Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (28 page)

It was symptomatic of the hypocrisy of the Prohibition era that, in 1921, the American Bar Association decided to hold its annual meeting in Cincinnati — the very town where almost the entire police force was on George Remus’s payroll, either as convoy guards or as salesmen on commission. In Daugherty’s presence, it solemnly declared that

The people of the United States have undertaken to suppress the age-long evil of the liquor traffic. When for the gratification of their appetites, lawyers, bankers, merchants, manufacturers and social leaders, both men and women, scoff at this law, or any other law, they are aiding the cause of anarchy, and promoting mob violence, robbery and homicide.

After hours, many of those attending the meeting were haunting the speakeasies they denounced. Every lawyer present must have been aware that “the General” was on the take, using Jess Smith as his bagman not only to dispose of controversial cases but to protect big bootleggers and even peddle B permits to them. But even the most cynical among them must have listened to Daugherty’s keynote address with wry amusement.

“I do not mean to impute moral turpitude to him who is opposed to the Eighteenth Amendment,” Daugherty conceded magnanimously,

But when public sentiment has crystallized into law there can be no question as to the duty of good citizens. They may still debate as to the wisdom of the law, but there is only one course of conduct, and that is obedience to the law while it exists. ... To refuse or to neglect to enforce a valid enactment of the legislative department of government, or to enforce it mechanically or half-heartedly, or to wink at its violation, is without justification on any sound theory of government. Those who ask or expect this not only contribute to lawlessness, but destroy the basis upon which their own security rests. Our safety and happiness lie in obedience to law by every man, woman and child.

There was loud, prolonged applause.

No one who is intellectually honest will deny that
there has not yet been effective nationwide enforcement.

— Mabel Willebrandt, deputy attorney general
in charge of Prohibition enforcement, 1929

S
hortly after resigning her post in 1928, Mabel Willebrandt published
The Inside ofProhibition,
¹
from notes accumulated during her eight years in office as deputy attorney general in charge of Prohibition enforcement. Her book was in sharp contrast to Haynes’s. Unlike him, she had no reason to pull any punches: she owed her appointment not to the Ohio gang but to former president Taft, who had strongly recommended her to Harding. And though she did pull
some
punches, (here, too, references to Daugherty are tongue-in-cheek, though criticism is clearly implied), she did not balk at allocating responsibility for failure where she felt it was due. The bootleggers and rumrunners, she made it clear, were less responsible for the Prohibition mess than the corrupt, hypocritical
system
that battened onto them.

From today’s standpoint, one is tempted to ask what all the fuss was about. Who cared whether a network of speakeasies and middlemen kept Americans supplied with liquor, good or bad, while police and Prohibition agents systematically looked the other way? But
the perspective was different in the twenties. The fact is that, as Willebrandt wrote, ever since the United States became a republic,
“No political, economic or moral issue has so engrossed and divided all the people of America as the Prohibition problem, except the issue of slavery. . .
. Nor will it be denied that Prohibition enforcement remains the chief,
and in fact the only real political issue of the whole nation”
²

Willebrandt was one of the few in authority to point to the folly of passing a law and simply expecting it to be obeyed. Of course, such a controversial issue required teeth (“the problem of enforcement will not solve itself”), but neither the transgressors nor the corrupt Prohibition agents were really to blame. “The Federal Government’s record in all these things is not such as to produce exaggerated pride in one who has been a part of it,” she conceded.

Willebrandt acknowledged the quandary facing any administration, defining it as follows:

1. It was clearly impossible to prevent immense quantities of liquor from entering the country.

2. The media had perhaps exacerbated the problem, but “certainly it would be ridiculous for me to deny that liquor is sold in large and small quantities throughout the country, and that practically anyone who possesses simultaneously a thirst and as much as a quarter dollar can partly assuage that thirst.”

3. At the same time, repeal of Prohibition’s stricter measures, making wine and beer legal again, was “practically impossible,” for she was convinced that a majority of drys would vote against any modification in the law, however much it was disobeyed. Her assessment, as a well-informed Republican, was that “Congress remains overwhelmingly dry in its votes,
whatever the personal habits of the members may be,” and “a Congressman who comes up for re-election every two years cannot afford to be wrong about the wet or dry sentiment of his district. He knows!”
³

The real culprit was the American political system itself. Traditionally, liquor interests had “financed city and state campaigns, controlled city councils, boards of commissioners, state legislatures. Through political allies they prevented enactment of early closing-hour ordinances and Sunday closing laws, the breweries and whiskey wholesalers were always willing to chip in to help elect a county or state’s attorney, a member of the legislature or the city council.”

Despite the swing in public opinion in favor of Prohibition — provoked by church militancy, the ASL, and, above all, America’s entry into the First World War — Willebrandt was convinced that such influence had simply passed into the hands of the bootleggers, moonshiners, still owners, and all those with vested interests in the status quo. “The influence of liquor in politics begins down in the City wards and often in county districts,
but it extends if it can up to the Cabinet and the White House in Washington”
⁴

After George Remus, king of the bootleggers, had been convicted and lost his appeals, the rumor reached me that he would never serve a day in Atlanta prison. I set it down as only the bragging of the defendant. But a few days later, a phone call came from the White House, stating that a respite of 60 days would be granted Remus if the Attorney General would send over the necessary papers. Prominent politicians . . . had intervened with the President.

She did not, of course, infer that they had, in all probability, included the attorney general himself.

In a case involving another prominent bootlegger, “every conceivable political and personal appeal, including an appeal by a Cabinet official, was made to quash the case. Attorney General Daugherty called me to his office and told me of the pressure that had been brought on him to call off any further investigation into this matter.” Again, she must have known that Daugherty was playing games with her, but chose not to mention this. Most readers, she knew, would draw their own conclusions.

