Liberated Spirits
Page 27
After additional witnesses impugned the reputation of Hubbard, it appeared the defense would move to its summation, but Hilen had one more trick up his sleeve. He called Senator Wesley Jones to the stand, causing a clamor from the crowd. Although the senator’s prominence had been tarnished at the recent Republican state convention, where participants had openly mocked him for his shifting stance on Prohibition, he still held the respect of most people in the state and certainly the court’s curiosity. The prosecution wanted to know his role in the hiring of Hubbard as an undercover agent. “My advice was sought,” Jones recalled, and “I was asked to see if it could be done.” Jones had seen the value in having a man inside the Olmstead organization, though Lyle and Whitney had told him they “didn’t know if they could depend on Hubbard, but they thought they could and he couldn’t do any harm anyway.” Jones testified that he went to see Roy Haynes, Prohibition commissioner at the time, but “I can’t say that I recommended the appointment”; he had merely explained the request and “left it up to Haynes,” a transparently disingenuous claim. How could he have gone to the commissioner’s office and explained the plan without Haynes concluding this was an idea the senator endorsed?59 Jones’ support of the men he’d chosen to run federal Prohibition enforcement but disavowal of their hiring of Al Hubbard left most Seattleites questioning either the senator’s judgment in tapping Whitney and Lyle or his involvement with Hubbard, a predicament epitomizing the prosecution’s assertions of ineptitude, confusion, and duplicity among Seattle’s federal Prohibition forces.
Closing statements began with the prosecution’s lead attorney, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Salter, declaring, “It was impossible to entertain the theory that Hubbard could have hoodwinked either man [Roy Olmstead or William Whitney] and that it was therefore apparent that an alliance had existed between Olmstead and the law-enforcement officers.” Hubbard was a “callow youth,” Olmstead a “master mind of bootleggers,” William Whitney an “astute attorney.” Salter reminded the court of the “undisputed evidence that vast quantities of liquor had been brought into Seattle during the period of the conspiracy . . . [many of the] circumstances . . . admitted by the defendants themselves . . . ,” but he offered no specific facts or documentary evidence, relying on the “he said, she said” litany of witness testimony.60 Charles Moriarty, another defense attorney, reminded the jury of the contradictions strewn about by the prosecution’s witnesses, leaving a trail of so-called evidence so convoluted that finding a conspiracy amidst the tangle would be impossible.61 Moriarty seized upon a key point conceded by the prosecution: Roy Olmstead, the King of the Bootleggers, currently resided in a cell at the McNeil Island penitentiary.62 The defendants had convicted Olmstead in one of the most significant cases in Prohibition history and had indicted him twice more, obtaining a second conviction—hard facts to reconcile with the prosecution’s insistence that Whitney and Lyle conspired with the man they sent to prison. Moriarty believed Whitney and Lyle had become “victims” of anti-Prohibition sentiments sweeping the city of Seattle, the state of Washington, and the entire country, which was increasingly wet and intolerant of the rigid law enforcement practiced by the Prohibition Unit in Seattle.63 The defense got a little extra help when the judge instructed the jury to carefully weigh the testimony of convicts, ex-convicts, coconspirators, and those admitting previous false testimony. Judge Norcross took particular aim at “witnesses for the government [who] admittedly were co-conspirators,” their testimony “a polluted source to be viewed with suspicion.”64 After only a few hours, the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” for all defendants, ending the last piece of business begun by Mabel Willebrandt before her departure from government service.
