Truman, Harry S., 79, 106, 107, 364
Tumulty, Joseph Patrick, 76
Turner, George Kibbe, 26, 29–30
Tuttle, Arthur J., 151–52, 259, 261
Twenty-first Amendment, 329, 351–54, 374, 375
ratification of, 353–54, 356, 357, 361, 366
see also Repeal
“21” Club, 208, 209, 314, 361
Ulysses (Joyce), 207n
Underground Railroad, 35
Underwood, Oscar W., 70, 71, 245
Underwriter, 279
Union National Bank, 203–4
Union Signal, 57, 358
Union Trust Company, 200
United Kingdom, 18, 74–75, 113, 162, 167, 238, 279, 332, 342
illegal whiskey shipments from, 153, 155–57, 170–73, 210, 367–69
twelve-mile-limit treaty signed by, 171–73, 220
United States, 4
historic role of alcohol in, 7–9, 19–20, 53–58
immigration increase in, 26, 48, 81, 241
urban growth in, 81
United States Brewers’ Association (USBA), 12, 26, 30, 33, 40, 41, 51, 54, 64–65, 85, 102–3, 248, 296
United States v. Manly S. Sullivan, 282n
universal suffrage, 3, 4, 15, 19, 62
Untouchables, The, 136
Uppercu, Inglis Moore, 217
Upshaw, W. D. “Earnest Willie,” 131–33, 351
Urban II, Pope, 43
U.S. Steel, 51, 98, 133
Van Buren, Martin, 15
Vandenberg, Arthur, 327
Van de Water, Frederick F., 161–62
Vanity Fair, 222, 337, 340
Variety, 210, 243–44
Viano, Conrad, 177
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 268
Vinson, Carl, 90, 91
Volstead, Andrew J., 57, 78, 108–14, 117, 135, 160–61, 187, 208, 231, 234–35, 268, 356
Volstead, Laura, 139
Volstead Act of 1919, 109–12, 117–18, 133–34, 137, 139–40, 142, 144, 151, 164, 201, 234–35, 252–53, 329–30, 332, 356, 375
permissive clauses in, 120, 127, 131, 176, 180, 183, 185n, 187, 192, 193–94
Von Tilzer, Albert, 119
Wadsworth, James W., Jr., 220, 289–90, 292, 294–96, 298–99, 302, 303, 304, 314, 333, 362
Wagner, Robert F., 289
Wald, Lillian, 49, 186
Walgreen, Charles, 197
Walgreen, Charles, Jr., 197
Walker, Alexander, 173
Walker, James “Jimmy,” 288, 337
Walker, Johnnie, 173
Walker, Stanley, 137, 353
Wallace, A. J., 51
Wallace, Bess, 106
Wall Street Journal, 162, 332
War of 1812, 54
Warren, Earl, 104
Warren Commission, 369
War Revenue Acts, 98
Washington, Booker T., 43, 74
Washington, D.C., 59–62
Capitol Building in, 37, 51n, 59, 61–62, 70, 93, 109, 230, 325
First Congregational Church in, 117–18, 127
White House in, 108, 129–30, 227–28, 266, 352
Washington, George, 8, 19–20, 37, 47, 54, 208
Washingtonian Movement, 9–12, 14, 25, 43
Washington Post, 61, 241, 327, 339, 341, 347, 355
Washington’s Farewell to the Officers of His Army, 19–20
Washington Star, 336–37
Washington Times, 85, 102, 335
Water Bucket, The, 14
Wathen brothers, 199
Watson, Tom, 86n
Waugh, Evelyn, 206
Webb-Kenyon Act of 1913, 58, 60, 282
Welch, Charles, 191
Welch, Thomas Bramwell, 191
Wente, Ernest A., 184, 359
Wente brothers, 177, 181–84
Wesley, John, 13
West, Mae, 273
Western Reserve Law School, 39
Westheimer, Morris F., 34
“What Goes on in Nunneries” (Watson), 86n
Wheeler, Ella Belle Candy, 39, 293, 294
Wheeler, Everett P., 121
Wheeler, Wayne Bidwell, 88, 97, 99–100, 102, 109–13, 117, 138, 143–44, 176, 206n, 227
ASL work of, 38–41, 52, 77, 81–82, 91–95, 125, 127, 131, 134, 139, 239, 240, 244–46, 292–94, 316–17
death of, 294, 300, 301–2, 355
political power of, 39–41, 59–61, 131–33, 220, 229–30, 234, 237, 251, 266–70, 279, 286–88, 292–94
Wheel Within a Wheel, A: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (Willard), 18
whiskey, 8, 41, 42, 54, 83, 118, 130, 156, 324
see also Irish whiskey;
rye whiskey
scotch whiskey
Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, 54, 134
White, E. B., 218, 333
White, William Allen, 48–49, 323
Wickersham, George W., 320, 351
Wickersham Commission, 320, 334, 351
Wilder, Alec, 211, 212
Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, 85, 97, 104
Willard, Ella Guthrie, 121
Willard, Eugene S., 121
Willard, Frances, 16–19, 20–21, 26, 35–37, 42, 63–64, 80, 85, 237, 341, 357
Willard, John D., 228
Willard, Mary, 17
Willebrandt, Mabel Walker, 137–41, 144, 172, 199n, 216, 231, 253, 255, 262, 264, 281n, 285, 307–8, 314, 325n, 327–28, 345–47, 356
Williams, John Sharp, 90
Willis, Pauline Sabin, 363
Wilson, Clarence True, 231, 319
Wilson, Edmund, 206
Wilson, Woodrow, 55, 129
administration of, 58–59, 76–77, 79, 81, 86–87, 98–100, 127, 130, 183, 281n, 297
wine, 15, 17, 77–78, 108, 126, 174–92, 358–59
collectors and connoisseurs of, 8, 119–20, 290, 304
homemade, 108, 122–24, 176–80, 251
immigrant consumption of, 12, 175–76, 178, 245
wine (cont.)
