by Hugh Ambrose
Arthur Davis, New York’s ASL superintendent, added his voice, claiming Wadsworth held the power to determine the success or failure of the enforcement bill and the promises made by the Republican Party to get the bill passed. The state assembly had passed the bill on to the state senate, where twenty-six votes would secure its passage; twenty-nine Republicans served in the senate, but four of that number indicated they would oppose the bill, voting the wishes of their constituencies. Davis refused to accept that argument, declaring, “They should have thought of that before they ran on a Republican ticket at an election where the Republican Party promised a State enforcement law.”23
Throughout, Wadsworth remained silent, annoyingly so to some Republican leaders, but he did lend his name to a publication of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment during this time, making clear where he stood. Whether Wadsworth’s influence was strong enough to sway one of the four state senators without doing damage to his own interests is unknown, but without his involvement, the enforcement bill went down to defeat in March 1925.24 In a final stab at the perceived betrayal, Arthur Davis announced the ASL would “take every lawful and proper step to oppose the renomination and election of the leading exponent of the fundamental principles of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, Senator James W. Wadsworth.”25
The charge that James Wadsworth controlled the Prohibition debate in New York represented a minor component of a larger contention by his opponents that he controlled all politics in the state, and the votes of all the Republican state legislators, who controlled both houses. It was an outlandish accusation, allowing the senator’s detractors to focus all their frustrations with the Republican Party in one person rather than admitting rifts within the party. The promotion of personal freedoms, big business, and small government clashed with movements to create more protections—Wadsworth would say restrictions—whether applied to women, children, farmers, or minorities. Progressive Republicans had brought many changes, including suffrage and Prohibition, in the previous twenty years and many in the party, particularly women, wanted such change to continue. Wadsworth did not, and his unwavering opposition to legislation that might be termed progressive continued to create trouble for him.
The associate chairman of the Democratic State Committee, Caroline O’Day, called upon all New York women to oppose the “boss rule” of James Wadsworth, and charged the senator with directing Republican legislators to vote against anything supported by Governor Al Smith. At Wadsworth’s command, Republican legislators ensured the death of bills to promote children’s health and education, protect working women, and safeguard public morals, charged O’Day. She wondered, “What brutal system of forcible feeding was employed to make them swallow their own words and try to look happy,” but it was clear to O’Day that Wadsworth had directed them through “secret pressure” to do just that. She insisted that the “boss” would not allow any Republican candidates in the 1925 election for state assemblymen who did not follow his edicts.26
Pauline Sabin remained silent while charges were thrown at her friend Jim Wadsworth, but accusations soon flew her way. In late May 1925, Sabin hosted an “unofficial conference” at Bayberry Land to discuss the reelection of George H. McDonald, chairman of the Republican Suffolk County Committee, and John Boyle Jr., the assemblyman from Sabin’s district. A rift among the attendees formed, due to an alleged association between McDonald and the Ku Klux Klan, which claimed credit for getting him elected to his current position. Sarah Schuyler Butler—daughter of Nicholas Murray Butler—representing the Republican state committee, said that the state committee would not recognize McDonald or his associates. One newspaper account described Sabin as supportive of the county’s “old guard,” who wielded “great power with the party leaders not only in New York state, but throughout the country.”27 Another labeled her an “anti-dry,” out of step with the majority of Republicans in Suffolk County, who would not “take kindly to having the whip lash snapped over them by a few wealthy summer residents of Southampton who are threatening not to recognize the regularly elected representatives of the party in the county in the matter of Federal or state appointments.” Harsh criticism, also, followed Miss Butler, “daughter of a pronounced wet,” who made an “intemperate speech . . . not likely to tend to party harmony in Suffolk.” Pointedly, the paper warned that Suffolk Republicans supported the Eighteenth Amendment, implying that Sabin and Butler did not. The charges made against the two women diverted attention from the original issue: McDonald’s possible relationship with the KKK, a group in favor of Prohibition. McDonald declared no allegiance to the KKK, but his refusal to disavow the group raised calls for his resignation. He declined, but the state committee revoked his privilege of assigning federal patronage in Suffolk County.28
The conflict did not end with the conference. After Pauline and Charles left the country for a summer in Europe, McDonald and his cronies put forth a candidate to challenge for her seat on the county committee.29 Upon her return, Pauline had only two weeks to address the challenge, but her reputation in the county and her growing voice on the national scene brought her a slim victory. Unfortunately, McDonald and Boyle won, also.30 A few weeks later, committee members, including most of the women, returned McDonald as county chairman, though his involvement in patronage decisions remained in limbo.31
