All this new money did facilitate a cut in income tax rates. The levy paid by workers earning $2,000 to $3,000 annually dropped by a full 20 percent in the years immediately following Repeal. But it didn’t go down for the wealthy. Much of the liquor revenue was treated as additive, and helped to pay for the new government initiatives that began to proliferate in the second half of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. To the economic conservatives who had sponsored Repeal, the combination of high taxes and new programs defined a perfect hell. They had defeated the drys, but in their own view they had ended up similarly vanquished. In the summer of 1934 a small group convened in Washington to discuss their displeasure. Among them were John J. Raskob, Irénée du Pont, James W. Wadsworth Jr., and Al Smith.* Out of this and subsequent discussions emerged the American Liberty League, whose meetings might as well have been AAPA reunions. As they had with the AAPA, the du Pont family took on financial responsibility for the largest chunk of the league’s operating costs. Smith and Wadsworth were among the group’s first five board members. Pierre du Pont soon joined them.
It did not take long for the Liberty League to become notorious in a nation that was growing increasingly loyal to Franklin Roosevelt. The members’ names drew attention, but not necessarily of the complimentary sort: J. Howard Pew of the Sun Oil Company. General Motors chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Steel magnate Ernest T. Weir. And, of course, archmandarin James Montgomery Beck, who referred to New Dealers as “Washington Stalins.” Roosevelt could not have wished for a better foil than this alliance of multimillionaires profoundly out of touch with the agonies the Depression had imposed on most Americans. To Roosevelt—and through Roosevelt, to much of the nation—the Liberty Leaguers were “unscrupulous money changers” seeking to manipulate “political puppets” for their own benefit. He was proud, the president said, to have earned “the hatred of entrenched greed.”
In 1936 the Liberty League tried to summon the same political and financial power it had brought to defeating Prohibition, this time in an effort to deny Roosevelt a second term. It turned out to be a dreadful year for them. The first debacle was a gathering of two thousand members and supporters, described by a reporter as “jammed elbow to elbow, tailcoat to tailcoat, fluttery bouffant to sleek black velvet dress” as they listened to Al Smith deliver a viciously anti-Roosevelt address “under the gilt plaster ornaments and glittering crystal chandeliers” of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. At the time, 20 percent of the U.S. workforce was unemployed. National sympathy for the Liberty League sank even lower as the year unfolded. After throwing their full emotional and financial support behind Republican Alfred M. Landon, the league helped him achieve the most mortifying defeat in American presidential election history, losing the electoral vote 523 to 8.
Along the way Pierre du Pont, whose personal tax bill in some years was higher than any other American’s, had a revelation: his support for the AAPA, he suddenly concluded, had been misguided. “I acknowledge my mistake,” he wrote. “The effort should have been directed against the XVIth Amendment”—the income tax amendment—“which I believe could have been repealed with the expenditure of less time and trouble than was required for the abolition of its little brother,” the Eighteenth. Prohibition had been dead for three years, but the damnable taxes du Pont had expected to die with it lived on.
“THERE CAN ONLY be one capital, Washington or Moscow,” Al Smith had said at the Liberty League’s banquet at the Mayflower. “There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul air of communistic Russia.” The audience ate it up. “The noise rose in waves,” said the Post. “Applause shook the ballroom.” At the speakers’ table, “in an evening jacket of solid white sequins over a black crepe gown,” sat one of the program’s other stars, a member of the six-member administrative committee that did most of the league’s work: Pauline Morton Sabin.
In Women and Repeal, an authorized history of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform, author Grace Root attempted to define Pauline Sabin’s influence on American politics. Root (who was Elihu Root’s daughter-in-law) stated that the founder of WONPR had provoked America’s husbands to ask, “What have you done to my wife, Mrs. Sabin? She now insists upon reading the editorial page before she will pour my breakfast coffee!” A similar, if less cringe-inducing, way of putting it was offered decades later by one of Sabin’s granddaughters: she had taken at least one phylum of American women “out of their living rooms, away from their canasta packs,” Pauline Sabin Willis said, and into active and independent engagement in the nation’s political life. Women had won the vote in 1919, but by opposing the dominant position of the WCTU and its allies, Sabin and the WONPR proved that women were not a monolithic political bloc.
