Liberated Spirits

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by Hugh Ambrose


  • • •

  Never missing an opportunity to expand her political affiliations and raise her profile, Pauline Sabin entertained Charlie Sabin’s Democratic friends and attended party events with him, charming the power brokers, impressing them with her knowledge on many subjects and willingness to compromise whenever convinced of the greater good. When the New York legislature created a commission in late 1925 to study the current structure of state government and make recommendations for combining various agencies and departments, Sabin was well-known to those, mainly Democrats, assembling the committee. Sabin was designated to serve on the commission addressing the Corrections Department, along with George Wickersham, a man with whom she would cross paths on the Prohibition debate. The Corrections Department committee made several recommendations concerning creation of new positions, elimination of others, and transfer of a hospital for “mental defectives” to the Department of Mental Hygiene.50 By the end of the legislative session all of the recommendations had been approved.51

  Sabin’s experience in bipartisanship continued in late 1925 with her appointment as a vice chairman to a newly formed Department of Political Education under the auspices of the National Civic Federation, an organization formed in 1900 to foster better communication between labor and business interests. The department aimed to raise voter turnout by promoting “a greater realization of their duties and responsibilities.” The executive council of the group included some of the biggest names from both parties, expanding the circle of influence in which Sabin operated, building her political résumé. Her friend Sarah Schuyler Butler joined her on the council, along with two men with whom she would do more and more work, Charles Hilles and Senator James Wadsworth. The Department of Political Education hoped to reverse the downward trend in voter turnout, which fell to about 50 percent in the 1920 and 1924 presidential elections. That number proved especially troubling when the assumption had been that granting suffrage to women would produce a significant spike in voter numbers; it appeared women tended to vote in the same middling percentage as men.52

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  • • •

  Tom Revelle wanted a trial soon, but he knew the court’s calendar was full for many months. On a more hopeful note, he stated, “We believe we have all of the evidence necessary to obtain a conviction,” but he would not have been surprised if the attorney general—which meant in reality the assistant attorney general, Mabel Willebrandt—decided to send him experienced prosecutors to assist in trial preparation and prosecution.53 Luckily for Olmstead, the lengthy court docket combined with a continual stream of motions from his attorney pushed the trial date to December 1925, eleven months away.

  Although he remained free on bail, Olmstead found himself in a tough spot. The publicity and legal wrangling in advance of the trial had diminished his business, and newspapers had run his photo so many times he could hardly expect not to be recognized. The prospect of jail had not convinced him, however, to change professions. The fight to keep himself, his wife, and their friends out of jail demanded lots of money. Musings about rebuilding his liquor importing and distributing business received an enthusiastic response from his young radio inventor and houseguest, Alfred Hubbard, who wanted to do more than operate the radio station, fix engines, and repair boats. Olmstead, desperately in need of men, agreed.

  Behind his deference to his boss, Al Hubbard hid a keen desire for money, and lots of it, along with the power and perhaps even the fame of Olmstead. That desire, better understood as a combination of brashness and jealousy, led Hubbard to the offices of the Prohibition Unit, where he offered his services, claiming Olmstead was “not the kind of man he thought he was.”54 The proposition must have quickened William Whitney’s heart with possibility. Hubbard sold Whitney on the solidity of his friendship with Olmstead and his own trustworthiness, marrying his respectful and guileless demeanor with easy lies. He was the boy wonder, ready to set things straight, wanting “to be able to look the world in the face and say when the blow-up comes, as must inevitably happen . . . that he was a duly accredited employee of the United States Government while he was furnishing this information and working for the downfall of this enormous [smuggling] ring.”55 Hiring a friend and business associate of the King of the Bootleggers posed many risks, but Hubbard seemed like a weak personality Whitney could keep in check. In submitting Hubbard’s application to Senator Wesley Jones, who controlled the Seattle unit’s positions, Whitney assured, no matter what, Hubbard “could do no harm.”56 Jones hastily approved the application and Hubbard took the oath of office on October 2, 1925.57