kosher, 186–92
sacramental, 110, 182–92, 258–59, 261, 359
varietal grapes for, 177–78, 180–81, 184–85, 335, 358–59
Winthrop, John, 7
Wise, Stephen M., 186
Wittenmyer, Annie, 17
Wolfe, Thomas, 86
Wolff, Al “Wallpaper,” 136
Wolsey, Louis, 192
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 16–23, 30, 33, 36, 43, 57, 63–64, 70, 75, 78, 83, 144–45, 176, 233, 322–23
decline of, 37, 80, 357
Motion Picture Department of, 213
Unfermented Wine Department of, 191
woman suffrage, 1, 14–15, 17–18, 48, 56, 62–66, 69, 76, 86, 90, 102, 126, 132, 231, 235, 289, 332, 363
Women and Repeal (Root), 363
Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), 339, 340–41, 346, 349, 350, 354, 363–64
women’s rights, 4, 12, 14–15, 117
Wood, Gar, 277
Woods, Edward R., 369
Woodward, C. Vann, 43
Worker’s Compensation laws, 51
World Congress Against Alcoholism, 294
World Temperance Society, 15
World War I, 3, 74–75, 85, 86–87, 95, 97–101, 124, 130, 142, 170, 206, 236, 240, 280, 281
U.S. forces in, 97–99, 103, 106, 175, 203, 297
World War II, 364
World WCTU, 18
Wright, Orville, 98
“Wright Bone Dry Law,” 255
Yale, Frankie, 276
Yale University, 25, 108, 230, 282, 289, 291, 315
Yorkton Distributing Company, 151
Young, S. Glenn, 137, 245
Zwiebel, Jeffrey, 249
Zwillman, Abner “Longy,” 273, 366
About the Author
Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times; editor at large at Time, Inc.; and managing editor of Life magazine. He is the author of four previous books, including Great Fortu
ne, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He has held appointments as the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer in Press, Politics and Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; as the Hearst Foundation Fellow in New Media at the Columbia University School of Journalism; and as chairman of the National Portrait Gallery. Okrent lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent. They have two adult children.
The march to Prohibition began in December 1873, when a group of prayerful women stationed themselves outside the saloons and barrooms of Hillsboro, Ohio. Within weeks, “Mother Thompson’s Crusade,” as it was called, had spread across the Northeast and Midwest.
Frances Willard, the dominant figure in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, considered herself a “Christian socialist” and called her supporters “Protestant nuns.” A U.S. senator said Willard was “the Bismarck of the forces of righteousness.”
Mary Hanchett Hunt led the campaign that made her grossly inaccurate “Scientific Temperance Instruction” compulsory in every state. Among STI’s “facts”: “when alcohol passes down the throat it burns off the skin,” and “the majority of beer drinkers die of dropsy.”
In the original 1848 Currier and Ives engraving of Washington’s farewell to his officers (4), the general offered a toast. Reissued in 1876 as the WCTU was gaining strength, the wineglass had been removed from his hand, and a hat replaced the decanter and goblets on the table (5).
Much of the campaign for Prohibition revolved around gentle, family-related themes (6). But Carry Nation (she wasn’t particular about the spelling of her first name) was singularly audacious. Once she started destroying saloons with her hatchet, she found the vaudeville circuit as comfortable as the church pew. She also published a newspaper, she said, so “the public could see by my editorials that I was not insane.”
The Anti-Saloon League convention, 1915, in Atlantic City. Speakers included former heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan and Dr. J. H. Kellogg, the man who gave America cornflakes.
