Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (9 page)

In the small town of Everett, in Washington State, where there were forty saloons, the churches energetically campaigned for local prohibition in a 1910 election, though not all religious groups were dry. Some Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews were in favor of “good” saloons, and raised the issue of personal liberty and choice. The local
Labor Journal
, a militant unionist newspaper, argued that the dramatically lower life expectancy of working men (60 percent that of the rich) was due not to drink but to the disastrous consequences of low wages and working conditions generally. “Wets and drys boycotted each other’s businesses. There were street brawls, a frenzy of meetings, parades, prayers.”
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In the event, Everett voted dry, but a subsequent state-level vote rejected Prohibition entirely.

Thanks to men such as Newell, the Alcohol Education Act (AEA), passed in Seattle in 1885-86, taught the evils of drink as a mandatory course in all schools. “The AEA was the compost heap that brought the Volstead Act into being after three generations of indoctrination.” But, as Norman Clark points out, “unlike the Indians, the manual laborers who built the railroads had a common culture and
potential political clout.” The short-lived Progressive party — which included among its “populists” beer-drinking first-generation German immigrants, whiskey-drinking Irish Catholics, and wine-drinking Italians — was powerful enough as the nineteenth century came to an end to equate Prohibitionists with cranks.

It was the Anti-Saloon League’s sophisticated understanding of the confused, often contradictory, nature both of Prohibitionist activists and of the anti-Prohibitionist forces arrayed against them that made the ASL into the driving force that would eventually lead to the passing of the Volstead Act. Between 1893 and 1918, a handful of its leaders would bring about nothing less than a social, moral, and political revolution.

Whereas moral propagandists such as Ernest H. Cherrington brought the Prohibition message to the masses, it was Wayne Wheeler — the ASL’s behind-the-scenes political manipulator (“controlling six Congresses, dictating to two Presidents” and “becoming the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States”)
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— who, more than any other Prohibitionist activist, engineered the political change.

By all accounts, including those of his subordinates and fellow ASL executives, Wheeler was in many ways a deeply flawed, utterly ruthless manipulator of singularly limited vision. His conversion to Prohibition was not religious in origin, nor did he come from an alcoholic family. His later reminiscences about the evils of drink are curiously undra-matic, though he did his best to sensationalize them: in one instance, he was forced to listen to the divagations of an “ ‘Old Soak’. . . acting out the story of
Ten Nights in a Bar Boom
while mother and we children gasped in alarm. . . . My dreams were long colored by that scene.” On another occasion, a farm laborer “stuck the tine of his fork into my bare leg while I was packing down the hay he pitched on the wagon. He had been drinking but did not believe his condition required any excuse.” Wheeler’s career suggests that he chose to make his mark as a Prohibitionist because he realized that with his natural talent for manipulation and intrigue this was the surest means of acquiring the behind-the-scenes power he craved.

His credentials were impeccable. The fourth of nine children of an Ohioan cattle dealer and farmer, young Wayne displayed from childhood onward the entrepreneurial skills so admired in nineteenth
century puritan society. As a schoolboy, he earned pocket money operating a sausage-making machine in a local butcher’s shop. No sooner did he move to Oberlin College than he took a job as a dormitory janitor. “Wherever he saw a remunerative position open, he entered the gap,” whether this meant waiting on tables, deputizing for the college chaplain, publishing scorecards, or dealing in books, rugs, or blackboard-desks. With this background and his trading skills, he might well have joined the ranks of the robber barons who were already changing the face of America.

But Wheeler also fancied himself a poet, orator, and debater, and it was this need to thrust himself into the limelight that first attracted him to the Prohibitionist cause. Oberlin college had been, since its early establishment as Oberlin Collegiate Institute in 1832, at the forefront of the abolitionist battle — and abolitionists were also, overwhelmingly, Prohibitionists. This deeply Calvinist college was a nurturing-ground for fledgling missionaries, and Wheeler quickly started mining a rich seam. In debates at religious meetings he began speaking out on the plight of the African Negro — whose wretchedness, at least according to American missionaries there, was not due to colonial abuses (about which Wheeler was curiously silent) but to overindulgence in alcohol.

