistent when Repeal arrived. In the Napa Valley, endless rows of now-worthless alicante grapes, planted during the homemade wine boom of the early 1920s, choked the valley for years. (As late as 1951 wine writer Frank Schoonmaker could say, “The sooner this variety is eliminated from superior California vineyards, the better.”) Worse yet, the fourteen-year cloud that had hovered over most of the California wine industry had erased winemaking knowledge accumulated in the pre-Prohibition years. It did not help that the University of California at Davis, the Oxford and Cambridge of American oenological science, had shut down all its wine work during the 1920s.
Consequently, recalled vintner Ernest A. Wente, one man was “right in the driver’s seat when Repeal came”: Georges de Latour. Thanks to his arrangement with the Catholic Church, de Latour and his Beaulieu Vineyards had floated through Prohibition on a river of sanctified wine. While potential competitors labored to build up their inventories in 1933, de Latour was sitting on a million gallons in barrels, which he began bottling in the months leading up to Repeal. “Mr. de Latour has expended a fortune this fall,” reported the St. Helena Star. “He has furnished many men with work, paid good wages and contributed to the well-being of many families in the valley.” Even more valuable was Beaulieu’s winemaking skill. While other wineries were trying to relearn their craft, the experienced vintners of Beaulieu were sweeping up the prizes at American wine competitions. When de Latour died in 1940, the means of his ascent did not go unnoticed: four archbishops presided at his funeral.
To some there was also a religious aspect to the post-Repeal distilling business. Fortune intimated the Jewish dominance of the liquor industry with a notable lack of grace. In November 1933 the magazine captioned a collection of head shots of industry leaders “Four Gentlemen of the Faith,” and eleven months later it elaborated: “For better or for worse, the industry today has hardly the ruling caste that a Hitler would be happy about.” The men who dominated the post-Repeal business either arose from the medicinal liquor racket, like Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley, or they invaded from the north. Among the latter, Sam Bronfman was preeminent.
Repeal had not yet arrived when the Bronfmans purchased the Rossville Union Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, in 1933. Unlike the Greenbrier Distillery they had acquired in 1922, this one was not dismantled and moved to Montreal. On December 5, as dockworkers and cartage men on distant St. Pierre marked the last day of Prohibition with a funeral cortege led by French and American flags at half mast, Sam Bronfman was already sitting on the four hundred thousand gallons of whiskey in the Rossville warehouse that had been part of the deal. Working closely with his brother Allan, he bought out his Scottish partners, acquired the Calvert Distillery in Maryland, devised the slogan that Seagram’s would wear like a badge of civic responsibility (“Drink Moderately”), and introduced Five Crown and Seven Crown, the brands that would make his legal American fortune. Seagram’s sold a million cases of the Crown brands in 1935, their first full calendar year in the U.S. market.
But neither good citizenship nor good business could purge the Bronfman brothers of the reputation that had attached itself to them during the bootlegging years. Late in 1934 the Canadian government investigated several years of dubious commerce and brought a mammoth conspiracy suit against the four Bronfmans and fifty-seven others. They were charged with smuggling liquor out of Canada in violation of the Export Act and smuggling liquor back into Canada, via St. Pierre, without paying appropriate duties. Regarding the outbound smuggling, the Bronfman lawyers made the sensible argument that the Canadian government had been a virtual party to it. Regarding the inbound smuggling, they were more audacious: although Bronfman liquor had gone to St. Pierre and Bronfman liquor had returned from St. Pierre, and more than $3 million had been transferred from Bronfman accounts in St. Pierre to Bronfman accounts in Montreal, they persuaded the court that there was insufficient evidence establishing that the Bronfmans had in fact been responsible for the cross-border shuffle.
Still, American officials were not prepared to welcome Sam Bronfman with open arms. The consul general in Montreal tried to persuade U.S. authorities to bring smuggling charges against the Bronfmans, arguing that a conviction “would constitute a moral and psychological triumph, similar to the capture of Capone.” It would also, he suggested, “remove from active ‘hostilities’ the fertile brain and evil genius of Sam and Allan Bronfman.”
But instead of bringing a prosecution, the Treasury Department negotiated a settlement with the Canadian government, providing for payment of U.S. excise taxes on all the Canadian whiskey that had flowed across the border during the Prohibition years. After diplomatic exigencies led the Americans to settle for only $3 million of the $60 million they considered due, the Canadians collected from the various distillers their proportionate share of the back taxes. The Bronfmans, unashamed of their dominant role in the “export business,” agreed to pay a full 50 percent of it.
When Treasury Department officials came calling at the Seagram’s castle on Peel Street in Montreal, however, Bronfman maintained that the payment was going in the wrong direction. According to a witness, Bronfman told them that “the United States Government should be grateful to him for having smuggled rye and bourbon whiskies into the United States and having thus kept alive an appetite there for these types of whiskies.” Had he not, Bronfman pointed out, the United States would have become a nation of Scotch drinkers, and the American whiskey industry would have never gotten back on its feet.<
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For Charlie Berns and Jack Kriendler of “21,” the only thing they needed in order to become legitimate was the turn of the calendar on the night of Friday, December 5, 1933. The loyal and profitable clientele that the proprietors had built made Saturday’s business the same as Friday’s business, except that it was taxable. Good connections developed in the 1920s paid off in other ways. In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt pardoned Berns for his one Volstead conviction so the former speakeasy operator could get a gun license. The “21” Club of the speakeasy era, with its elaborately engineered system for destroying incriminating evidence in the depths of its subcellar, was best memorialized by a rumor originating in the 1950s, when the land directly behind 21 West Fifty-second Street was excavated for construction of a branch of the New York Public Library on Fifty-third Street. Workers laboring a couple of dozen feet below street level, it was said, were taken aback by the odor of alcohol that permeated the soil.
WITHOUT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S desperate need for new tax revenue, said Representative John J. O’Connor of New York early in 1934, “we would not have had Repeal for at least ten years.” Congress’s avid interest in the new liquor taxes suggests that he may have been right. It wasn’t just the mandarins of the AAPA who had seen the promise of government revenue in a bottle of booze or beer; a liquor tax bill passed the House in the first week of January, by a vote of 388–5.
Not that the economic conservatives who had pushed so hard for Repeal weren’t especially delighted. Ratification had already triggered a clause in the National Industrial Recovery Act, which had become law the previous June: Section 217 provided for the immediate revocation of emergency taxes on dividends and excess profits, effective upon the ratification of Repeal or the passage of a balanced budget, whichever arrived first. This was comparable to setting up a race between a rocket and a rock. In the very first post-Repeal year, even though many states remained dry or severely limited the sale of alcohol, the government collected $258,911,332 in alcohol taxes—instantly, nearly 9 percent of total federal revenue.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 48