Smuggler Nation (39 page)

As a substitute for European and Asian workers, employers considered Mexicans an ideal labor force: flexible, compliant, and temporary—or so it seemed at the time. As we will see later, millions of unauthorized Mexican migrants would eventually settle in the United States, becoming a vital source of labor for agriculture and other sectors of the economy but also the main rationale for more intensive border enforcement. Yet in the meantime, as we’ll examine in the next chapter, U.S. border agents had a new preoccupation: the flood of smuggled alcohol coming across the nation’s borders.

13
Rumrunners and Prohibitionists

ALCOHOL AND SMUGGLING HAVE
long been closely connected in American history. As we saw at the beginning of our story, smuggling West Indies molasses to supply New England rum distilleries was critical for colonial trade, and British efforts to clamp down on it helped provoke the backlash against imperial rule leading up to the War of Independence. Illegally trading alcohol for Indian furs was also a defining feature of frontier relations and westward expansion in the nineteenth century. But with the notable exception of efforts to ban the liquor trade in Indian Country, smuggling booze usually had more to do with evading taxes than prohibitions. Starting with Maine in 1851, there were various attempts to outlaw the sale of alcohol at the state level (prompting some smuggling between wet and dry states), but for the most part the feds stayed out of it. It remained largely a local rather than national and international matter.

That all changed with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the implementation of the Volstead Act to enforce it. Once again, the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce opened the door for boosting its policing powers. The national ban on the alcohol trade between 1920 and 1933 was an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in top-down social control. In the process, it transformed both the business of smuggling and the policing
of smuggling. Smuggling became more sophisticated, organized, and violent, and the federal government became more involved in crime fighting than ever before.

Banning Booze

America was born a nation of drinkers. As the historian W. J. Rorabaugh describes it, with only slight exaggeration, “Americans drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn.”
¹
The
Mayflower
carried more beer than water; the Continental Army received regular rum rations; George Washington built his own distillery at Mt. Vernon, and William Penn owned a Philadelphia brewery; John Adams drank hard cider every morning; James Madison drank a pint of whiskey every day; and Thomas Jefferson was famously fond of fine wine and champagne at White House dinners. Benjamin Franklin was also a hearty drinker, favoring punch, Madeira, and rum, and he even penned drinking songs.
²
As he put it, “if God had intended man to drink water, He would not have made him with an elbow capable of raising a wine glass.”
³
Drinking water was in fact considered unhealthy, unsanitary, and even dangerous—and often it was.

Thanks to the proliferation of distilleries, by the 1820s a mixed drink with whiskey was cheaper than a cup of tea. Astonishingly (at least by today’s standards), between 1800 and 1830 annual per capita pure alcohol use in America increased to more than five gallons—nearly three times contemporary consumption levels.
⁴
In 1839 the English traveler Frederick Marryat was amazed by how important liquor was in everyday American life. As he wrote in
A Diary in America
:

I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave.
⁵

With the influx of Irish and German immigrants in the decades that followed, beer increasingly supplanted spirits as America’s favorite drink. Beer consumption tripled between 1870 and 1915, and it came to be closely associated with the rapid spread of urban saloons catering to working-class immigrants.
⁶
The new immigrants were not just beer guzzlers but beer brewers; the leading beer companies, among them Pabst, Schlitz, and Miller, were all German.

Prohibition was the culmination of a century-long backlash against America’s seemingly insatiable drinking habit. What began as a grassroots religious appeal for temperance morphed into a stunningly ambitious campaign to legislate morality by trying to put one of the country’s largest industries out of business. Similar to the earlier purity crusades against commercial sex and obscenity, the push for prohibition was caught up in broader societal anxieties about rapid urbanization and mass migration. It also provided a powerful catalyst for organizing women—most notably through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—who not only resented that wages were being spent on booze rather than bread but were on the receiving end of much of the drinking-induced male violence.
⁷
But only by adding patriotism and the intensely anti-German climate of World War I to the mix were prohibitionists actually able to do what no other lobby group has ever done: change the Constitution of the United States.

