Drink

by Iain Gately

  Moreover, Prohibition had been a key issue in the 1916 presidential elections. The ASL had become the best-organized lobbying machine in the United States. Its influence was such that at the eve of the elections it was indifferent as to which party won: Whatever the color of the next administration, Congress would be packed with ASL supporters. Before the results were announced, in the words of Wayne Wheeler, the svengali of the ASL, “the dry workers throughout the country were celebrating our victory. We knew that the Constitutional Amendment would be submitted to the states by the Congress just elected.”

  When, in 1917, the issue of Prohibition had been threatened to be overshadowed by the entry of the United States into World War I, the ASL had turned the conflict to its advantage. The drain on resources created by alcoholic beverages was exaggerated in the most lurid language by ASL propagandists: “Brewery products fill refrigerator cars, while potatoes rot for lack of transportation, bankrupting families and starving cities. The coal that they consume would keep the railways open and the factories running.” Abstinence, meanwhile, was promoted as the key to victory over the beer-swilling Germans: “Prohibition is the infallible submarine chaser we must launch by thousands. The water-wagon is the tank that can level every Prussian trench. . . . Sobriety is the bomb that will blow kaiserism to kingdom come.”

  The first wartime legislation to be used as a Trojan horse for Prohibition was the 1917 Food Control Act, whose aim was to husband the country’s resources for the war effort. Despite the fact that America was in no danger of famine, the drys ensured that the conversion of food into distilled liquors was forbidden by the act—a de facto prohibition on spirits. The Food Control Act further allowed the president, at his discretion, “to limit or prohibit the manufacture of beer or wine as he saw fit.” In the event, President Wilson decided to introduce a British-style restriction on American brewers in December 1917. The quantity of grain they were allowed for brewing was cut by 30 percent, and a legal maximum strength for beer was fixed at 2.75 ABV. In 1918, further austerity measures and restrictions were introduced via the Food Stimulation Act, which proscribed the use of grain for brewing until the war had ended and demobilization had been completed.

  Although the brewers tried to fight back, they were tainted by their German heritage, which they had done so much to promote before the war. After 1917 they were forced to keep their heads below the parapet, as the American wartime press demonized Germany and its culture. Things Teutonic were boycotted or renamed—sauerkraut, for instance, became “liberty cabbage.” The drys were quick to identify this weakness and exploit it. In addition to linking beer drinking and kaiser culture in ASL propaganda, Wheeler wrote to the federal custodian of alien property to alert him to the menace posed to America by traitors in its midst.

  Dear Mr. Palmer:

  I am informed that there are a number of breweries in this country which are owned in part by alien enemies. It is reported to me that the Anheuser-Busch Company and some of the Milwaukee Companies are largely controlled by alien Germans. . . . Have you made any investigation?

  Palmer duly investigated and concluded that the brewing companies, while American owned, had done their best to encourage kaiserism: It was “around the sangerfests and sangerbunds and organizations of that kind, generally financed by the rich brewers, that the young Germans who come to America are taught to remember, first, the fatherland, and second, America.”

  At the same time as they were denying Americans access to spirits via food control legislation, and attacking brewers in the name of patriotism, the drys kept working on their principal objective—Prohibition via constitutional amendment. In August 1917 a bill was introduced to the Senate, where the prevailing mood was favorable. No one knew how long the war might last, and a measure that could only increase the fighting efficiency of the nation merited careful attention. Moreover, many senators felt the bill would “not really enact prohibition, but merely [submit] it to the states,” and that the states would never all go dry. Sensing that they were in a minority, and that the bill would be passed, wet politicians tabled an amendment that set a time limit of seven years for individual states to ratify the bill, which they believed would be insufficient for the required three-quarters majority to do so, and which therefore would prevent it from becoming law. The vote was taken, and the amendment adopted. The following December the bill was put to Congress, where it was approved by 282 votes to 128. The Washington Times insinuated that this apparently healthy majority reflected fear rather than a genuine interest in Prohibition: “Every Congressman knows that if the ballot on the constitutional amendment were a secret ballot, making it impossible for the Anti-Saloon League bosses to punish disobedience, the amendment would not pass.” To the consternation of the wets, the amendment was ratified by thirty-six states within fourteen months, followed quickly by nine more,63 and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States became law—America was officially dry.

