Liberated Spirits

by Hugh Ambrose

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  James Doran, Prohibition commissioner, and his top aide, Alf Oftedal, had come west in mid-June for meetings in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. In the Prohibition Bureau’s suite of offices in downtown Seattle, Doran started with encouraging words, promising his two top men in Seattle they would be retained in their present positions provided the Civil Service Commission admitted them, a matter in limbo and out of Doran’s hands. Alf Oftedal then admitted that he had been wrong about Whitney and wanted “to let bygones be bygones.” Oftedal now considered Whitney “one of the best men he had in the entire service.”

  During the commissioner’s discourse, though, Whitney heard a great deal that disturbed him. Ongoing reorganization would require Whitney and Lyle to report to Oftedal, who could cherry-pick the most significant cases, leaving Whitney’s office chewing on the tiny, the tenuous, and the troublesome. Whitney foresaw unnecessary and unproductive competition between the two units, their agents already distrustful of one another. “We may perhaps have to suffer with them [special agents] but we do not do it with good grace,” Whitney wrote to Senator Jones. “[They] undermine the morale of our own agents . . .”9

  Doran also announced the creation of a new unit for investigating allegations of professional misconduct, feeding fears Whitney carried with him always. His fears were confirmed just a few weeks later, when he began hearing rumors that Oftedal’s agents were using bootleggers to discredit him. One of the bootleggers who had become friendly with the special agents bragged that he had been brought to Washington to meet Mabel Willebrandt and Doran, both of whom had promised him a presidential pardon, the very notion of which must have sent paroxysms of anger shuddering through Whitney. More than Oftedal, Whitney directed his anger at “the rather unfriendly attitude of Mrs. Willebrandt towards us.”

  Whitney believed Oftedal’s agents and U.S. Marshal Ed Benn, whom Whitney had never trusted, had obtained statements from defendants in the Olmstead trials and sent them to Willebrandt. As luck would have it, Willebrandt was attending the American Bar Association conference in Seattle in July 1928, offering Whitney an unexpected chance to confront her. He approached Willebrandt while she attended a luncheon of the Young Men’s Republican Club, a club he once had led, to ask for a few minutes of her time. She refused, telling him her schedule was already full. Whitney took this as proof she was in league with his enemies, Oftedal and Benn. He was partly correct, as he heard later from Mrs. Vincent, chairwoman of the WCTU in Seattle, who had met with Willebrandt for three hours, and from Tom Revelle, who had heard it from his successor in the office of District Attorney Anthony Savage: Willebrandt held him and Revelle responsible for the grand jury’s refusal to indict Al Hubbard and Richard Fryant.10 Worse, Roy Lyle had learned while in Washington, D.C., that Willebrandt “is more and more dominating the Prohibition Bureau, listening to the Intelligence Unit & now she and the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Bureau David Blair are good friends & working together . . .” Blair and Willebrandt had cooked up the idea to divide the country into eight districts and provide each with additional attorneys to get more Prohibition cases tried and won. As before, Lyle and Whitney believed they should not be asked to answer to the leadership of the Prohibition Bureau. “The importance of our work and the results we are getting & would continue to get justify no change.” Ignoring problems nationwide, they saw the change directed against them specifically as a move to take Whitney’s job as legal advisor. Lyle believed “Mrs. Willebrandt has been poisoned on Whitney and my office.”11 Considering all the forces he felt arrayed against him, Whitney confessed that his job was difficult, “one not agreeable except as we feel we are doing the public service.”12 His belief in his rightness was confirmed in early August 1928, when CSC finally approved his application and that of Lyle.13 Lyle would remain as administrator and Whitney expected to be appointed to the newly created post of senior attorney.

