Liberated Spirits

by Hugh Ambrose

  Daugherty’s first task was filling prominent staff positions, none more important than assistant attorney general, second in command and responsible for prosecuting violations of the nation’s newest law, the Volstead Act. Hiram Johnson was a major force not just in the California party, but within the GOP nationally. As such, he expected the new administration to look to him as it began to fill federal jobs in California, such as postmasters, customs inspectors, Prohibition administrators, and U.S. District Attorneys. Johnson, looking ahead to a reelection campaign in 1922 and recognizing he had fewer close allies in the southern part of the state than he liked, solicited his friend Frank Doherty’s ideas about who among their allies should receive one of the patronage jobs located in or around Los Angeles.41 Sometime in late May or early June 1921, Mabel Willebrandt met Frank Doherty for the first time, and learned that he had begun lobbying for her appointment as the new U.S. assistant attorney general. He had heard that Daugherty intended to nominate a woman to succeed Annette Adams, the first woman ever to hold the post, and he doubtless knew of or perhaps had even witnessed Willebrandt’s indefatigable drive and superior ability. She met the qualifications for the job, having presented cases before federal courts, and she had the gifts of persuasion, earnestness, and keen insight.

  In political terms, it was crucial that Mabel be a Mrs. and not a Miss. Doherty would have asked about Mr. Arthur Willebrandt, recognizing the public scrutiny Mrs. Willebrandt would receive. Her marriage had failed years earlier, her husband a deadbeat. They had not, thankfully, divorced; she had left him behind, but not the union, not the name, not the ring. In public opinion, divorce compounded the sacrilege of a woman taking a man’s job. Men had families to feed, while women worked only to earn “pin money” for little luxuries.

  Doherty took it for granted that she supported Prohibition, just as Hiram Johnson understood it to be a “woman’s issue.” Mabel Willebrandt did not view Prohibition as a war between God and Satan as women of the WCTU were wont to offer, rather she believed in the sanctity of the Constitution. So she wasn’t passionate about Prohibition. That was okay. Hiram Johnson enjoyed the occasional drink and disliked the ASL heartily. As Johnson’s emissary, Doherty mainly needed to know if Willebrandt was ambitious; was she up to the job of assistant attorney general of the United States? She affirmed her desire to attain that lofty rank, one so far above what the few thousand female attorneys in America in 1921 could ever hope to attain.

  Frank Doherty had surely passed his recommendation of Wille-brandt to Hiram Johnson by June 24, 1921, when the Washington Times ran a story holding up Clara Foltz as the likely assistant attorney general. Foltz had become the first female attorney in California and was also the sister of newly elected senator Samuel Shortridge, famous for her activism, a single mother of five who in 1878 had authored the bill to change California state law allowing women to become members of the bar, and a longtime leader in the suffrage movement.

  By almost any measurement, Clara Foltz’s credentials and experience outweighed Willebrandt’s, but Doherty would have fortified her in advance, telling her of Foltz’s many enemies, including California’s senior senator, Hiram Johnson, who thought appointing Foltz would be “unfortunate and embarrassing,” Foltz siding too often and too publicly with his political opponents.42 She had also angered prominent club women when, as assistant district attorney, she denied the existence of the “white slave trade,” or prostitution rings, in Los Angeles, and suggested that women engaged in the world’s oldest profession had chosen of their own free will. College-educated women in particular, the demimonde of which Willebrandt was an acknowledged leader, took a dim view of Mrs. Foltz’s “old fashioned ways and pompous style.”43

  With the support of key party officials growing behind Willebrandt, Senator Shortridge offered to endorse her if she could first secure the endorsement of his sister. Willebrandt hastily arranged a meeting with Mrs. Foltz, showing her the telegram with Shortridge’s offer and letting her know Mabel “would not presume to ask” her brother, Senator Shortridge, for his support, expecting him to “urge her [Clara’s] appointment.”44

  Looking at Mabel, Clara, noting the open collar, the short hair and shorter hemline, the absence of a frilly hat, could see how times were changing. The effect was less formal and ladylike than her own appearance, but Willebrandt’s light makeup kept her from looking too rebellious. Having confronted all her career the stereotype of being a dowdy, unsexed spinster because of her activism, the veteran understood the importance of her dress, of her constant references to being a mother and cooking and cleaning.45 Foltz had always intended her career to inspire younger women, to open opportunities for them, to convince America that women were full citizens, and here before her sat the result. The renowned seventy-two-year-old leader of the women’s movement liked what she saw.

