Drink (61 page)

While drinking on the silver screen helped sway public opinion in favor of the repeal of Prohibition, the actual termination of the noble experiment was the work of former groups of drys who turned against the monster they had created. Business was the first to rebel against the Eighteenth Amendment, followed by American women, and, finally, organized labor. The defection of industry to the wet cause came as a shock to the drys: Industrialists had been among their most ardent supporters, and the concept that drinking and operating machines did not mix had been vital to their case: In the words of Henry Ford, “We must give up drink or industrialism.” However, in 1928 the Du Ponts, hitherto staunch Prohibitionists, assumed leadership of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). Their stated reason for this volte-face was to preserve the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution; their tacit motivation was a desire to reduce their tax bills by restoring liquor revenues. They were joined by senior management from other large businesses, including Western Union and Standard Oil. By the end of the year the AAPA had among its members 103 directors serving “on the boards of businesses with two million employees and assets of forty billion dollars.” This development occurred at a time of weakness for the drys. Wayne Wheeler had died of a heart attack in the same year, and his replacement, Bishop Cannon, lacked the political clout of the pioneer of pressure politics.

However, when American women turned against Prohibition, through the formation (in 1929) of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), which was headed by a cast of New York socialites, the drys rallied on the moral high ground and attacked the traitors to their cause. The
American Independent,
a dry rag, was of the opinion that “these wet women, though rich most of them are, are no more than the scum of the earth, parading around in skirts, and possibly late at night flirting with other women’s husbands at drunken and fashionable resorts.” However, by 1932 the WONPR had over a million members, and the drys had lost their moral authority: Bishop Cannon had been uncovered as a stock market speculator, a black market profiteer during World War I, a gambler, and an adulterer who had kept his mistress on diocesan funds.

Unlike its women and its industrialists, America’s workers had never been part of the Prohibition camp. In 1922, the American Federation of Labor passed a resolution supporting modification of the Volstead Act to permit beer and light wines; the same resolution was passed every subsequent year. Prohibition was perceived as discriminatory against urban and factory workers, who had drunk beer in saloons rather than cocktails and so had suffered more than the rich, whose tastes in drinks were better catered to by bootleggers. The workers not only had to endure thirst but also violence as a result of Prohibition. Organized crime, flush with money from selling alcohol, moved into the strike-breaking business. Union leaders were murdered and workforces cowed by gangsters hired by unscrupulous industrialists. This unintended consequence of the great moral experiment sickened many Americans, as did the never-ending casualty register caused by toxic bootleg.

In 1930, America suffered the worst outbreak of mass poisoningit had yet experienced, which crippled perhaps fifty thousand people for life. The culprit was a patent medicine, Jamaican ginger extract, known colloquially as
jake,
which was available without prescription from pharmacists as a remedy for coughs. Jake was up to eighty-five percent alcohol. It was legal under the medicinal alcohol exemption of the Volstead Act, although federal law required that such “tonics” contain at least five percent solids after an evaporation test, that they be unpalatable, and that they be packaged in small containers to dissuade people from buying them by the pint. However, the criminals who moved into the market for tonics found such limitations irksome. They added plasticizer chemicals from the photographic industry to their product, which enabled them to cheat federal tests and to sell what were in essence bottled shots at drugstores up and down the country. The chemicals, however, were highly toxic: Contaminated Jake permanently damaged its victims’ central nervous systems. Its usual symptoms were a loss of control of the muscles in the feet, forcing those afflicted by it to walk on their ankles until the ligaments had been ripped to shreds, and thereafter to crawl. This condition was known as jake leg, or jake foot. Jake also made men blind and impotent. As the outbreak occurred in the days before class action suits, there are no precise figures for how many people were poisoned. The greatest number of victims were in the southern and southwestern states, and many of them were African Americans. The progress of jake leg was recorded in blues songs such as “Jake Leg Blues” by Willie Loften & the Mississippi Sheiks. Although the source of the contamination was traced, and one of the bootleggers responsible for such misery sentenced to two years in prison, the outbreak helped to turn small-town America against Prohibition.

The failings of the Volstead Act were brought to the attention of the federal government by the Wickersham Commission, which concluded its two-year scrutiny of Prohibition and reported its findings on January 7, 1931. Although it recommended that America continue to be dry, albeit with more diligent enforcement, the body of evidence in its report showed that Prohibition was a failure. In the opinion of the Wickersham Commission, “The Eighteenth Amendment and the National Prohibition Act” had come into existence “at the time best suited for their adoption and at the worst time for their enforcement.” It was, in essence, oppressive wartime legislation introduced after peace had been declared, and as such had been resented from the start.

Thereafter, matters went from bad to worse. The United States had changed so much since 1920. Automobiles, airplanes, cinema, and radio had connected rural and urban America, and metropolitan values had spread at the expense of rustic fanaticism. The commission noted the appearance of “new standards of independence and individual self-assertion, changed ideas as to conduct generally, and [a] greater emphasis on freedom and the quest for excitement since the war.” Such new standards had influenced people’s perception of alcohol: “It is safe to say that a significant change has taken place in the social attitude toward drinking. This may be seen in the views and conduct of social leaders, business and professional men in the average community. It may be seen in the tolerance of conduct at social gatherings which would not have been possible a generation ago. It is reflected in a different way of regarding drunken youth, in a change in the class of excessive drinkers, and in the increased use of distilled liquor in places and connections where formerly it was banned.” As a result of all these changes, it was evident to the commission that, “taking the country as a whole, people . . . are drinking in large numbers in quite frank disregard of the declared policy of the National Prohibition Act.”

