Prohibition Page 7
The Volstead Act did allow farmers to make hard apple cider for their own consumption, but the beverage could neither be sold nor transported. Home-brewed beer was banned, but the federal government issued permits allowing wine to be made for family use. All sorts of mischief came from that provision. Rabbis, priests, and other clergy who needed sacramental wine were authorized to obtain wine from specially licensed sources. The Beaulieu winery in California supplied the Roman Catholic Church throughout the United States, and the winery became the largest vintner in the country, a position it continued to hold for years after the repeal of prohibition. Subject to state law, physicians could write limited prescriptions for medicinal whiskey, which pharmacists had to fill using federal order pads.
The Volstead Act gave enforcement to the new Prohibition Bureau. From the beginning, the agency was incompetent and corrupt. Wayne Wheeler, who controlled all appointments, ignored law enforcement qualifications in favor of political patronage and church connections. The bureau was under Internal Revenue inside the Treasury Department. Later, the Prohibition Bureau was a separate Treasury unit, and it was subsequently transferred to the Justice Department. J. Edgar Hoover rejected proposals that prohibition be enforced by the Bureau of Investigation (i.e., the FBI); he saw no advantage in getting involved in the issue. The Coast Guard got the unenviable job of interdicting liquor illegally entering or leaving the United States by water. Enforcement turned out to be far more challenging than the dry forces ever imagined.
Chapter 3
Prohibition
January 16, 1920, was the last day that Americans could legally buy a drink before both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act went into effect. At the stroke of midnight, the country was set to go dry. In the great cities, revelers treated the evening like New Year’s Eve. Saloons, cafes, cabarets, dance halls, hotel bars, and gourmet restaurants hung festive decorations, served special food, and played music, while patrons ate, drank, and danced. All evening, celebrants downed glass after glass of their favorite and soon to be forbidden alcoholic beverages. No city turned out in greater force than did New York, which was often considered the wettest city on the continent. As midnight approached, the band played, and patrons raised their glasses ironically to toast the beginning of dry America. When the clock struck twelve, drinkers downed their last drop of legal liquor accompanied by cheers, jeers, whistles, and noisemakers. Then celebrants looked at their empty glasses and called for another glass. In most places, waiters obliged. How long did prohibition last in New York? About two minutes, or however long it took to obtain a new glass.
Whenever a substance is banned, two things happen. First, the price goes up, and second, the product returns in a more concentrated form, or a replacement appears. The high risk of handling an item that has low value leads to potent substitutes that can be readily made, shipped, and stored. Thus, the ban on opium under the Harrison Act (1914) yielded heroin, the war against cocaine in the 1970s produced crack, and the prohibition of alcohol caused a shift from beer to hard liquor, and the substitution of opiates. In many parts of the country, the illegal production of beer was problematic. The beverage spoiled quickly, it was too bulky to hide, and hijacking of delivery trucks was common. Distilled spirits were cheaper to produce, storage was easier, and the higher price per gallon for spirits helped compensate for the risk of handling an illegal substance. Beer existed during prohibition, especially in New York, Chicago, and a few other great cities, but the standard drink was distilled spirits. Prohibition brought back the very hard liquor that the original temperance movement had despised.
In the early 1920s, supplying liquor was largely a mom-and-pop operation. Saloons and restaurants tried to stay open and serve customers alcoholic substitutes for their regular drinks. Bootleggers supplied imports immediately. In 1920, a pilot landed a cargo of eighteen cases of Canadian liquor at an airstrip near Des Moines, Iowa. Asking $250 per twelve-bottle case, more than six times the pre-prohibition price, he sold out in two hours and flew away before the police even knew he had arrived. This type of high-quality imported liquor was likely to be cut with low-quality local spirits, which moonshiners instantly supplied. Distillation was simple, and kitchen stills and bathtub gin became a reality. This new moonshine, unlike commercial American whiskey, was not aged. White lightning was colorless and biting, and it usually had to be drunk with a flavorful mixer to mask the foul taste. Soft drinks and fruit juices were favored.