  Other considerations factored in, of course. Foltz had also just embarked on a secret get-rich-quick scheme.46 She may have seen little reason at her age to sacrifice a successful practice to move to Washington, D.C., to administer the controversial antiliquor law, a job almost certainly destined to destroy the career of the person who held it. The evidence was everywhere. In her former hometown, San Francisco, the city supervisors reprimanded “two police captains for having actively enforced National Prohibition while on duty.” The California state legislature wanted to amend the laws to allow the sale of light wines and beer, and voters in Los Angeles had rejected an ordinance to require local police to enforce Prohibition, leaving the task to federal agents.47 Yet the position of U.S. assistant attorney general was a prize not to be quickly scorned.

  Clara Foltz made her decision on August 3, and sent a telegram to Daugherty removing herself from consideration and recommending Mabel Walker Willebrandt for the position. Ten days later, Willebrandt heard from the man himself, the new U.S. attorney general, via telegram. He informed her of Johnson’s recommendation of her nomination as assistant attorney general, but said she also needed the support of the other senator from California. “If you desire to do so,” he proffered, “you may come here to talk the matter over.”48 She decided to go to Washington and chase down this opportunity. She would begin with a visit to Senator Johnson on Monday morning, taking his counsel on whether to pay a call at the office of Senator Shortridge, whom she did not trust, before visiting the attorney general.

  Willebrandt bought a rail ticket, a serious gamble on her part given it cost upward of four hundred dollars, excluding meals and accommodations. On the day she was to depart she heard that Senator Shortridge had informed the attorney general of his approval of her appointment. She wasn’t going to the nation’s capital to discuss a possible job; she was going to talk to her new boss.49

  Of her thoughts of the five-day trip, only fragments remain. The Southern Pacific Railroad’s steam-powered locomotive headed south out of Los Angeles, skirted around the southern end of the massive mountain ranges on California’s eastern border, stopping often to replenish the engine’s water supply, and turned northeast at El Paso before pounding across her native state of Kansas. As farmers’ fields and rural communities flashed past, so too must have scenes of her youth, as the daughter of two dreamers who had eked out a living on the flat prairie. Her parents, David and Myrtle Walker, had tried their hands at a number of occupations in many different locales, usually establishing a newspaper in an emerging community, only to fail, time and again, and move on to the next perceived opportunity. To pay her tuition, Mabel set type in her father’s newspaper presses. The grown woman, the successful attorney, rode the train with her Bible on her lap, often opened to one of her favorite verses, a reminder of a youth spent worshipping at any church within walking distance, and of parents whose love and encouragement had never set boundaries on her ambition, their itinerant life a model of a stubborn desire to try, and try again. As ably explained by Willebrandt’s biographer, no woman in 1921 could have watched the vast land pass her window a
nd assumed that the new job would give her actual power, that her opinions would be valued by her bosses or her directions followed by her male employees, or that she would be paid anything close to what the male assistant attorneys general earned.50 She knew she would be a token, yet there were grounds to dare for more.

  A relentless club woman, Mabel worried less about whether she would be treated as a token and more about making another critical step forward, toward women’s equality. Her success could set fire to the web of prejudices, buried deeply into American culture, that dismissed women as unfit for serious endeavors. To become the standard-bearer for millions of women placed a heavy responsibility upon Mabel Willebrandt’s shoulders, so heavy the Southern Pacific Railroad should have charged her for the extra baggage.

