by Iain Gately
The demand for cocktails stimulated invention. New recipes were created, and old ones improved, including the dry martini. This faultless elixir was developed in New York in the 1920s and celebrated by its gintellectuals. According to H. L. Mencken, the dry martini was “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet”; and Ogden Nash lauded the mixture in “A Drink with Something in It”:
There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
Dorothy Parker, epitome of the modern girl, immortalized its effects in a ditty:
I like to have a Martini
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table.
After four I’m under the host.
America’s women were imitated by its students. Drinking flourished on hitherto dry campuses, and students paid their way through college by bootlegging or bartending in speakeasies. During their vacations they flocked to fashionable watering holes in the great cities, adding their thirsts to those of the resident multitudes. So great was the demand in New York that in 1929 its police commissioner estimated it was home to thirty-two thousand drinking places—double the number of saloons and illegal joints it had contained in the pre-Prohibition era.
Americans who lacked the time to visit speakeasies could buy their liquor at other retail outlets. These were numerous, if not ubiquitous: At the height of Prohibition The New York Telegram sent a team of reporters to investigate where alcohol was for sale in the city. They found it on offer in “dancing academies, drugstores, delicatessens, cigar stores, confectionaries, soda fountains, behind partitions of shoe-shine parlors, back rooms of barbershops, from hotel bellhops, from hotel headwaiters, from hotel day clerks, night clerks, in express offices, in motorcycle delivery agencies, paint stores, malt shops, . . . fruit stands, vegetable markets, groceries, smoke shops, athletic clubs, grillrooms, . . . chophouses, importing firms, tea-rooms, moving van companies, spaghetti houses, boarding houses, Republican clubs, Democratic clubs, laundries, social clubs,” and last, but not least, “newspapermen’s associations.”
By 1923, America was considered by one observer to be neither wet nor dry, but rather “amphibious.” Perhaps the archetype of its amphibians was President Harding, who set a bad example to the nation by drinking in the White House while vowing to enforce the Volstead Act in the role of chief executive. Whiskey was his favorite poison, which he knocked back in his “study” with his gang of Ohio cronies. An account of this place shows that saloon style had not perished with the saloon: “Trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand,” and there was “a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.” When Harding died midterm, his successor, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who was reelected as president in 1924, pursued a policy of benign neglect toward Prohibition. With such mixed messages from the top, even the Prohibition bureau developed amphibian traits. For instance, the director of Prohibition enforcement in northern California confessed in public “that he did drink occasionally because San Francisco is a wet community, and that he also served liquor to his guests because he was a gentleman and ‘not a prude.’”
Widespread and flagrant disobedience to the Volstead Act was made easier by the incompetence of the federal body that had been created to enforce it. Ever since its inception the Prohibition Bureau had made a reputation for itself as being violent, inefficient, and corrupt. Its organization was flawed, and its agents were second-rate. Their average wages—between twelve hundred and two thousand dollars a year in 1920—“compared unfavorably with those of garbage collectors.” Not only were the rewards poor, the work was also dangerous. By 1923, thirty Prohibition agents had been killed in action. They had taken quite a few civilians with them, indeed had committed some spectacular murders that had turned public opinion against them. In consequence, a career in Prohibition enforcement offered little to an honest man. Turnover was rapid, and one in twelve agents was dismissed for cause. Recorded grounds for dismissal included “bribery, extortion, theft, violation of the National Prohibition Act, falsification of records, conspiracy, forgery, [and] perjury.”
There were honorable exceptions, such as Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, who between them arrested nearly five thousand violators and confiscated five million bottles of illicit booze. They worked as a team, often in disguise, and their disparate physical appearances gave them the appeal of a double comedy act. The newspapers followed their raids, noting new disguises or ruses that had enabled them to deceive bootleggers and speakeasy proprietors. Izzy, labeled “the master mind of the Federal rum-ferrets,” often tipped off reporters before a bust, and this hunger for publicity led to his downfall. In 1925 both he and Moe were dismissed “for the good of the service”—their stellar performances had set their colleagues in too unfavorable a light.
The disappointing form of Prohibition agents was outstanding in comparison to the other groups of people whom the Volstead Act had envisaged would assist in its enforcement. State legislatures were dilatory in introducing the necessary supplementary legislation, even those that had been dry pre-Prohibition. Some, like New York, legislated for state Prohibition only to withdraw it. The Mullan-Gage Law it passed in 1921 was repealed in 1923 after it had paralyzed the courts with liquor offenses. Private citizens were disinclined to inform on or to testify against bootleggers, and juries were loath to give guilty verdicts. Dry sentiment, when put to the test, had evaporated.
The organizations and individuals who had campaigned for Prohibition found themselves on the defensive in the 1920s. They were held accountable for the failings of an unenforceable law as well as the culture of violence it had spawned. They responded by going into denial: In 1925, for instance, faced with evidence that that the nation’s youth were turning to the bottle, Wayne Wheeler claimed that things had never been so good. Prohibition-era drinks were so bad and so expensive that no one could fall in love with them: “The cost and quality of post-Volsteadian drinks does not create a habit as did the licensed intoxicants,” ergo: “The American youth problem is less serious than that in other countries.”