After picturing Prohibition as a hated anachronism, which was held in contempt by Americans of either sex and every age, the Wickersham report drew attention to its discriminatory nature, so alien to the principles of America. It noted that it had been “easier to shut up the open drinking places and stop the sale of beer, which was drunk chiefly by working men, than to prevent the wealthy from having and using liquor in their homes and in their clubs. . . . Thus the law may be made to appear as aimed at and enforced against the insignificant while the wealthy enjoy immunity. This feeling is reinforced when it is seen that the wealthy are generally able to procure pure liquors, where those with less means may run the risk of poisoning through the working over of denatured alcohol or, at best, must put up with cheap, crude, and even deleterious products.”

Moreover, popular hatred of Prohibition had been inflamed by the oppressive manner in which it had been enforced: Homes had been searched, telephones tapped, innocents murdered by Prohibition agents. Americans were disgusted with the “informers, snoopers, and undercover men unavoidably made use of if a universal total abstinence is to be brought about by law,” and were furious at the “inequalities of penalties, even in adjoining districts in the same locality.” There was also the little matter of corruption, evidence of which was hard to ignore: “It is sufficient to refer to the reported decisions of the courts during the past decade in all parts of the country, which reveal a succession of prosecutions for conspiracies, sometimes involving the police, prosecuting, and administrative organizations of whole communities . . . to the revelations as to police corruption in every type of municipality, large and small, throughout the decade . . . to the evidence of connection between corrupt local politics and gangs and the organized unlawful liquor traffic, and of systematic collection of tribute from that traffic for corrupt political purposes.” Such ubiquitous graft had clogged up the courts at the state and federal level, resulting in real damage to the efficiency and integrity of the administration of justice in the United States.

The Wickersham report made sobering reading for the shrinking number of dry Americans. It concluded that Prohibition would only succeed if it was enforced by an expensive army of trained agents, assisted by the cooperation and blessings of the general public. And as the report had pointed out, the likelihood of the latter helping the cause in either deed or thought was slim. However, sincere efforts were made to carry out the commission’s recommendations. The federal courts went into overdrive to prosecute bootleggers and owners of speakeasies. The number of convictions for liquor offences, which had averaged about 35,000 per annum during the Roaring Twenties soared to 61,383 in 1932. Jail sentences rocketed from around 12,000 to 44,668. This last flurry of prosecutions proved to be the dying convulsions of Prohibition. By the end of 1932, America had sunk into the Great Depression. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed, industrial production had fallen by more than half, and two million people were homeless. In this changed climate, it was useless to persist in enforcing an expensive and unpopular law, when the country might plug the gaping hole in its revenues with taxes on drinking.

President Hoover himself acknowledged “the futility of the whole business,” and repeal was a central issue in the election of 1932. The Democratic Party adopted it as a plank of its platform, and when its candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, declared, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” the new deal included the termination of Prohibition. Hoover, in contrast, wobbled on the issue. New Yorkers joked that the new bridge from Fort Tryon to the Palisades should be named after him, “since it was wet below and dry on top and straddled the river with a foot on either side.” The Republicans eventually settled for a moist compromise—resubmission of the Eighteenth Amendment to the states, with the caveat that whatever the states decided, the saloon would remain banned. Roosevelt won by a landslide.

On December 6, 1932, Senator John J. Blaine of Wisconsin drafted a Twenty-first Amendment, to be submitted to the states, which would nullify the Eighteenth. It was quickly adopted by both houses and sent to state governors in February 1933. Each state was to hold a referendum on the matter and a three-quarters majority of states was required for ratification. The process was expected to be slow, and as an interim measure, Congress sought to modify the Volstead Act, via the Cullen Bill, to permit the sale of beer with an ABV of 3.2 percent. Its aims were made clear by Congressman La Guardia: It was before the House “first, by reason of the great need of additional revenue; second, owing to the complete failure of prohibition enforcement; third, by reason of the changed attitude of the American public.” The bill provided for a federal tax of five dollars per barrel of beer and became law on April 7, 1933. The surviving breweries turned off their de-alcoholizing units in preparation, Anheuser-Busch arranged a floodlit ceremony, attended by thirty thousand people, for 12:00 P.M. on the sixth of April, and
The New York Times
carried the headline BEER FLOWS IN NINETEEN STATES AT MIDNIGHT.

Drinkers wanting something stronger did not have long to wait: The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified with the same alacrity as had been the Eighteenth. By December 1933, thirty-five states had consented, with Utah standing in the wings, determined to be remembered as the thirty-sixth to do so: “No other state shall take away this glory from Utah.” At 5:32 P.M. on December 5, Utah cast its ballot. At 7:00 P.M. President Roosevelt signed the proclamation that banged a stake through the heart of Prohibition. The death of the monster was generally quietly received. Although New Orleans greeted it with a twenty-minute cannonade, most places and people kept their heads. H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, celebrated with a glass of water and the comment that it was “my first in thirteen years.” Prohibition had lasted thirteen years, ten months, and eighteen days, fifty-odd days less than the fourteen years’ supply of wine laid down by the Yale Club back in 1920.