Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (10 page)

Myron T. Herrick, governor of Ohio, was among the prominent politicians whose careers Wheeler destroyed virtually single-handedly. Herrick, the Republican governor of a staunchly Republican state, seemed unbeatable when he ran for reelection. But Wheeler first got the ASL to endorse the Democratic candidate, John M. Pattison, from Cincinnati, a strict churchman and dry. “We had a hard job making the people see that they were not giving up their religion when they voted Democratic,” Wheeler said later.
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“That was especially true in the rural sections, where they always voted a straight Republican ticket. I used to tell them that Lincoln wasn’t running that year.” Pattison won. Herrick did, subsequently, reap his reward for lifelong service to the Republican party: he was appointed U.S. ambassador in Paris, and was on hand to greet Lindbergh after his historic flight across the Atlantic (1927). Prohibition was in full swing by this time, and Wheeler wondered what Herrick and Lindbergh, a staunch Prohibitionist, had had to say to each other in private.

Soon, under Wheeler’s effective direction, Ohio became — long before Prohibition — one of the driest states in the Union. As he proudly noted in 1908, 57 of its counties had gone dry under County Local Option laws. Various other dry measures instituted since he had begun working full-time for the ASL affected most of the other counties as well, so that by 1908, 60 percent of Ohio’s population, and 85
percent of its territory, was under “dry legislation,” though its large towns, especially Cincinnati, remained almost aggressively wet. The Ohio legislators, for all their “prohibition correctness,” were well aware of the revenues liquor brought into the state coffers. Saloon licenses, introduced in 1896, first cost $350 a year, then — in 1906 — $1,000. In 1908, there were 7,050 saloons in Ohio, and 690 more opened in 1911. The ASL’s position was that licensing saloons was immoral, but this challenge failed, and a licensing law gained a substantial majority. Wheeler’s rearguard action was to make life more difficult for saloon keepers by prohibiting saloon operations within 300 feet of a school-house, forbidding “loitering by minors” there, compelling Sunday closings, and denying licenses to noncitizens and those of insufficiently good “moral conduct.”

Wheeler was helped, indirectly, by the blatant political immorality of the times. License commissioners in Ohio and elsewhere were known to take bribes and favor friendly candidates, and many were in league with the major breweries, which in most cases were the saloons’ real owners (they also maintained close relations with owners of the technically illegal speakeasies). In the course of his work, Wheeler — who in middle age bore a striking resemblance to France’s elder statesman, the late Antoine Pinay — had met most of the influential figures in the business world. John D. Rockefeller, after hearing him preach, presented him with a paper vest against the cold — and $5,000 for the ASL, the first of many contributions. He was becoming an acknowledged behind-the-scenes political power in Ohio, but now he had further ambitions. Ohio was at the forefront of the war on liquor, and, in many respects, a microcosm of still overwhelmingly rural America. Wheeler was sufficiently sensitive to the public mood to know that nationwide Prohibition was becoming a distinct possibility. As a first step, he persuaded the ASL to announce that statewide Prohibition was “imminent and inevitable,” introducing for the first time the notion of “a national constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes” in the ASL’s organ
The American Patriot
.

In 1913, the ASL’s National Board of Trustees met in Columbus to celebrate their Jubilee Convention. Wheeler, in the wings as usual, let J. Frank Hanly, a former Governor of Indiana, make the actual call for national Prohibition, to be brought about by constitutional . amendment
“For a moment there was silence, deep and tense,” Wheeler recalled. “Then the convention cut loose. With a roar as wild as the raging storm outside it jumped to its feet and yelled approval. The first shot in the Eighteenth Amendment had been fired.” The proposal was unanimously carried, and on December 10, 1913, a 1,000-mem-ber ASL delegation met in Washington on the steps of the Capitol, demonstrating its power and nationwide impact.