Moreover, America underwent profound changes in the Prohibition years, but these were not the changes for which the drys had hoped. Instead of becoming pious models of self-restraint, Americans had launched themselves into a frenzy of crime and consumerism. Although the drys held their noses and tried to reconcile such behavior with temperance, they misinterpreted the spirit of the age, and their post-Volsteadian publicity only succeeded in demonstrating the extent of their anachronism. A 1924 Atlantic Monthly article on the impact of consumptionism, for example, predicted that this new phenomenon would lead to voluntary abstinence. At its dry author saw it, consumptionism, defined as “the science of compelling men to use more and more things,” was “bringing it about that the American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” And “consumptionism cannot suffer drink because in drink men find a substitute for that satisfaction which is in the acquiring of luxuries.” In other words, the opportunity to go shopping would extinguish the desire to binge. After all, “The purpose of Prohibition was not to make more valuable citizens. The purpose was to make for valuable consumers.”
The item most American consumers aspired to purchase was an automobile. In 1921 the nation had nine million cars; by 1929 over twenty-six million of them were on its roads. Prior to this expansion, it had been hoped that driving would discourage drinking. Temperance was “the friend of machinery,” and no sane person would wish to compromise the pleasures of driving by getting stewed to the
gills64 before taking to the road. However, the reverse proved to be the case. Automobiles facilitated bootlegging. If Prohibition had been introduced in the age of the horse and cart it might have stood a chance of success, but cars enabled bootleggers to cover vast distances quickly. They often worked in armed convoys and held regular firefights with Prohibition agents, whose trigger-happy ways led to a fashion in Michigan for windshield stickers reading, DON’T SHOOT, I’M NOT A BOOTLEGGER.
The rapid increase in the number of automobiles extended the reach of bootleggers into small rural communities, whose residents hitherto had had to rely on the exemptions to the Volstead Act in favor of sacramental wine and medicinal hooch when they wanted a drink. The exemption in favor of religious drinking was exploited with considerable zeal: In 1925 the Federal Council of Churches reported to its members that “nearly three million gallons of sacramental wine were taken out of government warehouses in 1924,” only a quarter of which had ended up on the altar. A similar proportion of medicinal alcohol went astray. Together the markets for communicants, Jews, and invalids, whether genuine or bogus, enabled a number of California winemakers to hang on through Prohibition. While their overall number declined by 80 percent post-Volstead, the quantity of wine they made under bond did not decrease proportionally. Indeed, the average annual output of bonded wineries during Prohibition was eight million gallons, much of which was consumed by healthy atheists.
Those California vineyards that did not supply the bonded market prospered by going into the juice grape business. Whereas many had anticipated ruin in the Volstead era, instead they enjoyed a boom. The total area of vineyards in the state increased from 300,000 acres in 1919 to 400,000 in 1923, to 650,000 acres in 1928. Not only were more grapes planted under Prohibition, but the prices they commanded soared. In the best pre-Prohibition years prices had been twenty-five dollars a ton. The first Prohibition era harvest averaged fifty dollars a ton; in 1921 it hit a Prohibition high of eighty-two dollars a ton. It fell back from this spike, but for most of Prohibition prices exceeded those commanded when America had been wet.
Demand for grapes was driven by the “nonintoxicating cider and fruit juices” exemption to the Volstead Act, which allowed the manufacture of such drinks for use in the home. The principal out-of-state destination for California “juice” grapes was New York, followed by Chicago. These places were supplied via a market at the Pennsylvania Railroad yard, to which growers shipped their products in refrigerated cars. The scale of business was titanic: “In 1928 one buyer bought 225 carloads (3,100 tons) of grapes in a single purchase.” As Business Week observed, “The only inference is that these grapes went to someone who is manufacturing wine in vast quantities.” The periodical labeled the Penn yard “the Wall Street of the grape auction business” and described the procedure by which grapes were sold on to the public: “The ordinary speculator buys two or three cars and has them shipped to a siding in his own neighborhood. Then he sends word around and families gather for the year’s supply of wine. To cart away their purchases they come with toy wagons, wheelbarrows, and even baby buggies.” The Manhattan Produce Yard became so clogged up with prams when a grape delivery arrived that its administration banned them altogether from its grounds.
In order to exploit the juice grape market systematically, and to utilize winemaking equipment lying dormant, the Californian Vineyardists Association (CVA) was organized in 1926, with the intention of producing and selling concentrated juice. Despite the probability that such concentrate would be used to make wine, the legality of manufacturing it was cleared with Washington. The CVA established a commercial subsidiary, Fruit Industries, Inc., to sell its new product, which it branded Vine Glo. Advertisements were placed in local and national media that hinted at its potential:
Now is the time to order your supply of VINE-GLO. It can be made in your home in sixty days—a fine, true-to-type guaranteed beverage ready for the Holiday Season. VINE-GLO . . . comes to you in nine varieties, Port, Virginia Dare, Muscatel, Angelica, Tokay, Sauterne, Riesling, Claret, and Burgundy. It is entirely legal in your home—but it must not be transported.
