Liberated Spirits
Page 17
Willebrandt’s answers seemed clear to everyone but Senator James Reed of Missouri, an outspoken opponent of Prohibition, who demanded to know if it was her judgment that the law could be “enforced so as to absolutely stop the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors.” She replied:
I am not a Utopian, but what I do mean to say is that the officers of the law with proper evidence and facts can try a case and get a conviction, and more than that, I mean that the violations of this law can be reduced to be probably commensurate with the violations of other laws.
Reed reminded her that Lincoln Andrews, the assistant treasury secretary in charge of Prohibition enforcement, had said in earlier testimony that the seizure of 172,000 stills in the previous year represented only one out of ten in existence. Seeking a comparison for argument’s sake, Reed mused, “Do you think it is the same sort of a problem as horse stealing or burglary or highway robbery?” Willebrandt answered no, “because we are long past the time when so-called first citizens indulge in highway robbery, horse stealing, and burglary.” Reed pushed again, asking whether she believed the law could be enforced to the same degree as any other. Willebrandt did, basing her assessment on the success of enforcement in locations where local law agencies did their fair part. When full transcripts of the hearings were published, Willebrandt’s testimony was buried nearly one thousand pages deep; the testimony of Lincoln Andrews, who made similar statements about enforceability with additional agents and training, began on page forty-five. Roy Haynes, the commissioner of Prohibition, had not appeared at all.
* * *
• • •
On March 8, Judge Neterer sentenced Roy Olmstead to four years in a federal penitentiary and assessed him an eight-thousand-dollar fine. Olmstead wrote the verdict down in a little red book, his casual manner unflappable. A U.S. Marshal placed him in custody, but only until bail could be arranged. Mrs. Olmstead had her husband out that same afternoon, having sold their home for thirty thousand dollars. Their appeal had been filed in federal court, with a motion for a stay on jail time, so once bail was arranged, the Olmstead gang might spend as much as a year waiting for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to offer a ruling, one that might send the “whispering wires” case back to Neterer or on to the Supreme Court. If they lost the appeal outright, Olmstead would have to serve at least two and a half years before he would be eligible for parole.40
Roy offered no comment to the press at his sentencing, perhaps at last, rather too late, realizing that allowing himself to become a public figure, maintaining an office downtown and a mansion in a fashionable district, had made William Whitney’s job easier. A few days later, the Olmsteads held an estate sale to clear out their house. Roy absented himself while Elsie watched the throngs of people poke and prod through her belongings, and bravely kept up appearances for the reporters, making it sound as though downsizing to a smaller home would be good for them.41
The sale of his home and its contents may have been when Roy Olmstead divined the truth, one that tens of thousands of men in his industry faced: for all his efforts, he had created nothing of real and lasting significance. The money from rum-running and bootlegging had vanished; the superstructure of his enterprise broken; his reputation in the community, of which he had been so proud, irrevocably diminished. A convicted felon facing time behind bars had few respectable friends and no social standing. Whatever the long-term effects of his conviction, Olmstead needed money to appeal the decision to the Circuit Court and more money to pay for his defense of the Woodmont Beach indictment, still awaiting a court date. Like many convicted felons free on bail, especially those tens of thousands caught violating the Volstead Act in the 1920s, Olmstead went back to work in the only job that could get him out of the hole: running rum from Canada, humping thousands of cases on and off boats to the caches used by their distributors in town.
In one last gambit, Olmstead went to Tom Revelle’s home and threatened the U.S. District Attorney. If two of Olmstead’s operatives, recently caught by the Prohibition Unit, were indicted, Olmstead would go to the press about payments Al Hubbard claimed to have made to Whitney and Lyle, as well as bribes paid by Olmstead to Revelle’s assistant, Clifford McKinney. Revelle, who knew nothing of these payments and alleged bribes, did not hear enough in Olmstead’s threat to realize that Hubbard was playing a double game. Perhaps Revelle understood the threat to mean Olmstead would betray Hubbard’s secret undercover work. By coincidence, William Whitney was at Revelle’s house, and Revelle brought him in from another room. Whitney bucked up Revelle’s courage and the two men refused to make any deal with Olmstead. As Olmstead walked out the front door, though, he probably failed to realize his exit meant Al Hubbard was home free. Like Revelle, Olmstead had missed any clues about Hubbard’s true allegiances and actions.42
