Then the mob stories began to pop up like spring blossoms. Meyer Lansky, who’d had plenty of chances to talk about it before, suddenly claimed a pre-Repeal Kennedy connection. In 1973 Frank Costello told a journalist (with whom he was collaborating on a book) that he had done business with Kennedy during Prohibition; the inconsiderate Costello proceeded to die a week and a half later. Another mobster, Joe Bonanno, repeated Costello’s assertion on 60 Minutes ten years after that—while promoting a book of his own. By 1991 a drama critic for the New York Times could refer to Kennedy in a theater review as a bootlegger without any elaboration. The same year a potential juror in the rape trial of one of Kennedy’s grandsons could assert without challenge, during voir dire testimony, that the family fortune had been founded on bootlegging. By then it had become nearly impossible to ask a reasonably informed individual to name a bootlegger without getting “Joe Kennedy” as a reply.
Some of the less reputable Joe-as-Bootlegger assertions are based on “evidence” as flimsy as one man’s recollection that he’d seen Kennedy on the docks near Gloucester, gazing out to sea, waiting for his next shipment to come in. Never mind that during the 1920s, when he was an extremely successful stock market trader and the hands-on owner of a major motion picture studio, Kennedy might have had more productive ways to pass his time. One writer, citing an interview with Al Capone’s ninety-three-year-old piano tuner, actually has Kennedy coming to Capone’s house for spaghetti dinner to discuss trading a shipment of his Irish whiskey for a load of Capone’s Canadian.
Looking backward, many find convincing evidence in the booze Kennedy provided for his Harvard tenth reunion—something any thirty-three-year-old sport could have done in 1922, especially one whose father had legitimately been in the liquor business before Prohibition and retained the right to own his remaining stock.
Others have chosen to leave shards of evidence insufficiently examined—for instance, the biographer who found a 1938 letter from Kennedy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in which the new ambassador mentions his twenty years of doing business with Great Britain. The investment industry and the movie industry could have provided Kennedy with plenty of opportunity for transatlantic commerce in those years. Additionally, had the biographer realized that Hull was a lifelong and active dry, he might have been less eager to conclude that Kennedy could have been referring to nothing but the bootlegging business. Others have uncovered the name of a Joseph Kennedy in the transcripts of hearings conducted by the Canadian Royal Commission on Customs in 1927, but do not mention that the “Joseph Kennedy Export House” was based in Vancouver; that its eponym was identified at the time as fictitious; and that the operation in fact belonged to Henry Reifel, a powerful British Columbia distiller who, according to Bronfman biographer Terence Robertson, had simply appropriated the name of a waiter in a Vancouver bar.
Even the most reputable investigators have been unconvincing. Trying to nail down Kennedy’s putative bootlegging career, one of the finest reporters of the last forty years tried assiduously to overcome what he called “the remarkable lack of documentation in government files.” In hundreds of pages of FBI reports, he found “no mention of any link” between “Kennedy, organized crime, and the boot-legging industry.” He then proceeded to retail a batch of second- and third-hand stories from people who had been suspiciously silent for generations. A noted scholar of the Scotch whiskey industry based his case for Kennedy’s illegal activity on the memory of a Scotsman he interviewed more than three decades after Repeal—a man who not only might have been remembering the liquor-importing Joe Kennedy of 1934, but who also, as it happened, asked his interviewer not to reveal his name, even after his death.
One can exonerate the old Scot of malicious intent. The Kennedy family’s rise to prominence, compounded by the increasing appearance of stray rumors in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, surely made dimly recalled encounters from the distant past suddenly seem more meaningful (or, as the aspiring litterateurs Costello and Bonanno may have hoped, more profitable). It’s harder to forgive writers who stretch logic and research standards as if they were Silly Putty—for instance, the author of a Kennedy family biography who, unable to find substantive evidence of bootlegging, reaches a conclusion that can only be described as mind-boggling: “The sheer magnitude of the recollections,” he writes, “is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.”