Americans wishing to enjoy some “true-to-type” port or claret could purchase by mail order or through pharmacies. They were delivered a five- or ten-gallon keg by Fruit Industries personnel, who would add water to the concentrate, start fermentation and return in sixty days to bottle the product and retrieve the keg. Vine-Glo was a commercial success and inspired copycat products, including Bacchus wine bricks, which were marketed as “solidified merriment.” Such was the impact of juice grape and concentrate sales that American per capita consumption of wine grew while the Volstead Act was in force.
Nineteen twenty-eight, the year that wine bricks hit the market, was a watershed year for Prohibition. The drys, on the defensive, succeeded in strengthening the mechanics of enforcement; the wets, bolstered by explicit backing from labor organizations and prominent capitalists, began to build up momentum toward repeal. Moreover, Prohibition was a pivotal issue in the 1928 presidential election. For the first time since its introduction, voters could chose a self-confessed wet candidate—the Democrat, Alfred E. Smith. His Republican opponent, Herbert Clark Hoover, was, in contrast, in favor of continuing Prohibition, which he described as “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far reaching in purpose,” and vowed to improve the enforcement of the law as it stood. The election was notable for the malicious personal attacks on Smith, a Catholic, who was vilified as a papist drunk intent on turning America into a Vatican fiefdom. The popular historian H. L. Mencken summed up the state of the nation on the eve of the polls: “If Al [Smith] wins tomorrow, it will be because American people have decided at last to vote as they drink. . . . If he loses, it will be because those who fear the pope outnumber those who are tired of the Anti-Saloon League.” Smith lost by a convincing margin.
True to his word, Hoover reformed Prohibition enforcement. Attempts were made to raise the abysmal standards of Prohibition Bureau agents. The entire service was made to sit the civil service exam. Only 41 percent passed after two attempts. Most of those who failed were dismissed and replaced. In 1929 the Jones Act was introduced, which stiffened penalties against violators of the Volstead Act. An amendment to it raising the appropriations of the Prohibition Bureau to the stupendous sum of $256 million (from around $12.5 million) was approved, then dropped—the drys were leery of making an unpopular law an expensive one. They had claimed that Prohibition would be cheap and virtually self-enforcing, which clearly had not been the case. Most important, in May 1929, Hoover appointed a commission under George W. Wickersham to perform the first federal review of law enforcement in the United States. Violent crime, much of it related to bootlegging, had become the principal domestic political issue since his election. On February 14 of the same year, members of the gang of Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone had lined seven members of a rival organization against a warehouse wall and gunned them down. The circumstances of the murders caught the imagination of the public—the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong in America since Prohibition had been introduced. The man behind the massacre likewise typified the kind of citizen who was profiting from the blunder. Al Capone was a second-generation Italian American who had left school at fourteen after beating up a teacher, and who seemed destined for a career in petty crime until the Volstead Act appeared. Thereafter, his star ascended, until he was accounted Public Enemy Number One. Capone, never shy of publicity, put his philosophy on record: “I make my money by supplying a public demand. If I break the law, my customers, who number hundreds of the best people in Chicago, are as guilty as I am. The only difference between us is that I sell and they buy. Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”
29 LOST
Wine inspires gaiety, strength, youth, and
health. It is bottled sunshine.
—Professor P. Pierret
“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” “Really?” I said “You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.”
—Ernest Hemingway
The “great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” which President Hoover had been elected to defend, was being abandoned as a failure in the few places where it had been attempted outside of the United States. By the time Hoover assumed office, Communist Russia had re-legalized beer and wine and was about to commence the state manufacture of vodka by the workers for the workers. Iceland and Norway had flirted with and given up on Prohibition, Sweden had decided against it in a 1922 referendum; indeed, only Finland and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island soldiered on as dry lands. Although drink control legislation brought in as austerity measures during World War I lingered on the statute books in Great Britain, in general the waters of temperance were receding. They never had been very deep in France, and while absinthe remained banned, drinking was otherwise encouraged in the Roaring Twenties. French winemakers, who had lost two of their principal export markets—claret to America and champagne to Russia—sought to compensate through the promotion of their product to their fellow countrymen. Their efforts were supported by a state Office International du Vin whose mission was to endorse the benefits of wine drinking. The government also took steps to improve the quality of French wines. The concept of the present-day appellations controlées was introduced, which decreed that only wines from carefully defined regions might be labeled as such, and furthermore that the growers in each region were limited to using “grape varieties hallowed by local, loyal, and established custom.” The improved product was marketed as quintessentially French, the key to good health, amiable humor, and long life.