Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (40 page)

Mencken went on to argue that there was no such thing as an honest politician, cop, public relations person — or journalist, for that matter. Current American perceptions are not so very different, even
if measures have since been taken to limit election campaign contributions. Organized crime no longer openly funds politicians — as it did in Chicago during the Prohibition years. But the log-rolling persists, as do the expectations of major contributors.

That Prohibition helped to shape such prejudices is not surprising. Those who failed to apply the Volstead Act provisions were not necessarily deeply corrupt: they simply did not regard breaking them to be a crime. But even benign neglect of these provisions had the effect of encouraging organized crime — the financial rewards simply being too huge.

The major bootleggers rapidly completed their reconversion into the legitimate liquor business. Joe Kennedy, Sr., father of JFK, became the official distributor of Haig and Haig and Pinchbottle whiskey and Gordon’s gin even
before
Prohibition’s repeal; Samuel Bronfman, Canada’s biggest bootlegger (and “Lucky” Luciano’s biggest supplier) founded Seagram’s; Frank Costello and his underworld partners set up Alliance Distributors, selling the same brands of Scotch (King’s Ransom, House of Lords whiskey) they had smuggled into the United States during Prohibition. They also acquired a controlling interest in J. Turnley and Sons, another Scotch distributor. Meyer Lansky — with Luciano, “Bugsy” Siegel, and others — set up the Capitol Wine and Spirits firm, and became leading importers of vintage French wines, Scotch, and Canadian whiskey. Even in jail — and after (he was deported to Italy in 1946) — Luciano continued to receive a large share of the profits.

As students of organized crime well know, racketeers simply found new targets. After December of 1933, New York’s underworld bosses began extending their protection activities to bakeries, restaurants, laundries, limousine services, the garment industry, and New York’s Fulton Fish Market. Today, underworld bosses in New York’s Chinatown display a businesslike ruthlessness that Al Capone could well have envied. More ominously, from time to time evidence surfaces of a form of gangland-police collusion (at least in Chinatown) that was so prevalent during Prohibition.

The relationships forged during those years did not vanish overnight. When Mafia leaders staged their much-publicized conference in the Appalachians in 1957, it was discovered that many of their pistol permits had been signed by New York and New Jersey police
officials. In 1958, Paul W. Williams, a U.S. district attorney for the southern district of New York, was the first to refer to “the Invisible Government,” tracing its origins back to the Prohibition era. And just as corrupt law enforcement officials had been able to call a halt when overly zealous policemen and Prohibition agents threatened the livelihood of politically powerful underworld bosses, so a notorious post-Prohibition politician-entrepreneur like New York’s James J. Hines was able to put a stop to the NYPD’s attempt to crack down on gambling operations, using his clout to have honest cops transferred and gambling cases dealt with by “friendly” magistrates.

Even a hugely respected, influential anticrime crusader such as Mayor La Guardia could not prevent the election of William Copeland Dodge as Manhattan district attorney, whose links with organized crime were an open secret.
⁴
And his repeated attempts to rid the Fulton Fish Market of racketeering elements were only temporarily successful: in 1995, an investigative report in the
New york Times
revealed that the mob was still as active there as ever.

It would of course be overly simplistic to put the blame exclusively on Prohibition for the shifting patterns of post-1933 organized crime. But there can be no doubt that the laxity of the law enforcers during the Prohibition years encouraged underworld crime bosses in their belief that anyone could be bought. “I just couldn’t understand that guy [La Guardia],” “Lucky” Luciano told his ghostwriters. “When we offered to make him rich he wouldn’t even listen. ... So I figured: what the hell, let him keep City Hall, we got all the rest, the D.A., the cops, everything.”
⁵

Prohibition may not have initiated, but it certainly underlined, the two-tier element in American justice so dramatically illustrated in 1995 by the O. J. Simpson case. As court records from 1920 to 1933 show, Prohibition agents concentrated their efforts on those they could
not
shake down; that is, the poor, the barely literate, the recent immigrants least able to defend themselves. With a few exceptions (George Remus was one of them), the wealthy were virtually immune from prosecution, as were bankers and wealthy entrepreneurs responsible for establishing lucrative contracts with bootlegging investors, often with the complicity of congressmen.

The methods used to enforce Prohibition anticipated those of
the DEA in its war on drugs. Although it would be ridiculous to compare the DEA to the Prohibition Bureau — the former a highly professional, motivated organization staffed by high-caliber agents of the greatest integrity; the latter a motley crew of venal political appointees — the
results
, in both cases, are startlingly similar. At no time did Prohibition law enforcers seize more than 5 percent of the quantities of liquor illegally entering the United States. The DEA’s record of drug seizures, though higher (around 10 percent), is comparable, inevitably raising all sorts of questions. Should drugs be legalized? Are not current antidrug laws responsible for perpetuating organized crime? With over half of America’s current prison population in jail for drug-related offenses, a drastic overhaul of antidrug legislation is not just in order, it is badly overdue.

But perhaps the least-learned lesson of Prohibition is that legislation alone is no answer to America’s problems. The moralists and evangelical pioneers without whom Prohibition would have remained a dead letter believed that enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment would be sufficient to change the habits of American society as a whole. They were quickly proved disastrously wrong.