Richmond P. Hobson, who introduced the Prohibition amendment in Congress, exhorted his colleagues to pass it “in the name of your manhood.” The Speaker of the House considered Hobson “a political lunatic.”
Andrew Volstead never joined the ASL or delivered an antiliquor speech. But the enforcement law he wrote led to the word “volsteadism”—according to Webster’s Third, “the doctrine of or adherence to prohibition.”
“The liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no man,” said an ASL publication. Said Sunday, “I will fight them till hell freezes over, then I’ll buy a pair of skates and fight ’em on the ice.”
Wayne B. Wheeler, the brilliant tactician who dominated the ASL, was considered—by a critic—“the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States,” who “controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents [and] held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties.”
As secretary of state in 1914, William Jennings Bryan served grape juice at state dinners. The following year, as a stump speaker for the ASL, he was delivering as many as ten speeches a day.
Trying to distinguish “healthful” beer from dangerous liquor, brewers liked to refer to it as “liquid bread.” Detroit brewer George H. Gies took the healthfulness argument several steps further.
Adolphus Busch said brewers should be willing to “risk the majority of our fortunes” to fight Prohibition; he used quite a lot of his own money to bribe newspaper editors, buy votes, and pay operatives to influence elections through means, said one of his agents, that “are best not written about.” But the brewers—almost all of them of German extraction—were rendered helpless after the United States entered World War I and the ASL turned the nation’s anti-German feeling against them.
On January 16, 1920, this Detroit liquor store had no trouble depleting its stock. Within hours, a vast and unstoppable legal trade was born, giving rise in turn to the creation of multistate criminal syndicates. Much of the public that had once responded to songs like this 1866 number (20) would, by 1920, be hearing a very different tune.
Representative W. D. Upshaw of Georgia took any opportunity he could find to demonstrate that he was the “driest of the drys.” Wets treated him as a living parody of dry priggishness, and Upshaw usually rose to their expectations—both in writing (he signed his mail “Yours very dry”) and in front of the cameras.
As the “Prohibition Portia,” Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt was the most visible—and powerful—woman in American public life through the 1920s. Still, newspapers described her in the familiar vocabulary of the women’s pages: the Atlanta Constitution said she was a “delightful luncheon companion who neither paints, powders, nor uses lipstick.”
Willebrandt’s efforts in the Justice Department were frequently undermined by the icy indifference of Andrew Mellon (25) and the buffoonish Roy Haynes (24). Mellon, it was said, was the “only Treasury Secretary under whom three president served.” A crony of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Haynes was primarily responsible for dispensing patronage on behalf of Wayne B. Wheeler of the ASL.
Almost from the beginning, enforcement was a practical failure. But even sporadic effort produced good visuals. This barrel-smashing assault took place in the first months of Prohibition; the raid on the contents of a Detroit warehouse (27) occurred a few years later.
The honeymoon trip that Sam and Saidye Bronfman took in 1922 included a sidetrip to Kentucky, where Sam bought the Greenbrier Distillery. Dismantled, shipped to Canada, and reassembled, it was quickly put to use as the foundation of Bronfman’s enormous bootlegging business.
In any given week, Bronfman had a million dollars’ worth of inventory stashed on the North Atlantic island of St. Pierre. Virtually every man, woman, and horse on the island was engaged in unloading, storing, and reloading liquor destined for the United States; many houses were shingled with used packing crates.
After Congress appropriated money for a vastly enlarged Coast Guard, bootleggers on Rum Row were much more likely to be apprehended. Seizures of ships like this one increased, but so did bribery and violence.
Georges de Latour built Beaulieu Vineyards on the lucrative (and legal) business of providing communion wines for the Catholic Church. Many California grape growers shipped their crop to New York, where Paddy’s Market, which stretched along seven blocks of Ninth Avenue, became a bazaar for home winemakers. Because the Volstead Act allowed rabbis to distribute sacramental wines to synagogue members, “wine congregations” exploded in size, and wine stores like this one opened in Jewish neighborhoods.
The going price paid to physicians for a legal liquor prescription was two dollars. “Spiritus Frumenti”—abbreviated by this Kentucky pharmacist as “spir. fru.” (36)—is the Latin term for such elixirs; in most cases, it was straight rye.
Physicians and pharmacists supplying medicinal liquor were required to submit records to the Prohibition Bureau. This ledger, maintained by a doctor in Providence, Rhode Island, suggests that almost everyone seemed to suffer from the same ailment.
S. S. Pierce of Boston was one of the leading distributors of “medicinal liquor,” which they offered to pharmacists in a number of tasty varieties.
Near beer was available everywhere, but under the law, the word “beer” itself could not be used in describing it. Brewers tried to claim it was as good as the real thing—but, some asked, if that were true, why had they bothered to make the real thing in the first place? Malt syrup (44), for home brewing, was a more successful product.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 69