A few days later, on May 13, 1926, Revelle announced indictments for liquor conspiracy against nearly two hundred defendants, including Olmstead, stemming from the bust at Woodmont Beach. Roy Lyle, the region’s Prohibition administrator so often in Whitney’s shadow, spoke to reporters about the “smashing blow” these indictments dealt to liquor law violators in the Pacific Northwest, a comprehensive “take down sure to have national and international significance.”43 The next morning, the former King of the Bootleggers took a familiar trip across town and presented himself at the U.S. Marshals’ office to be taken into custody only long enough to post bail.44 Whitney knew it was time to announce the ace up his sleeve. The titular head of the Prohibition Unit stood up and shocked everyone by announcing, “Alfred M. Hubbard, 23 years old, long believed to be a confidential aide of Roy Olmstead, convicted liquor king, has been a secret agent of the federal dry office for some time.” Pouring it on, Whitney delivered the startling news that “the cases which resulted in the liquor conspiracy indictments which the grand jury has just returned were all due to Hubbard’s work.”45 In an impromptu press conference, Whitney’s protégé stood before reporters and took questions. When asked what his other boss, Roy Olmstead, would say, Hubbard matter-of-factly responded, “Well, all I can say is Olmstead was doing wrong, wasn’t he?”46
Chapter 9
The Republican Party in New York increasingly opposed Prohibition. The selection of U.S. Representative Ogden Mills, a confirmed wet, as temporary chairman for the upcoming state convention hinted at the evolving direction of the party. That Pauline Sabin served on the committee selecting Mills suggested her own views might have been changing also.1 Pundits suspected Republicans wanted to tap a wet for the governor’s race, mitigating Al Smith’s wet position, forcing voters to choose their candidate based on something other than Prohibition. A leader of the New York ASL agreed with that assessment, charging “Mrs. Sabin” and others with trying to divide the “outlaw vote” with Smith, an impossibility, they charged, because the governor was “the bootleggers’ hero.”2
* * *
• • •
As the campaign moved into the fall, the national dividing line in the Republican Party over Prohibition played out in the state of New York. The presumptive Republican candidate for governor, James Cropsey, a New York Supreme Court justice, wanted the party to endorse greater enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, something the state had not seen since 1923. Wadsworth, Sabin, and many other Republicans opposed the idea. Wadsworth remained hopeful of an alternative to Cropsey, and learned on a recent trip through upstate New York that Republican leaders there opposed Cropsey’s plan to push for a change in Prohibition enforcement. So strong was their opposition, some of the leaders suggested they would vote for Democrat Al Smith in the general election if Cropsey’s plan were endorsed.3
Days before the state convention, Wadsworth reiterated his opposition to Cropsey’s proposal to secure a plank supporting Prohibition enforcement, but he preferred to set aside any measures concerning Prohibition until after the election, when results of the state referendum would reveal which way the wind was blowing.4
As for presumptions that Cropsey would be the party’s nominee for governor, Wadsworth refused to “discuss persons or candidacies of persons,” leaving a decision on the party’s candidate for governor to the convention delegates. Wadsworth’s non-endorsement worked as a blow to Cropsey’s candidacy, and he rescinded his name from consideration.5
As Cropsey’s light faded, Congressman Hamilton Fish III picked up the torch for an enforcement plank. Wadsworth cared little, according to Fish, about the damage caused to the Republican Party and state candidates who might be tarred with his brush on the Prohibition question, and Fish warned that if the party slipped off “the rock of enforcement,” or was “pushed into the quicksand of lawlessness and defiance of the Federal Constitution, its candidates on the State ticket will have no chance of election.”6 Fish’s views reflected those held by many upstate party leaders and voters who questioned New York’s defiance of the Volstead Act by the absence of state-mandated enforcement. Wadsworth conceded he could support a “moderate dry” as candidate for governor if that made him electable. Dry advocates suggested the term might apply to any candidate, wet or dry, who agreed to approve an enforcement bill if passed by the legislature, leaving the question, again, in the hands of voters who would determine the makeup of that body.
But the public was clamoring to know where each potential candidate stood on Prohibition. Sabin had managed to sidestep questions for much of the campaign, but in mid-September she endorsed the referendum vote, reminding people that its results carried no mandate to modify existing laws, its purpose only to inform the U.S. Congress of New York’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with Prohibition. She managed to avoid stating which way she would vote, but hinted at it in advising women to “register whether or not they thought the existing Prohibition laws are affecting among our citizens, the temperance and respect for law and order that every woman wished to have instilled in her children.”7 Sabin’s carefully chosen words suggested a frustration with the law’s inability to deliver on its promise.
Behind all the debates, arguments, editorials, and aspersions loomed a largely unstated question: did Wadsworth’s call for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment mean anything when no one believed Congress would allow a reconsideration of the amendment or that the requisite number of states would overturn the amendment?