One cannot prove a negative. Perhaps there’s a document somewhere, or even a credible memory, that establishes a connection between Joseph P. Kennedy and the illegal liquor trade. But all we know for certain is that Joe Kennedy brought liquor into the country legally before the end of Prohibition and sold a great deal of it after. Along the way the “legally” somehow fell off the page, as it had in Walter Trohan’s 1954 article. Given nearly eight decades of journalism, history, and biography, three trips through the Senate confirmation process, and the ongoing efforts of legions of Kennedy haters and Kennedy doubters (and even Kennedy lovers who venerated the sons but despised the father), one would think that some sliver of evidence that he was indeed a bootlegger would have turned up by now.
But Joe Kennedy didn’t have to be a bootlegger. After all, nearly everyone else was.
* Smith was not as unlikely a member of the group as it might appear to those who knew him as the liberal, social-welfare-promoting governor of New York. As Raskob’s close friend, he had already embarked on a rightward move during the 1928 presidential campaign, when he became the first Democrat ever to run on a high-tariff platform. The association with Raskob further aligned him with the anti–New Deal right. A more unlikely member of the Liberty League was none other than Richmond Hobson, a dry afloat in a sea of wets.
Epilogue
I
N ALMOST EVERY RESPECT IMAGINABLE, Prohibition was a failure. It encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy. It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of ill-trained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles. One could rightfully replace our prevailing images of Prohibition—flappers kicking up their heels in nightclubs, say, or lawmen swinging axes at barrels of impounded beer—with different visions: maybe the bloated bodies of the hijacked rumrunners washing up on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, their eyes gouged out and their hands and faces scoured by acid. Or perhaps the crippled men of Wichita, their lives devastated by the nerve-destroying chemicals suspended in a thirty-five-cent bottle of Jake.
But in one critical respect Prohibition was an unquestioned success: as a direct result of its fourteen-year reign, Americans drank less. In fact, they continued to drink less for decades afterward. Back in the first years of the twentieth century, before most state laws limiting access to alcohol were enacted, average consumption of pure alcohol ran to 2.6 gallons per adult per year—the rough equivalent of 32 fifths of 80-proof liquor, or 520 twelve-ounce bottles of beer. Judging by the most carefully assembled evidence, that quantity was slashed by more than 70 percent during the first few years of national Prohibition. It started to climb as American thirsts adjusted to the new regime, but even Repeal did not open the spigots: the pre-Prohibition per capita peak of 2.6 gallons was not again attained until 1973. (It stayed that high only until the mid-1980s, when it began to drop again, to current levels of roughly 2.2 gallons per person per year.) In The Thin Man, released in the summer of 1934, William Powell and Myrna Loy have thirty-three drinks between them, or more than one every three minutes (including a few tossed off at breakfast). In real life, as Morris Markey explained in The New Yorker, it was rather different. “I went over to the Ambassador Hotel one afternoon for cocktails,” Markey wrote just two weeks after Repeal. “We were four men, all told. We sat there for three hours, and drank three cockt
ails each—one an hour. And all of us remarked how impossible such temperance would be in any speakeasy we have ever known. In the speakeasies there was always a tension, a pressure to drink and keep on drinking, even after appetite had faded completely.”
In the surprisingly slow growth of post-Prohibition drinking lay the central irony of Repeal: across most of the country, the Twenty-first Amendment made it harder, not easier, to get a drink. During the latter stages of Prohibition, especially in the big cities or near the coasts or adjacent to the Canadian border, little effort was required to obtain a drink, a bottle, or in some places even a shipment of liquid contraband, few questions asked. What was formally illegal was necessarily unregulated, as if it didn’t exist. “Remember the old days before Prohibition,” a comic asked, “when you couldn’t buy a drink on Sunday?”
But Repeal changed that, replacing the almost-anything-goes ethos with a series of state-by-state codes, regulations, and enforcement procedures. Now there were closing hours and age limits and Sunday blue laws, as well as a collection of geographic proscriptions that kept bars or package stores distant from schools, churches, or hospitals. State licensing requirements forced legal sellers to live by the code, and in many instances statutes created penalties for buyers as well. Just as Prohibition did not prohibit, making drink legal did not make drink entirely available.