  Like medieval sumptuary laws, and unlike prior amendments to the Constitution, the Eighteenth was a proscriptive piece of legislation, which took away rights rather than guaranteed them. The restrictions it introduced had to be implemented, and the Volstead Bill, named after its sponsor, Andrew Joseph Volstead of Minnesota, and drafted by Wayne Wheeler, set out the mechanics of enforcement. Its sponsor, although partial to an occasional drink, was a disciplinarian at heart who believed “law regulates morality, law has regulated humanity since the Ten Commandments,” and hence had no qualms in attaching his name to what he considered to be a useful exercise in social engineering. The bill was debated at length in Congress and subjected to a string of amendments. President Wilson vetoed it in its final form for technical reasons, but the House and the Senate overrode him and the Volstead Act was adopted in October 1919.

  It was prima facie a Draconian piece of legislation: Violators of its provisions might be punished with substantial fines, prison terms, and confiscation of their property; and infringements were to be investigated by a force of fifteen hundred agents, who were endowed with intrusive powers of search and seizure. It was also horribly flawed: Two classes of Americans—medical patients and religious communicants— were still allowed to purchase alcohol for pleasure. The distillation of alcohol for industrial purposes was also exempted, as was home brewing and cider making, for the Volstead Act envisaged a damp, not dry, America. It was no crime under its provisions to drink alcohol—people were permitted to consume their pre-Prohibition stocks and any other booze they might come across. Its potential for confusion was immense and its oppressive nature was bound to be resented. Congressman Crago of Pennsylvania predicted, while the act was being debated, that it would result in “a discontent and disregard for law in this country beyond anything we have ever witnessed before.” He was right.

  The start of Prohibition, in January 1920, was marked by Americans in a variety of ways, some auspicious, others less so. The drys were jubilant. Church bells rang out to commemorate victory; Billy Sunday, the celebrity dry evangelist, staged a mock funeral for John Barleycorn in Norfolk, Virginia. “The reign of tears is over,” he claimed. “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.” Some communities really believed that all crime was alcohol-inspired and sold off their jails. The wets, in contrast, were pragmatic, or opportunistic. The Yale Club laid down a sufficient stock of wine to last for fourteen years; and within a minute of the Volstead Act coming into effect six armed bandits robbed two railroad cars in Chicago of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey intended for medical use. Before the law was twenty-four hours old, two similar robberies had occurred in the same city—a foretaste of the crime wave to come.

  Since it was not an offense to drink per se, and the act had not—as if by magic—dried up the thirst of the country’s wets, anyone willing to take the risk of supplying them with hooch could be certain of handsome rewards. Demand was vibr
ant: After all, once Americans had liquor in their clutches they could drink it with impunity at home. The Volstead Act created its own species of criminal—the bootlegger—a smuggler ready to disobey the Constitution in order to sell alcohol to his or her countrymen. The subcategory who specialized in international trade, known as rum-runners, were the most glamorous class of bootleggers, especially those who ran in their goods by water—over the warm blue Caribbean, the steel-gray St. Lawrence, across the Gulf of Mexico, and through Pacific swells. America’s neighbors took advantage of their activity. The Bermudas, and various small Caribbean islands, developed statistically prodigious thirsts; Canadian provinces quickly repealed their own Prohibition laws in order to profit from tax revenues on liquor sales south.