  With his confidence returning, Olmstead arranged to land a shipment at the Woodmont Beach dock on November 26, 1925. As he and his men, including Hubbard, began unloading 111 sacks, each protecting a case of whiskey, gin, or a popular cordial, three men approached unnoticed, guns drawn, and jumped into their midst, demanding, “Hands up!” William Whitney could barely contain his glee in reporting the arrest to the press. “It is the first time since Olmstead left a police force that he has been caught handling liquor directly,” Whitney said before observing, “In his palmy days [Olmstead] never touched a load, just directed his subordinates. He evidently was forced to do the actual work because of many recent reverses which had hit his pocketbook pretty hard.”58 Being caught red-handed meant another grand jury, another indictment, and seemingly a lock on what would become a second conviction.

  In due course, Hubbard had to answer to Whitney, Lyle, and Revelle. What had he been doing on that beach? Hubbard explained that he had learned of the liquor landing at the last minute and had no means to inform his Prohibition Unit superiors. To maintain his credibility with the criminals, he had played along, intending to inform Whitney as soon as possible. The plausibility of the story, along with the young agent’s honest-to-gosh mannerisms, convinced Whitney and Revelle. They had hired Hubbard to get them inside the rum rings, to get them the evidence on the big operators, but they wanted some insurance while they tried to build a conspiracy case from the Woodmont Beach bust. Whitney decided to ask his bosses at the Prohibition Unit headquarters in Washington, D.C., for help, and he requested a special agent to work with Al Hubbard and to keep an eye on him.59

  Chapter 8

  During the 1925 Christmas season, Willebrandt, perhaps feeling a need to construct a traditional family for Dorothy, revisited Fred Horowitz’s marriage proposal made a year earlier. However, she came to the same conclusions, placing even greater emphasis on the professional goals she hoped to achieve. She doubted his “love & satisfaction” could survive the “strain, social conditions & other circumstances out of my control.” Should the marriage dissolve, as she suspected, “wrecked would be the fruits of all my sea of repressions and discipline and achievements so far,” while Fred’s “prestige and opportunities for a full life” would be unaffected.1 Though she didn’t say so, the specter of Arthur Willebrandt, her estranged husband, probably shrouded her thinking. A divorce from Arthur, the mystery man never spoken about by Willebrandt or revealed in the press, would need to be obtained before betrothal to Horowitz, marking one strike against her. A potential second divorce from Horowitz, should he realize her fears, might as well have been strikes two and three in Willebrandt’s assessment of her future opportunities. She loved Horowitz, but could not trust his love would last and could not afford the damage to her career and standing that would accrue with another failed marriage.

  Amidst congressional hearings, Supreme Court presentations, appearances at court cases around the country, and the administrative chores of her office, Willebrandt found time to be a mother to Dorothy, whom many took to calling “little Mabel,” especially as the girl tagged along on her mother’s business trips. Willebrandt took her to Seattle in January 1926 to peek in on the Olmstead case preparations, to Yellowstone National Park for a vacation in April of that year, and to New England in the summer for a slate of Chautauqua presentations she made.2 She admitte
d frustrations with her daughter’s “infinite capacities for naughtiness,” but conceded she was “bright and original and responsible.” Dorothy enriched her life, but Willebrandt still wanted more, judging, “I am in my life and profession a man.” She craved a “family reaping vicarious pride in my success and being noticed for it, etc. But that—the forever not having that—is another liability of my sex.”3

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  • • •

  Pauline Sabin began 1926 by removing her name from consideration for president of the Women’s National Republican Club, a post she had held for three years, during which she had increased the club’s membership rolls and raised its political profile along with her own.4 She would remain a member, but her duties with the Republican National Committee and plans to assist James Wadsworth in his reelection campaign demanded all her time. The success of Sabin’s efforts to educate women through the club’s programs could best be seen in her successor, Alice Chittenden, who had opposed suffrage for women out of fear that it would alter a woman’s control over the home, but had come to see suffrage as granting political power to preserve the home rather than allowing men alone to determine its fate.