Despite his exoneration, Whitney would not return to work for the Prohibition Unit. The trial had revealed all his faults—poor judgment, rash decision-making, distrust of his superiors—which when combined with his lack of remorse left the commissioner of Prohibition no alternative but to fire him.65 Lyle, Whitney’s boss in name only, was seen as subordinate to Whitney and was spared, the government offering him a position as a liquor permit inspector.66 Always seeking the last word, Whitney opined that his banishment came because “perhaps I have taken this work too seriously,” and the absence of serious people, he predicted, would prove the undoing of Prohibition.67
Chapter 13
Mrs. James Doran, whose husband had served as commissioner of Prohibition, assembled a recipe book for nonalcoholic drinks, including one from Mabel Willebrandt. Her recipe, Portia’s Punch, included one small bottle of red Concord “California pure concentrated grape juice,” two bottles of ginger ale, one thinly sliced lemon, and a half cup of chopped mint leaves.1 Willebrandt submitted the recipe just after accepting a job with Fruit Industries, representing California grape growers.2 Fruit Industries hoped that retaining the former assistant attorney general might improve an awkward relationship with the federal government, which suspected the company of playing both sides of the Prohibition fence. Many customers used the company’s concentrates to ferment wine, drawing the ire of “gangsters,” who had threatened to disrupt distribution of the juices. The company asked the government for protection of its salesmen and distributors, claiming it had no control over the actions of its customers.3 Willebrandt’s decision to work for Fruit Industries had been fueled by her desire to support California grape growers who had suffered under the weight of drought and the expanding economic depression, but it smacked of hypocrisy to many in the Prohibition camp.
The Anti-Saloon League offered Willebrandt an opportunity to explain her seemingly contradictory position—working for an alleged winemaker while claiming to support the Eighteenth Amendment—at a meeting attended by many prominent in the Prohibition camp. To sustained applause from the 450 in attendance, Willebrandt professed her support for Prohibition, saying that she saw “an irresistible upward reaching, a spiritual flame, that can’t be argued with” from the American people, among whom she saw “no weakening” of support for the Eighteenth Amendment.4 She did not mention the alleged illegal use of her client’s product to make drinkable, intoxicating beverages.
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The congressional elections of 1930 brought a flip in the balance of power between wets and drys, opening the door to the day when wets would gain the majority necessary to approve legislation allowing state legislatures to reconsider the Eighteenth Amendment. In the House of Representatives, five states—Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington—with long histories of favoring Prohibition elected candidates favoring repeal. The electorate in three states—Illinois, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island—stated their preference for repeal in referendums on the issue and Massachusetts overturned its state enforcement, or “Baby Volstead,” law, bringing the number of states refusing to enforce Prohibition to eight, representing 25 percent of the total U.S. population. In another eighteen states, the two major parties inserted repeal planks in their platforms. New York’s legislature had gone so far as to pass a resolution stating their desire for the U.S. Congress to call state conventions for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, the position advocated by the WONPR.
Pauline Sabin resigned from the Women’s National Republican Club in November 1930, apparently after the club’s membership voted to support the continuance of Prohibition. She had been much less active in the club’s business after her resignation as president in 1925, but, as she was a founding member, her influence and the cachet of her name were still considerable. The executive committee suggested that Henrietta Livermore, another founding member and the current president, contact Sabin to ask if she truly intended to resign from the club.5 Livermore must have convinced Sabin to remain a member, because three years later she submitted another letter of resignation.6 There was no changing her mind the second time.
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At the WONPR’s second annual convention, held at t
he Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in April 1931, representatives from thirty-one states met to hear of their organization’s progress and the plans going forward. Sabin characterized the “growth of the sentiment” for repeal as “so inspiring, so convincing, that it sounds more like a song of triumph than the plain and simple annals of an organization.” She charted that progress in surging membership, the increased number of avowed wets in Congress, the refusal of many states to expend funds on Prohibition enforcement, and the Wickersham Commission’s near “complete indictment of the workings of the Eighteenth Amendment.” Behind it all, Sabin saw the WONPR’s insistence that candidates state their views on Prohibition and directing its membership to vote only for those candidates supporting reform, regardless of party affiliation. Moving forward, the organization would enlist “an army of women so great that its backing will give courage to the most weak-kneed and hypocritical Congressman to vote as he drinks,” saying, “Women will prove to them that the ballots of an aroused people are irresistible in the achievement of a fundamental project.”7 The WONPR endorsed all efforts to bring repeal, but balked at any plans for modification of Prohibition that might “leave the matter still in the hands of Congress and therefore liable to be a football in successive political campaigns.” The organization wanted state legislatures to vote on repeal and they wanted the president and Congress to make that happen. The convention’s attendees voted unanimously to send its resolutions to the president, leaders of Congress, and leaders of each party.8
Sabin had a quiet summer in terms of WONPR activities. Perhaps she was simply recuperating from surgery she underwent for an ear infection two weeks after the convention; certainly she was developing strategies for the big push that would come in 1932.
