Liberated Spirits

by Hugh Ambrose

  Hubbard wanted to help Willebrandt convict these men and suggested she designate him an investigator for the DOJ, so he could begin collecting evidence. As he was a former Prohibition agent, Hubbard’s direct testimony could not be ignored. He could be shown the door, but something had hit the mark. After he departed, Willebrandt got in touch with a friend at the Bureau of Investigations, a man she had recommended for the job of director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. She asked Hoover to open an investigation into the allegations, the last action Willebrandt would take in the trials and tribulations that had affected Seattle’s Prohibition office almost since the day Prohibition had begun.59

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  • • •

  Sensing the end was near, Willebrandt sought to set Prohibition on the right path, fixing those things she could and advocating for change where she could not. Pushing for the transfer of the Prohibition Bureau from the Department of Treasury to the Justice Department stood at the top of her list. Willebrandt listed numerous failures in enforcement, administratively and in the field, under Treasury’s watch, especially the alcohol permitting system, designed to provide alcohol for legitimate industrial uses, but so often corrupted. “One reason why,” she charged, “is because from the start there has been an absence of legal sureness in granting and revoking permits. Almost everything done is the result of compromises with permittees.” Treasury’s close relationship with representatives of permitted liquor operations, distillers she referred to as a “little cabinet” within the Internal Revenue Bureau, had only grown over the years, especially after the appointment of Dr. James Doran in 1926 as Prohibition commissioner. Doran had worked as a chemist for the distillers prior to Prohibition, leading him toward leniency in dealing with his old friends. “Small wonder, then, that the Treasury Department has never been able effectively to control the diversion of alcohol and other intoxicating liquors,” charged Willebrandt.60 She begged Mitchell to advance statutory changes to strengthen oversight of the permit process, stiffen penalties for violators of all offenses, and promote transfer of all enforcement functions to the Department of Justice.

  Mitchell took his time, but two weeks later he told Willebrandt he had become convinced of her argument to move everything into the Justice Department. At almost the same time, she learned President Hoover had decided against the move. She insisted upon an audience. She and Mitchell met in the president’s study on a Sunday afternoon, attempting to sway Hoover with charts and data for an hour and fifteen minutes. His counterproposal to provide more agents and attorneys for her office would be “spectacular but of little real value in conquering crime,” Willebrandt argued.

  Hoover would not be turned. Willebrandt believed that his recalcitrance was rooted in fear that the legislation needed to effect a transfer could not be passed in Congress. She left the meeting “discouraged,” tempted “to indulge the emotion ‘to make them sorry’ by resigning in such a way as to let the truth—cowardice plus the power of the alcohol trade—out,” but she resolved to pray on it first. The next day she awoke “with the confidence that I must resign and insist that they accept my resignation, not because I couldn’t have my way doing things but because such indefinite postponement of steps necessary for anyone to do the job scientifically and well and I simply couldn’t permit myself to do it less than that way after 8 years in public office and by pledge of last summer’s campaign.” Her soul relieved, she had “never felt so happy.” She talked to Mitchell immediately, who said, “It would be a blow to have me go and he wouldn’t give up but understood.” The next day, Willebrandt spoke to one of the president’s aides who relayed the message to Hoover, who reportedly said, “Of course if she can’t see that it’s right she must be allowed to go,” asking only that she delay her resignation until he could designate a replacement.

  Within a matter of days, Willebrandt accepted a sizable retainer to represent a fledgling air transport company, AVCO, and agreed to write articles for Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, which paid enough for her to buy furniture and law books for the private practice she would open upon leaving the Justice Department. The new work would provide her the stability she craved, erasing any doubts about resigning. Willebrandt got equal satisfaction knowing Prohibition would stay in the spotlight as speculation swirled around who would be her replacement when “they [Hoover and Congress] wanted just to forget it.”61 Her only regret was that she would not be “taking a hand in the greatest achievement of this agency,” the trial and conviction of Al Capone on tax evasion charges, an area of the law in which she had excelled.