  Transitioning from club organizer to political campaigner, Sabin hosted the WNRC’s annual luncheon, held, as always, at the Waldorf-Astoria; she invited James Wadsworth and Nicholas Longworth—speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and husband to Pauline’s longtime friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth—to speak at the January 16 gathering.5 On the same day, at the Hotel McAlpin, five hundred members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union met to hear several speakers attack inadequate efforts to enforce Prohibition. Carrie Chapman Catt, an old-guard suffragist and Prohibitionist, painted “a gloomy picture of immorality and crime” rooted in “extravagance and prosperity,” of which Prohibition violations were but the most obvious symptom. Ella Boole, president of the WCTU, denounced James Wadsworth and the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and called for a “campaign of education, agitation and legislation to show that America’s financial leadership of the world is greatly enhanced by the benefits of Prohibition even under imperfect enforcement” and by opposition to any changes in the Volstead Act. As if on cue, Arthur Davis, the New York ASL superintendent, called for the “political annihilation” of Senator Wadsworth.6 Back across midtown Manhattan, the two thousand attendees at the WNRC luncheon filling nearly the entire second floor of the Waldorf-Astoria heard Longworth defend Wads-worth and say it would be a “national disaster” if he were not reelected. The senator spoke next, condemning attempts to centralize more power in the federal government’s hands, citing Prohibition as the keystone example of failed policies in that direction. He characterized the Eighteenth Amendment as the first “to say to the individual citizen, ‘thou shalt not.’” In so doing, Wadsworth accused Prohibitionists and like-minded people of diverting “the logical and orderly development of the Constitution . . . to a new path and in the direction of a goal scarcely dreamed of by the liberty-loving people who founded the Government. So abrupt a change was this and so at variance with the age-old conception of constitutional law that we should not be surprised at this confusion, to use a mild term, which resulted.”7

  Orville Poland later saw fit to challenge Wadsworth’s attack on centralization, saying that if the senator believed in states’ rights so strongly, he should have no reason to oppose a state enforcement law, wresting responsibility from the federal bureaucracy so the state could regain its sovereignty.8 Poland failed to mention that an enforcement law by the state legislature would never be enacted; Governor Al Smith had promised to veto it.9 The true intent of bringing a vote to the New York legislature was to force Republicans—for all Democrats were considered Wet—to state definitively their position on Prohibition. If they voted for an enforcement bill, the ASL and WCTU would hold those legislators accountable in any future Prohibition arguments, using their vote as a cudgel to hold them in line. If they voted against an enforcement bill, they would be cast as radicals, defying the party platform. But New York’s Republican legislators bridled at being defined by one issue. On March 22, 1926, five Republican state senators stiffened their backs and joined twenty-two Democrats, that party’s entire caucus, to reject two enforcement bills.10 Emboldened by the victory, senate Republicans pushed forth a resolution calling for a statewide referendum asking voters whether a petition should be sent to Congress requesting modification of the Volstead Act.11 Republicans in the assembly sought to reassert their claim as the “dry” party, exposing any members choosing to vote against the party’s promises. Both measures, the referendum bill in the senate and the enforcement bill in the assembly, moved in tandem through committee hearings and floor debates into mid-April, each seeking enough votes to set a tone for the most populous state in the country and for the Republican Party nationally. On April 13, the competing bills came up for votes in their respective chambers. The senate passed the referendum proposal, needing only the votes of twenty-two Democrats for victory, but also got eight votes from Republicans, unafraid of the ASL and WCTU’s threats. The assembly passed the enforcement bill with the bare minimum—seventy-six votes to seventy-two—needed to send it to the senate.12 The triumph of the enforcement bill held little joy for its backers, though, who saw no chance in the senate after that chamber’s recent vote against a similar measure. They were right. Arguments that the public should have a say on the Prohibition question drew more votes, the referendum bill passing the assembly easily.13 The bill moved to Governor Smith’s desk, and on to a vote in November.

