Prohibition - Thirteen Years That Changed America

by Edward Behr

  Remus could not resist making himself heard. “The defendant has never hijacked liquor,” he told the court, “and the defendant has no apologies to make for having sold good liquor since 1919.”

  At the close of the trial, Dr. E. A. Baber, superintendent of Cincinnati’s Longview psychiatric hospital and one of the panel of psychiatrists who had examined Remus, testified that he was sane. Remus subjected him to repeated questioning. It was “the peculiar situation of a man claiming insanity for his defense, cross-examining an expert on insanity” the Cincinnati Enquirer noted, adding that Remus “gave Dr. Baber some uncomfortable moments,” as when Remus asked him: “Sanity is the reverse of insanity, is it not, Dr. Baber?”

  BABER: Yes.

  REMUS: Insanity is an abnormal condition of the mind, isn’t it?

  BABER: Not necessarily.

  Elston delighted the audience with excerpts of some of the inane tests the panel had subjected Remus to. “Didn’t he say at the time that he was on trial for murder, and didn’t have time to bother with this nonsense?” he reminded the court.

  Taft’s lackluster summing up differed little from the prosecution’s opening statement, though he did his best to portray “the weeping, whining Remus” as a cynical play-actor. He also reminded the jurors that Truesdale, a convicted felon, must have known that he was immune from prosecution. Under the Ohio state laws, it was not a punishable offense to conspire to commit a crime if no crime was subsequently committed.

  Remus came into his own on December 19 with an emotional summing up. “Here before you stands Remus the lawyer. In the chair there [gesturing] is Remus the defendant, charged with murder. Remus the defendant does not desire any sympathy or compassion in any shape or form whatsoever. If you feel the defendant should go to the electric chair, do not flinch. The defendant will not flinch. He stands before you in the defense of his honor and the sanctity of his home.”2

  Thanking the judge for his “fairness and squareness,” Remus reminded the jury that insanity [Dr. Baber notwithstanding] in his opinion was “nothing more than the abnormal condition of the mind.” He also reminded the court that Franklin Dodge, “that ace of the Prohibition department, that deuce with women, that moral leper, this human parasite with whom County Prosecutor Charles Taft traveled the country” had not been called on to testify. He made a final crack at prosecutor Basler (“Look at his profile and say whether it has the look of hypocrisy?”), ending with a reference to the Volstead Act, “... one of the greatest criminal and legal abortions of all time. Why, but for the act, the defendant would not have been here!” Whatever the outcome, Remus told them, “Ithankyou. Happy Christmas to you.”

  Elston’s summing up was equally passionate, but on a different note.

  Was there ever a woman in history, in fiction, who treated a man worse or more shamefully than Imogene Remus? Was there ever a woman who had less reason for doing so? And yet they say he was in a normal state of mind, that October 6 when he had the faith of a little child. . . . Turn him loose for Christmas. Bring peace of mind to the man who has suffered the tortures of hell for more than two years. We are not asking for mercy, we say this man is not guilty.

  Just before the jury retired, on December 20, Judge Shook took the unusual step of reminding them that outright acquittal would be “against the law,” but the jury was almost certainly more receptive to his ambiguous acknowledgment of Imogene’s behavior. “The law,” Shook went on, “does not justify one person taking the life of another because the latter may be of a bad character.”

  As reporters later ascertained, their verdict was determined within two minutes, on a single ballot, but the jurors stayed out for three hours after informing the judge they had come to a decision, enjoying a long, celebratory lunch — aware that the bulk of the press would not be back in the courtroom until four P.M. As a juror later told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “We felt: let’s go out and give him a Christmas present. He has been persecuted long enough.”

  “We find the defendant not guilty on the sole ground of insanity,” Harry G. Byrd, the jury foreman, announced, to wild cheering, when the court reconvened. “That’s American justice!” Remus shouted. Surrounded by reporters in the hubbub that followed, he extended his “deepest appreciation” to the jury, the court, the prosecutors, the sheriff and jailer. “God knows what is in my heart at the moment. The rest of my life I will dedicate to stifle the insult that is upon our statutes, known as the National Prohibition Act.” Had there been no Prohibition law “to fill the coffers of a class that seeks and practices only venality,” he would not have been in court in the first place, he said.

