Mile High (14 page)

In 1914 Mr. Wheeler announced that the expenses of the drys had reached a peak point of two and a half million dollars a year, 90 percent of which came from “the little people of the country.” He recalled for the press that “in only one case did the national organization receive as much as fifty thousand dollars from a single source, The American Crusade Incorporated, and only five persons contributed ten thousand dollars or more. Furthermore, we have spent less than one hundred thousand dollars directly in electing drys to the Congress.” It was like killing a dragon with sandpaper.

In 1912, E. C. West was named liaison officer among the League, the WCTU, the Methodist Conference and the Prohibition party. He was now at the executive council level, and he began to bring some of the most influential men and women in the United States to meet Mr. Wheeler, Bishop Cannon and William Johnson, who complimented these leaders effusively on their achievements toward a dry America. The great names E. C. West revolved through the doors of the prohibition movement were limited partners of Horizons A.G., friends and associates of those partners, clients of Pick, Heller & O'Connell or founders or friends and associates of the founders of The American Crusade Incorporated. They were powerful publishers, great bankers, leading industrialists, famous lawyers. And the flow was so constant that it began to seem that E. C. West was vitally connected with almost everyone of consequence in the nation. He was such an alert, forceful and gifted young man.

Every one of Mr. West's visitors impressed upon League executives that in his opinion it was excruciatingly important to abandon the local option and state-wide prohibition strategy in favor of a national referendum. Late in 1912 the League moved to endorse that constant recommendation. Only William Jennings Bryan demurred, but he had never been right in his life. The three principal prohibition agencies announced for the first time their total solidarity and accepted as their common goal the total abolition of the liquor trade. The original and basic plan to dry up the United States by steps and stages, first in villages, then in the towns and counties, then throughout whole states, until the nation had been overcome was abandoned forever. The new policy required an amendment to the Constitution, therefore every professional politician in the United States on every level of government was to be enlisted—not necessarily through outright “purchase” of his cooperation, although if that became necessary it would be done.

E. C. West's central strategy was to bring every imaginable pressure on candidates and officeholders; to maintain an espionage system that would reveal the enemy's plans; to unload on the voters a barrage of truths, half truths and imaginative postulates that would synthesize the educational work of the previous thirty years; and to refuse to falter even if it became necessary to bring direct pressure on individuals in politics through business, banking and even family connections. All permutations and combinations of effect were directed toward the end of causing the Senate and the House of Representatives to act in the national interest by delivering the legal preconditions that would then place the issue squarely before the people of the United States—who could, after all, be persuaded to do absolutely anything, E. C. West assured his partners.

“If ever any subject was thoroughly discussed before the American people it was the prohibition issue. If ever the American people had a full and fair chance to make up their minds and declare their decisions at the polls in the election of candidates for legislative office, it was in connection with prohibition,” E. C. West told
The New York Times
in 1923. “No other amendment ever before brought before the people of this country has received such uniform support from both political parties, from every section of the country, and has been ratified by such an overwhelming majority of the states.”

With the decision taken to push for a national amendment in 1913, E.C. West was moved upward to places on both the finance and legislative committees of the League, retaining his portfolio as interagency liaison with the other major agencies.

It was Clarence Padgett who actually “discovered” Warren G. Harding. A great many of the interests of the bank that employed Padgett were in Ohio, and naturally he was very close to the George Cox machine in Cincinnati, where it operated from a saloon headquarters. Cox put Harding into the State Senate in 1901, and he stayed there, except for a run for governor in 1910, until he was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1914. Harding wasn't any deep thinker, but he didn't have to be. He was as amiable as a whore at a bankers' convention. The only time in his life he ever voted against the party line was over a local-option bill that the party wanted passed. His “manager,” Harry Daugherty, made him vote dry because the Anti-Saloon League wanted that option badly, and the party would be a lot quicker to forgive him than the League. And the League remembered. When Harding ran for the U. S. Senate, Wayne B. Wheeler himself publicly forgave Harding for owning brewery stock, saying that the stock was the only payment Harding could get for the advertisements the brewers placed in Harding's newspaper. He was a country courthouse senator in 1914 and President of the United States six years later—his progress having been achieved with the private support of the League, which, publicly, on E. C. West's emphatic advice, had refused to support either presidential candidate.

Padgett “found” Harding in the gubernatorial campaign in 1910 and he talked him over with George B. Cox. “Warren ain't much,” Cox said, “but he does what you tell him to do.” E. C. West liked the sound of that. He went to Ohio to meet Harding and consequently also met Mr. Harry Daugherty. “He's a big, sweet dummy,” West told his partners. “And I have to agree with Daugherty—he looks like a President. And heaven knows, he's the easy-going opposite of Woodrow Wilson.”

In the Spring of 1919 Horizons A.G. was in full agreement on the make-up of the 1920 ticket, and gradually West impressed the importance of this opportunity on the leaders of the League by his tested method of bringing in distinguished visitors to underscore his confidence in the candidate. In turn the League, unaware that West's business and industrial forces were on the same tack, began the line-up of the cadres of the senators of the old guard who would handle the nomination under the orthodox convention proceedings.

The League, indeed the entire movement, was thrilled at the victory of their “hand-picked” new President at the very outset of the force of the Eighteenth Amendment as the law of the land. Then the sound of clinking bottles was heard through every open White House window.

“We're beside ourselves with admiration out here,” Padgett told West on the telephone from Chicago. “You did it! You actually went and did it!” West did more than that. He introduced Elias H. Mortimer as the official White House bootlegger.