IN ENACTING THEIR OWN dry laws some states encouraged a hybrid drinking culture incorporating Prohibition’s pieties, Repeal’s realities, and a bizarre set of signifiers specifically their own. The Jack Daniel’s distillery operation that had fled Tennessee for St. Louis returned home in 1938—to a dry county; they could make the stuff in Lynchburg, but no one could buy it there. Mississippi remained legally dry until 1966, providing the outstanding example of official self-delusion. Liquor sales were outlawed, but for years a 10 percent tax on illegal sales remained in place, which encouraged the state to encourage lawbreaking. In 1950 William Faulkner defended the prevailing rules, urging his fellow Mississippians not to disrupt “the long and happy marriage between dry voters and illicit sellers, for which our fair state supplies one of the last sanctuaries and strongholds.” Willie Morris, in his memoir North Toward Home, recalled a Yazoo City bootlegger’s campaign slogan when liquor law revision made the ballot: “For the sake of my family, vote dry!”
But even if states didn’t want to stop the flow of booze, the second clause of the Twenty-first Amendment allowed them to employ the liquor laws for unrelated purposes.* In some states officials kept nude acts out of nightclubs and bars, not because they had authority over public nudity but because the clause, as interpreted by the courts, established that they had authority over what went on in places that served alcohol. In New York officials used similar powers to keep Billie Holiday from performing in the city’s cabarets after her conviction on drug charges.
REPEAL PRODUCED WINNERS and losers in many crannies of American life distant from the alcohol industry. Already pummeled by the Depression, Harlem nightclubs catering to a downtown clientele lost their illicit appeal, and the stylish crowds stopped traveling uptown in ermine and pearls. Intercoastal “booze cruises” disappeared altogether by 1938. On the other hand, the “cruise to nowhere” begat every passenger liner that departs a U.S. port for, say, a luxurious journey to the Caribbean and back. Country boys who had made their living racing souped-up cars ahead of revenue agents on the back roads of the South soon found people were willing to pay to watch them race—hence the birth of NASCAR. Then there were losers who realized that some new ideas and new energy could make them winners again. After his friend Franklin Roosevelt assured him that Prohibition was about to end, the governor general of the Bahamas issued a new challenge to his executive council: “Well, gentlemen, it amounts to this—if we can’t take the liquor to the Americans, we must bring the Americans to the liquor.” Thus, the Bahamian tourism industry—helped along by the Royal Bank of Canada, which had used the rum trade, a Bahamian commentator wrote, to establish a foothold in the Caribbean that stretched “all the way from Montreal to Belize.”
The fate of individuals or businesses or national economies aside, Prohibition’s most enduring legacy is probably its robust versatility as an example or a remonstration. The wholesale enactment of national criminal laws during Prohibition gave rise to post-Repeal federal statutes addressing kidnapping and bank robbery; on the other hand, the manifest failures of federal Prohibition enforcement enabled the states to hold on to most of their authority over the enforcement and administration of criminal law. Because Prohibition proved the nation could not legislate personal morality, advocates for the legalization of drugs have been able to draw a direct parallel to their own argument. And in the 1950s southern politicians who only belatedly discovered that Prohibition was a pretty bad idea made cynical use of a similar line of reasoning. Because the failures of the Volstead Act had established that the moral code of one region could not be imposed on another, they argued, school integration was at least folly and likely catastrophic.
In the end, though, the single indisputable lesson of Prohibition might have been the one offered by Sam Bronfman on a fine summer day in 1966. He was talking with two magazine journalists visiting Belvedere, his estate in Tarrytown, New York. Preparing an article about Bronfman’s dominance of the American liquor industry, the journalists wanted to know about his activities during the dry years. For decades Bronfman had deployed a ready stock of autopilot evasions. It wasn’t illegal in Canada (which, if one took into account customs and tax laws, wasn’t true). Seagram’s never sold directly to bootleggers (this was, in fact, true: Seagram’s sold to agencies wholly owned by the Bronfman family that sold directly to bootleggers). He had never seen any proof that the goods his family had shipped actually ended up in the United States (not necessarily false, but entirely specious).