As a freshman, Wheeler’s speech to the college debating society, “Rum on the Congo,” made considerable impact, and has been preserved. Based on letters to a fellow student of a missionary father, it was a typical example of the hyperbole that passed for eloquence at the time (1890).

Today, the eyes of the Christian world are turned to the “Free State” of the Congo. Its present condition and its future is the burden of every philanthropist’s soul!

But let us for a moment turn to Germany. The representatives of the fourteen leading powers of the world have met in Berlin. They are considering the future relations of the Congo with the outside world.

The earnest petition to keep rum from the savages is scarcely noticed. The rum dealer who represents Germany urges absolute free commerce on the Congo. Holland heartily approves and in spite of the slight objection of the U.S. and England, the resolution is carried. Their object is accomplished. Henceforth the Congo will be prey to the ravenous trader! ... Its only purpose is to increase commerce, no matter at what expense, even of innocent life.

Wheeler went on to paint an idyllic picture of the Congo “before the liquor traffic was legalized,” with lucrative trade in ivory palm oil and coffee. “A commerce was fast developing which might have been the richest in the world, had it not been for the iniquitous rum dealer.” Richest for whom? Wheeler did not pursue this line of thought. Given the brutal aspects of Belgian rule in the Congo, later stigmatized obliquely by Joseph Conrad in
Heart of Darkness
and more openly by André Gide, the beneficiaries would certainly not have been the native Congolese.

Be this as it may, the Congo was paradise no longer, for “The stupefying climate of the Congo renders men an easy prey to this evil of drink. . . . The Caffirs and the Hottentots have been reduced by this poison, until they are no longer distinct tribes.” Wheeler cited missionary reports of

four hundred blacks lying drunk in the streets. . . . Thirty girls under sixteen lay drunk, even parts of their clothing bartered for drink. . . . Germany and America export eight million gallons of rum to the Congo yearly, with the result that the Negro has degenerated morally and mentally. . . . remember as you go next Sunday morn to church that the Congo native, his wife and children lie in their hovels drunk.

There were no references to heavy-drinking Belgian colonial settlers.

When the ASL turned to Oberlin College to recruit a full-time worker to help bring about “an era of clear thinking and clean living,” Wheeler was an obvious choice. At first, he demurred: the pay was low, and he had “another business proposition.” But the ASL’s Ohio League was headed by the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, himself an Oberlin alumnus and a powerful, persuasive preacher. “When I pointed out to him,” Russell later wrote, “that a man to fill the other position could be much more easily found than one for this complex and strenuous service, he agreed to treat the matter carefully and prayerfully. We bowed together — Oberlin’s training had made it easy for us to do this — and we asked God to be the guide as to the duty involved and to inspire the right conclusion.”

Russell got his way. Wheeler, however, committed himself to ASL
work for “one year only.” His duties as a full-time “dry worker” were twofold: as a church preacher on Sundays (he was already a regular speaker, his passionate delivery much appreciated by congregations of all types) and as an “Organizer of legislative districts.” The issue was the Haskell Local Option Bill, allowing counties to become dry if a majority of voters so decided. There had been 200,000 dry petitioners in favor of the bill, but only 36 state legislators had voted for it. Whether the idea came from Wheeler or from Russell is not known, but the Ohio ASL took a step that would establish the pattern for Wheeler’s later lobbying tactics: it informed the legislators who had voted for the bill that the ASL would throw its weight behind them, and at the same time do its best to discredit the bill’s most vocal opponents.