  As Willebrandt cleared her desk of lingering cases in preparation for a life outside government service, the first of the defendants arrested in the speakeasy raids in New York City in the summer of 1928 came to trial. Both Helen Morgan and Texas Guinan, prominent “night club hostesses,” were quickly acquitted. In Morgan’s case, a juror told a reporter the jury felt Morgan “was only earning a living, that the law was wrong, and that no conviction was possible under such circumstances.” A reporter for the Washington Post suggested that distaste for the newly enacted Jones-Stalker, or Jones Five and Ten, Act, (its primary sponsor was Senator Wesley Jones of Washington) might have clouded the jury’s decisions.62 The law, enacted only a month earlier, raised potential penalties to ten thousand dollars and/or five years in prison for each violation of the Volstead Act, but allowed judges to use discretion in sentencing, determining if the violations in question constituted “casual or slight violations” or “habitual” abuses.63 The reporter also suggested a recent edict from Willebrandt reflected the handwriting on the wall. She had asked for stiffer penalties almost from her first day in office, but, fearful that acquittals would embolden new violations of the Volstead Act, directed her U.S. Attorneys to use discretion in applying the Jones Law, bringing charges under it only in cases where conviction was a certainty.64 Willebrandt had gotten the stick necessary to punish large-scale violations, but it had come with a distinction—casual versus habitual—that made prosecutors, judges, and juries uncomfortable with the weight of their responsibility and the repercussions of making that distinction. For all intents and purposes, the new law came with a bark, but little bite.

  Mabel Walker Willebrandt submitted her formal letter of resignation to President Herbert Hoover on May 26, 1929, after nearly eight years, three presidents, and three attorneys general; having brought down high-profile bootleggers and rumrunners—Roy Olm-stead, Willie Haar, George Remus, Al Capone—and overseeing the convictions of tens of thousands of smaller operators, but never having stemmed the tide of alcohol flowing through the country. She felt it possible to stem that flow, but had never been given the tools. Willebrandt reminded Hoover, “The solution of the problem of lawlessness is in your hands.”65 President Hoover accepted her resignation with “deep regret,” granting, “The position you have held has been one of the most difficult in the government and one which could not have been conducted with such distinguished success by one of less ability and moral courage.”66

  Chapter 12

  The day after announcing her resignation from the Republican National Committee, Pauline Sabin met with fifteen women to iron out their plan to end Prohibition; they needed to adopt a temporary name, elect officers, rent an office, outline a basic organization, and arrange for a meeting, a sort of national convention, in Chicago on May 28, 1929, barely a month away.1 Contacting the vast network of friends and political operatives she had cultivated over the past decade, Sabin got commitments from women in twenty-six states to establish state organizations and assurances from women in fifteen states that they would attend the Chicago meeting. Sabin and her friends, particularly in New York, began talking to their friends and friends of friends, drumming up additional support and publicity, generating pamphlets to spread the word of their aim: to “promote temperance and restore respect for law.”2 Almost as important to Sabin as ending Prohibition was letting men know that Ella Boole of the
WCTU did not speak for all women, a claim she frequently made and which had been repeated in the press many times in the previous eight years.

  At the meeting in Chicago, the women agreed on a name, the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Repeal (WONPR), a bit long, but reflective of their intent and origins. The group also adopted a structure, surely rooted in Sabin’s experiences on the Republican National Committee; they established a “skeleton organization” with a national advisory council composed of members from every state, with state advisory councils directing local efforts. Each state council would form committees on membership, publications, investigations (to compile statistics on Prohibition’s negative impact), and legislation (to attend hearings). The WONPR would assess no dues and all work would be conducted voluntarily. The WONPR presented no specific policies at the meeting, preferring to collect opinions and thoughts from its mushrooming membership, and reporting, “Women in all sections of the country are welcoming this opportunity to voice their protest and to help bring about the real temperance we all desire.” As if plucked from the WCTU or ASL literature of twenty years earlier, Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll declared, “We stand at the cross roads today where one sign points to anarchy and demoralization of the very fibre of our national character, the other sign points to bring about a change in the law and the recovery of those principles on which the nation was founded.”3