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Getting passed over for federal judgeships had become almost routine for Mabel Willebrandt, but another rejection in February 1925 must have stung more than the others and let her know there was very little, if any, chance for an appointment so long as Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House. The President emphatically declared he would not appoint a woman to any government post if it was not already held by a woman. Katherine Philips Edson, a prominent player in the California Republican Party and a Wille-brandt supporter, pondered, “How many women expect to get any place if everybody took that position? It certainly is a pretty good way to stop any progress.”32 Coolidge’s decision came just weeks after Willebrandt had attended an event at the White House, noting, “I’ve been invited to the White House so often lately and all the officials are so fine to me that I can’t help have a grudging enjoyment of it all,” a marked change from the previous years in which she received far less recognition. Mabel showed “no disappointment” outwardly, upon hearing about the latest denial of a judicial appointment, but admitted to her parents, “At heart I care terribly,” the frustration having “plunged” her into doubt “and a feeling that destiny is a thing one’s dreams cannot deflect nor toy with as perhaps I have tried to do, unwisely.”33
Willebrandt pushed forward. In mid-February 1925, she traveled to Cleveland “on a most intriguing mission,” for which she would “need the wisdom of Solomon and the guiles of a serpent, the intuitions of H. G. Wells and the self control of Lincoln.” She attended the grand jury hearing for two bootleggers indicted for conspiracy in 1921, but who had fled the country before trial. One of the men, Harry Grossberg, claimed he could not be indicted or convicted because his political influence extended to former president Harding, who had passed away eighteen months earlier. Grossberg’s claim was based on an association with Sam Ungerleider, who had allowed Harding to purchase stock on margin. Before Harding could pay for the stock, he died and the stock promptly lost $170,000 in value. Attorneys representing the Harding estate and Ungerleider pled with Willebrandt for restraint in the matter regarding Sam, which she was willing to grant, but she did not feel the same about his brother, Abe, who had closer ties to Grossberg. Abe’s books showed that payments for ten carloads of whiskey from Canada came from the same account from which President Harding’s stock purchases had been made. “Imagine the arguments ‘destroy the country’s confidence,’ ‘smirching [sic] a dead president,’” she thought, agitated at the complication, but deciding it “was right to prosecute letting consequences be what they may.” Unrecorded were her thoughts about her old boss, Harr
y Daugherty, Harding’s trusted friend and frequent bagman, whom she had so staunchly defended. He would surely have known of Harding’s ties to the Ungerleiders. Perhaps her decision to proceed was an admission that her blind loyalty to Daugherty had led her astray, and she had a chance now for redemption.
Willebrandt told Coolidge of her plans to proceed with the case, but he said nothing, forever holding his distance from Harding’s scandals. Digging deeper into the case, Willebrandt learned Prohibition agents associated with the case had been dismissed or shipped to “some ‘burying ground’ as they call it like Butte, Montana.” The Ohio Prohibition director, appointed by President Harding, approved permits, intended for industrial and medicinal purposes, requested by Warren Barnett, the law partner of a Harding campaign manager. Barnett collected twenty dollars per case of questionable liquor, and used the money to pay for graft and to reduce the million-dollar debt remaining from Harding’s 1920 campaign. The former president had interceded in the Grossberg case in 1922, getting Secret Service agents to “cover up” the movement of money collected by Barnett.
Willebrandt relished the idea of bringing down Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose department oversaw the Secret Service. She regarded Mellon as “the full partner” in the Cleveland case, directing “his agents” to funnel monies into the campaign fund.34 Such bold thoughts revealed her frustration with Mellon’s lack of interest in enforcing Prohibition, which had made Willebrandt’s job much harder. The grand jury returned numerous indictments, but none for the Secret Service agents or Mellon. Willebrandt’s “personal assurance” that the cases would be prosecuted had secured the indictments, but the grand jury’s reluctance to find against the Secret Service agents served as yet another reminder of how deeply politics extended into the daily machinations of Prohibition enforcement.35
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District Attorney Tom Revelle informed U.S. Attorney General Harlan Stone on January 2, 1925, that some evidence against Roy Olmstead had been gained through wiretaps. He did not know who had “tapped” the wires and felt it was “better for me not to know,” noting that wiretapping was a misdemeanor under Washington State law, but he believed the ends justified the means in this situation.36 Two weeks later, Willebrandt appointed William Whitney as a special prosecutor in the Olmstead case, putting aside her usual “repugnance” to appointing special prosecutors to avoid the risk of losing the trial. She appreciated Whitney’s expertise regarding the wiretapping evidence, but noted his questionable methods in the past, recalling an incident when the Prohibition agent “almost came to blows” with a U.S. Marshal.37 Later, Senator Wesley Jones suggested Willebrandt attend the trial to provide “assistance.”38
Rumor of the wiretapping leaked to the public, newspapers seizing on the salacious rumor. The Seattle Times teased: “Did the ‘whispering wires’ whisper your name?” Seattleites wondered if secrets exposed during the Olmstead case would “be the spark to set off a great explosion.”39
Meanwhile, an avalanche of press coverage was making Olmstead a famous man—not a good attribute for the head of an illegal enterprise—and tending to convict him in the minds of readers and potential jurors. A lot of the leaks were true, of course, including the rumor he had bribed policemen not only to protect his shipments, but also to disrupt his competitors. Thomas Revelle predicted the grand jury would hand down scores of indictments after considering the array of evidence, the facts disclosing a massive conspiracy with “tentacles of the traffic reaching into Oregon and California” from British Columbia.40 Revelle was right; the grand jury wasted little time finding just cause for the issuance of indictments covering smuggling and clandestine importation of liquor. Working late into the night, the U.S. Attorney’s office issued warrants of arrest for ninety individuals, a staggering number in keeping with the promises made by federal law enforcement officials that they would expose a vast conspiracy.