About this time, the drys were also provided with further “scientific” evidence — this time from Europe — of the ill effects of alcohol, even taken in small quantities. August Forel, a noted Swiss brain specialist, had investigated its effect on mental processes, and professed they were terrifying. So too did Emil Kraeplin, a German psychiatrist. This boosted the campaign for sobriety that was a growing feature in factories. As Norman Clark wrote, “probably even more than religion, science had prepared the public mind for complete prohibition.” Ever since he began making automobiles, Henry Ford had insisted that his workers be teetotalers, and used a private police force to spy on them; anyone caught buying hard liquor in a store a second time was fired.

Throughout his subsequent dry campaign, Wheeler had systematically favored the rural dry vote. “God made the country, but man made the town” was his
leitmotif
, and, as his personal secretary noted, he viewed the cities as “un-American, lawless and wet,” reserving special scorn for the “Irish, the continentals with their beer and wine, and the guzzling wet Democrats in the North and East.”
⁷

Even in Ohio, a model for other states, the dry vote, though effective (for the towns were underrepresented), was always a minority. He himself noted that there were only 400,000 dry voters out of a total Ohio voting population of 1,250,000. The success of ASL tactics depended to a large extent on overrepresentation in the rural areas and underrepresentation in the towns.

This led the Ohio ASL to gravely miscalculate its chances. In 1914, constitutional amendments to declare the whole of Ohio dry were defeated, and many previously dry counties returned to their wet state.

The 1914 congressional elections did, however, provide the ASL with a heaven-sent opportunity to bring the Prohibition issue to the public. In the
New york Times,
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Wheeler reminisced that it “mobilized 50,000 trained speakers, volunteers and regulars directing their fire
upon the wets in every village, town, city, county and state.” Its literature, he wrote, “found its way to every spot in the United States. . . . While we were fighting back in the districts, we were also bombarding the House and Senate in Washington. . . . We kept the field workers advised of the attitude of every individual member of Congress and suggested ways to the local workers of winning converts.”

The result, Wheeler noted, was a triumph “beyond our hopes.” The ASL knew it lacked — for the time being, at least — the votes to push for a constitutional amendment that would make Prohibition a reality nationwide. But it was soon to use another formidable weapon. In March of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called the Sixty-fifth Congress (elected in 1916) into special session to declare war on Germany. America’s entry into the war would provide a new weapon — patriotism — to undermine the anti-Prohibitionist campaign carried out by the saloon, liquor, and brewery vested interests.

At first the anti-Prohibitionists did not realize how effective the jingoist campaign of the ASL would be. When they did retaliate, theirs was a costly, bumbling, piecemeal, ineffective campaign. The brewers and the hard liquor interests never did manage to coordinate their efforts, for in the last resort the brewers were ready to abandon the distillers to their fate. The brewers felt that although there was a possible case for banning hard liquor outright, beer — a benign, natural substance — would never be banned.

The war drastically altered the picture and advanced the dry cause beyond Wheeler’s wildest hopes. After Britain and France went to war with Germany in 1914, Wheeler, accurately gauging the feelings of his fellow Americans, was aware that the increasingly anti-German mood, rapidly amounting to hysteria, would be a godsend to the dry cause. He would exploit this cynically and crudely, but with enormous effectiveness. As, in state after state, the strength of the dry vote became increasingly apparent, it was clear to him that the Great War would administer the final coup de grace to the opponents of Prohibition.

This was also becoming apparent to politicians all over America, especially the most opportunistic, unscrupulous ones. In 1917, Harry Micajah Daugherty — later to become attorney general during the first Prohibition years and one of the most corrupt members of any American administration — conferred with Warren Harding, then an Ohio senator, and decided to climb on the Prohibition wagon as a
means of strengthening Republican fortunes in the state. “Prohibition,” Daugherty wrote to Harding, “is going to be a movement that has come to stay and it will be joined by the strong men of the party.”
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In fact, Wheeler’s victory was assured the day America itself entered the war (April 6,1917). In the last resort, it was a misguided form of patriotism, amounting to jingoism, that would ensure the prompt passing of the Eighteenth Amendment.

A
lthough many Americans were unaware of it, a massive transformation in the ethnic mix of the United States occurred in the half-century that preceded America’s entry into the First World War. Millions of Europeans, taking advantage of its ultraliberal immigration policy, settled in America,
changing
the country’s ways.