  There was a party in his cell suite that night, attended by Elston, his close circle of friends, his daughter Romola, and two of the jurors. The following day, the jury presented a unanimous petition to Judge Shook, asking him to free Remus, “if possible, in time for Christmas.” A furious Judge Shook promptly ordered them to apologize to the court, which they did. But for a long time afterward, at Taft’s instigation, they remained under investigation for improper conduct, facing possible jail sentences.

  Remus’s troubles were not over either. Taft told the press that despite the verdict, which had been “a gross miscarriage of justice . . . , [we] are not through with all the angles in this case.”

  A more skillful behind-the-scenes manipulator than prosecutor, Taft worked relentiessly to have Remus committed for life to an insane asylum. He successfully petitioned for a “lunacy hearing” before a probate judge. Remus was confident he would emerge a free man. Had not a panel of psychiatrists, chosen by the prosecution, proclaimed him sane?

  But Taft also persuaded two members of the panel to change their minds. A Dr. David A. Wolfstein now determined that Remus was “ruthless, reckless, selfish, eccentric — the kind of man who takes the law into his own hands. . . . He has shown he can be dangerous.” Over Dr. Baber’s objections, the judge ruled that a two-to-one opinion was sufficient to have Remus confined to the Lima insane asylum. On January 6,1928, an ambulance took a strait-jacketed Remus to the dreaded Kentucky “prison-hospital.”

  Elston promptiy appealed for a habeas corpus writ on the grounds of illegal confinement, and to the Ohio Supreme Court, while Remus — for all his alleged emotional instability — displayed singular resilience in Lima, soon becoming a hero to the warders there. As reported in the Cincinnati Post on January 28, “Wife-slayer George Remus saved the life of a hospital guard who had been overpowered by a giant negro patient.”

  An appeals court was now convened to review the case, and a fresh panel of six psychiatrists again submitted him to extensive tests, which he passed with flying colors. “Remus is sane beyond a doubt,” said Dr. Shelby Mumaugh, a former Longview consultant. “He is not a psychopath.” “I wish I had his brain,” said Dr. W. L. Neville, a Florida specialist.

  Two Lima officials disagreed. A supervisor told the appeals court that Remus had “recently violated standing orders.” His offense was “having in his possession a book on insanity.” Lima’s superintendent, W. H. Vorbau, in frequent touch with prosecutor Sibbald, cited as evidence of Remus’s insanity “his persistent refusal to wear underwear.”

  A more insidious attempt to brand him as insane was disclosed by the Cincinnati Post. Prosecutor Sibbald, sent by Taft to Lima to argue in favor of his continued incarceration, intended citing Franklin Dodge as witness at the new hearing — almost certainly to provoke Remus and cast his sanity in doubt. Cornered, Sibbald admitted as much. “We want to see how Remus acts when he meets Dodge” he was foolish enough to admit to the Post. Dodge denied his visit had anything to do with the Remus case. He was only in Lima to sell distributors an automatic cigarette lighter whose patent he had acquired, he told the press. The judge decided Dodge’s presence was not relevant to the case.

  The hearing did not go Sibbald’s way. Remus was the calm, dispassionate one, refusing to rise to the prosecutor’s bait, and the judge ended up reprimanding Sibbald for his “intempe
rate language.” In many respects, his cross-examination of Remus was a rehash of the murder trial, with Sibbald embarking on a scathing, interminable review of Remus’s past, alleging he had always had criminal tendencies. He conspicuously failed to prove his case, succeeding only in antagonizing the court — and revealing his anti-German bias. Remus came across as an archetypal example of the new American in search of the American Dream — a compulsive workaholic and a loving, caring son, as Remus’s old mother, seventy-eight, speaking in German through a translator, confirmed. (She had been called as a witness on the spur of the moment after Sibbald alleged that, after becoming rich, Remus had neglected his family). On March 30, the court declared Remus sane.

