Prohibition - Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Edward Behr

  four hundred blacks lying drunk in the streets. . . . Thirty girls under sixteen lay drunk, even parts of their clothing bartered for drink. . . . Germany and America export eight million gallons of rum to the Congo yearly, with the result that the Negro has degenerated morally and mentally. . . . remember as you go next Sunday morn to church that the Congo native, his wife and children lie in their hovels drunk.

  There were no references to heavy-drinking Belgian colonial settlers.

  When the ASL turned to Oberlin College to recruit a full-time worker to help bring about “an era of clear thinking and clean living,” Wheeler was an obvious choice. At first, he demurred: the pay was low, and he had “another business proposition.” But the ASL’s Ohio League was headed by the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, himself an Oberlin alumnus and a powerful, persuasive preacher. “When I pointed out to him,” Russell later wrote, “that a man to fill the other position could be much more easily found than one for this complex and strenuous service, he agreed to treat the matter carefully and prayerfully. We bowed together — Oberlin’s training had made it easy for us to do this — and we asked God to be the guide as to the duty involved and to inspire the right conclusion.”

  Russell got his way. Wheeler, however, committed himself to ASL work for “one year only.” His duties as a full-time “dry worker” were twofold: as a church preacher on Sundays (he was already a regular speaker, his passionate delivery much appreciated by congregations of all types) and as an “Organizer of legislative districts.” The issue was the Haskell Local Option Bill, allowing counties to become dry if a majority of voters so decided. There had been 200,000 dry petitioners in favor of the bill, but only 36 state legislators had voted for it. Whether the idea came from Wheeler or from Russell is not known, but the Ohio ASL took a step that would establish the pattern for Wheeler’s later lobbying tactics: it informed the legislators who had voted for the bill that the ASL would throw its weight behind them, and at the same time do its best to discredit the bill’s most vocal opponents.

  Wheeler was assigned the task of ensuring the political demise of John Locke of London, Madison County, a virulent anti-Prohibitionist who had told the House: “If you want to dig your political grave, vote for the Haskell [dry] bill.” Locke was a candidate for the State Senate, and seemed unbeatable. But Wheeler’s tactics proved dazzling. He persuaded the ASL to buy him a bicycle, to give him the required mobility. He then tirelessly lobbied clergymen and leading citizens in the three counties casting their votes in the election. His next step was to persuade a prominent dry Methodist businessman, W. N. Jones, to stand against Locke, becoming, in effect, his campaign manager. The turning point was Wheeler’s use of volunteers to bring the voters to the polling booths. Jones was elected, and offered to pay Wheeler a substantial fee for his invaluable services. Wheeler refused. The League, he said, was not out to make money but to “make it safe for men to vote right.”

  He had found his vocation, as a brilliant, behind-the-scenes operator. There was no further talk of leaving to go into a more profitable business. Instead, Wheeler realized that the ASL badly needed a fully trained lawyer in its ranks. Studying in his spare time, he graduated from the Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1898 and became the ASL’s first full-time attorney. In his defense of local liquor laws (dry counties had made their appearance all over Ohio) he appeared in over 3,000 cases — later claiming that he won all but ten of them.

  Wheeler remained poorly paid. The ASL was not yet the recipient of huge endowments, and even had difficulty raising enough money to pay Wheeler’s minimal expenses. In 1901, he married Ella Bell Candy, the daughter of a leading Columbus Prohibitionist, and they soon had three sons, but his financial prospects remained grim. The ASL did not pay enough to live on, and he depended on the generosity of his wealthy father-in-law.

  He continued to hone his talent for manipulation. His language in court, deliberately intemperate, infuriated those judges unsympathetic to the cause, and Wheeler in turn pursued a ceaseless campaign against those he believed to be on the side of the wets. He was sensitive to any type of anti-ASL behavior, to the point of paranoia. He turned against the mayor of Cleveland for allowing a National Retail Liquor Dealers’ convention to be held there, and supported his opponent, John H. Farley, for reelection despite the fact that Farley owned two saloons. “Owning a saloon doesn’t have anything to do with his official actions,” Wheeler told the press with a straight face. But political expediency mattered to him more than personal convictions: His endorsement of “personal wets” who were “politically dry” (because they knew the dry issue would get them votes) was criticized in some ASL circles, as was his habit of gaining the apparent friendship of known wets solely for tactical reasons.