To some Americans, steeped in the puritan culture that still centered around the farm, the family, and the church, these newly emerging ethnic patterns were deeply disturbing. As historian Dennis Brogan has noted, in New York a great and increasing part of the population was now composed of recent immigrants, usually indifferent to American issues, “having nothing to lose but their chains and little to sell but their votes.”

Arguably, the single most influential group of immigrants — over eight million in the second half of the nineteenth century — came from Germany. Their culture and industriousness put an indelible stamp on the areas they settled into — and transformed American drinking habits.

The Germans had been among the earliest of America’s immigrants. Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia), was founded in 1683. From 1832 onward, the trickle of German immigrants to America turned into a flood. Political unrest in Germany accelerated their departure: socialists and liberals hostile to Metternich’s policies began fleeing in large numbers after a brutally suppressed protest movement in 1832; then came the failed revolution of 1848, provoking a further flood of departures, to such an extent that by the time the Civil War broke out there were German-speaking regiments fighting in Lincoln’s army. Bismarck’s authoritarianism, especially after 1870, led to another influx. Although some of the German immigrants were motivated by the classic hope of a better life, what set them apart from other categories was the large proportion of highly educated, politically sophisticated liberal intellectuals in their midst.

By 1914, they were all over America, concentrating in places where German-Americans had already made good, such as Chicago and Milwaukee, but nowhere was their impact greater than in Cincinnati, which became, in many ways, from the 1850s onward, almost a German city.
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German-American historian Friedrich Gerstacker described Cincinnati as “the Queen of the West, the Eldorado of the German immigrant.” For many years, he wrote, Cincinnati did not even try to assimilate its German immigrants — “instead, they assimilated Cincinnati.” In 1820, they had been 5 percent of the population. In 1917, 35 percent of Cincinnati was German, and almost half its inhabitants were German-speaking. German was taught in schools not as a foreign language but as a mother tongue. Many of Cincinnati’s inhabitants spoke nothing but German, and found it unnecessary to learn English. There were German orchestras, theater groups, gymnasiums, libraries, credit unions, and trade associations and “Vereine” (associations) of all types. In many Methodist and Lutheran churches, services were in German. In the years 1870-1917, when the German cultural influence was at its peak, there were twenty-seven German newspapers and magazines in the Cincinnati area.

Cincinnati benefited enormously from the German-American presence: they were energetic, industrious, entrepreneurial, and, above all, civic-minded. Cincinnati’s red-brick “Theatrum,” said to have the finest acoustics in the world, and now the site of the town’s opera company, is but one of their still extant landmarks. German-Americans
funded hospitals, old people’s homes, cultural centers, gymnasiums, and charities of all types. In that successive immigration, waves were triggered not only by poverty and the hope of a better life but by political opposition. The town’s rich cultural life reflected the diversity and intellectualism of its German-American element, including teachers, lawyers, artists, soldiers, artisans, and laborers. Tolerance prevailed: there was little or no anti-Semitism in Cincinnati — at least among its German-American element. In 1914—1915, the Mayor of Cincinnati was Frederick S. Spiegel, a Prussian-born Jew.

The German influx after 1832 made America beer-conscious. In Cincinnati especially (where beer consumption was four times the national average), beer drinking was part of the German-American way of life. There was little drunkenness; it was a social phenomenon, part of the cultural scene, on a par with oom-pah-pah brass bands, Strauss music, and choir-singing. Parties, birthdays, and commemorations of all types would have been unthinkable without the true natural tonic, the “teutonic” stein of beer. There were German-Americans all over the city, but part of Cincinnati was so German it was known as “Across the Rhine” — the “Rhine” being the old Florida-Erie Canal, since filled in. “Across the Rhine” had over a hundred cafés,
Bierstuben
, restaurants, and beer gardens with German brass bands and string orchestras. It was famous all over America: in the early 1900s, Cincinnati rivaled Niagara Falls as America’s favorite honeymoon destination.