In North Georgia and other parts of Appalachia, farmers who had always done a certain amount of home distillation of corn liquor for family and friends were happy to expand production to meet market demand. Hardware stores sold portable stills. Retail prices for moonshine shot up three to five times. High prices provided the incentive to scale up production, even when distillers balanced the chances of being caught by federal agents. A short prison term might be a bargain if they could make enough money selling illegal moonshine before they were arrested. After World War I, the value of the dollar, compared with other global currencies, had risen so high that the United States lost its grain export markets. The twenties brought low farm prices and rising farm foreclosures, so wherever grain was grown, some farmers liquefied their crops to make moonshine. Poor white women and African Americans were also involved in small-scale rural distillation. In addition, blacks commonly tended white-owned stills, which made them vulnerable to arrest.
In the Midwest, some farmers also defied dry expectations. Irish and German Catholic immigrants had settled Carroll County, Iowa, in the mid-1800s, and they had never accepted local, state, or national prohibition. The county priest assured locals that illegal liquor was no sin; indeed, the priest allowed moonshine to be distilled in the church basement. When federal prohibition arrived, Joe Irlbeck was a twenty-year-old farm laborer who was shocked to find that spirits cost $10 a gallon. He needed a quart to drink for the weekend, and that would cost nearly half a week’s pay. So he decided to distill his own liquor. In the twenties the county’s struggling farmers formed a co-op to sell corn and rye to Irlbeck, who eventually ran one of the biggest moonshine operations in the United States. The county produced a high-quality product, Templeton Rye, which was sold locally, but to gain wider distribution, the distiller had to deal with mobsters, including the Al Capone gang in Chicago. Templeton Rye commanded the highest price of any domestic product in Chicago’s speakeasies. Although the liquor contained some rye, it was mostly sugar, which distilled more quickly.1
A wet consensus, a wet sheriff, and payoffs protected moonshine in Carroll County, but danger came from the federal Prohibition Bureau’s Benjamin F. Wilson, who knew the area. The honest, diligent, and resourceful Wilson was an exceptional agent. Most political appointees like him had a bad reputation. Brooklyn US attorney William Ross called them “absolutely crooked.”2Variety observed in 1922, “The federal men . . . are doing more to make prohibition detested than anyone else, even the drys.”3 That year, Wilson raided Carroll County. Using thirty-eight search warrants, he seized 2,500 gallons of mash and 125 gallons of spirits. Sixteen moonshiners eventually pled guilty and paid small fines. Local juries would not convict violators, so Wilson brought the cases in federal court in Fort Dodge. Wilson staged only sporadic raids in the county because he had to operate elsewhere in Iowa. Carroll County residents were not afraid of Wilson’s infrequent visits. They made a lot of liquor and money during his absence.
Carroll County residents were more afraid of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been organized in neighboring dry evangelical Protestant counties. Concerned about the government’s lax enforcement of prohibition, the Klan invaded Carroll County to impose its own peculiar form of law and order. One Ku Kluxer explained that an excellent way to obtain liquor was to seize it while marauding with the Klan. In many parts of the United States, the Klan attacked distilleries or wet shipments. “If local officials cannot enforce the law,” vowed one Klan leader and Methodist minister in Denver, Colorado, “we should teach them how.
” The Indiana Klan’s magazine, the Fiery Cross, promised, “The Klan is going to drive bootlegging out of this land.”4 In Williamson County, Illinois, the federal Prohibition Bureau agent in charge deputized hundreds of Klansmen from neighboring counties to assist in a series of simultaneous raids. The resulting deadly mayhem led higher-ups in the Prohibition Bureau to replace the head agent.
In most rural areas, farmer-distillers had to be wary. Neighbors might call the authorities, or producers might turn in their rivals to reduce competition and gain a local monopoly. To be allowed to distill for commercial sale required campaign contributions, payoffs, or bribes to elected officials, who often allowed the moonshining to continue but insisted on a large share of the profits. Local markets were necessarily small because the population was small, many people were abstainers, and others lacked cash. To make significant money, the farmer-distiller had to join a larger distribution network. The stills were in the country, but the thirst was in the cities. Distillers in Carroll County, Iowa, looked to Des Moines and Chicago. Making contacts with buyers could be risky, producers could be cheated out of payments, or urban gangs might come to steal liquor from a known still or even demand the sale of the entire property at a very low price.