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On March 31, 1925, Mabel Willebrandt appeared before a Senate subcommittee investigating the efficiency of the Internal Revenue Bureau’s operations. Willebrandt believed that different ideas about the best means of enforcing the Volstead Act hampered cooperation and decreased the effectiveness of enforcement between the IRB and her office.
The handling of revoked permits for legal alcohol production provided a glaring example of the disconnect between the two agencies, charged Willebrandt. The IRB issued permits for production of alcohol for industrial and medicinal uses, but many distilleries generated volumes in excess of permitted amounts, selling the surplus to bootleggers. When the IRB found out, they seized such distilleries and initiated legal proceedings. However, the IRB allowed the distillers to appeal a permit revocation, a process that could take six months, during which time the distiller could continue operations with little oversight. The seizure and appeal process clogged court dockets and pulled Willebrandt’s district attorneys away from cases focused on big bootleggers and rumrunners. Willebrandt preferred injunction proceedings, which simply demanded that illegal operations must cease, and if they did not, fines and jail time could be assessed.41 Executing an injunction placed the onus on the owner of the brewery rather than law enforcement. When asked by the Senate committee if attempts to convince the IRB to use injunctions had proven successful, Willebrandt explained that U.S. Attorneys had been told to use injunctions “vigorously,” but she confessed those attorneys could make their decisions based only on evidence provided them by Prohibition agents, suggesting yet another disconnect between the agencies.
Willebrandt listed inadequate investigations by Prohibition agents where they should have dug deeper to reveal bigger conspiracies or where they did not collect sufficient evidence to make a case, necessitating additional investigations, often undertaken by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, precursor to the FBI.42 Inefficiencies in the building of cases by Prohibition agents led Willebrandt to conclude that Prohibition agents had little knowledge of the laws they were responsible for enforcing or of proper “tactics of investigation and the science of investigation.”43 Senator William King of Utah opined, “You may spoil some political jobs in that way,” implying that some agents might fail training or educational exercises designed to improve their qualifications. Willebrandt wanted agents placed under civil service hiring guidelines, which would bring in better people without political obligations. Quoting from a recent New York Times article, she said of agents: “Many of them are well meaning, sentimental, and dry, but they can’t catch crooks. The sole object of others has been to appropriate all the graft in sight, and they won’t catch crooks.” Attempting to lay blame, Senator James Couzens tried to label Willebrandt as the “chief law enforcing officer of the Prohibition law.” She quickly refused the appellation and the misconception that the Department of Justice had primary responsibility for Prohibition enforcement, reminding the committee that the Treasury Department annually received twenty-six million dollars specifically to enforce Prohibition; the Justice Department received no designated funding for its efforts, and made do with existing staff and attorneys whose work without Prohibition on their plates would be more than ample to keep them busy. Willebrandt answered all the senators’ questions with statistics and specific case references, but felt attacked by veiled suggestions that she had it in for Treasury Secretary Mellon, overseer of the IRB. Publicly, Willebrandt admitted nothing but facts in discussing her knowledge of Prohibition operations overseen by the Treasury Department, but in private, she voiced her frustration to her most trusted confidants, her parents. She charged Senator Couzens, in the midst of a long-running feud with Mellon, with using her to “load his gun to shoot at his personal enemy Mellon, meaning also the whole bunch of conservatives who’d rather choke truth than to face a criticism.”44 She suspected the portrayal of her as opposing Mellon dimmed any remaining chance she had for a judgeship, but took comfort in knowing she had spoken the truth. Ac
knowledgment of her integrity came two months later when Senator King summarized what many had been thinking: “I feel confident that if it had been taken over by the Department of Justice in the beginning many of the evils which we are now seeking would not have existed.”45 Fellow committeemen agreed with King, but the idea would go nowhere for another five years.
The badgering questions and misperceptions of the senators tried Willebrandt’s patience, but the greater hurdle to overcome was her hearing loss, still unknown to anyone outside her closest associates and family. The quick banter of congressional hearings, questions bouncing from one committee member to another, from one side of the rostrum to the other, not to mention chatter from the gallery, made it difficult to keep her secret. She had taken to using a hearing aid, which helped, but it required concealment, lest she show anything that could be perceived as a weakness.46
Willebrandt’s apprehensions about her hearing loss extended to her personal life, as she wondered whether she could be a good mother. What if an occasion arose when she might not hear the sound of her child in danger? Willebrandt’s mother lovingly scolded her, “If you say ‘when I am deaf’ you are forging in your body a deaf condition,” knowing best how to prod her daughter, who always rose to a challenge.47 Restored by her mother’s faith, Willebrandt resumed her search for a child, finding “the dearest, wisest little two year old I ever saw” in August 1925.48 The little girl, Dorothy, already adopted once, had come from a woman Mabel had assisted during her days as a public defender in Los Angeles.49 While her schedule of trials and speaking engagements frequently pulled her around the country, Willebrandt, eager to hold tight to the new family she had craved, brought Dorothy whenever possible.
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