Prohibition - Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Edward Behr

  Their ships were always faster than ours, and they had protection from the local community. There were spotters out there alerting them. I remember once we were chasing a rum-running fishing vessel off Fire Island and I saw a man drop off and make for the shore. He was warning the people waiting for the consignment that they were being chased. It was a cat and mouse game, and the smugglers made great use of sandbars. We knew that within our Coast Guard station there were informers working for the bootleggers.

  As seaman second class, Slovick earned $36 a month. To his knowledge, there were no black sheep among his crew mates, but there were plenty among customs officers.

  A lot of the time, when we had seized some liquor, we didn’t bring it into the Customs house during the daytime because we didn’t want any contact with the customs men. They wore great big brown overalls and they would stash bottles of liquor in them as they carried the stuff into their trucks, as many as they could — they would keep it for their own purposes, or to sell.

  11

  “PROHIBITION WORKS!”

  The Prohibition Department has made, and is making,

  substantial progress.

  — President Warren Harding, in a preface to

  Roy A. Haynes’s book Prohibition Inside Out, 1926

  Twenty months after Prohibition became effective, the Internal Revenue Bureau, as it was then called, reckoned that bootlegging had become a one billion dollar business, and a senior official urged the government to take steps to recover $32 million from bootleggers in excess profits taxes. Americans consumed 25 million gallons of illegal liquor in 1920, the Bureau claimed, noting that another 30 million gallons had been released to consumers for medicinal purposes by the new Prohibition Unit.1

  For all this disastrous beginning, Prohibition apologists felt they had good grounds for believing that the long-awaited millennium was at hand. Statistics could be made to prove that, at any rate in the first few years of its existence, Prohibition worked, was indeed spectacularly successful.

  “Deaths from alcoholism took a terrific tumble in 1920,” wrote the Literary Digest, the best-informed, most influential American magazine of its day. Many years later, in occupied France, when supplies of wine and hard liquor disappeared from the shops (all stocks had been requisitioned by the Germans), there was a marked drop in cases of delirium tremens, cirrhosis of the liver, and other alcohol-related illnesses — and this was also true of America, at least until the bootleggers got organized. State budgets all over the United States, in 1921 and 1922, reflected Prohibition’s impact. During those years, hospitals had fewer patients with alcohol-related illnesses; there were fewer cases of alcohol-related crimes, including street drunkenness; and there was a corresponding drop in the prison population. In Chicago, the DTs ward of Cook County Hospital was closed, as well as one wing of the Chicago City Jail.

  Although Wheeler and the ASL naturally attributed the improvements exclusively to Prohibition, the Volstead Act alone was not responsible. In actual fact, as 1900-1910 statistics showed, per capita liquor consumption had steadily declined since the turn of the century, America had turned partially dry long before 1920, and in the 1917-1918 war years, many drinking American males were serving abroad.

  Some health figures were impressive. In the years immediately before America’s entry into the First World War, the death rate from alcoholism had oscillated between 4.4 and 5.8 per 100,000 people. In 1917-1918 the drop was spectacular — from 5.2 to 2.7. To Prohibitionists, this was sufficient proof that America was indeed on the threshold of the much-vaunted millennium. In 1920, the death rate from alcoholism went down still further, from over 2 per 100,000 to 1. In 1921, there was a modest rise (1.8). In 1922, the level had climbed to 2.6 — still an improvement over the 1917 figure. In 1923, it climbed still further (to 3.2), and from then on the rise became vertiginous, even if deaths caused by adulterated liquor poisoning are excluded from the count.

  As late as 1925, Wayne Wheeler could, with some legitimacy, argue that the benefits of Prohibition were huge — though some of his reasoning was specious. “Prohibition is decreasing crime,” the Literary Digest reported in January of 1925. Violent domestic crime was down, as were arrests for drunkenness and brawling. “Prohibition has saved a million lives,” Wheeler announced that year. “The welfare of little children is too eloquent a voice to be howled down,” the Grand Rapids Herald acknowledged.

  Prohibition enthusiasts also used statistics to argue, again before

  bootlegging operations got into their stride, that cash once spent on liquor was now being used to buy more and better food, and that consequently people were healthier. Statistics showed that grocery stores were doing better business, and that American families were putting more money into savings accounts.

  “It makes me sorry we did not have Prohibition long ago,” wrote the editor-owner of the Seattle Times, who had originally opposed Prohibition. “Yes, sir, we have found in Seattle that it is better to buy shoes than booze.”2 The Prohibitionists naturally claimed that the Volstead Act was uniquely responsible. This was by no means certain, for the revitalized postwar economy was almost certainly a likelier reason for the new spending patterns. In any case, benefits were only temporary, and long before 1929, such claims were no longer being made.