  Sabin understood “that we have a powerful group opposed to us in the W.C.T.U. and the Methodist and Baptist Churches. They have certainly put the fear of God into the Republican members” of the New York legislature and U.S. Congress.4

  Sabin’s organization catered to women exclusively, because she saw women’s concerns at the heart of Prohibition, their actions over a long period bringing the law to fruition. For that reason, “surely, it is the duty of every woman to face the question fearlessly and to lend her part in its final judgment.” Taking that position made her appear to stand in opposition to her long-standing pronouncements that women needed to shed themselves of women-only issues and work from within the established parties, but Sabin saw things differently. Prohibition was “a problem which the American people, regardless of party or creed, must solve,” she reasoned. The WONPR was not a new party; it would work to increase the number of politically active women regardless of their party affiliations. Sabin knew that repealing Prohibition could not be accomplished by one party, or by women standing alone. However, many women had never yet cast a vote and thus were uncommitted to parties, politicians, or other anti-Prohibition organizations, like Charles Sabin’s AAPA, all of which had complicated relationships with one another and with public perception. The WONPR could step into the debate without baggage. “Temperance,” which had been the battle cry of the Prohibitionists, “must come from within,” charged Sabin, and the extreme of abstinence demanded by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act could not be compelled of people. Prominent among her critics was the WCTU, which of course had “Temperance” in its name rather than “Prohibition”; Sabin found it hypocritical of the organization to ignore the obvious contradiction of legislators voting dry but allowing themselves a drink. She found it difficult “to understand the frame of mind and the elasticity of conscience which can condone such obvious dissimulation.” Even if Prohibition could be enforced, at a great cost, Sabin said she would still oppose the law because it was “contrary to the spirit of our fundamental Constitution.”5

  The WONPR’s earliest networking activities spread from women Sabin had known in the Republican Party to the women’s auxiliary branch of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), to which Charles Sabin had belonged since its inception in 1918. Other members of the AAPA among Pauline Sabin’s circle of friends and political allies included Nicholas Murray Butler and James Wadsworth. The AAPA opposed the Eighteenth Amendment because it damaged the economy; the alcohol tax had brought in about 30 to 40 percent of all federal tax revenue prior to the amendment’s enactment, and personal income tax rates were raised to compensate for the lost revenue.

  Much of the public, as a result, viewed the AAPA as a group of rich men devoted to lowering their taxes rather than to personal liberty or concerns about increased crime and alcoholism rates. The AAPA had made little progress, and its membership fluctuated wildly, from an alleged high of 770,000 in 1926 to a low of 11,000 in January 1929, after the group’s president purged the membership roll of anyone who had made little or no financial contribution.6 Charles Sabin’s involvement with the AAPA gave Pauline a window into its activities, informing many of her decisions on the WONPR’s organization and solidifying her determination to be inclusive of women from all backgrounds and every section of the country, encouraging local and state organizations in grassroots efforts, forgoing any required dues, making a far more democratic organization than the AAPA. Still, Pauline saw value in maintaining an association between the WONPR and the AAPA, and she sent her group’s declaration of principles and plan of organization to the AAPA leadership for comment. The AAPA’s leadership had one overarching recommendation, namely that the WONPR provide clear definitions of the organization’s intent and policies so that prospective members would be left with no confusion about what they were supporting: full and complete repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.7

  Congress and Prohibitionist groups tried to assert a strong connection between the WONPR and the AAPA, citing the men’s group’s provision of an office and secretary to the WONPR when they began in 1929. But the WONPR’s rapid expansion forced them into bigger offices and a larger staff, which they arranged without AAPA involvement.8 Years later, Pauline Sabin was asked about a connection, specifically whether the AAPA provided any funding to the WONPR, but she refused to give an answer, saying financial matters were private and had long since passed being of interest.9 Regardless of any behind-the-scenes association, Sabin and the WONPR set their own agenda, secured new members at a rate never experienced by the AAPA, and extended their arguments deep into the middle section of the country, something never accomplished by their male counterparts.

