Daniel okrent last call the rise and fall o ion (v5 0)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR Nine Innings The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center Public Editor #1 LAST CALL The Rise and Fall of Prohibition DANIEL OKRENT Credits, photo inserts: Courtesy of J P Andrieux and Flanker Press 29, 31; AP/Wide World Photos 26, 49; © Bettman/CORBIS 8, 14, 23, 30, 45, 50, 56, 57, 60; Brown Brothers 3, 10, 17, 33, 52, 55; Brown University Library 20, 21; Catholic University of America 46; the great-grandchildren of Georges de Latour 32; Hagley Museum and Library 28; Hulton Archive/Getty Images 61, 62; Kansas State Historical Society 7; Library of Congress 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 22, 24, 25, 47; Maryland Historical Society 59; New York Post/SplashNews 54; Ohio Historical Society 1; Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies 4, 5; TavernTrove.com 39–43; “21” Club 53; Underwood & Underwood 34; Walter P Reuther Library, Wayne State University 19, 27, 48, 51, 58; author’s collection 6, 15, 16, 18, 35–38, 44 SCRIBNER A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2010 by Last Laugh, Inc All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 First Scribner hardcover edition May 2010 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-2483049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com Book design by Ellen R Sasahara Manufactured in the United States of America 10 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009051127 ISBN 978-0-7432-7702-0 ISBN 978-1-4391-7169-1 (ebook) For my sister, Judith Simon, and in memory of absent friends: Robert N Nylen (1944–2008) Richard Seaver (1926–2009) Henry Z Steinway (1915–2008) Contents Prologue January 16, 1920 PART I THE STRUGGLE Thunderous Drums and Protestant Nuns The Rising of Liquid Bread The Most Remarkable Movement “Open Fire on the Enemy” Triumphant Failure Dry-Drys, Wet-Drys, and Hyphens From Magna Carta to Volstead PART II THE FLOOD Starting Line A Fabulous Sweepstakes 10 Leaks in the Dotted Line 11 The Great Whiskey Way 12 Blessed Be the Fruit of the Vine 13 The Alcohol That Got Away 14 The Way We Drank PART III THE WAR OF THE WET AND THE DRY 15 Open Wounds 16 “Escaped on Payment of Money” 17 Crime Pays 18 The Phony Referendum PART IV THE BEGINNING OF THE END, THE END, AND AFTER 19 Outrageous Excess 20 The Hummingbird That Went to Mars 21 Afterlives, and the Missing Man Epilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: The Constitution of the United States of America Notes Sources Index THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES Ratified January 16, 1919 Section After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited Section The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation Section This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress Prologue January 16, 1920 T San Francisco were jammed A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons, and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills Porches, staircase landings, and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered on the last possible day before transporting their contents would become illegal The next morning, the Chronicle reported that people whose beer, liquor, and wine had not arrived by midnight were left to stand in their doorways “with haggard faces and glittering eyes.” Just two weeks earlier, on the last New Year’s Eve before Prohibition, frantic celebrations had convulsed the city’s hotels and private clubs, its neighborhood taverns and wharfside saloons It was a spasm of desperate joy fueled, said the Chronicle, by great quantities of “bottled sunshine” liberated from “cellars, club lockers, bank vaults, safety deposit boxes and other hiding places.” Now, on January 16, the sunshine was surrendering to darkness HE STREETS OF San Franciscans could hardly have been surprised Like the rest of the nation, they’d had a year’s warning that the moment the calendar flipped to January 17, Americans would only be able to own whatever alcoholic beverages had been in their homes the day before In fact, Americans had had several decades’ warning, decades during which a popular movement like none the nation had ever seen—a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes—had legally seized the Constitution, bending it to a new purpose Up in the Napa Valley to the north of San Francisco, where grape growers had been ripping out their vines and planting fruit trees, an editor wrote, “What was a few years ago deemed the impossible has happened.” To the south, Ken Lilly—president of the Stanford University student body, star of its baseball team, candidate for the U.S Olympic track team—was driving with two classmates through the late-night streets of San Jose when his car crashed into a telephone pole Lilly and one of his buddies were badly hurt, but they would recover The forty-gallon barrel of wine they’d been transporting would not Its disgorged contents turned the street red Across the country on that last day before the taps ran dry, Gold’s Liquor Store placed wicker baskets filled with its remaining inventory on a New York City sidewalk; a sign read “ Every bottle, $1.” Down the street, Bat Masterson, a sixty-six-year-old relic of the Wild West now playing out the string as a sportswriter in New York, observed the first night