World War I was a godsend for the Anti-Saloon League, the most powerful single-issue lobby organization the country had ever seen. German drinkers and brewers could now be cast as not just sinners but traitors. As Wayne Wheeler, the head of the league, who devoted his life to the cause of Prohibition, told the
New York Times
in 1917, “The liquor traffic aids those forces in this country whose loyalty is called into question at this hour.”
⁸
Speaking German in public or on the phone was outlawed in Iowa, playing Beethoven in public was prohibited in Boston, and German books were burned in Wisconsin.
⁹
German toast became French toast, Frankfurters became hot dogs, Sauerkraut became freedom cabbage, and Kaiser rolls became liberty buns. Little wonder, then, that it was so easy to cast the country’s German brewers as unpatriotic, even downright traitorous. The new fervor of wartime patriotism and long-festering moral indignation proved a potent political mix. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed
with remarkable ease, with Congress pushing through the needed votes to overturn President Wilson’s veto.

As Prohibition took effect in January 1920, the Anti-Saloon League triumphantly declared that “at one minute past midnight … a new nation will be born.… Now for an era of clear thinking and clean living! The Anti-Saloon League wishes every man, woman and child a happy New Dry Year.”
¹⁰
But dry America remained thirsty. And bootleggers, moonshiners, and rumrunners were more than happy to help quench the thirst.

Enforcing Prohibition

Prohibitionists had a remarkably naïve faith in the law. Their assumption, it seemed, was that the law would largely enforce itself: Americans would simply stop buying booze because, well, the law told them to. An upbeat Wayne Wheeler assured Congress that implementing Prohibition could be done cheaply. Just a few months into Prohibition, he confidently asserted that a $5 million budget would suffice—and that the cost of enforcement would actually go down over time. By January 1921 he had already revised this number upward, calling for an $8 million appropriation from Congress.
¹¹
Two years later, the treasury secretary told Congress that $28 million was needed.
¹²

John F. Kramer, handpicked by Wheeler as the first Prohibition Commissioner, boldly proclaimed that once Prohibition took effect, no alcohol would be commercially produced in the United States, “nor sold, nor given away, nor hauled in anything on the surface of the earth or under the earth or in the air.”
¹³
His successor, Roy Haynes, asserted two years later that Prohibition enforcement was “rapidly approaching the highest point of efficiency.” At the end of the following year he announced that the Prohibition agency had made such progress that it was “nothing short of marvelous.”
¹⁴
In 1923 he claimed that “The illegal liquor traffic is under control.… The control becomes more complete and thorough with each passing day.”
¹⁵
He even went so far as to state that 85 percent of all drinkers had gone dry.
¹⁶
Such lofty official claims of success had little to do with reality. In fact, rarely in American history has there been such an extreme gap between a law and its enforcement.

Figure 13.1 New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach, right, watching agents pour alcohol into a sewer following a raid (Library of Congress).

Enforcement was anemic. The federal government was woefully unprepared to implement such a sweeping law. A Prohibition Unit (later renamed the Prohibition Bureau) with some fifteen hundred agents and an initial budget of $6.35 million was set up within the Treasury to police the drinking habits of the entire nation. The Coast Guard, Customs, and immigration agents along the border were also drafted to enforce Prohibition. The expectation in Washington was that the states would also play a big policing role, but they never really embraced the job and devoted to it only token resources. After all of the clamor to pass Prohibition, it turned out there was little enthusiasm to actually pay for it.

To make matters worse, the appointment of the Prohibition agents was highly politicized and consequently marred by incompetence. Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League made sure that Prohibition agents were exempt from standard civil service requirements. This ensured that appointments would be driven by patronage politics,
in which connections rather than competence determined hiring. Prohibition jobs were doled out as rewards for political loyalty and support. When agents were finally subjected to civil service requirements in 1927, fewer than half of them passed the basic entrance exam.

Enforcement was chronically corrupt. Between 1920 and 1926, one out of twelve Prohibition agents was fired on corruption-related charges.
¹⁷
In New York City, the wettest of wet cities, corruption was so entrenched that the Prohibition agency resorted to cutting off outgoing telephone calls from its office on nights when raids were planned to prevent corrupt agents from tipping off bootleggers. Some agents showed up to work in fancy cars and wearing jewelry they clearly could not afford. Not only did agents take bribes to look the other way but they also sold seized alcohol—sometimes even selling it right back to
the original owners. By the end of the first year of Prohibition, nearly a quarter of the two hundred Prohibition agents in the city had been fired. The next year, the
New York Times
reported that more than a hundred agents had been dismissed.
¹⁸