  Taft did not give up even then. Invoking “irregularities,” he announced he would appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court to get the decision annulled. A motion for a new trial was denied, but the Ohio Supreme Court took an inordinately long time to make up its mind while Remus appealed for release from what he described as “this dumping- ground of hell. “

  Finally, on June 20, 1928, he arrived at Cincinnati’s Union Station, a free man at last. A small crowd of well-wishers, including some members of the jury, was there to greet him. So were Elston and Conners. He looked tanned and fit from his work on the Lima farm, and seemed no worse for his six months there. “I shall remain in the city where people have been so kind to me,” he told the Cincinnati Post.

  Remus never returned to boodegging, and never salvaged his fortune. He sold the Price Hill mansion (it was later pulled down), married Blanche Watson, his former secretary, and tried — but failed — to make another fortune, first in patent medicine, then in real estate.

  His death, on January 20, 1952, was the occasion for a series of obituaries recalling a fabulous era. In 1995, the Cincinnati Historical Society staged a Remus exhibit. Among the memorabilia: a photograph of the party he gave to celebrate the opening of his $125,000 swimming pool, with Imogene — the glamorous bathing belle — demurely by Remus’s side, and the revolver he used to kill her.

  16

  A FATAL TRIUMPH

  While Remus remained in Lima “criminal lunatic” hospital awaiting the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision on his sanity, a medical controversy of another type gripped America: for the first time, the Volstead Act was being blamed for huge numbers of deaths from poisoned liquor.

  It all began on New Year’s Day, 1927, with scores of emergency admissions to New York’s Bellevue Hospital. There were forty-one deaths there that day, and the Department of Health announced there had been 750 such deaths in New York alone during 1926.

  Although no entirely accurate nationwide statistics are available, it is probable that by 1927 such deaths may have exceeded the 50,000 mark — to say nothing of hundreds of thousands more nonfatal cases resulting in blindness or paralysis. In 1930, the Prohibition Bureau reported that in a single, small county in Kansas — an exceptionally dry state — there had been over 15,000 victims of adulterated liquor.

  Bootleggers like Remus, Olmstead, and McCoy, who refused to deal in adulterated liquor, were extremely rare. In Roy Haynes’s day, fifteen chemists were on hand to examine samples of all seized liquor. In very few cases did they discover genuine brand whiskey, gin, or wine. At their most harmless, the bootleggers’ wares were diluted; in the majority of cases, the chemists found liquor made of pure grain to which coloring and flavoring had been added; moonshine — from corn meal, molasses, fruit, vegetables or sugar — presented graver risks. In some cases denatured alcohol had been redistilled to remove the poison. But in others the hooch was outright poison — wood alcohol. “Of 480,000 gallons of confiscated booze analyzed in New York in 1927, 98 percent contained poisons,” said a Prohibition Bureau report. The New York Telegram collected over 500 samples of liquor from four hundred speakeasies. Fifty-five of them were found to contain significant traces of wood alcohol, and lesser poisons were found in seventy more.

  Under Volstead Act provisions, the manufacture of denatured alcohol was not only legal, but tax exempt. The denaturing substance was usually methanol, and methanol was extremely poisonous. Three glasses could be lethal, explaining the steady rise in the death toll from 1920 onward. The Volstead Act’s provisions that industrial alcohol should be made undrinkable included no proviso that its contents should be labeled “poison,” and this was nothing more than “legalized murder,” wrote Dr. Nicolas Murray Butler of Columbia University.

  So, for the first time, in early 1927, Wayne Wheeler, that master manipulator and moral scourge of godless drinkers, found himself on the defensive. Although he denied any liability, it was a fact that the ASL had originally sanctioned the use of methanol when Volstead Act provisions were being drawn up, and had lobbied against any mandatory “poison” labels on denatured alcohol. Wheeler had boasted of the ASL’s key role in drafting the act so loudly, and so frequently, that he lacked all credibility now that he denied responsibility for some of its provisions.

