by Hugh Ambrose
Perhaps owing to her frustrations, Mabel Willebrandt allowed herself a rare evening off in the Big Apple after her speech at the bar association. She joined some friends for a ginger ale on the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hotel, and after midnight they headed off to a club called the Plantation, at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-first Street, to see its famed cabaret depicting the life of the “negro from a hen roost to a Mississippi flat boat.”39 If she witnessed any of the patrons topping off their glasses with a hip flask, as was likely the case, she ignored it, knowing that consumption of alcohol did not constitute a crime in itself.
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The small fine assessed against Olmstead after his arrest convinced him the risks he had taken were well worth any penalty, and that he could gamble more. He gathered investors, retained an attorney, hired an office staff, and instituted a simple code of ethics: forbid employees from carrying firearms, never water down the product, and never deceive suppliers or customers.40 Behind his easy smile and glad hand was the trustworthiness that had always drawn people to him, that ability to know what he could accomplish at the moment and never overpromise. Olmstead aimed to be the most honest rumrunner and bootlegger in America, and he was confident that profits would ensue.
Roy Olmstead and Tom Clark operated primarily through a company called Western Freighters, though they also worked with a larger company called Consolidated Exporters. These entities, both duly licensed Canadian liquor exporting houses, provided the financing and created the contracts for shipping tons of spirits to Vancouver, British Columbia, from around the world. At the docks, stevedores loaded as many as thirty thousand cases at a time into the holds of their steamships: the Prince Albert, the Tuskawa, and the Coal Harbour. As the ships made their way to the twelve-mile limit, cases were broken and bottles placed in more manageable gunnysacks before being unloaded to midsized boats, which then proceeded along the coasts of Oregon and California to make other rendezvous. The midsized boats brought their loads lumbering into the Strait of Juan de Fuca at night, meeting up with the faster gas launches at various points, most often one of the coves along the coast of Discovery Island, in Canadian waters. The fast boats then made the run down the Puget Sound.41
With every shipment, Olmstead, who handled the Seattle area, and Clark, who received shipments in California, collected handsome profits in cash and became ever more successful international businessmen. Early in 1922, they expanded. Eschewing the expense of buying or leasing another ship, they decided to move their products aboard freight cars of the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Company. Loading train cars in Seattle for the trip to the big markets down south first required that the bottles of King George Scotch, Haig & Haig, and Old Taylor Whiskey be pulled from their muslin sacks and stuffed into barrels with sawdust for padding, a process completed on one of the islands in the Puget Sound. Part of the trick was to match the weight of each barrel of alcohol with that of a barrel of salted herring. Olmstead’s ships docked right along Seattle’s waterfront, his agents bribing stevedores, railroad workers, and another set of customs officials to move the barrels off the ships and onto the railcars. Soon, Olmstead and his confederates were sending a train south about once a week.
Some of the railroad agents in Olmstead’s chain, however, became greedy and tipped off hijackers, who on May 10 attempted to steal six barrels, marked “salt fish,” stored at the railroad freight warehouse in Seattle. The ensuing confusion came to the attention of William Whitney, and his investigators spent days surreptitiously watching and following the shipment of salt fish, building their case. On May 19, Prohibition Director Roy Lyle announced that his men had coordinated with the Prohibition Unit in San Francisco on a major bust, seizing “barrels of the finest kinds of whiskey and wines” in warehouses in Seattle as well as in San Francisco. The liquor seized in the raid in San Francisco was valued at over $100,000, although the trap there had been sprung poorly and one truckload of Scotch had escaped in a car chase through the business district.
Lyle described the enterprise behind these shipments as “the operations of a whiskey ring financed in Seattle.” From the financiers to the “expert packers” in the islands of the Puget Sound to transfer men working at Seattle’s docks to the railroad freight houses, the Prohibition agents had found a flood of bribe money. Thousands of barrels of the finest whiskeys and wines “had poured openly into Seattle from the islands of the Puget Sound and trans-shipped here by railroad to Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Kansas City and Eastern points.” This liquor cabal had been moving the contraband along the railroad “virtually on a weekly schedule,” so well had this outfit greased the wheels of any suspecting law enforcement official.42 Lyle’s description clearly distinguished this gang of unnamed bootleggers from the several smaller, less sophisticated groups his men had arrested of late.