of constitutional Prohibition sitting alone in his favorite bar, glumly contemplating a cup of tea Under the headline GOODBYE, OLD PAL !, the American Chicle Company ran newspaper ads featuring an illustration of a martini glass and suggesting the consolation of a Chiclet, with its “exhilarating flavor that tingles the taste.” In Detroit that same night, federal officers shut down two illegal stills (an act that would become common in the years ahead) and reported that their operators had offered bribes (which would become even more common) In northern Maine, a paper in New Brunswick reported, “Canadian liquor in quantities from one gallon to a truckload is being hidden in the northern woods and distributed by automobile, sled and iceboat, on snowshoes and on skis.” At the Metropolitan Club in Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D Roosevelt spent the evening drinking champagne with other members of the Harvard class of 1904 There were of course those who welcomed the day The crusaders who had struggled for decades The Anti-Saloon League convention, 1915, in Atlantic City Speakers included former heavyweight champion John L Sullivan and Dr J H Kellogg, the man who gave America cornflakes Richmond P Hobson, who introduced the Prohibition amendment in Congress, exhorted his colleagues to pass it “in the name of your manhood.” The Speaker of the House considered Hobson “a political lunatic.” Andrew Volstead never joined the ASL or delivered an antiliquor speech But the enforcement law he wrote led to the word “volsteadism”—according to Webster’s Third, “the doctrine of or adherence to prohibition.” “The liquor interests hate Billy Sunday as they hate no man,” said an ASL publication Said Sunday, “I will fight them till hell freezes over, then I’ll buy a pair of skates and fight ’em on the ice.” Wayne B Wheeler, the brilliant tactician who dominated the ASL, was considered—by a critic —“the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States,” who “controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents [and] held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties.” As secretary of state in 1914, William Jennings Bryan served grape juice at state dinners The following year, as a stump speaker for the ASL, he was delivering as many as ten speeches a day Trying to distinguish “healthful” beer from dangerous liquor, brewers liked to refer to it as “liquid bread.” Detroit brewer George H Gies took the healthfulness argument several steps further Adolphus Busch said brewers should be willing to “risk the majority of our fortunes” to fight Prohibition; he used quite a lot of his own money to bribe newspaper editors, buy votes, and pay operatives to influence elections through means, said one of his agents, that “are best not written about.” But the brewers—almost all of them of German extraction—were rendered helpless after the United States entered World War I and the ASL turned the nation’s anti-German feeling against them On January 16, 1920, this Detroit liquor store had no trouble depleting its stock Within hours, a vast and unstoppable legal trade was born, giving rise in turn to the creation of multistate criminal syndicates Much of the public that had once responded to songs like this 1866 number (20) would, by 1920, be hearing a very different tune Representative W D Upshaw of Georgia took any opportunity he could find to demonstrate that he was the “driest of the drys.” Wets treated him as a living parody of dry priggishness, and Upshaw usually rose to their expectations—both in writing (he signed his mail “Yours very dry”) and in front of the cameras As the “Prohibition Portia,” Assistant Attorney General Mabel Willebrandt was the most visible— and powerful—woman in American public life through the 1920s Still, newspapers described her in the familiar vocabulary of the women’s pages: the Atlanta Constitution said she was a “delightful luncheon companion who neither paints, powders, nor uses lipstick.” Willebrandt’s efforts in the Justice Department were frequently undermined by the icy indifference of Andrew Mellon (25) and the buffoonish Roy Haynes (24) Mellon, it was said, was the “only Treasury Secretary under whom three president served.” A crony of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Haynes was primarily responsible for dispensing patronage on behalf of Wayne B Wheeler of the ASL Almost from the beginning, enforcement was a practical failure But even sporadic effort produced good visuals This barrel-smashing assault took place in the first months of Prohibition; the raid on the contents of a Detroit warehouse (27) occurred a few years later The honeymoon trip that Sam and Saidye Bronfman took in 1922 included a sidetrip to Kentucky, where Sam bought the Greenbrier Distillery Dismantled, shipped to Canada, and reassembled, it was quickly put to use as the foundation of Bronfman’s enormous bootlegging business In any given week, Bronfman had a million dollars’ worth of inventory stashed on the North Atlantic island of St Pierre Virtually every man, woman, and horse on the island was engaged in unloading, storing, and reloading liquor destined for the United States; many houses were shingled with used packing crates After Congress appropriated money for a vastly enlarged Coast Guard, bootleggers on Rum Row were much more likely to be apprehended