  In 1927 cartoons and editorials he was depicted as a poisoner, and a callous one at that, for his response to the attacks against him was surprisingly inept. At first he claimed that only one such death had occurred since 1920; then, when this was ridiculed by experts, he suggested, in a press statement, that “the government is under no obligation to furnish people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide.”1 This was a monstrously hard-hearted reaction from the leader of an organization heavily subsidized by the Protestant church, leading to further press attacks on him in an admittedly overwhelmingly wet press.

  His clumsiness reflected not only his increasingly precarious health but his loosening grip on Congress — and the ASL itself, for Wheeler’s prickly arrogance had made him many enemies within the organization. His loss of face, and clout, had begun in 1925: in a move intended to curb Wheeler’s inordinate political powers, and his hold on Congress, President Coolidge appointed Lincoln C. Andrews, a forceful retired brigadier general, as assistant secretary of the Treasury, with overall responsibilities for Customs, the Coast Guard, and the Prohibition Bureau.

  The nomination undermined the position of Prohibition Commissioner Haynes, a Wheeler appointee and his pliant stooge, but it also eroded some of Wheeler’s own authority, for Andrews himself began keeping Wheeler at arm’s length, and a number of congressmen, past victims of Wheeler’s strong-arm tactics, now began an open revolt against him. And as his own power declined, a number of new, or long-dormant, anti-Prohibition associations began gathering strength.

  By 1926, several articulate and increasingly powerful lobbies had emerged, campaigning for a return to pre-1920 state liquor laws and even for outright repeal. These were no easily dismissed lobbies sponsored by former brewing and distilling vested interests. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the Crusaders, and the Moderation League, mostly composed of middle-class professionals, lawyers, and businessmen, had all been in existence since the early 1920s, had no connections with the liquor industry, and were now attracting considerable media attention for the first time — with prominent personalities joining their ranks. Various state bar associations, as well as the powerful American Bar Association, were now also daring to challenge the legality of the Volstead Act, drawing attention to the abuses it occasioned; the American Federation of Labor (AFL), representing the views of all but a tiny minority of factory workers, had never given up the struggle for legal 2.5-proof beer, and in 1927 was making its influence felt in Congress as never before. Anti-German sentiment was receding at last: the American Legion, to which millions of First World War veterans belonged, was also turning against the ASL, and would soon urge an end to Prohibition.

  But what worried Wheeler most in 1927 was another “women’s war” phenomenon, waged this time by the wets, and headed by America’s most prominent female Republican. Pauline Morton Sabin, granddaughter of a Republican governor and daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt’s s
ecretary of the Navy, was a dyed-in-the-wool, mainstream Republican. After marrying a wealthy banker (himself a prominent anti-Prohibition campaigner), she had risen through the Republican ranks to become president of the Women’s National Republican Club and the first female ever appointed to the previously all-male Republican National Committee. As a vocal anti-Prohibitionist, she sacrificed her long-standing Republican convictions for her new cause, exploiting the growing, nationwide resentment at corruption and two-tier justice, displaying formidable debating and organizing skills.

  Wheeler was by now a very sick man, with severe heart and kidney afflictions, but was refusing to let up. On April 23,1927, he confronted Clarence Darrow in a contradictory debate on Prohibition at Carnegie Hall. So weak was he that his opening statement had to be read by an underling, and the audience, overwhelmingly pro-Darrow, interrupted him with cruel catcalls. Wheeler responded with considerable bravado. “According to the wets I am dangerously ill and about to quit prohibition work,” he told them. “This is unmitigated bunk. My health is better than the wets wish it was and it is getting better every week.” In fact, he only had another five months to live, and in the brief period left would face increasingly serious challenges.

  That same April, Wheeler had advance warning that Andrew Mellon, Coolidge’s closest cabinet colleague, intended letting both Haynes and Andrews go, and the following month, though in constant pain, he lobbied Congress and the White House to get the decision overthrown. But he was no longer the dreaded “big boss,” and Coolidge ignored his entreaties, replacing Haynes with James M. Moran, who was no friend of Wheeler’s.