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  After her big announcement, Pauline Sabin had committed her energies to the election of Herbert Hoover, but not without some hesitation. Prominent Republican women, including Sabin, met in late July to map a strategy for getting women in the eastern and southern portions of the country to the polls for Hoover, but controversy arose as soon as the conference began. Reference was made to the recent decision by Hubert Work, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to exclude women from an advisory group that would guide Hoover’s campaign efforts in the eastern United States. Sabin called the decision a “grave mistake” and stressed that “if women are to share responsibility for the success of this campaign then they should also share in its direction and confidences.” Sabin and others agreed to table the matter until they could present their case to Work, and moved on to strategies for getting women to the polls, adopting a plan perfected by Sabin in New York. Campaigning would be divided by congressional districts, with the greatest efforts devoted to areas classified as doubtful for Hoover. Sabin believed that votes for Hoover could be secured from Democrats, tilting the election in his favor. Applying the model to New York, Sabin explained that to take New York from its native son, Al Smith, party workers must increase the number of women registered to vote by 20 percent in every district. “It is our duty to see to it that women who have in the past stayed at home on Election Day shall go to the polls,” declared Sabin.14 Hubert Work, without a hint of irony for his refusal to involve women in running the larger campaign, expected a large turnout of women to favor Hoover, especially when they considered the “moral issue,” alluding to Al Smith’s anti-Prohibition stance.15 Apparently, women could help, so long as they followed rather than led.

  Many pundits believed women would, finally, after eight years of having the vote, turn out in greater numbers for the 1928 presidential election, probably determining the winner. Political parties, acknowledging the untapped power of women voters, attempted to win over the uninitiated or unaffiliated who were not entrenched like men were in their parties and beliefs. More significantly, the stark contrasts in candidates and issues between the two parties gave women something to care about more than in the previous two presidential elections. As a result, Eunice Fuller Barnard, a prominent journalist, saw politics invading the home: “The young mother, sewing beside her baby, may be listening at the same time to a candidate’s radio speech. The factory girl conning her tabloids [i.e., reading her magazines] is balancing the rival masculine charms of the nominees and, also, perhaps, their labor records. Grandmother and flapper are debating the Prohibition issue.” Barnard attributed the increased interest among women to “three factors which have been present in no previous election since women had the vote.” First, the diametric opposition of the candidates in personality and on key issues revealed “undercurrents of feeling . . . about the moral issues of Prohibition, of religious intolerance and of the tenement against the log cabin as a birthplace for a President. These are all questions about the conduct of human life, of the sort women are used to considering and which they feel themselves equally competent with men to judge.” Second, the rapid increase in the number of radio stations across the country, with ever-increasing range of broadcast, taking the “abstractness out of politics,” bringing to “women who would never cross their thresholds to go to a political meeting . . . politics in the raw, with all the heat of emotion and personality about it.” Such rawness came without the filter of reports from newspapers or husbands, allowing “the acute feminine ear” to hear a “candidate’s humor, his dullness, or his adenoids.” Lastly, Barnard saw the influence of more political education on women, the kind initiated by Sabin and the Women’s National Republican Club, bringing many more women into campaign work.

  Despite the very real possibility that women’s votes could determine the election, Barnard saw old ideas about women voters setting the tone of efforts by the parties to secure their favor. On Prohibition, Barnard quoted Hubert Work, who looked
“with confidence to women of all classes, irrespective of party affiliation, for support at the polls next November.” Barnard found, however, that within the Republican Party, “most prominent women favor repeal or modification,” citing a survey conducted by the Women’s National Republican Club that revealed a margin of eight to one favoring a change. On the Democratic side, Prohibitionist women favoring Al Smith looked past his wetness, considering other issues of greater importance. Barnard’s findings and suppositions challenged the masculine view of women as consistently and reliably dry, prompting a greater effort by male leadership in the parties to learn where they stood with women, according to Barnard. Each party tried to claim the greater allegiance and sympathy for women’s concerns: the Republicans asserted that Hoover’s experience as food administrator during the Great War provided him insight into issues of the homemaker, a designation he promised to list as an occupation in the federal census, and Democrats listed the legislation advanced by Al Smith promoting and protecting the rights of mothers, children, and labor.16 Left unaddressed by both parties was the dearth of female candidates for local and state offices in the previous eight years, and the Republican Party’s blatant refusal to allow women a role in planning campaign strategy for Hoover’s election. Again, women’s votes were in high demand, but not their opinions.