The cart-before-the-horse mentality is the same, as is the strident vocabulary of the new “moral majority.” The reason the evangelist Billy Sunday became the popular hero of the twenties, among so many millions of God-fearing households, was that he was the very incarnation of the belief in an endearing, yet hopelessly naive panacea. Today’s new repressive penal measures (chain gangs, “three-strikes-you’re-out” sentences for habitual offenders, and so on) are not so very different from the special prisons for alcoholics advocated in the early 1800s, or indeed the whole array of laws contained in the Volstead Act.

The thinking in both cases is that such measures (either federal in nature or passed by different state legislatures) can radically reform a sick society, or at least make it tolerable to its law-abiding majority. Only the handful of intellectuals left on the political scene (foremost among them Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan) are aware of this fallacy, and campaign against it: they know from experience that repression is like morphine — it masks the pain, but in no way cures the sickness.

The Prohibition disaster should have made this clear, but most
American decision-makers are singularly indifferent to the lessons of the past. The American educational system has become highly selective where the teaching of history is concerned. We tend to forget an important lesson: that those who know no history condemn themselves to repeat it, either as tragedy or as farce.

1
. Andrew Sinclair,
Prohibition: The Era of Excess
, Atlantic, 1962.

2
. John J. Rumberger,
Profits, Power, and Prohibition
, State U. of New York Press, 1989.

3
. Norman H. Clark,
Deliver Us from Evil
, W. W. Norton, 1976.

4
. “Drug War Two,” January 30, 1995.

1
. Herbert Asbury,
The Great Illusion
, Doubleday, 1950.

2
. This practice was known, from the seventeenth century on, as “eleven o’clock bitters.” There was a similar break at four P.M.

3
. Nine cents a gallon for liquor distilled from grain (whiskey), eleven cents for rum.

4
.
The Great Illusion
.

5
. The term originated from early smuggling habits, when contraband was hidden in the tops of then-capacious boots.

6
. Norman H. Clark,
The Dry Tears
, U. of Washington Press, 1965 and 1988.

7
. Edwin M. Lemert,
Alcohol and the Northwest Indians
, U. of California Press, 1954.

1
. For these and other quotes from nineteenth-century documents, diaries, and sermons I am indebted to the Rev. W. H. Samuels,
Temperance Reform and Its Great Reformers
, A. M. Cincinnati, 1879.

2
.
The Great Illusion
.

3
. Published by the American Tract Society, New York, in 1847.

4
. My italics.

1
. John Kobler,
Ardent Spirits: The Rise and E all of Prohibition
, Putnam, 1973.

2
. It was part of Carry Nation’s eccentricity to believe that Freemasons did the “devil’s work.”

3
. She reproduced them, later, in her rambling autobiography. Her favorite:

This is a joint [as saloons were called]
Touch not, taste not!
handle not! Drink will make the dark, dark blot
Like an adder it will sting!
And at last to ruin bring
They who tarry at the drink!

1
. Norman H. Clark,
The Dry Tears
, U. of Washington Press, 1965 and 1988.

2
.
The Dry Tears
.

3
. Nov. 10, 1883, and Jan. 19, 1884.

4
.
The Dry Tears
.

5
. Justin Stewart,
Wayne Wheeler: Dry Boss
, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1928.

6
.
Wayne Wheeler: Dry Boss
.

7
.
Wayne Wheeler: Dry Boss
.

8
.
New york Times
, March 29, 1926.

9
.
Wayne Wheeler: Dry Boss
.

1
. I am indebted to Dr. Don Heinrich Todzmann of the U. of Cincinnati for his help and expert advice in this chapter, and for allowing me to consult his Ph.D. thesis: “The Survival of an Ethnic Community: The Cincinnati Germans” (Ph.D. dissertation U. of Cincinnati, 1983).

1
. Examples: The “Prohibition Battle Hymn”

We’ve played the Good Samaritan
But now we’ll take a hand
And clear the road to Jericho
Of the robbing, thieving band;
Distillers and Saloonists
Shall be driven from the land
As we go marching on.

And “The Anti-Saloon War Song”
Tramp, tramp, tramp the States are marching
One by one to victory;
But we cannot win the fight
Until thirty six are white
So we’ll press the battle on from sea to sea.

2
.
The Great Illusion
.

3
.
Ardent Spirits
.

1
. Although his byline does not appear, the series was also researched by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, John T. Rogers, who also spent considerable time with Remus after his release from jail.

2
. The land on which it stood is now part of densely populated Cincinnati suburbia.

3
. St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, Jan. 4, 1926.

1
. F. L. Allen,
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s in America
, Penguin, 1931.

2
. Francis Russell,
The Shadow of Blooming Grove
, McGraw-Hill, 1968.

3
. Samuel Hopkins Adams,
The Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Harding
, Houghton Mifflin, 1930.

4
. Nan Britton,
The President’s Daughter
, Elizabeth Anne Guild, 1927.

5
. Charles Mee,
The Ohio Gang
, Evans and Co., 1981.

6
. Alice Roosevelt Longworth,
The Crowded Hours
, Scribners, 1933.