In the days following the bust, Olmstead and Clark felt the Prohibition Unit getting closer. Men in the rail yards and warehouses were being questioned. On May 24, Prohibition agents nabbed one of Olmstead and Clark’s key organizers, in part because the man had looked out of place in the village of Anacortes, a bustling little port in the middle of Puget Sound, where he was driving a fast, gasoline-powered boat, “well dressed” and with “the appearance of a retiring but prosperous business executive.” Director Lyle crowed in the press, outlining the tentacles of this underground enterprise, with its fictitious shipping bills and paperwork, and promised more arrests shortly. “The operations of the liquor ring are declared to be the most extensive ever uncovered on the Pacific Coast.”43 In the ensuing days, the unit arrested men in Seattle and San Francisco and interrogated scores of others. Roy Lyle’s goal, along with rolling over the workers and getting them to name their employers, was to uncover the location where the bottles were repacked between Victoria, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington. Lyle also suspected that Olmstead and Clark maintained another location somewhere in Seattle and used it to repack the bottles for shipment on the railroad.
Whitney was getting closer than Olmstead could have expected, and was speaking with Elsie Potter, the rumrunner’s bookkeeper, in early June of 1922. Elsie told him about several “liquor caches,” which he located, confirming her value.44 Years later, the government claimed Elsie had been a paid informant who provided evidence regularly.45
Still, Olmstead and Clark were open for business. In early June, their rum-running boat, the Zambesi, brought down three hundred cases. They set their men to repacking the sacked bottles into pine boxes for loading onto a railcar, where the bottles would be hidden under a load of furniture. Thomas Clark and his associates then boarded the steamship President for the trip to Los Angeles, and held a little party in Clark’s stateroom. Among the passengers invited to join in was Leonard Regan, who worked for Whitney’s unit. Regan had stepped aboard at the last minute “with $13 in his pocket and no baggage,” surely snickering up his sleeve at the invitation to join Clark’s party.
While the steamer sailed, Whitney’s men seized the railcar loaded with whiskey, a cargo valued at $66,000, and held several workers at the warehouse for questioning. Using the “wireless,” Whitney arranged to have the ship met by six agents at the dock in Los Angeles. Agent Regan greeted the local agents at the dock, and decided to tail the suspects instead of effecting an immediate arrest. At Clark’s “palatial” villa—rented for four hundred dollars per month, a sum significantly greater than most workers’ entire monthly paycheck—they found a small quantity of liquor and arrested Clark and his two accomplices.46 Clark’s high living helped convict him in the newspapers. How else but bootlegging could a former cop earn such fabulous sums of money? The suspects were held on bail of ten thousand dollars each, although the only charge against them was “possession and transportation of a small quantity of liquor found in the palatial home.”47 Director Lyle traveled to Los Angeles to develop a conspiracy case against Clark while Whitney hunted for Thomas�
� partner, Roy Olmstead.