  The prince of the rum runners, whose surname has entered the language as a byword for quality, was William S. McCoy. An ex- merchant seaman, McCoy was working as a yacht builder in Florida at the outbreak of Prohibition. Sensing the opportunities for gain, he purchased an old fishing schooner, the Henry L. Marshall, registered her in the Bahamas under the British flag, loaded her holds with scotch, and set sail for the Georgia coast. He dropped anchor in St. Catherine’s Sound and disposed of his cargo to a prearranged buyer for a price that covered the cost of his boat. Over the next three years, McCoy expanded his fleet, acquiring the J. B. Young, The M. M. Gardener, and his favorite, the schooner Arethusa. After the loss of his original boat, which was taken by the U.S. Coast Guard while under the command of a subordinate, he did all his business from international waters, i.e., more than three miles offshore. His customers would motor, row, or sail out to him to make their purchases: “They would come wobbling and bouncing out in their little open craft, one man steering, the other pumping for dear life, and swing in under my schooner’s lee. Usually it was too rough to tie up. Four of us would hold the skiff away from our side with oars and boat hooks, and we would throw the . . . liquor out to the crew. The buyer would toss a roll of bills to me. ‘Twelve thousand dollars for two hundred cases, Bill,’ he would shout. . . . My reputation and the white form of the Arethusa riding on the Row was all the advertisement I needed.” McCoy never watered his liquor and never dealt with gangsters, hence his reputation for probity and the birth of the term the real McCoy for an article of genuine quality. In 1924 he was captured aboard the Arethusa by the Coast Guard, tried for violations of the Volstead Act, and spent eight months in jail. Upon release he retired from rum-running and passed the remainder of his life as a real estate investor in Miami. The adventures of McCoy and his fellow rumrunners captured the imagination of the public to the extent that Outlook magazine commented in 1924 that prohibition was satisfying “three tremendous popular passions . . . the passion of the prohibitionists for law, the passion of the drinking classes for drink, and the passion of the largest and best organized smuggling trade that has ever existed for money.”

  While the smuggling trade was significant, for the first few years of Prohibition the largest source of bootlegged hooch was industrial alcohol. Production of this useful chemical increased several fold, despite the reduced need for cordite in peacetime. Indeed, by 1926, American industry was consuming 150 million proof gallons of it annually,of which perhaps a third was diverted to the beverage market. As a precaution against such an eventuality, the Volstead Act had required that industrial alcohol be denatured, i.e., adulterated with chemicals that made it unpleasant or impossible to drink. However, the bootleggers soon learned how to remove, neutralize, or dilute denaturants, and their customers were prepared to put up with any traces that remained. Each gallon of industrial alcohol produced three gallons of mock whiskey, gin, or brandy, so that the overall volume of the illicit market equaled that of legal production prior to Prohibition.

  The second largest domestic source of bootlegged booze was moonshine, i.e., spirits from clandestine stills. Moonshine had a long and honorable connection with the Appalachian Mountain region, where it had been made in significant quantities since the nineteenth century, and where craft distilleries rose to the occasion when demand leapt in 1920. The scale of the expansion of the moonshine industry can be gauged from the statistics of the Prohibition Bureau: In 1921 a total of 95,933 illicit stills were seized; in 1925 the figure was 172,537, and by 1930 it was 282,122. Moonshine could be rough stuff. Quality was sacrificed to quantity once the Volstead Act came into force. Distillers could not take the risk of aging their product to improve its flavor, so they added dead rats and rotten meat to it to achieve the same effect. The average glass of moonshine was on a par with gin-craze gin, and its pet names—Panther and Goat whiskey, Jackass brandy, Yack Yack bourbon—all suggesting a coarse strength, were similar in spirit to those that had emerged in eighteenth-century England. Moonshine and imperfectly renatured industrial alcohol poisoned thousands of Americans. Their deaths were given lurid coverage by the press, but instead, as the drys had hoped, of evoking disgust among readers, they attracted sympathy: It was wrong that people should have to risk their lives for a drink. Fortunately, the quality of moonshine improved with the increased availability of corn sugar, the production of which (a rare example of Prohibition benefiting the white economy) expanded sixfold between 1921 and 1929.