Seizures of ships like this one increased, but so did bribery and violence Georges de Latour built Beaulieu Vineyards on the lucrative (and legal) business of providing communion wines for the Catholic Church Many California grape growers shipped their crop to New York, where Paddy’s Market, which stretched along seven blocks of Ninth Avenue, became a bazaar for home winemakers Because the Volstead Act allowed rabbis to distribute sacramental wines to synagogue members, “wine congregations” exploded in size, and wine stores like this one opened in Jewish neighborhoods The going price paid to physicians for a legal liquor prescription was two dollars “Spiritus Frumenti”—abbreviated by this Kentucky pharmacist as “spir fru.” (36)—is the Latin term for such elixirs; in most cases, it was straight rye Physicians and pharmacists supplying medicinal liquor were required to submit records to the Prohibition Bureau This ledger, maintained by a doctor in Providence, Rhode Island, suggests that almost everyone seemed to suffer from the same ailment S S Pierce of Boston was one of the leading distributors of “medicinal liquor,” which they offered to pharmacists in a number of tasty varieties Near beer was available everywhere, but under the law, the word “beer” itself could not be used in describing it Brewers tried to claim it was as good as the real thing—but, some asked, if that were true, why had they bothered to make the real thing in the first place? Malt syrup (44), for home brewing, was a more successful product Al Smith, said one dry leader, “is just the kind of man wanted by those who want that kind of man.” His presidential candidacy in 1928 was a critical turning point in the Prohibition saga He may have been defeated by the anti-Catholic propaganda unleashed by the drys (46), but his public advocacy of the wet cause changed the terms of the political debate Aeromarine Airways, departing from Miami, was one of several exploiters of “liquor tourism.” Havana’s rise as a vacation spot for Americans was a product of Prohibition (the sign at Sloppy Joe’s Bar read where the wet begins), as was the entire cruise-ship industry The clothing industry developed a new specialty because of Prohibition, with garments designed both for smuggling and for partying The vial embedded in this high-heel shoe could accommodate a full shot of whiskey Los Angeles bootleggers managed to hide seventy cases of scotch behind the camouflaged access door of this lumber truck In Detroit, rum-running traffic across the frozen Detroit River was so lucrative that some overly enthusiastic smugglers kept at it a little too late in the season Al Capone’s intuitive feel for publicity enabled him to see the value in building a photo opportunity around a meeting with Chicago police captain John Stege, a famously honest cop “Public service is my motto,” Capone said; he could as easily have said “public relations.” By the late ’20s, New York’s attention to Prohibition was so halfhearted that few bothered to be terribly secretive about their drinking This glittering event at the Puncheon Club on West Forty-ninth Street was a precursor of yet more glamorous nights at “21,” presided over by cofounder Jack Kriendler (second from right) After the wealthy, elegant, and extremely able Pauline Morton Sabin (54) became the public face of Repeal, well-born American women (and those who aspired to the same social status) flocked to her cause Her opposite number at the WCTU, Ella Boole, was opposite in countless ways Pierre S du Pont (left) bankrolled the Repeal movement; his associate John J Raskob was among its key strategists They had many reasons to oppose Prohibition, but reinstating the excise tax on legal liquor (thereby enabling a reduction in the income tax) was foremost among them At the time this picture was taken, three years after Repeal, both men had become principals in the right-wing, antitax, anti-Roosevelt organization known as the Liberty League In 1931, as the citadel of Prohibition began to crumble, forty thousand people jammed Military Park in downtown Newark, demanding legal beer Pauline Sabin was among those who addressed the crowd Beer’s return was hurried along by the Depression The nation’s desperate need for both jobs and tax revenue prompted this labor-sponsored parade in Detroit H L Mencken and friends celebrated the legalization of beer at the bar of the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore After draining the first legal glass, Mencken declared it “pretty good—not bad at all.” Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith (60), the nation’s best-known Prohibition agents, celebrated Repeal by openly doing what they had long done under cover: having a drink Upon Repeal’s arrival in New York, a large crowd mobbed the liquor department at Macy’s A substantially larger one, seeking newly available liquor licenses, lined up outside the city’s Board of Health ... sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for... lecture on the subject of alcohol In it he urged the women of THE OPPOSITION OF Hillsboro to use the power of prayer to rid the town of its saloons—not by calling down the wrath of God, but by... was to walk into a saloon and chug a double rye At thirty-five Willard was among the small group of women who in 1874 founded the WCTU; at forty she took control of the organization, and for the