Wheeler was assigned the task of ensuring the political demise of John Locke of London, Madison County, a virulent anti-Prohibitionist who had told the House: “If you want to dig your political grave, vote for the Haskell [dry] bill.” Locke was a candidate for the State Senate, and seemed unbeatable. But Wheeler’s tactics proved dazzling. He persuaded the ASL to buy him a bicycle, to give him the required mobility. He then tirelessly lobbied clergymen and leading citizens in the three counties casting their votes in the election. His next step was to persuade a prominent dry Methodist businessman, W. N. Jones, to stand against Locke, becoming, in effect, his campaign manager. The turning point was Wheeler’s use of volunteers to bring the voters to the polling booths. Jones was elected, and offered to pay Wheeler a substantial fee for his invaluable services. Wheeler refused. The League, he said, was not out to make money but to “make it safe for men to vote right.”

He had found his vocation, as a brilliant, behind-the-scenes operator. There was no further talk of leaving to go into a more profitable business. Instead, Wheeler realized that the ASL badly needed a fully trained lawyer in its ranks. Studying in his spare time, he graduated from the Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1898 and became the ASL’s first full-time attorney. In his defense of local liquor laws (dry counties had made their appearance all over Ohio) he appeared in over 3,000 cases — later claiming that he won all but ten of them.

Wheeler remained poorly paid. The ASL was not yet the recipient of huge endowments, and even had difficulty raising enough money to pay Wheeler’s minimal expenses. In 1901, he married Ella Bell Candy,
the daughter of a leading Columbus Prohibitionist, and they soon had three sons, but his financial prospects remained grim. The ASL did not pay enough to live on, and he depended on the generosity of his wealthy father-in-law.

He continued to hone his talent for manipulation. His language in court, deliberately intemperate, infuriated those judges unsympathetic to the cause, and Wheeler in turn pursued a ceaseless campaign against those he believed to be on the side of the wets. He was sensitive to any type of anti-ASL behavior, to the point of paranoia. He turned against the mayor of Cleveland for allowing a National Retail Liquor Dealers’ convention to be held there, and supported his opponent, John H. Farley, for reelection despite the fact that Farley owned two saloons. “Owning a saloon doesn’t have anything to do with his official actions,” Wheeler told the press with a straight face. But political expediency mattered to him more than personal convictions: His endorsement of “personal wets” who were “politically dry” (because they knew the dry issue would get them votes) was criticized in some ASL circles, as was his habit of gaining the apparent friendship of known wets solely for tactical reasons.

Wheeler claimed, with reason, that such tactics worked. From his growing web of contacts, including staunch opponents of the ASL, he was obtaining valuable information about
their
tactics. He was not the only ASL worker to use such techniques. William (“Pussyfoot”) E. Johnson became an even more astute political manipulator for the ASL, specializing in “publicity and underground activities” in several states, infiltrating wet lobbies of brewers and distillers, later reaping his reward as a leading executive of the World League Against Alcoholism.

But no other ASL official achieved national prominence comparable to Wheeler’s, though he was never the official leader of the ASL. Despite his meteoric rise, becoming in the space of a few years its senior attorney as well as its Ohio superintendent, he always preferred working behind the scenes, an incomparable wheeler-dealer.

In Ohio, in his early days with the ASL, he used the methods that would later prove so effective in Washington. With a complete disregard for partisan labels, the ASL systematically supported the candidate who expressed a willingness to endorse dry policies — even if it was well known that he was both a hypocrite and a toper. The ASL’s refusal to enter into a political alliance with either party turned out to
be one of its key assets; it was well aware of the failure of the Prohibition party to make its mark on voters, even those highly sympathetic to the cause. One of the ASL’s pamphlets was its “Church in Action Against the Saloon,” a question-and-answer document modeled on the catechism and devised for the guidance of ASL instructors addressing schools and meetings. One of its questions was: “May the League, at any time, be identified with any one political party for the accomplishment of its purpose?” The answer was: “No. The League is under solemn promise not to form affiliations with any political party, nor to place in nomination a ticket of its own.”

This crucial ideological plank was bitterly opposed by William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, later President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, a fanatical dry — and, in his public utterances, an unspeakably boring, flatulent windbag, who early on in his political career had made the fatal mistake of arguing that the Democratic party should become the official dry party.