  Wheeler claimed, with reason, that such tactics worked. From his growing web of contacts, including staunch opponents of the ASL, he was obtaining valuable information about their tactics. He was not the only ASL worker to use such techniques. William (“Pussyfoot”) E. Johnson became an even more astute political manipulator for the ASL, specializing in “publicity and underground activities” in several states, infiltrating wet lobbies of brewers and distillers, later reaping his reward as a leading executive of the World League Against Alcoholism.

  But no other ASL official achieved national prominence comparable to Wheeler’s, though he was never the official leader of the ASL. Despite his meteoric rise, becoming in the space of a few years its senior attorney as well as its Ohio superintendent, he always preferred working behind the scenes, an incomparable wheeler-dealer.

  In Ohio, in his early days with the ASL, he used the methods that would later prove so effective in Washington. With a complete disregard for partisan labels, the ASL systematically supported the candidate who expressed a willingness to endorse dry policies — even if it was well known that he was both a hypocrite and a toper. The ASL’s refusal to enter into a political alliance with either party turned out to be one of its key assets; it was well aware of the failure of the Prohibition party to make its mark on voters, even those highly sympathetic to the cause. One of the ASL’s pamphlets was its “Church in Action Against the Saloon,” a question-and-answer document modeled on the catechism and devised for the guidance of ASL instructors addressing schools and meetings. One of its questions was: “May the League, at any time, be identified with any one political party for the accomplishment of its purpose?” The answer was: “No. The League is under solemn promise not to form affiliations with any political party, nor to place in nomination a ticket of its own.”

  This crucial ideological plank was bitterly opposed by William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, later President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, a fanatical dry — and, in his public utterances, an unspeakably boring, flatulent windbag, who early on in his political career had made the fatal mistake of arguing that the Democratic party should become the official dry party.

  Myron T. Herrick, governor of Ohio, was among the prominent politicians whose careers Wheeler destroyed virtually single-handedly. Herrick, the Republican governor of a staunchly Republican state, seemed unbeatable when he ran for reelection. But Wheeler first got the ASL to endorse the Democratic candidate, John M. Pattison, from Cincinnati, a strict churchman and dry. “We had a hard job making the people see that they were not giving up their religion when they voted Democratic,” Wheeler said later.6 “That was especially true in the rural sections, where they always voted a straight Republican ticket. I used to tell them that Lincoln wasn’t running that year.” Pattison won. Herrick did, subsequently, reap his reward for lifelong service to the Republican party: he was appointed U.S. ambassador in Paris, and was on hand to greet Lindbergh after his historic flight across the Atlantic (1927). Prohibition was in full swing by this time, and Wheeler wondered what Herrick and Lindbergh, a staunch Prohibitionist, had had to say to each other in private.

  Soon, under Wheeler’s effective direction, Ohio b
ecame — long before Prohibition — one of the driest states in the Union. As he proudly noted in 1908, 57 of its counties had gone dry under County Local Option laws. Various other dry measures instituted since he had begun working full-time for the ASL affected most of the other counties as well, so that by 1908, 60 percent of Ohio’s population, and 85 percent of its territory, was under “dry legislation,” though its large towns, especially Cincinnati, remained almost aggressively wet. The Ohio legislators, for all their “prohibition correctness,” were well aware of the revenues liquor brought into the state coffers. Saloon licenses, introduced in 1896, first cost $350 a year, then — in 1906 — $1,000. In 1908, there were 7,050 saloons in Ohio, and 690 more opened in 1911. The ASL’s position was that licensing saloons was immoral, but this challenge failed, and a licensing law gained a substantial majority. Wheeler’s rearguard action was to make life more difficult for saloon keepers by prohibiting saloon operations within 300 feet of a school-house, forbidding “loitering by minors” there, compelling Sunday closings, and denying licenses to noncitizens and those of insufficiently good “moral conduct.”