Sabin’s early affinity for the American Liberty League suggested that the women who had broken with the WCTU were moved by the same ideas that motivated so many of their husbands. Widowed in 1933, Sabin in 1936 married Dwight F. Davis, a former secretary of war (and the donor of tennis’s Davis Cup) who also embraced the Liberty League agenda. Clearly, though, Sabin was also impelled by what she later told a reporter was her favorite activity: “organizing.” The Liberty League was there at hand, and Sabin embraced it and helped pull it together.
But when the league crumbled, she did not travel with those fellow league members who migrated to the isolationist America First movement. During World War II Sabin was the extremely effective director of volunteer services for the American Red Cross, coordinating aid that reached some four million families. After the war she actively engaged in political life, chiefly with the Democratic Party, while simultaneously serving, according to columnist Joseph Alsop, as “the most admired hostess” in Washington. (Sabin sold Bayberry Land to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in 1949.) In 1953, two years before her death at sixty-eight, she publicly condemned the “sickness of fear, of mutual suspicion, of unhealthy credulity” engendered by the McCarthyite Red hunts. But Sabin’s most telling post-Repeal political act—the one that demonstrated just how far she had traveled—occurred a few years earlier, when she urged her friend Harry Truman to veto a bill that had just passed Congress. Its central provision, which had provoked her to action, was a tax cut.
AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY, where the evidence of money is carved into the facade of nearly every building, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, named for Sam Bronfman’s eldest child, resides within Adolphus Busch Hall. Neither the illegal foundation of the Bronfman riches nor the saloon culture that launched the Busch fortune (not to mention the political manipulations that protected it for so long) disqualified either family from a proper memorial. Alcohol-derived wealth acquired before Prohibition had long been suspect, but after Prohibition the possessors of the old wealth were rehabilitated, and even those who made their money by breaking the law could buy a free pass to respectability.
To a degree this curiously benign aura came to surround the reputations of the era’s homicidal gangsters, truly evil men who managed nonetheless to acquire a romantic glow over the decades. Foremost among these, of course, was Al Capone, who became the beneficiary not only of his own deft use of the press, but of decades of Hollywood mythmaking. Over the years Capone has been played by Rod Steiger, F. Murray Abraham, William Devane, Eric Roberts (Eric Roberts!), Robert De Niro, Ben Gazzara, and Jason Robards Jr. (not to mention Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, a fictionalized version of Capone, in the original Scarface, and Al Pacino in its remake). If Capone hasn’t exactly been portrayed as a hero, all that celluloid has enabled him to maintain a reputation that would delight any narcissistic mobster. More than sixty years after Capone’s death, a browser on eBay could make bids in a single day for Al Capone wristwatches, trading cards, bobblehead dolls, toy machine guns, wall clocks, “framed art prints,” cigarette lighters, belt buckles, and T-shirts. Other items included a two-sided Al Capone Dog Tag Necklace; a “tiny piece of hat owned and worn by Al Cap
one, with Certificate of Authenticity”; a photocopy of Capone’s death certificate; from the Franklin Mint, an Al Capone Collectors’ Knife; and a Hugo Boss “Al Capone–style” suit, available in 40, 42, or 42 long. Literary offerings included several biographies, as well as Black Hats: A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone; the Travel Guide to Al Capone’s Chicago; Al Capone Was a Golfer: Hundreds of Fascinating Facts from the World of Golf; and a much-honored children’s book entitled Al Capone Does My Shirts—also available in Spanish as Al Capone Me Lava La Ropa.