  Chapter 4

  President Warren G. Harding was inaugurated on March 4, 1921, but he and his advisors had begun the chore of staffing his cabinet and other important posts shortly after his election in November. As a longtime Republican member of Congress, Senator Wesley Jones of Washington knew the president would need his help in enacting his legislative agenda, and in return Jones expected to have a say in filling certain jobs in his state. Senator Jones considered the post of the state’s federal Prohibition director one of the most important, especially given his ardent support of the Eighteenth Amendment. He announced he would “recommend no man for a Federal position as Federal attorney or marshal, or to any position that had to do with the enforcement of Prohibition, until I had a written pledge from him that he would stand by the enforcement of the law.”1 That pledge helped Jones avoid some of the mistakes made by others in his position; his criteria for judging potential officers, though, would have been improved vastly if he had demanded not just fealty to the law, but experience in law enforcement.

  The new position of federal Prohibition director in each state was not subject to the rules and regulations of the Civil Service Commission. Put another way, there were no minimum qualifications. Senator Jones could nominate anybody he pleased; send the name along to the federal Prohibition commissioner, Roy Asa Haynes, in Washington, D.C.; and expect it to go through. This is exactly what occurred.

  In late July 1921, Prohibition director Donald MacDonald received the letter he had been expecting, relieving him of duty and naming Roy Lyle to take his place. MacDonald released the letter to the press, sending reporters in search of Lyle, a former librarian and real estate agent, who had not yet received official word.2 Jones knew Lyle through the Young Men’s Republican Club of King County, and knew he was a supporter of Prohibition, a member of the Anti-Saloon League, and a Methodist as well as a Republican—an almost perfect candidate. The leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League supported his nomination because Lyle was a reliable Dry, a qualification lacking in so many men better qualified because of their experience in law enforcement. Lyle’s superiors in Washington, D.C., instructed him, and other state directors, to hire agents “of unquestioned integrity, firm conviction and patriotic purpose” rather than seeking “to pay political obligations.”3 In other words, they needed to be Dry, first and foremost.

  Roy Lyle took the job, announcing, “The booze runner, the bootlegger and the skulking flouter of our dry laws must go.”4 He said he appreciated how difficult his new job would be, although “the people of the state [have] thrice expressed themselves in favor of Prohibition, even as high as 5 to 1,” so he expected the support of every law-abiding citizen and the cooperation of every law enforcement official. More such declarations followed, none accompanied by substantive proposals, as Lyle set the bar for his success as the complete elimination of the use of alcohol as a beverage, a bar far higher than the police set for laws banning other vices—like prostitution and gambling—and a goal that ignored the fact that some alcohol, for medicinal or industrial uses, for example, was still legal.

  Roy Lyle’s enthusiasm and expectations buried some harsh realities. The Pacific Northwest District, the Twentieth, encompassed the states of Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, containing more than 800,000 square miles, and was one of the largest districts in the country, with seven distinct, sometimes idiosyncratic judicial districts before which cases would be brought. The climate, geography, and topography of the Twentieth Prohibition District presented another set of problems with its extensive jagged coastlines, high mountains, dense forests, heavy rain- and snowfall, and generally poor roads to navigate. Lyle was allotted eleven agents for the state of Washington, and another eleven were assigned to cover smuggling activities between the states of the Twentieth District, adjacent districts, and Canada. The agents enforcing Prohibition district-wide would have little communication with Lyle or the state agents he controlled; they preferred to work in the shadows, developing their cases without interference, even from their fellow agents. This created unnecessary competition and, often, resentment between state and district agents.