  Wheeler was helped, indirectly, by the blatant political immorality of the times. License commissioners in Ohio and elsewhere were known to take bribes and favor friendly candidates, and many were in league with the major breweries, which in most cases were the saloons’ real owners (they also maintained close relations with owners of the technically illegal speakeasies). In the course of his work, Wheeler — who in middle age bore a striking resemblance to France’s elder statesman, the late Antoine Pinay — had met most of the influential figures in the business world. John D. Rockefeller, after hearing him preach, presented him with a paper vest against the cold — and $5,000 for the ASL, the first of many contributions. He was becoming an acknowledged behind-the-scenes political power in Ohio, but now he had further ambitions. Ohio was at the forefront of the war on liquor, and, in many respects, a microcosm of still overwhelmingly rural America. Wheeler was sufficiently sensitive to the public mood to know that nationwide Prohibition was becoming a distinct possibility. As a first step, he persuaded the ASL to announce that statewide Prohibition was “imminent and inevitable,” introducing for the first time the notion of “a national constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes” in the ASL’s organ The American Patriot.

  In 1913, the ASL’s National Board of Trustees met in Columbus to celebrate their Jubilee Convention. Wheeler, in the wings as usual, let J. Frank Hanly, a former Governor of Indiana, make the actual call for national Prohibition, to be brought about by constitutional . amendment

  “For a moment there was silence, deep and tense,” Wheeler recalled. “Then the convention cut loose. With a roar as wild as the raging storm outside it jumped to its feet and yelled approval. The first shot in the Eighteenth Amendment had been fired.” The proposal was unanimously carried, and on December 10, 1913, a 1,000-mem-ber ASL delegation met in Washington on the steps of the Capitol, demonstrating its power and nationwide impact.

  About this time, the drys were also provided with further “scientific” evidence — this time from Europe — of the ill effects of alcohol, even taken in small quantities. August Forel, a noted Swiss brain specialist, had investigated its effect on mental processes, and professed they were terrifying. So too did Emil Kraeplin, a German psychiatrist. This boosted the campaign for sobriety that was a growing feature in factories. As Norman Clark wrote, “probably even more than religion, science had prepared the public mind for complete prohibition.” Ever since he began making automobiles, Henry Ford had insisted that his workers be teetotalers, and used a private police force to spy on them; anyone caught buying hard liquor in a store a second time was fired.

  Throughout his subsequent dry campaign, Wheeler had systematically favored the rural dry vote. “God made the country, but man made the town” was his leitmotif, and, as his personal secretary noted, he viewed the cities as “un-American, lawless and wet,” reserving special scorn for the “Irish, the continentals with their beer and wine, and the guzzling wet Democrats in the North and East.”7

  Even in Ohio, a model for other states, the dry vote, though effective (for the towns were underrepresented), was always a minority. He himself noted that there were only 400,000 dry voters out of a total Ohio voting population of 1,250,000. The success of ASL tactics depended to a large extent on overrepresentation in the rural areas and underrepresentation in the towns.

  This led the Ohio ASL to gravely miscalculate its chances. In 1914, constitutional amendments to declare the whole of Ohio dry were defeated, and many previously dry counties returned to their wet state.

  The 1914 congressional elections did, however, provide the ASL with a heaven-sent opportunity to bring the Prohibition issue to the public. In the New york Times,8 Wheeler reminisced that it “mobilized 50,000 trained speakers, volunteers and regulars directing their fire upon the wets in every village, town, city, county and state.” Its literature, he wrote, “found its way to every spot in the United States. . . . While we were fighting back in the districts, we were also bombarding the House and Senate in Washington. . . . We kept the field workers advised of the attitude of every individual member of Congress and suggested ways to the local workers of winning converts.”

  The result, Wheeler noted, was a triumph “beyond our hopes.” The ASL knew it lacked — for the time being, at least — the votes to push for a constitutional amendment that would make Prohibition a reality nationwide. But it was soon to use another formidable weapon. In March of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called the Sixty-fifth Congress (elected in 1916) into special session to declare war on Germany. America’s entry into the war would provide a new weapon — patriotism — to undermine the anti-Prohibitionist campaign carried out by the saloon, liquor, and brewery vested interests.