CHAPTER TEN

In the years between the formation of Horizons A.G. in 1911 and the day constitutional prohibition went into effect everywhere in the United States at 12:01
A.M.
, January 17, 1920, E. C. West had greatly consolidated his position. He had married and had had one son, Daniel Patrick. His efforts for the prohibition movement (his day-to-day work on its behalf among national leaders), his closeness to the President and the administration, the nature of his partners in the Swiss company, the increased strength of his position with Pick, Heller & O'Connell, his wife's father's influence and the influence of her family had greatly enhanced the yearly statements of the West National Bank. It was now a bank of the first echelon with total resources of $455,493,531, as of its annual statement issued on December 31, 1919, with deposits on that date totaling $301,768,091. West's national influence was seen not only through his stunning successes for the prohibition movement. He had won the admiration of the national business community for the decisive assistance he had brought to the desperate labor unrest, particularly in the steel industry in 1915—16, when he had organized an army of effective strikebreakers from New York and elsewhere, mainly through Dopey Benny Fein and Paul Kelly. This experience had given him insight into the labor opportunity that he was to bring to fruition in the garment industry in New York in 1925, installing his friends Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro, then, earning while learning, moving upward while he promoted still other labor leaders to effective control of the labor movement.

Before C. L. Pick's death in 1916 (when his place in the firm was taken by West's old roommate, C. L. Pick, Jr.) the old man had asked E.C. to visit him at Locust Valley. He was quite weak by then but wholly amiable. “Was it you or Evans Dwye who framed us in 1911, Eddie?”

“Why, C.L. I—”

“Have no fears, my boy. It's just one of those tiny things left unexplained that have interest only to me. It was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My word!”

“There was a good reason, C.L. I had to do it because—”

“I know. I know,” the old man said, staying him with a fragile hand. “We could never have taken your bizarre plan seriously—nor could we possibly have sponsored it—if we had not been so grotesquely indebted to you. It was good thinking, Eddie. You were born a master criminal, perhaps the greatest I have ever met in a lifetime of practicing corporate law.”

E.C. thanked him because he knew the old man meant it as a sincere compliment.

“Do you still own those six lots of your father's between Fulton and Wall?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You must build a new bank there. A skyscraper filled with money.” He sighed. “Ah, how I envy your coldness of spirit, Eddie, your inability to understand that mortals feel pain.” He delivered his sere and ghastly laugh. “You paranoiacs are the true romantics.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

If one is vaguely ashamed of being the son of a woman who wore a black shawl and who spoke only Sicilian, who spoke to one's father only in obscenities knowing that no one but her son could understand her, then one does not marry beneath oneself, simply because of the conviction that there is no one beneath one. If one spent eight telescoped years acquiring ten years of education at the Gelbart Academy, Yale and Harvard, in terms of envied personality, envied by all one's peers, and if one then became the youngest bank president and in relatively short order formed a company having assets of seventy-five million dollars, then went on to help direct one of the greatest social movements any nation has ever known, then one does not seek the hand of some mere commoner. Neither did Edward Courance West.

Irene Wagstaff was a red-blonde with very fair skin and pale green eyes, therefore she did not in any way resemble E. C. West's mother. Irene Wagstaff's bosom did not bulge exceedingly nor was it flat. She had skin for a botanist to wonder over and a look of such youth and freshness that all thought of giving and taking pain went out of West's mind, although not forever.

Her father was Walter Wagstaff, a railroad president-more than sufficient station for the times. He was a director of a large steel company, of the leading cooperative of the coming citrus industry, of an industrial chemicals complex and of an automobile-manufacturing firm near Detroit, Michigan, that seemed capable of doubling its value every year. He was also a consecrated prohibitionist, because liquor dragged down the efficiency of the workingman, and he and his daughter were devout Roman Catholics.

Irene was twenty years old, one of two children. Her religious conviction was prodigious, if unilateral: Mass every morning, Communion twice a week, and a confessor more regularly used than other girls' hairdressers. She was a throwback Catholic. She was fulfilled by the show-business side of the faith as opposed to the theological, by the costumes and processions and glorious singing that had been designed for ages and times long gone when there had been nothing to do for diversion except make love, go to war, work to exhaustion or respond to the slogan that church services were better than ever. Irene was an endearing but never immoderately bright girl. She was in no way stupid; she never tried to pass her Catholicism along. When she met Edward, for example, she didn't ask him whether he was a Catholic or, when they were courting, whether he would attend Mass with her or take Communion with her. She just went to church and got enormous pleasure out of it, as one gets from a classical play one has seen and enjoyed many times, a play with a simple plot or perhaps a plotless, mindless ballet. Irene was intact. She was one of those oddities who are either born whole or who somehow, as impossible as it seems, grow up whole. She made people happy merely by sitting and walking and being. She made E. C. West marvel.

Their meeting was correct in every way. West was a leader of the prohibition movement. His crusading activities were regularly reported in the national press. Because of that, because he was a banker and because he had requested it through the League's lecture bureau, he was invited to address a meeting of the American Bankers' Association on topics of prohibition. The members were circularized with a warning not to miss the meeting. As a bank director, Walter Wagstaff attended the luncheon, gorged on his own dry convictions. He was stunned with admiration for the speaker. When the meeting was over, Mr. Wagstaff sought West out to introduce himself. In the course of their very brief talk Mr. Wagstaff said that he didn't suppose Mr. West got to New York very often, and E.C. explained that he lived in New York, that he spent only the first three days of each week in Washington. “In that case,” Mr. Wagstaff said, “why don't you come to dinner next week?”

Casual students of the West legend might have said that he fell in love with Irene the moment he entered her father's mansion on Fifth Avenue, measured the vast entrance hall with his expert eye, took in warmth from the huge Delacroix that hung on a stair landing facing the door and entered the pleasant library of rare first editions.