Chapter 5
On May 3, 1922, anti-Prohibitionists, led by several labor organizations, held a rally at Madison Square Garden calling for modification of the Volstead Act, barely two years old. Some ten thousand people came, undeterred by a downpour outside. Senator James Wadsworth, unable to attend, sent a letter, read to the assemblage, describing Prohibition as a “terrible mistake” aggravated by “an enforcement act so severe in its provisions that it is proving impossible of enforcement.” Without providing details, he urged “that the whole Prohibition situation should be revised and a sane effort made to place it upon a respectable basis.” Other speakers claimed the Eighteenth Amendment never would have passed if politicians had not gone “to sleep,” refusing to believe a sufficient number of states would make it the law of the land. Loud cheers echoed through the arena when speakers claimed the right to drink alcohol as inalienable or a “physiological necessity.” Even if all the country’s drinkers could magically be exterminated and replaced with “Simon-pure Prohibitionists,” “within two weeks the Mexicans would be on the Hudson River with a flock of mudscows and capture New York City,” so weak was America’s fiber without liquor.1
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Olmstead was not one to hide from an arrest warrant, though he did take care to avoid capture for a week, allowing time to put some of his affairs in order. Whitney’s agents raided the home of Thomas Clark’s sister, finding dozens of cases, some in the basement, most in the high grass behind the small frame house. Whitney’s agents arrested two men there, and Whitney claimed that he had seen Olmstead there himself. At five p.m. that same day, Olmstead was arrested in the office of his attorney, John Dore, and charged with “transportation of liquor.” Importantly, he had not been arrested by Whitney, nor charged with a weightier offense, nor thrown into the Immigration Detention Center. The next morning, Roy Olmstead posted a one-thousand-dollar bail.
Whitney now had many suspects—stevedores from the freight yards, a dealer in used furniture, and a few others who seemed to be important operatives in Olmstead’s smuggling ring—but the connections between the suspects were tenuous, based upon hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The fifty cases of booze found in the backyard of Clark’s sister’s house would seem damning, but the house was owned by relatives of Clark, none of whom lived there or had a connection to the smuggling operation. A big bust at Point Lobos, just south of San Francisco, netted eight men and fifteen cars, which Lyle insisted had to be a part of the Clark-Olmstead ring. He had been told the shipment had come from British Columbia, the seized cars had Seattle plates, and the fifteen hundred cases of liquor were all bonded, brand-name products—only Clark and Olmstead were known to deal in large quantities of such quality. After a short exchange of pistol shots, about two dozen men and one woman had fled.2 Whitney put all of his men to finding the fugitives, surely suspecting that the woman was Elsie Potter, the one who kept Olm-stead’s books. He had to find her—and the books—to make his case.
When the federal grand jury convened on June 26, Whitney downplayed his hand to reporters, admitting his investigation into the ring operating between California, Seattle, and British Columbia was still “incomplete.”3 For his part, Lyle believed that some of the men in his custody were going to divulge important information. One suspected smuggler, upset that his employers had not gotten him out on bail, assured Lyle from his jail cell he could provide the key details about the “Seattle liquor ring” in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution, but Lyle passed on the offer, confident in the evidence he had collected.
Lyle’s investigations in Los Angeles and San Francisco uncovered a few facts. The fast boats with which the smugglers had attempted to land their cargoes at Point Lobos had cleared Canadian customs with false manifests. The ships were “declared to have arrived in Mexican ports without liquor,” according to the Mexican consul, “and obtained false clearance papers to show upon their return to British Columbia.”4 Lyle told reporters that, on the basis of the false manifests, he had asked the Canadian government to seize some of the boats engaged in this trade, but he knew that the Canadians were unlikely to expend much energy unless the matter was deemed detrimental to the Crown’s interests.
Roy Olmstead confidently strode into court on July 7, 1922, dressed in a fine suit, offering a smile toward friends and foes, his preliminary hearing presided over not by a judge but by a U.S. commissioner; this was a not-uncommon occurrence given the growing length of the court docket. William Whitney explained that his men had tailed Olmstead to the house occupied by Thomas Clark’s sister. Olmstead had not been apprehended there, but agents had found forty-eight cases of whiskey at the residence. The occupants of the home had been arrested, with Whitney charging that Olmstead had personally “conveyed [the] liquor” to them. Whitney hoped to establish a connection not just to the cases of liquor, but to Clark. Whitney charged both Clark and Olmstead with coordinating the shipment of alcohol confiscated in Los Angeles and Point Lobos, but offered no hard evidence, proffering Olmstead’s arrest two years earlier as proof of his guilt.