  Both moonshine and industrial alcohol were often repackaged prior to sale. Since the real McCoy commanded higher prices than a quart of Jackass brandy, Appalachian hooch was often labeled as imported whiskey, rum, brandy, or gin. It was, after all, a sellers’ market, and powers of discrimination were on the wane. The process of making such delights was described by a Prohibition administrator in Pittsburgh to a Senate subcommittee in 1926: “You sent in an order for gin, and they would open a spigot on this big tank, run out so much alcohol, and so much water, and so much flavoring extract and coloring fluid, and throw that into the gin. If you wanted a case of scotch, open the same spigot, run the recovered denatured alcohol into a container in whatever quantity they wanted, the addition of water, a few drops of creosote or essence of Scotch, and a little caramel, and it would come to the bench for scotch.”

  The wholesale trade in beverage alcohol catered not only to the home consumer but also to a thriving retail trade. The saloon was dead, long live the speakeasy! Americans did not wish to bid farewell to sociable drinking, and as saloons across the country closed, or struggled on as soda fountains, a multitude of illegal drinking places sprang up as substitutes. Speakeasies ranged from single rooms in tenement dwellings to palatial institutions equipped with restaurants, dance floors, and jazz bands. In New York, for example, illegal drinking establishments such as the Cotton Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, and 21 were the first true nightclubs the city had seen, offering food, drink, dancing, and entertainment to their clientele. They were patronized not only by the wealthy and dissipated but also by Broad-way stars and by New York’s intelligentsia, who were dubbed “gintellectuals” by the pioneer of American celebrity journalism, Walter Winchell. Speakeasies were staple fodder for the New York press, which reported who had been spotted where in its gossip columns, and noted the police raids on various joints in its crime pages. Collectively, they formed a never-ending carnival, which people might either join in or look on as observers through the eyes of their favorite columnists. Upton Sinclair, novelist, dry, and activist, suggested that they had dragged Bacchanalia into the twentieth century and that “Wine, Women, and Song” had been “modernized” into “gin, janes, and jazz.”

  Unlike the saloons they replaced, speakeasies were patronized by both sexes. American women had expanded their domain beyond the home during the war. They had become wage earners in their own right and, courtesy of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, had gained the right to vote. They began drinking in public in numbers during the Prohibition years; indeed, the removal of the prior taboo on women in saloons can be counted as one of the triumphs of Prohibition. Not only did women begin to tipple away from home duringthe Volstead era, they also started drinking ardent spirits. It made little sense to bootle
g beer or other weak drinks, and the standard fare at respectable speakeasies was cocktails. The fruit juices, bitters, and sugar they contained masked the dubious pedigree of the alcohol that gave them their kick.

  Cocktails spread from the public to the private sphere during Prohibition. Far fewer American households had servants in the 1920s and the formal dinner parties that had characterized the Victorian Age were impossible to stage without them. Instead, people entertained each other with cocktail parties, which required, in comparison, minimal preparation. By 1923 a journalist was able to comment, “There are not many ladies in well-to-do houses now—certainly in the Eastern States—who are not experts at mixing cocktails.” The trend did not pass unnoticed by federal authorities. In 1924, the Prohibition commissioner, Roy Haynes, appealed to the patriotism of women tempted to serve “pre-Prohibition” (i.e., alcoholic) cocktails because of the demands of fashion: “It is outrageous that in any American home the household should feel more ashamed of not having liquor to serve their guests than ashamed to violate and trample under their feet the Constitution of the United States.” Such views, however, were contrary to the spirit of the age. A retrospective article published in Vogue in 1930 identified cocktail drinking as a key attribute of the “secure leaders of fashion” who were idolized by young American women: “They are athletic. They were the first to smoke because they liked it, and probably the first to drink cocktails.”