Hoping to shore up support, Wadsworth traveled to White Pine Camp in New York’s Adirondack Mountains to meet with President Coolidge, who was summering there.* Coolidge supported Prohibition and had made it known he would not involve himself in the New York elections, but the president recognized the need to keep Republicans in power in the state.8 Wadsworth did not receive an endorsement, but returned from the mountains with Coolidge’s recommendation to nominate a moderate instead of a “wet” for governor.9
Perhaps sensing the growing angst over his candidacy and the problems it foretold for election, Wadsworth attempted to clarify his position, reiterating his desire that the Eighteenth Amendment be repealed, but equally stressing his hope that the saloon and private liquor traffic would not return. Wadsworth’s greatest concern lay in “the fact that millions of people are resisting and ‘nullifying’ the Constitution today, due in my judgement, to the unsoundness of the Eighteenth Amendment.” He urged repeal as a means to restoring respect for the Constitution, an issue “infinitely more important than the question of whether or not an individual may have a glass of beer.” The amendment and the Volstead Act did not bring abstinence and it never would, but temperance could be attained with different laws, decided upon by the respective states. Declaring, “We all want temperance,” he asked that discussion of solutions to the obvious failure of enforced abstinence be “temperate as well.”10
The New York Republican State Convention began on September 27 in the new Madison Square Garden with 2,600 delegates and alternates filling only a fraction of the twenty thousand seats available.11 After a preconvention conference, Wadsworth declared that a compromise on a Prohibition enforcement plank was at hand.12 Compromise on Wadsworth’s candidacy to retain his Senate seat, on the other hand, had not been reached. Many dry delegates supported Franklin Cristman and contended that “the plot to put up a wet ticket from Governor down, was hatched nine or ten months ago” by Wadsworth and his friends, setting a dangerous path for the Republican Party, not just in New York, but across the nation. “The questions of Prohibition and even of law enforcement become in a sense secondary issues, as compared to the whole nature of the Republican Party from a free agent, acting for the highest good of all the people, into a servile tool of sinister and discredited interests which know no party and are only interested in their own aggrandizement.”13
Regarding the Eighteenth Amendment “as a sacred part of our fundamental law,” Cristman’s supporters saw the nomination of Wadsworth “as so serious a menace to Republican principles and such a blow to Republican ideals, and of such serious and disastrous consequences to the future welfare of our nation, that we feel it incumbent upon us to hereby give notice that we reserve for ourselves complete liberty of action.”14 The agitation ended with Cristman’s declaration of his candidacy on behalf of the Constitutional Party. With Cristman choosing to avoid party squabbles, Wadsworth handily won the nomination in a near-unanimous vote.15
Rather than adopt a compromise plank regarding the enforcement of the Federal Prohibition law, the party simply urged voters to give “a full expression” of their opinion of Prohibition by voting on the referendum.16 Further dampening the spirit of the drys, the convention selected Ogden Mills as their candidate for governor.17
Wadsworth and his supporters had managed to keep an enforcement plank from the platform, but they did not go far enough, according to his Democratic challenger, Robert Wagner, a New York Supreme Court justice, who charged the senator with straddling the fence in hopes of keeping dry Republicans on his side. Wagner reminded voters that Wadsworth had voted for the Volstead Act, making him a “deserter” to the wet cause. Wadsworth had explained his vote many times, saying that, once Prohibition became law, he did not think it proper to leave it unenforced.18
The Wadsworth campaign sat in limbo, not wet enough to pull Democrat voters their way, and too wet for many Republicans, who drifted to Frank Cristman, whom Sabin regarded as unelectable. She sympathized with women who wanted to vote for Cristman, feeling “they must make their protest against Senator Wadsworth’s stand on Prohibition,” but she wondered if they realized such a choice was “throwing their vote to Tammany Hall, an organization far wetter than the Republican Party.” Sabin implored, “Don’t let it be said that the Republican women are not as loyal to their party as are their Democratic sisters.”19
Cristman’s campaign manager, S. E. Nicholson, warned that “national Republicans” supporting Wadsworth, “the pliant tool of the discredited liquor interests,” threatened to split the national party much as Wadsworth’s candidacy had done in New York. Sabin rushed to her friend’s defense, broadcasting her message by radio across New York City. Wadsworth, she asserted, opposed the Eighteenth Amendment as a perversion of the Constitution that inserted a “sumptuous police statute” into that document, resulting in “contention and disrespect for the Constitution itself.” Wadsworth, Sabin continued, had urged modification of the Volstead Act to end the “hypocrisy, corruption and contempt for law and the Constitution, so prevalent in the country today.” He did not oppose Prohibition for its aim, which he believed should be temperance, but its method, which forced abolition.20 Sabin herself was nearing a similar view, though she was not ready to stand fully for repeal in the same way Wadsworth did.
* * *
• • •
As the congressional elections of 1926 approached, Mabel Willebrandt was forced into the role of political pawn. Samuel Shortridge, the junior senator from California, tried to secure her endorsement, promising Willebrandt a judgeship, according to Hiram Johnson, the senior California senator so instrumental in Wille
brandt’s appointment as assistant attorney general.21 Relations between Johnson and Willebrandt had soured two years earlier when she supported Calvin Coolidge for the Republican nomination rather than Johnson.22 Matters were not helped by Johnson’s attempts to get Willebrandt’s assistance in the hiring and firing of personnel in federal prisons, to no avail. Explaining the situation to Harold Ickes, a Johnson supporter in 1924, Johnson granted Wille-brandt had “performed the duties of her office with fair success,” but averred, “I know she has been more successful in obtaining publicity.” Johnson claimed to “have no criticism” of Willebrandt, but accused her of abandoning him when he “was on the political toboggan and practically dead.” He assumed credit for “everything politically that she is,” but she had since become “a devotee of power, and worships at the shrine of the prevailing dynasty.”23