The rapper 50 Cent has said that Capone is his style icon. The Al Capone Memorial Jazz Band issued a CD in 1999. On St. Pierre, where economic life reverted to the hardship-ridden fishing industry in 1933, a small, sad museum in the Hotel Robert displays a straw hat said to have been left behind by Capone—even though there’s no reason to think Capone ever heard of St. Pierre, much less ever visited it. Even more bizarrely, the city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, is home to Big Al’s Café, a motel called Capone’s Hideaway, and stores full of Capone schlock—coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and so on. The town boosters who claim that Capone visited Moose Jaw, ran its prostitution and gambling dens, and had his tonsils removed by a local doctor are probably not aware of Capone’s colloquy with a Toronto reporter who was in Chicago to cover the mobster’s tax evasion trial in 1931. When the reporter asked him about his Canadian connections, Capone replied, “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”
Although Capone’s immortality seems to reside in a fantasyland of wishes, error, and kitsch, the wider criminal world’s bequest to post-Prohibition America was palpable—primarily, of course, the transnational scourge of organized crime. The syndicate built and maintained by Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and others was deeply rooted in Prohibition, when each of these men rose to prominence on a tide of illegal liquor. Once booze became legal, they developed a business that eventually produced profits even greater than those from bootlegging. It was an effort, wrote historian Mark H. Haller in 1976, that “involved the investment of tens of millions of dollars by ex-bootleggers from Boston, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Florida, Cleveland, Chicago, and Minneapolis.” Haller was writing under the auspices of a federal commission that had spent three years taking testimony from hundreds of people in law enforcement and other fields. The bootleggers had devised a money machine that proved to be “the culmination of their efforts,” Haller concluded—namely, Las Vegas.
Some, though, did decide to invest in the legal liquor industry, even if they did have to pay those damnable new taxes. Longy Zwillman and his old boss, Joseph Reinfeld, operated a distribution business under the name Browne Vintners. A few years after they sold it to Sam Bronfman in 1940, Reinfeld took his share of the payout and, with a new partner, bought the eminently respectable Somerset Importers from Joseph P. Kennedy. This was the same Joseph P. Kennedy who had at the onset of Prohibition taken physical control of much of the stock from his father’s legal liquor business; who in 1922 had provided the booze for his tenth Harvard reunion; who had later taken control of the RKO film studio; who was one of the most successful stock market speculators of the 1920s; and who, more than seven decades after the end of Prohibition, was the single individual, except perhaps for Capone, most identified in the public mind with the bootlegging industry. If you tell people you’re writing a history of Prohibition, virtually everyone asks the same question: “Do you have any good stuff on Joe Kennedy?”
Now, there’s a story. . .
ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1933, the same day Colorado became the twenty-fourth state to ratify the Repeal amendment, forty-five-year-old Joe Kennedy was aboard the S.S. Europa, bound for Europe with a younger friend and their wives. Their destination was England, where the seeds of Prohibition’s most enduring legend were about to be planted.
The younger man was an insurance agent named James Roosevelt. As he was also the eldest son of the new president, he was, said the Saturday Evening Post, “something like an American Prince of Wales.” Kennedy’s fondness for his twenty-five-year-old shipboard companion was such that he sometimes referred to himself as Roosevelt’s “foster father.” During their stay in London one or the other of them met with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and two of his eventual successors, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Together they had lunch with the managing director of the Distillers Company conglomerate. If Joe Kennedy wanted to open political doors or commercial ones, he could have done worse than travel with the son of a president.
By the time he returned from the UK—his wife had continued on to Cannes and then to Rome with the Roosevelts for an audience with the pope—Kennedy had concluded all-but-final agreements to become the sole American importer of Dewar’s, Haig & Haig, and Gordon’s Gin. These contracts were the crucial third leg of an enterprise that was also balanced on medicinal liquor permits Kennedy had obtained in Washington and the bonded warehouse space he had lined up. Shipments began arriving in November. Having heeded the advice of the president of Kentucky-based National Distillers, who had urged him to “get your skeleton organization in position” before sailing for Britain, Kennedy could anticipate December 6, 1933, as Opening Day for the next expansion of his already substantial fortune. On that morning, before the national hangover from the previous night’s revels had entirely subsided, Kennedy, wrote journalist Alva Johnston, “was on the market with one huge shipment of Haig & Haig medicine and another huge shipment of John Dewar medicine.” His Somerset Importers was in business, founded on an investment of $118,000. It apparently took its name from the Boston men’s club that barred its doors to Kennedy and other Irish Catholics, and it owed its creation to Kennedy’s friendship with Franklin Roosevelt’s son. Somerset emitted the scent that hovered around most marriages of politics and commerce, but it was in every respect perfectly legal.