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  • • •

  Great crowds of gawkers gathered outside the federal building on the morning of January 19, 1926, as the biggest case in the history of Prohibition, featuring the King of Bootleggers, opened.* Few of the members of the public jamming the halls made it inside the courtroom, with U.S. Marshals allowing entry only to those directly involved with the trial, and a few reporters. Forty-six defendants, many with their own attorneys, took up a sizable portion of the room. Another forty-four individuals who had been indicted had fled the country or pled to a lesser charge. If they had appeared, little room would have been left for the reporters.

  When the clock struck ten, the bailiffs and marshals quieted the crowd, and attention focused on the door beside the imposing bench of Judge Neterer, guarded by a bailiff. On cue, the bailiff opened the door, and the judge stepped up to his seat above the proceedings as another bailiff rapped a gavel, crying, “Hear ye, hear ye, all rise . . .” The solemnity lasted only a moment, though, as Roy and Elsie Olm-stead, accompanied by Roy’s mother, entered the rear of the courtroom. The elderly Mrs. Olmstead found a seat with the audience; the couple took their seats behind their counsel. Roy, tall, relaxed, and unhurried, had made his point. He would not be cowed. The long-delayed “whispering wires” trial, set in motion by the arrest of the Olmsteads and their dinner guests in 1924, had begun.14

  Everybody in the courtroom expected the prosecution team to open with testimony related to the “whispering wires,” but Tom Revelle chose to establish the length and breadth of the conspiracy from Canada to downtown Seattle first. Through a series of witnesses, most of whom had been employed by Olmstead, Revelle established the day-to-day routine of a rumrunner—pickups, deliveries, corruption of local law enforcement—but none could provide direct evidence of Olmstead’s participation in the purchase, transport, or sale of illegal liquor in the United States.15 The brief sideshow completed, the main event began. William Whitney, the man who knew everything, took the stand.16 With the hour of the “whispering wires” at hand, the prosecution began with questions allowing Whitney to reel off the successful raids, each yielding enough contraband to indicate a large commercial operation, Whitney specifying how each location fit into the Olmstead gang’s scheme. The description of each raid allowed Whitney to spell out who all the conspirators were and what were their respective duties, and to name all the defendants.
17 The Seattle Times, describing his first day of testimony, said, “Whitney has relentlessly invaded the strongholds of the liquor dealers,” and gathered the evidence against the conspiracy that had been “flooding Seattle with liquor and generating $500,000 a year in profit.”18

  After putting the conspiracy in context, Whitney held aloft the 775-page book that every spectator jammed into the courtroom knew contained the transcripts from the wiretaps.19 Whitney described entire conversations he had heard over the “whispering wires” between men clearly engaged in taking orders and running liquor to waiting customers. Many of the callers had helpfully identified themselves, according to Whitney, with salutations such as “Hello, this is Johnny the Wop,” and often included their locations. One of Olmstead’s attorneys, George Vanderveer, objected throughout Whitney’s testimony, claiming the Prohibition agent was providing hearsay evidence and relying on the book of transcripts for details of conversations he never heard. The judge, laying bare his bias and his assumption that Olmstead would be convicted, swept aside every objection and advised Vanderveer to raise the issues on appeal.20

  Upon cross-examination, Vanderveer bore into Whitney, and badgered until Whitney admitted he had not listened to all the conversations but relied on the book his wife, Clara, had typed up from her notes, which, in turn, had been extrapolated from the “stenographic” notes made by Whitney and the other agents listening to the calls. Vanderveer hammered away with questions about the validity of the information transcribed: How long had the book been in existence? How many agents had listened to the phone lines or seen the original notes? How could an entire conversation be captured in longhand? Eventually, the defense wanted to know what had become of the original notes.21 Whitney admitted he did not have them. Pressing, Vanderveer extracted an admission that Clara Whitney had edited the original notes, and she was also unaware of their whereabouts.

 

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