  Days after Barnard’s article appeared in the New York Times, the Republican Party announced its plan to put “a picture of Hoover in every kitchen,” professing its belief that women could win Hoover the election. The party recruited Mrs. Thomas Winter, former president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, to head the new effort, counting on her connections with those clubs to provide points of contact. They sent packets of postcards to club women, asking them to recruit one more woman to Hoover’s side, in a sort of chain-letter scheme.17 The Women’s National Republican Club followed suit, announcing the formation of a “flying squadron” of fifty members, including Sabin, available to speak in homes for women seeking information about the party and Hoover. Another 280 women volunteered to work in the club, making themselves available to answer questions and register voters.18

  James Wadsworth, the inveterate wet, jumped on Hoover’s bandwagon despite the candidate’s dry leanings. Wadsworth wanted the whole country wet, but he could not turn his back on his party, especially since he considered modifying the Volstead Act impossible if southern Democrats rode Al Smith’s coattails to Washington in a Hoover loss. “Doubtless,” Wadsworth offered, “there are some who wonder how a man who is utterly opposed to Prohibition can resist the temptation of voting for Governor Smith.” Wadsworth might have considered Smith’s views on modifying the Eighteenth Amen-dment if the governor’s plans included a proposal to allow state control of liquor with the attenuating side effect of establishing state-run systems for distributing and selling liquor. Where Smith would trade federal control for state control, Wadsworth would not, calling, as he had since January 1, 1920, for the outright repeal of the amendment, state and federal governments removing themselves from any involvement in the manufacture and sale of liquor. If loyalty to long-held beliefs were not enough, Wadsworth noted the distance between Smith’s proposal and southern voters, who would, in all likelihood, elect and reelect men to Congress who supported Prohibition. As Wadsworth saw it, “Governor Smith’s own party, controlled as it is, is absolutely against him,” his candidacy a “barren prospect.” No president, charged Wadsworth, could initiate changes to the Eighteenth Amendment or the Volstead Act; only Congress held that power. Until such time as Congress or the public would rise against Prohibition, Wadsworth, like so many others, would cast his lot with his party’s candidate, who supported Prohibition but promised an investigation to assess its successes, its failures, and possible adjustments—a glimmer of hope for anti-Prohibitionists who believed the investigation would reveal all of Prohibition’s flaws and create a realization that change was needed.19

  Sabin spoke frequently in September and October of 1928, advocating for Hoover’s election, spending every other free moment soliciting campaign donations and organizing women’s groups around New York to get out the vote.20 One of her more inventive endeavors, and, perhaps, a dig at party leaders who had left women outside the main campaign apparatus, was a conference and clambake, the first of its kind to include women, 130 in all, held at Bayberry Land. Sabin noted it had been the habit of men to host “stag” events for years and it seemed appropriate to do something similar for women.21 Only one man, W. Kingsland Macy, the Suffolk County chairman, spoke to the group; in his speech “women’s issues” took a backseat to the economy, foreign relations, and reorganizing the federal bureaucracy.22 Sabin’s efforts and the plans she created had their effect, according to the chairman of the Hoover-Curtis Campaign Committee (Charles Curtis was Hoover’s running mate), who claimed a new wave of women voters had “made up their minds to take a hand for the first time in electing a man who is keenly conscious of women’s needs and the needs of the home.”23

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  On September 6, 1928, Mabel Willebrandt wrote a letter to Hubert Work, chairman of the Republican National Committee, acknowledging the view of herself as a “storm center” swirling around Prohibition, an issue about which the Republican Party had not decided on its campaign tactics. Willebrandt wanted to help Hoover’s campaign, but refused “to be haggled over and thus contribute to the indecision and confusion of a hard campaign.”24 Associates passed along rumors and innuendo, giving the impression “in some quarters that I am an unwelcome speaker.” For those reasons, Willebrandt withdrew her name from the list of speakers available to campaign on behalf of Hoover and suggested that the “press of official duties” be offered as the reason she would not make appearances or speeches. Chairman Work denied her request, scheduling several speeches in Ohio, starting in two days.