  Wheeler declared that Prohibition had “doubled the number of investors” and was fueling America’s growing manufacturing boom — a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” argument, but one enthusiastically supported by most American industrialists, at least until the Great Crash of 1929.

  One major but anonymous industrialist told Prohibition Commissioner Haynes that “before the Volstead Act, we had 10% absenteeism after pay day. Now it is not over 3%. The open saloon and the liquor traffic were the greatest curse to American morals, American citizenship, thrift, comfort and happiness that ever existed in the land.”3 Men such as Rockefeller (at least at first) and Edison were also Prohibition supporters. And much was made of the fact that certain skilled labor unions, such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, had come out in favor of Prohibition.

  Wheeler’s most vocal and influential Prohibition ally was undoubtedly Henry Ford — a major Anti-Saloon League contributor from the start. Ford’s rationale was simple: neither a principled nor a religious man (insofar as he had any moral convictions, these were based on the superiority of the white, Aryan race), his sole concern, as an innovative car manufacturer, was efficiency: hangovers slowed down the pace of the assembly line and provoked accidents. The Volstead Act did not make Henry Ford disband his private police, but their task became simpler, for they no longer had to keep watch over a multitude of saloons and liquor shops.

  Halfway through Prohibition, Ford himself issued a stern warning in the Pictorial Review.

  For myself, if booze ever comes back to the U.S. I am through with manufacturing. I would not be bothered with the problem of handling over 200,000 men and trying to pay them wages which the saloons would take away from them. I wouldn’t be interested in putting autos into the hands of a generation soggy with drink.

  With booze in control we can count on only two or three effective days work a week in the factory — and that would destroy the short day and the five-day week which sober industry has introduced. When men were drunk two or three days a week, industry had to have a ten- or twelve-hour day and a seven-day week. With sobriety the working man can have an eight-hour day and a five-day week with the same or greater pay. ... I would not be able to build a car that will run 200,000 miles if booze were around, because I wouldn’t have accurate workmen. To make these machines requires that the men increase their skill.

  Other automobile industry tycoons shared these views, and the Carnegie Institute’s tests on the effects of alcohol on human efficiency added credibility to Ford’s remarks. But the arguments in favor of Prohibition were not confined to industrialists. Some of the social arguments advanced no longer used the hysterical rhetoric favored by the ASL and the WCTU, which
equated Prohibition with salvation. One of the few totally honest members of the Harding administration, Mabel Willebrandt, the deputy attorney general (and the infamous Daugherty’s “real” number two), argued that even if they drank in speakeasies, women were Prohibition’s greatest beneficiaries.

  Herself one of America’s early feminists, who had defended prostitutes and victims of domestic abuse at the start of an impressive law career and had gone on to campaign for better conditions in women’s prisons — scandalizing some of her more straitlaced legal colleagues by becoming an early “Murphy Brown,” adopting a baby girl after her divorce — Willebrandt defended Prohibition in dispassionate, modern terms. She recognized that there was little interest in Prohibition “among those who congregate in country clubs and who have plenty of leisure and very little work.” Nevertheless, speaking as a woman in a male-dominated society, she wrote that

  An early cartoon (1874) showing Women’s Christian Temperance Union volunteers picketing a saloon full of drunks. (Library of Congress)

  Carry Nation praying in her jail cell in Wichita, Kansas. (Library of Congress)

  Wayne Wheeler, power broker and Anti-Saloon League boss. (Library of Congress)

  President and Mrs. Warren Harding. (Library of Congress)

  Andrew Volstead (1869–1947), Minnesota congressman, author of the Volstead Act, which brought Prohibition into being in 1920. (National Archives)

  Warren Harding and members of his cabinet. Seated, left to right: John Weeks, Andrew Mellon, Charles Evans Hughes, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Edwin Denby. Standing, left to right: Albert Fall, Will Hays, Harry Daugherty, Henry Wallace, Herbert Hoover, and John Davis. Daugherty was bootlegger George Remus’s man in the Harding administration. (Stock Montage, Inc.)

  Jess Smith, Harding intimate and a close friend of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, was Daugherty’s bagman and effective number two in the Justice Department. (Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  A St. Louis wine cellar chockablock with vintage French wines being inspected by a Prohibition official before it was sealed off (1920). (National Archives)

  A Prohibition Bureau agent smashes seized liquor (1923). (Library of Congress)

  A bootlegger’s car, which crashed during a police chase in Washington, D.C. (1926). (Library of Congress)

  FBI agent with captured plane and getaway car near the Mexican border (1928). (Library of Congress)

  Prohibition Bureau agents raid a speakeasy in Washington, D.C., at 922 Pennsylvania Avenue (1923).(Library of Congress)

  Special garter and miniature flask for ladies. (Library of Congress)

  New York’s largest illegal beer brewery being dismantled (1930).(national archives)