That last part—“perfectly legal”—was something Walter Trohan, the longtime Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, failed to include in an article published some twenty years later, when Kennedy’s son John was serving his first term as U.S. senator from Massachusetts. In that 1954 article on James Roosevelt’s impending divorce, Trohan also related the story of Joseph Kennedy’s Roosevelt-assisted entry into the liquor business. After a brief description of Kennedy’s deal with the British, Trohan added, “At the time prohibition had not been repealed.” This was true as far as it went, but it did not acknowledge that the pre-Repeal liquor Kennedy imported in November 1933 entered the country under legal medicinal permits, and was at first stored in legally bonded warehouse space. From such acorns, nourished by a lifetime’s accumulation of rumors, enemies, and vast sums of money, arose the widely accepted story of Joseph P. Kennedy, bootlegger.
Except there’s really no reason to believe that he was one. The most familiar legacy of Prohibition might be its own mythology, a body of lore and gossip and Hollywood-induced imagery that comes close enough to the truth to be believable but not close enough to be . . . well, true. The Kennedy myth is an outstanding example. The facts of Kennedy’s life (that he was rich, that he was in the liquor business, that he was deeply unpopular and widely distrusted) were rich loam for a rumor that did not begin to blossom until nearly thirty years after Repeal. Three times during the 1930s, Kennedy was appointed to federal positions requiring Senate confirmation (chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, ambassador to Great Britain). At a time when the memory of Prohibition was vivid and the passions it inflamed still smoldered, no one seemed to think Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger—not the Republicans, not the anti-Roosevelt Democrats, not remnant Klansmen or anti-Irish Boston Brahmins or cynical newsmen or resentful dry leaders still seething from their humiliation. Nothing in the Senate record suggests that anyone brought up the bootlegging charge; there’s nothing about it in the press coverage that appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the Boston Globe. There was nothing asserting,
suggesting, or hinting at bootlegging in the Roosevelt-hating Chicago Tribune or in the long-dry Los Angeles Times. Around the time of his three Senate confirmations, the last of them concluding barely four years after Prohibition’s Repeal, there was some murmuring about Kennedy’s involvement in possible stock manipulation schemes and a possible conflict of interest. But about involvement in the illegal liquor trade, there was nothing at all. With Prohibition fresh in the national mind, when a hint of illegal behavior would have been dearly prized by the president’s enemies or Kennedy’s own, there wasn’t even a whisper.
In the 1950s another presidential appointment provoked another investigation of Kennedy’s past. This time Dwight Eisenhower intended to name him to the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, an advisory group meant to provide oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. The office of Sherman Adams, the White House chief of staff, asked the FBI to comb through Kennedy’s past associations and activities. The fat file that resulted touched on nearly every aspect of his life, including his business relations with James Roosevelt. Nowhere in the file is there any indication of bootlegging in the Kennedy past or even a suggestion of it from Kennedy’s detractors.
And so the record remained, apparently, until his son’s presidential campaign. That’s when the word “bootlegger” first attached itself to Kennedy’s name in prominent places—for instance, in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article dated October 15, 1960, in which Edward R. Woods wrote, “In certain ultra-dry sections of the country Joe Kennedy is now referred to as ‘a rich bootlegger’ by his candidate-son’s detractors.” A quiet period followed, and then the inference started showing up again after the 1964 publication of the Warren Commission report. Supporters of the theory that John F. Kennedy was murdered by the Mafia suggested that the assassination had something to do with the aged resentments of mobster Sam Giancana.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 49