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On May 12, 1931, Roy Olmstead, dapper as ever in a gray suit and tan overcoat, stepped from the McNeil Island launch onto solid ground, vowing never to return to the prison from which he had just been released, his sentence served in full, minus six months for good behavior. He didn’t know what he would do, but vowed he would not return to bootlegging. He bore no grudges, relishing the chance “to do what I like.”9 Elsie met him at the dock and the two faded into the crowd and obscurity, though the Supreme Court’s ruling in his case, in which they approved wiretapping over privacy rights, would prove a rallying cry in the anti-Prohibition crusade.
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The WONPR represented a different kind of lobby, reported Vanity Fair in August 1931, and it was disorienting to congressmen comfortable with groups seeking favors for specific industries, labor interests, or those hoping to force their beliefs on other people. The WONPR, by contrast, wanted nothing for itself and did not advocate a moral agenda; the “Sabines”* wanted merely “to correct a nauseating abuse of political authority . . . by ceasing to dragoon the public in the interest of a law which nobody loves.” Ebbing membership in the WCTU and ASL, combined with economic misfortune, benefited the Sabines, “beautiful, cultured, and practical to their finger-tips,” who approached congressmen with a single question—Where did they stand on Prohibition?—treating a dry “as a future friend” and a wet “as a valued ally.” When votes arose on Prohibition-related measures, the Sabines mobilized their membership, sending telegrams to allies and prodding “future friends.” They also instituted a “social lobby,” hosting receptions, teas, and dinners for the wives of congressmen, many of whom were anxious to fit in with Washington society. “Dirty work,” Vanity Fair called such efforts by “young, pretty and intelligent women . . . to employ their wiles to ingratiate themselves.”
Such descriptions sound sexist today and probably offended the WONPR’s leaders at the time, even though the magazine acknowledged the political acumen of their approach: nonconfrontational, inviting, and entirely effective. With the WONPR leading the charge for repeal, Vanity Fair believed the movement in “capable hands,” a “cultured, charming and temperate body of women, who do not propose to let the country be ruined or their children debauched in the name of American womanhood.”10 The “Sabines” were usurping the WCTU claim that they represented women.