Getting the goods to market posed a challenge. State and federal authorities, acting on tips, set up roadblocks. Hijackings were a greater problem. Rivals stole the loads, or sometimes the thief was the pre-arranged buyer, so payment would not have to be made for a shipment. Thugs or prohibition agents sometimes stole cars or trucks, and sometimes drivers got shot. There were dangerous high-speed chases on unpaved roads. Few distillers drove their own loads because if they were caught, authorities would search the farm, destroy the still and any alcohol, and seize the property. Any property used in the production, distribution, or sale of alcohol was subject to forfeiture. A distiller risked grain, firewood, the still, liquor inventory, and the farm; a driver could lose only an automobile. In 1924, the Prohibition Bureau seized 5,214 such automobiles. To escape police and hijackers, drivers used Whiskey Sixes: six-cylinder Buicks or Studebakers with souped-up engines, heavy springs, and extra storage compartments. Southern drivers tested their cars in races against each other, which later became the basis for the NASCAR racing industry.5
Rural moonshiners could not, however, slake the thirst of the cities. One possibility was to act within the Volstead Act to produce beer that had less than half a percent alcohol. In 1918, Anheuser-Busch spent $10 million to build a giant near-beer brewery in St. Louis. Heavily advertised, Bevo sold well for a few months in 1920, but sales quickly dropped after drinkers found that Bevo lacked a kick. Production dwindled, although Iowans liked to spike near beer with hard liquor, including Templeton Rye.
The best way to make non-alcoholic beer was to brew regular beer and then remove the alcohol. This process led to the diversion of the original alcoholic beer to speakeasies. In 1922, 200 of 500 licensed brewers were cited for violations. “The working classes demand their beer,” declared Governor Emanuel Philipp (R-WI) in 1920.6 In the mid-1920s brewers sold non-alcoholic malt syrup and malt extract. When customers added water and yeast, the substance turned into beer or malt for distillation. Robust sales continued until the end of prohibition. “If you really want to know,” Gussie Busch later said, “we ended up as the biggest bootlegging supply house in the United States.”7
Urban distillation was one possibility, but it had limitations. Only the smallest kitchen stills could be hidden in a city. Even then, neighbors who learned about the activity might demand free liquor, which cut into profits. Producers also used small kitchen alcohol cookers to remove poisons from industrial alcohol. Italian women frequently ran these businesses, and they sometimes made wine as well as liquor. Criminal gangs quickly gained control. In Brooklyn, the mobster Frankie Yale paid Italian families $15 a day to maintain stills in their homes. In Pittsburgh, working-class women who produced or sold small amounts of alcohol were the most likely wets to be arrested. The police searched homes without warrants, looking both for alcohol and for signs of union organizing. Cities also had large commercial stills, but getting grain or other material without being noticed was a problem. Such distilleries could only be operated with payoffs to police and elected officials. The quality was low, the technology was unsophisticated, and these distilled products were often mixed with other, higher quality liquors.
Another source of liquor throughout the twenties was industrial alcohol, which was distilled legally by special federal permit in large quantities. Alcohol was used in paint, in antifreeze, and as a solvent in many mechanical processes. Production rose from 28 million gallons in 1920 to 81 million gallons in 1925, when chief prohibition enforcer Lincoln Andrews estimated that 90 percent of all bootleg liquor contained at least some denatured industrial alcohol. To prevent its use in beverages, the government required the industry to add toxic chemicals to this alcohol. As a practical matter, it was cheaper and easier for the industry to distill pure alcohol (which could be drunk) and then add poison. This gave unscrupulous manufacturers the ability to divert some drinkable product for illegal sale as a beverage prior to treatment. While most additives had a foul smell or taste, this was not always true. Some industrial processes required tasteless and odorless poisons. Druggists bought bootleg denatured alcohol for $3.50 to $4.00 per gallon rather than pay $5.00 for legal alcohol, which included $4.18 of tax and considerable red tape.