Even more damaging to those who genuinely wanted to uphold Prohibition laws was the government’s neglect of the end use of industrial alcohol. In 1926, she revealed, every month some 660,000 gallons of “denatured” alcohol were sold to a variety of customers, including pharmaceutical industries, beauticians, and drugstores — and a tidy amount, duly flavored and sometimes lethal, had ended up in bootleggers’ whiskey bottles.

Even those relatively innocent congressmen without any bootlegging connections brought the political system into disrepute by challenging the validity of one of the laws embodied in the Constitution. In the first place, “many originally in favor are now opposed to it,” or
had become convinced that Prohibition could not be enforced, and were lobbying for its repeal.

Many others have been antagonized by the discovery that the very men who made the Prohibition law are violating it and that many officers of the law sworn to enforce Prohibition statutes are constantly conspiring to defeat them. How can you justify prison and fines when you know for a fact that the men who make the laws and appropriate the money for Prohibition are themselves patronizing bootleggers?

It was common knowledge that “Senators and Congressmen appeared on the floor in a drunken condition,” that “bootleggers infested the halls and corridors of Congress and ply their trade there,” and that no attempts had ever been made to expel them. What she failed to say, but must have known, was that bootleggers kept huge stocks of liquor in the House of Representatives and Senate cellars so that orders could be met without delay. It was common knowledge that well-connected retailers had unlimited access to Senate and House of Representatives offices, with home deliveries of every conceivable type of liquor.

Congressmen and high government officials, Willebrandt noted, believed they were above the law, and customs officers were told to extend the usual courtesies and free entry privileges to them — as they would to foreign diplomats. When one congressman was caught smuggling a barrel of rum into the country after a West Indies cruise (a customs officer’s attention had been drawn to a broken bottle of rum, part of thirty quarts of smuggled liquor), he was indicted but acquitted. In her book, Willebrandt failed to add that the politician concerned was Republican Congressman Everett Denison of Ohio, one of the most intransigent Prohibition propagandists in the House. Elected by rural church-going voters, like so many other publicly dry, privately wet politicians, he was compelled to toe the Prohibition line, at least in his speeches and voting record or risk losing his seat to an even more hypocritical rival. For years, men such as Denison would be the pliant tools of Wayne Wheeler’s Anti-Saloon League, refusing him nothing — one of the reasons why the Prohibition albatross poisoned the political life of America for so long.

For those lacking political clout or money for lawyers there was
no such leniency. In her book, Willebrandt made no mention of police persecution of small-time violators or of measures in both Michigan and New York that provided drastic mandatory sentences to those convicted for a fourth time for violations of the Volstead Act.
⁵

There were some appalling travesties of justice. Both Fred Palm of Lansing and a mother of ten elsewhere in Michigan got life sentences for possession of a pint of gin. Michigan was “the wettest state in America,” the
New York Herald Tribune
pointed out with heavy irony, “with tens of thousands violating the Volstead Act daily if not hourly ... so we suggest a further simplification: instead of sentencing to life imprisonment those of its citizens who insist on harboring pints of gin in their homes, let Michigan sentence them to the chair. ...”

“The truth is,” Willebrandt wrote, “that in New York as in other cities, it is immensely profitable to the politicians to let the speakeasies flourish: politicians never lack for poll workers on election day.” Prior to Prohibition, she noted,

. . . the saloons were the assembling places and allies of crooked politicians who manipulated elections in the interests of the grabbers of franchises for street railways, electric light and gas plants and other seekers of special privilege. It is those political machines that are still functioning . . . the so-called decent citizens have done little anywhere permanently to curb the reign of the corrupt manipulators of city affairs.

Few were really prepared to fight for “decent city government.” Until they did so, “there would not be honest enforcement of either Prohibition or any other laws. If the searchlight of Prohibition has revealed the city as our national shame, then it will have served more widely than the framers of the 18th Amendment ever dreamed.”

But the change could not be imposed from above. Anticipating the Republican tidal wave victory in the November 8, 1924, elections, Willebrandt, in a prescient chapter titled “The Seceding States,” noted that “the people of America do not want and will not permit an army of offices of the Federal Government to enforce law and order in local counties and cities. Nothing in the country is more contrary or repugnant to basic principles of our form of government.”

The trouble was, as Mabel Willebrandt well knew, in some states the federal government was all that was left to enforce Prohibition — for starting with New York State (in 1923, with the assent of Democratic Governor Al Smith, an acknowledged wet), a handful of states (New Jersey, Montana, Nevada, Wisconsin)
had
repealed Prohibition, at least insofar as state law enforcement was concerned, putting the entire burden on the FBI, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Prohibition Bureau, and the federal courts.

In New York State alone, Willebrandt pointed out, there were some 3,000 state police, a 17,000-strong city police force, 113 state supreme court judges, and 62 county prosecutors. From the end of 1923 onward, they were all ostentatiously refusing to enforce Prohibition laws. This did not mean that in these states Prohibition no longer existed; on the contrary, the introduction of the Jones Act (passed in 1925) sharply increased sentences for violations of the Volstead Act (up to five years in jail instead of two, and $10,000 fines instead of $1,000 fines, double that for recidivists), and a new “padlock” rule, admittedly only partially enforced, resulted in the permanent closure of speakeasies whose owners had come before the courts. But it did mean that federal agencies, and the highly corrupt Prohibition Bureau, could no longer enlist the aid of state authorities in their fight against bootlegging.