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  • • •

  Mabel Willebrandt’s exit from office came so unexpectedly that an article written by her and published in the July 1929 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal still listed her as the assistant attorney general. She had prepared the article, “Smart Washington After Six O’Clock,” before resigning, never hinting in the piece that she would leave. In it Willebrandt discussed the changing social scene as the nation’s capital became increasingly devoid of alcohol, “the ribaldry of the cocktail shaker, the exchange of home-brew recipes and the florid eagerness for false stimulation” fading in inverse proportion to the ascendancy of Herbert Hoover and his strong moral influence. She allowed a glimpse into her private life, a mystery for much of the eight years she served in Washington, with stories of dinners hosted by Supreme Court justices and cabinet secretaries, where intellectual discourse proved more stimulating than alcohol, the absence of liquor at a party “a social achievement” establishing a “reputation for successful entertainment without cocktail, highball or liquors.” Willebrandt declared, “There is no such thing any more, if indeed society ever achieved it, as graceful drinking.” She knew of congressional get-togethers in the past where liquor was proudly served, but she doubted the practice continued. The wealthy and powerful had begun to see themselves as contributing to the crime and corruption necessary to bring liquor to their tables, realizing, “It may have been clever and smart to serve a thing forbidden and costly if the dregs in the glass were not so repulsive and disillusioning.”10

  A month later, “The Inside of Prohibition,” a series of twenty-one articles written by Willebrandt, began appearing in newspapers across the country, in which the former assistant attorney general addressed the question that had dogged her since she took office in 1921: were the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act enforceable? She would “not discuss the wisdom of adopting Proh
ibition as national policy,” leaving others to determine the fate of the amendment; when “people are sure whether or not we can actually have Prohibition enforcement, then they will decide whether or not there shall continue to be a Prohibition amendment and Prohibition laws.”11 Throughout the series, Willebrandt offered specific instances—arrests, trials, conversations—where state and federal agencies failed to fully enforce Prohibition, either for corruption, ineptitude, or lack of effort. In making that argument, she returned to familiar themes. “Hundreds” of Prohibition Unit agents appointed through “political pull” put enforcement in charge of men “as devoid of honesty and integrity as the bootlegging fraternity.”12 During her tenure, she saw no change in the problem of corrupt agents, and she charged that the “government is committing a crime against the public generally when it pins the badge of police authority on and hands a gun to a man of uncertain character, limited intelligence or without giving systematic training for the performance of duties that involve the rights and possibly the lives of citizens.”13 The situation had improved slightly, she admitted, after 1927 when Prohibition Unit agents were put under civil service regulations, but problems at the administrative level, an area still governed by political appointments, had continued to hamper her efforts to establish training requirements for all agents. She charged Lincoln Andrews, the former assistant treasury secretary in charge of the Prohibition Unit from April 1925 until July 1927, with putting “in office men who were temperamentally and in every other way unfitted for the task to which he assigned them,” adding, “It will take many a day for law enforcement to recover from the setback it suffered under General Lincoln Andrews.”14 Corrupt or incompetent leadership, within the Prohibition Unit, the Department of Treasury, and Congress, made it easier to divert alcohol manufactured legitimately under permit to illegal distributors. Such leaders placed no restrictions on the number of permits that could be issued, the volume of alcohol that could be produced under permit, or the businesses that could purchase alcohol. Even when Prohibition agents suspected a purchaser might be involved in illegal trafficking of spirits, they had no legal authority to inspect the alcohol in question or inquire of its uses. Willebrandt believed these diversions to be the single greatest source of illegal alcohol in the country.15