  Only eleven days after he started his job, hardly enough time for Lyle to be seen as capable, a group of thieves broke into the Prohibition Unit’s “secure vault” and removed 3,500 quarts of liquor with a street value of $35,000, a fantastic sum of money to most readers of Seattle’s daily newspapers.5 The details of the heist made a poor impression, with little “security” in evidence as the truck backed in to haul away the prize—a process that had taken hours—and a Prohibition agent caught wondering aloud why the bottles, held for evidence for a trial long since completed, had not been destroyed. The fact that much of the liquor had been seized originally from a gang led by former Seattle police officers Roy Olmstead and Thomas Clark helped make the theft look suspicious to the community. Director Lyle demonstrated little control of the situation and little force of personality.

  A great sigh of relief came two weeks later, when Lyle’s men, working in conjunction with local police, U.S. Customs officials, and an investigator from the Internal Revenue Bureau’s Special Intelligence Unit, sent from the bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C., found the cache of stolen liquor and caught six men “red-handed.”6 Lyle believed the men were just employees working for “the king bootleggers,” whom he did not identify, but the specter of Roy Olmstead was raised in a newspaper story about the incident. Lyle praised his fellow law enforcement officials for their help, particularly Seattle police chief William Searing, with whom he released a joint statement: “We were working to clear the Police Department and Prohibition office because aspersions had been cast on individuals of both services. Our investigation has failed to show any police officer or [Prohibition] official was in any way connected” to the theft from the unit’s vault. While the suspects were first held at the Immigration Detention Center, a federal facility over which Lyle had some authority, the center had not been built to handle prisoners, and Lyle was grateful when the police allowed him to place them in the county jail.

  The spirit of cooperation began to strain, however, when a week later Lyle ordered the arrest of Patrolman C. H. Parker. He had been under suspicion since the first break in the case, having walked the beat around the warehouse from which the liquor was stolen, and Lyle promised more arrests related to the robbery. He needed to generate good news; Prohibition agents were on trial for manslaughter in Spokane, and one of his sting operations had netted nothing but bottles of water.7 For his part, Parker, the arrested patrolman, told a reporter, “I am not worrying,” perhaps displaying an insider’s knowledge of how difficult it was to get a bootlegging conviction, especially against a Seattle policeman.

  With the assistance of revenuers from the Seattle office of the Internal Revenue Bureau, additional arrests were made, but in late October, the wheels started to come off the case. The district attorney reported that Attorney General Harry Daugherty had ordered him to delay the trial until the new district attorney, Thomas Revelle, took office. The outgoing district attorney alleged that Roy Lyle had gone behind his back and contacted Daugherty directly, assuming Revelle’s commi
tment to prosecution would be more vigorous. A delay was granted, but at a cost: the men arrested by the revenuers were freed because the revenuers had failed to prove any connection between their suspects and the other thieves. For the others, the six arrested at the site and Patrolman Parker, delays resulted in two missed appointments before the grand jury—a violation of their right to a speedy trial, claimed their attorney.8

  * * *

  • • •

  Mabel Willebrandt’s predecessor as the assistant attorney general responsible for Prohibition was Annette Abbott Adams, another Californian whose selection had reflected both the decision to reward women for carrying the torch of Prohibition and to hold them accountable if it failed. The Volstead Act, as the outgoing AAG described it, had been left as an infant on the Justice Department’s doorstep. “As a woman I could not refuse to offer it shelter and neither did I want the men to think it was too big for me to undertake, so from the day of its christening, I mothered it.” Yet it had been a thankless task. “The tendency on the part of men is not to share with us what they already have but to invent new fields for us. They want to have a welfare department for us where we can mess around. This [Prohibition] will be a new toy for us to play with.” She did not believe the women’s movement should settle for such limitations, and she recommended that women continue to “bore from within.”9

  Willebrandt met with Attorney General Harry Daugherty and his staff several times during her first week in Washington. Daugherty thought having a woman might have a “wholesome effect” on his department.10 Daugherty wanted Willebrandt to focus on prosecuting tax fraud and those arrested for violating the Volstead Act. To her primary tasks, Daugherty added reviewing all cases involving war risk insurance, pensions, prison cases, the interstate commerce commission, and commerce and labor laws. She was granted a staff of three attorneys, one secretary, and two stenographers.11