Whitney then admitted that his star witness—a woman whose name he refused to divulge, an associate of the bootleggers who knew everything and could connect the conspirators—had disappeared. Whitney asked the court for a three-week continuance, though he admitted he was not absolutely certain he could locate the witness. The court asked him to detail what information, exactly, she would bring. Whitney refused to provide any specifics, claiming that releasing such information would harm the government’s case. The U.S. commissioner immediately threw out the case and ordered Olmstead’s one-thousand-dollar bail returned. Whitney vowed to haul Olmstead before the next grand jury.5 But his complete defeat—with the dapper Olmstead, known by all of Seattle as a bootlegger on a massive scale, strolling out of the courthouse a free man—raised public doubt about the Seattle Prohibition Unit’s competence and greatly boosted Roy Olmstead’s arrogance in flouting the law. Whitney would not see the mystery woman again for a number of years. Whatever interest she had expressed in helping him had dissipated quickly because she had begun a relationship with Olmstead.6
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The grant of suffrage and imposition of Prohibition, the aim of women activists for so long, left the groups claiming to represent women asking: What next? Only two years after its formation, the League of Women Voters questioned its necessity. Many women working in other organizations also questioned the need for the LWV. Seeking to validate its existence, the League asked the WNRC to take the affirmative to the following question: “Resolved, that the League of Women Voters should be abolished.” After a spirited debate among the members, Pauline Sabin declared that the question suggested the League “considers the question of its existence a debatable one,” a point which the club would not help the League decide.7
Pauline Sabin revealed more of her thoughts on groups devoted solely to women’s issues when she concurred with the decision of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Acting Secretary of the Navy, to prohibit use of the Naval Radio Service to broadcast speeches made by members of the National Woman’s Party at the dedication of their national headquarters in May 1922. Roosevelt declared that the naval radio system, the only network in those early days of radio with the capacity to broadcast across the entire country, should not be used for political purposes. Roosevelt feared that allowing the Woman’s Party to use the radio system would encourage other politicians and political groups to insist upon fair access, also.8* Roosevelt’s decision and his reminder that the Woman’s Party was a political entity prompted President Harding to cancel his planned appearance at the ceremony for fear of appearing to endorse an agenda of which he was unaware. Pauline Sabin sent a telegram to Roosevelt, a former beau, commending his decision, which he appreciated almost as much as he took pleasure in the Woman’s Party’s disappointment, saying he regretted “that circumstances p
revented me from saying what I really felt about them.”9
Roosevelt did not spell out what he would say about the National Woman’s Party and whether his seemingly negative attitude toward the group extended to women in general or just to women activists, but his cordial relationship with Sabin suggested he accepted women in politics at least so long as they worked within the mainstream parties. Sabin agreed, or at least she knew that setting themselves apart would only make it harder for women to be heard, would give men opportunities to exploit differences, and would weaken the political strength the women’s groups held collectively.
The National Woman’s Party, which claimed membership from the two major parties, was now seeking a twentieth amendment guaranteeing equal rights to women, bringing them on par with men in all matters. Many women, including Pauline Sabin, opposed this type of “blanket” amendment because it lacked specific definitions of equality, and failed to acknowledge that true equality would eliminate current protections for women in the workplace. The National Consumers League, a bipartisan group of men and women who had championed many of the workplace safeguards an equal rights amendment would dismantle, appointed Sabin, a longtime member, to the central committee responsible for arranging speaking engagements and educational sessions to promote opposition to the blanket legislation. Pauline hosted a gathering of three hundred women at Bayberry Land in July 1922 to hear Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to an administrative position in the New York state government, speak on the subject.10 Then in November 1922, Sabin presided over a conference that addressed the matter of “Why Women Oppose Blanket Legislation” and was sponsored by the National Consumers League.11 The proposed amendment had little chance, but it foreshadowed the splintering of the gender-centric interest groups that had brought the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to passage. Gaining their political voices, through suffrage, meant women no longer had to huddle together, separate from men, for support. They could join the political mainstream.