Testing the political deftness portrayed in Vanity Fair, the WONPR sent a letter to each congressman and senator in September 1931 asking if he would vote in favor of a bill to send the question of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment to state conventions, where the people would decide its fate. The organization did not ask whether he opposed or favored Prohibition, but only whether he would per-mit the people of the country to vote on whether the amend- ment should be sustained or repealed.11 Sabin announced the early results on December 1: nearly 60 percent of the respondents favored submitting a repeal referendum to the states. Of 251 respondents (almost half the House and Senate membership), 149 supported the proposal for submission, 49 opposed, and 53 refused to commit either way.12 Sabin announced at a meeting of the WONPR’s Executive Committee the votes of each congressman, identifying those opposed to any reconsideration of the Eighteenth Amendment and placing a target upon them in the 1932 elections, a tactic borrowed from the Prohibitionist women of yesteryear.13
As the anti-Prohibition tide rose, moderate politicians, those most likely wet in orientation but unwilling to challenge their constituencies, offered various schemes to modify the Volstead Act to allow manufacture and sale of “light” wine and beer containing less than 3 percent alcohol. Sabin and the WONPR opposed any modification, believing it “disastrous for us to think for a moment that we have thereby effected a real and lasting reform of [the] Prohibition problem.” “National Prohibition will continue to plague, disorganize and demoralize the country as long as it remains in the Constitution,” declared Sabin.14 The organization would accept nothing less than full repeal, the uncompromising simplicity of that position gaining steam. By the end of 1931, after only eighteen months of existence, the WONPR had recruited four hundred thousand women to their cause, more than the WCTU could claim at any time in its fifty years of existence. The WONPR’s membership included women from all forty-eight states, representing all manner of professional experiences and women classifying themselves simply as housewives, dispelling the “silly slander that the movement for Prohibition Reform is a leisure-class movement, maintained chiefly by ‘smart’ or fashionable women.”15
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In November 1931, a federal court in Kansas City ruled that the sale of grapes, grape juice, or grape concentrate that could be fermented constituted a crime under the Volstead Act. Specifically, the court ruled against sales to consumers in their homes, where the process of fermentation was described and suppliers such as Fruit Industries provided bottling services after the fermentation period had passed. Fruit Industries immediately announced it would no longer sell its products door-to-door, would offer them only in grocery stores with-out instructions or mention of fermentation on the labels.16 Much as Mabel Willebrandt had avoided the question of whether her employer operated as a de facto bootlegger, Fruit Industries sidestepped the issue, asserting that their salesmen had done nothing more than provide advice and that they could not control the ultimate use of their product. Willebrandt made no statements on the ruling.
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Pauline Sabin knew supporters of repeal resided in even the driest states, their voices and votes buried beneath a vocal minority declaring the supremacy of abstinence over temperance. In November 1931, the WONPR had established an Anti-Prohibition Institute and an associated School of Public Speaking. The institute sought to educate the organization’s members and other interested parties in the “fundamental arguments” for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the return of liquor control to the individual states. A series of lectures would be presented twice a month through March of 1932. The School of Public Speaking was organized to develop additional speakers to carry the repeal movement, using the information acquired from the Anti-Pr
ohibition Institute lectures, to clubs and organizations around the country.17
Seeking to expose the fallacy of a unified dry front, Sabin traveled to so-called dry states to gauge the level of support for repeal. In January 1932, she and Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll, the WONPR’s vice chairperson, traveled to Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Ohio, the birthplace of the temperance and Prohibition movements. Sabin’s belief proved prophetic a few months later, when the newly formed Dayton, Ohio, WONPR chapter registered twenty thousand members in two weeks.18
Holding to the same theme of spreading the word, and making the WONPR a truly national organization, Sabin would need to attract supporters in the Deep South, a region known for its conservative values, its disdain for anything originating up north, and its devotion to the Democratic Party. She had some familiarity with the region, though, having spent considerable time in South Carolina at the Sabins’ winter retreat, the Oaks, located a short distance from Charleston. Sabin called for a meeting of the executive committee of the WONPR in Charleston to formulate a plan to gain traction in the South. Representatives from twenty-six states, including women from several southern states, attended the Charleston meetings, which produced a resolution disputing old arguments by dry leaders that twelve million members of women’s organizations endorsed Prohibition, having drawn that number from the combined membership of groups comprising the Federated Women’s Clubs. The WONPR countered that many anti-Prohibition women belonged to those clubs and their voices were lost in such false statements. Hoping to disabuse critics branding the WONPR as a group of society ladies, Sabin presented results of a survey of the organization’s membership revealing that 37 percent identified as housewives, 19 percent as clerical workers, and 15 percent as industrial workers.19 From Charleston, Sabin and five WONPR officers traveled to Atlanta, where the Georgia WONPR chapter sponsored a luncheon for Sabin, and later an evening of speakers, in the packed ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel, which even the mayor attended.20