  At first the anti-Prohibitionists did not realize how effective the jingoist campaign of the ASL would be. When they did retaliate, theirs was a costly, bumbling, piecemeal, ineffective campaign. The brewers and the hard liquor interests never did manage to coordinate their efforts, for in the last resort the brewers were ready to abandon the distillers to their fate. The brewers felt that although there was a possible case for banning hard liquor outright, beer — a benign, natural substance — would never be banned.

  The war drastically altered the picture and advanced the dry cause beyond Wheeler’s wildest hopes. After Britain and France went to war with Germany in 1914, Wheeler, accurately gauging the feelings of his fellow Americans, was aware that the increasingly anti-German mood, rapidly amounting to hysteria, would be a godsend to the dry cause. He would exploit this cynically and crudely, but with enormous effectiveness. As, in state after state, the strength of the dry vote became increasingly apparent, it was clear to him that the Great War would administer the final coup de grace to the opponents of Prohibition.

  This was also becoming apparent to politicians all over America, especially the most opportunistic, unscrupulous ones. In 1917, Harry Micajah Daugherty — later to become attorney general during the first Prohibition years and one of the most corrupt members of any American administration — conferred with Warren Harding, then an Ohio senator, and decided to climb on the Prohibition wagon as a means of strengthening Republican fortunes in the state. “Prohibition,” Daugherty wrote to Harding, “is going to be a movement that has come to stay and it will be joined by the strong men of the party.”9

  In fact, Wheeler’s victory was assured the day America itself entered the war (April 6,1917). In the last resort, it was a misguided form of patriotism, amounting to jingoism, that would ensure the prompt passing of the Eighteenth Amendment.

  PROHIBITION’S FIRST VICTIMS

  Although many Americans were unaware of it, a massive transformation in the ethnic mix of the United States occurred in the half-century that preceded America’s entry into the First World War. Millions of Europeans, taking adv
antage of its ultraliberal immigration policy, settled in America, changing the country’s ways.

  To some Americans, steeped in the puritan culture that still centered around the farm, the family, and the church, these newly emerging ethnic patterns were deeply disturbing. As historian Dennis Brogan has noted, in New York a great and increasing part of the population was now composed of recent immigrants, usually indifferent to American issues, “having nothing to lose but their chains and little to sell but their votes.”

  Arguably, the single most influential group of immigrants — over eight million in the second half of the nineteenth century — came from Germany. Their culture and industriousness put an indelible stamp on the areas they settled into — and transformed American drinking habits.

  The Germans had been among the earliest of America’s immigrants. Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia), was founded in 1683. From 1832 onward, the trickle of German immigrants to America turned into a flood. Political unrest in Germany accelerated their departure: socialists and liberals hostile to Metternich’s policies began fleeing in large numbers after a brutally suppressed protest movement in 1832; then came the failed revolution of 1848, provoking a further flood of departures, to such an extent that by the time the Civil War broke out there were German-speaking regiments fighting in Lincoln’s army. Bismarck’s authoritarianism, especially after 1870, led to another influx. Although some of the German immigrants were motivated by the classic hope of a better life, what set them apart from other categories was the large proportion of highly educated, politically sophisticated liberal intellectuals in their midst.

  By 1914, they were all over America, concentrating in places where German-Americans had already made good, such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but nowhere was their impact greater than in Cincinnati, which became, in many ways, from the 1850s onward, almost a German city.1 German-American historian Friedrich Gerstacker described Cincinnati as “the Queen of the West, the Eldorado of the German immigrant.” For many years, he wrote, Cincinnati did not even try to assimilate its German immigrants — “instead, they assimilated Cincinnati.” In 1820, they had been 5 percent of the population. In 1917, 35 percent of Cincinnati was German, and almost half its inhabitants were German-speaking. German was taught in schools not as a foreign language but as a mother tongue. Many of Cincinnati’s inhabitants spoke nothing but German, and found it unnecessary to learn English. There were German orchestras, theater groups, gymnasiums, libraries, credit unions, and trade associations and “Vereine” (associations) of all types. In many Methodist and Lutheran churches, services were in German. In the years 1870-1917, when the German cultural influence was at its peak, there were twenty-seven German newspapers and magazines in the Cincinnati area.