But on this July day, surrounded by his leather-bound books and the fine art on his walls, in the comfort of his terraced garden with its expansive view over the Hudson, fresh and relaxed in shorts and a sport shirt after a swim in the pool, seventy-seven-year-old Sam Bronfman was, in his late-life eminence, calm and confident enough to indulge in a bout of candor. There was really only one explanation for what happened during Prohibition, he said: “You people were thirsty.”
* The clause reads, “The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.”
Acknowledgments
W
ORK ON THIS BOOK formally began in the winter of 2002–2003, before it was interrupted by an eighteen-month detour through the editorial offices of the New York Times. Two specific encounters stirred my initial labors.
The first was a lunch with my old friends Wendy Wolf, Rick Kot, and Liz Darhansoff. Wendy and Rick, who used to be my publishers, convinced me that Prohibition should be my next subject; Liz, who was, is, and always will be my agent, began to design a strategy to make it possible.
Several months later, I ran into Ken Burns while strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge. For years Ken had been saying, “Let’s make a film together.” Knowing about as much about filmmaking as I do about molecular physics, I had chronically met his cheerful encouragement with an exaggerated rolling of the eyes. This time, though, when I told him I was working on a history of Prohibition, Ken skipped the imperative and moved directly to the declarative: “That’s it,” he said, extending his hand to clinch the deal. “That’s our film.”
As it turned out—as it should have turned out—Ken and his associate (and my dear friend) Lynn Novick made their own film, and I wrote my own book. But along the way, the exchange of ideas, research, and sources enhanced both projects to such a degree that they can be considered first cousins. My book is better for the input and reactions of Ken, Lynn, Geoffrey Ward, and Sarah Botstein; I hope they’ll be able to say as much about whatever I’ve been able to contribute to
their forthcoming film.
As a serial exploiter of research assistants, over the course of this project I was sequentially dependent on several. Foremost among these were Jonathan Lichtenstein, the incredible Patrick McCreesh, Ariel Ratner, Michael Spies, and Dan White. At various times Zane Curtis-Olsen, Amy Ettinger, and Lily Rothman provided additional assistance. Lydia Okrent deserves a category of her own and a form of gratitude (and pride) that only a father can offer.
A project such as this one requires travel to distant archives. My research took me to Cambridge, Washington, Wilmington, Toronto, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and San Francisco, and also required me to endure two weeks of extreme hardship in the Napa Valley. Some very capable surrogates plumbed collections I was unable to visit, among them Aaron Akins in St. Louis, Matt Becker in St. Paul, Amy Huprich Cook in Cincinnati, Annie Linskey in Baltimore, and Clifford Scott in Ottawa. Phoebe Nobles followed up on a number of forays I had begun at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor.
Among the scores of librarians and archivists who extended hospitality, assistance, and experience, I would like to single out four truly exceptional individuals. David Smith of the New York Public Library considers it his mission to help writers with their research, and I am proud to count myself among the hundreds of devoted Smithians who have been blessed with his assistance. Marge McNinch, who presides over the papers of both the du Pont family and the Bronfman family at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, generously accommodated my presence for one extended stay and my repeated inquiries for three additional years. Jeff Flannery of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress knows more about the division’s vast holdings than any mortal should; his ability to unearth exactly the right document exactly when I most needed it provoked my constant admiration and gratitude. Elaine McElroy manages an institution at the opposite end of the library spectrum, the Wellfleet Public Library in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. There wasn’t a book or a roll of microfilm that Elaine and her staff couldn’t hunt down for me, and their courtesy and hospitality on many long summer afternoons made indoor work on outdoor days much less onerous than it otherwise might have been.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 50