  An Anglo-American crew of rumrunners under arrest, posing with Prohibition agents. The top section of this composite photo shows their two-masted British schooner. (National Archives)

  Coast guardsmen survey their latest capture in New York harbor, gunnysack-stitched whiskey bottles, like “the real McCoy,” while thirsty citizens look on. (National Archives)

  In Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a customs agent displays a long submarine cable used to pipe whiskey from Canada to the United States. (National Archives)

  Prohibition agents breaking up New York’s largest whiskey still (1927). (National Archives)

  Inside the Remus mansion, Remus and guests pose for a photograph before a dinner given to celebrate completion of the $100,000 swimming pool. Remus is seated at the head of the table. Imogene is standing at his right. Stepdaughter Ruth is standing to his left with her arms around George’s shoulders. His sister is seated at his left. (Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  George Remus behind bars in 1924. Remus sold $75 million worth of liquor in a two-year period. At the same time he was said to have spent $20 million to pay off various federal, state, and local officials for their silence. Eventually arrested and prosecuted, he served five sentences for liquor law violations. (Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  George Remus.(Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  The former Imogene Holmes, Remus’s second wife. (Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  Remus’s adopted daughter, Ruth. She was nineteen at the time of the murder trial. (Jack Doll/Delhi Historical Society)

  Al Capone. (National Archives)

  Free soup kitchen in Chicago, paid for by Al Capone (1930). (National Archives)

  Prohibition agents smashing up a bar just prior to the end of Prohibition.(National Archives)

  “Big Bill” Thompson, mayor of Chicago during Prohibition years, and friend of gangsters. (National Archives)

  The beginning of the end: anti-Prohibition slogans on cars (1930–31). (Library of Congress)

  Anti-Prohibition demonstration in New York in 1932. (National Archives)

  In 1933, but before the end of Prohibition, applicants for licenses to sell draft beer line up in New York. (National Archives)

  At Prohibition’s end, there were no liquor stores, and such was the thirst for legitimate liquor that some banks turned over their premises temporarily (1933). (National Archives)

  Happy workers celebrate the reopening of their brewery (1933). (National Archives)

  In Philadelphia, a bar scene immediately after Prohibition’s end (1933). (National Archives)

  Anyone who mingles freely with all classes of women is bound to discover very soon that the majority are opposed utterly and unalterably to reestablishment of open saloons. . . . Most women still lean economically upon men, their fathers or their husbands. Even if they have property they let men in the family handle it. The saloons deprived women not only of the companionship to which they thought they were entitled but absorbed money which the women felt they were entitled to share. For selfish reasons, quite as much as moral reasons, the women of the country will continue to cast their influence for prohibition. There is better furniture in the homes throughout the country than ever before, simply because a woman is able to divert a larger part of her husband’s income to household uses. There are more luxuries in which the family can share: automobiles, music lessons for the children and the like.

  The modern girl, who makes no protest when her escort to dinner produces a pocket flask and shares its contents with her, has no present stake in prohibition enforcement. But the moment that girl marries, she probably will, whether consciously or not, become a supporter of prohibition, because she always will be unwilling to share any part of her husband’s income with either a bootlegger or a saloonkeeper operating legally. I am convinced that as far as the women of the country are concerned, prohibition has come to stay.4

  The arguments of Roy A. Haynes, the luckless Prohibition commissioner appointed by Harding on Wheeler’s recommendation (he too was part of the Ohio gang but one of the few honest ones), were far less convincing. Faced with an untenable situation, he was compelled to take an uncompromising moral stand: “It is no longer a question as to whether we are for or against that legislation, but whether we are for or against the United States Constitution.”

  Haynes recognized that Prohibition was hideously difficult to police. The frontier between Canada and the United States was over a thousand miles long, and Detroit was a privileged entry point. No pursuit was possible on the river separating Canada from the United States in Detroit, for spy ships “financed by Canadian brewing interests” were on a permanent lookout for Coast Guard and Prohibition Bureau craft, and the “smugglers have to be caught in the act.” But his contention was that Prohibition was under control “and that control becomes more complete and more thorough every day. . . . The clamor of a dwindling clique cannot drown the voice of truth.”

  “The boottlegger’s life is increasingly one of fear, dread and apprehension,” Haynes claimed, with some truth. He failed to add that the financial rewards were such that the risks were worth taking, even if, as he noted, the bootleggers were constantly preyed on by politicians, public officials, police, and lawyers.

  He wa
s correct to say that “few men in any line or calling are subject to the temptation which besets the Prohibition enforcement agent.” Bribes were on a phenomenal scale. A group of brewers offered some agents a monthly $300,000 retainer to look the other way. The bootleggers, Haynes wrote, regarded the agent’s badge as “nothing but a license to make money. . . . Bootleggers brag of top political connections, with representatives in the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Prohibition Unit itself.” In most cases, though Haynes did not say so, such accusations were well founded.