  Willebrandt’s concerns proved prophetic. In her first speech, delivered before two thousand Methodists in Springfield, Ohio, a group reminiscent of those that had started and pushed the drive for Prohibition, she declared Al Smith a “wet” who would not enforce the Eighteenth Amendment and urged Methodist ministers to denounce Smith from the pulpit.25 The Republican National Committee, uncomfortable with Willebrandt’s strident position, provided the text of her speech to reporters, but made clear that “the publicity department does not attempt to censor the remarks of the speaker.” Hubert Work did not address Willebrandt’s comments, but issued a general rejoinder decrying all personal attacks made against the Democratic candidate, describing unspecified articles and letters as particularly “scurrilous.”26

  Two weeks later, at a conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Lorain, Ohio, Willebrandt charged Al Smith with “hiding behind his own church because he is afraid to come out and face the record that he has made as a champion of the liquor traffic.” Her statement served as an answer to a speech by Smith in which he suggested Willebrandt was anti-Catholic. Willebrandt refuted the accusation, defining Prohibition as a moral issue, “long espoused” by all churches. Smith’s assertions sought to turn that moral issue into political hay, hoping to divide the Republican Party between “drys” and “wets” to secure his election, but Willebrandt saw the New York governor’s attacks as building stronger opposition, noting that both parties and all denominations favored Prohibition. “Religion has nothing to do with my attack upon him,” she declared. Willebrandt regarded Smith as “the greatest force for disregard of the Prohibition laws in America,” thus earning her opposition as a defender of the law.27 A day later, in Warren, Ohio, Willebrandt attacked Smith for refusing to enforce Prohibition in New York and for his statements that the law could not be enforced under any circumstances. She commended Smith on his rise from humble origins “in the tenements of New York,” but charged him with using “the forces of Tammany [Hall, the oft-cited corrupt seat of Democratic power in the city] and the underworld as stepping stones, with the inevitable oblig
ations thereby imposed.”28

  After the speech, Willebrandt phoned George Akerson, Herbert Hoover’s private secretary, and told him the meeting “went over wonderfully,” with several Catholics congratulating her afterward. She felt that “religious intolerance was honorably and properly handled,” and hoped she had defused criticism of her past statements and tempered the national debate over Smith’s Catholicism, which many voters viewed negatively, believing his allegiance might lean more toward papal doctrine than the Constitution. All that mattered to Willebrandt, and all that she believed should matter to voters, was Smith’s opposition to Prohibition. She blamed “wets at Headquarters” for stirring the opposition to her.29

  And opposition there was. Walter Newton, head of the Republican Speakers Bureau in Chicago, had directed that all abstracts of her Lorain, Ohio, speech be recalled from Chicago newspapers before printing because Willebrandt had not been designated a “scheduled speaker” for the Republican National Committee.30 Behind the scenes, Harriet Taylor Upton, the political veteran, counseled Hoover, heard nothing in Willebrandt’s speeches as disparaging of Catholics, and was unable to see how any of her comments “might do harm.” On the other hand, Upton admitted, “I do not offer my opinion as the effect all over the country politically of Mrs. Willebrandt’s talks.”31 Pauline Sabin added her voice to the debate over Willebrandt’s statements, saying, “I would rather see the Republican Party go down to defeat in November than to win as a result of religious intolerance.”32

  Mounting criticism, primarily from Democrats and “wet” groups, prompted Willebrandt to slip into Chicago for a meeting with Newton. She sequestered herself in the Blackstone Hotel, leaving instructions with the desk clerk to block all calls and visitors, but intrepid reporters learned of her arrival and asked Newton if Wille-brandt had come to town at his “invitation.” Newton demurred. “No, not directly,” he said, “although I may have suggested that she drop in some time if there was opportunity.” The reporters pressed, “Have you called her on the carpet?” Dodging, Newton answered, “I’ve found that I never have much success calling the fair sex on the carpet,” adding, “If she wants to see me it is merely to talk over her engagements.” He dispelled speculation that Willebrandt had been removed from the Speaker’s Bureau’s roster, listing several dates in October when she would give speeches in southern states.33