Bootleggers often cut their own product by adding cheap industrial alcohol. An illegal side industry developed in removing toxins; if they could be purged, then industrial alcohol might yield a big profit. Unfortunately, the amateur chemists sometimes produced deadly results. As injuries and deaths grew, so did the public outcry, but both the government and dry forces wanted to punish drinkers of industrial alcohol. After several New Yorkers died and hundreds were sickened by bad liquor in late 1926, Wayne Wheeler said, “The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable, when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide.” The wet Senator Edward Edwards (D-NJ) denounced the Anti-Saloon League lobbyist for condoning “murder.”8 Wheeler’s callousness fitted with the dry view that all alcohol was a poison. In 1930, there were 625 deaths from bad alcohol in New York City.
The safest way to supply America’s thirst, it turned out, was to import alcohol. Cheap tequila and other distilled products made specifically for Americans crossed the porous Mexican border into Texas, Arizona, and California. “Texas will not be bone dry nor even approximate that state,” concluded one journalist in 1922, “until Mexico, the great source of supply, takes the pledge.”9 Alcohol tourists flooded Tijuana and other border towns. West Indian rum, Spanish and Portuguese wines and brandy, and Scots, Irish, and Canadian whiskey made its way, along with moonshine, via Nassau in the Bahamas to Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, the state with the longest coastline in the United States. Bellhops in Miami took liquor orders while escorting guests to their rooms. Scotch was $6.00 a quart, less than half the price in New York.
In the absence of beer, Americans wanted to replace domestic whiskey with a similar product. One possibility was Scotch, but Americans were not drawn to the smoky taste, the price was steep, the voyage was long, and getting large transatlantic ships past the US Coast Guard was hard. Trying to avoid antagonizing the United States government over prohibition, the British stopped direct shipments to America. In the earliest days of enforcement, the shipping industry believed that the Eighteenth Amendment did not apply outside the traditional three-mile limit. Passengers and crew drank while crossing the Atlantic. Then the Treasury Department declared that no ship that docked in the United States could carry alcohol inside the three-mile limit. After diplomatic protests, the State Department allowed foreign ships to enter American waters with alcohol on board so long as it was locked up. In return, the three-mile limit was extended to twelve miles. American ships, however, had to be bone dry. Th
e travel industry was in turmoil, as Americans booked sailings on foreign vessels, and domestic lines vainly used games, films, or music as attractions to offset the loss of liquor.
Canadians generously stepped in to quench the thirst of their American neighbors. During the war Canada had imposed prohibition, and at the end of the war every province except Quebec remained dry. Canadian law allowed local distillers to make spirits for sale inside the United States so long as they paid a $20 per gallon export tax. Several large distilleries opened in Vancouver, British Columbia, to serve the West Coast. The liquor, however, was mediocre, and these export houses, as they were called, did not survive the end of prohibition. More successful was the major Ontario distillery Hiram Walker, which exported Canadian whiskey across the Detroit River into the Midwest. In 1922, one journalist estimated that one thousand cases a day crossed the river. In Saskatchewan, Samuel Bronfman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, shipped spirits across the border to North Dakota. Realizing that the larger market was in the East, Bronfman moved to Montreal, constructed a giant distillery, and bought the firm of Seagram’s. The House of Seagram both imported Scotch and made high-grade Canadian whiskey.
Some of Bronfman’s liquor reached the Midwest through Detroit, but most of the product was shipped down the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean, where Canadian vessels supplied dozens of mother ships that were anchored in international waters just beyond the three-mile limit of the United States. Collectively, these ships stretched from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, south to Norfolk, Virginia, and they became known as Rum Row. Small, fast vessels moved the liquor from Rum Row to the shore. After the limit was extended to twelve miles, one smuggler commented, “What is a mile or two extra? Now we have better and faster boats.”10 This part of the East Coast was rich in coves and private beaches close to such major markets as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. After goods were landed, they could also be transported by automobile caravans to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or even as far west as Chicago.