Prohibition Page 8

  Canadian liquor often arrived at the anchored ships in broad daylight, but the US Coast Guard legally could do nothing except watch it being unloaded. At night, speedboats that operated without lights darted from hidden spots along the coast to make a quick rendezvous with the anchored ships. Off-loadings were completed in minutes, and the speedboats reached shore long before the Coast Guard could do so. This was not an accident. The bootleggers had used public records to find out where the Coast Guard vessels had been built, they had gone to those shipyards and studied the blueprints, and then they had commissioned the same shipyards to build boats that were faster. Many speedboats used cheap surplus World War I aircraft engines. In 1925, the Prohibition Bureau estimated that only 5 percent of the liquor illegally entering the United States was stopped. The most famous rum-runner was Bill McCoy, who refused to cut liquor, honored business arrangements, and never cheated. His quality goods were labeled the Real McCoy, a brand of high reputation and premium price.

  The most desirable coastal landing areas created opportunities for political corruption and graft. Atlantic City was a playground city a short distance from New York, a day trip by train or car. Long known as a place to drink, gamble, and score a prostitute, this beach mecca became a major landing spot to supply high-end liquor to the New York market. The resort was run by the Republican county treasurer Nucky Johnson and his brother, the sheriff. They demanded cash, which had to be spread around to any number of people, as well as a plentiful supply of alcohol to keep Atlantic City oiled for tourists and businessmen. At least some of the liquor sold there, however, was not Canadian whiskey, but the good stuff cut with second-rate local moonshine.11

  The tough men who ran illegal gambling and prostitution moved quickly to take over the liquor industry. The connection was natural, since drinking had often been associated with vice. In 1920–1921 John Torrio and his deputy, Al Capone, left New York, where they were minor racketeers, to move to Chicago. The pair rapidly took over prostitution and alcohol on the South Side. They brewed beer in a big way, while two hard liquor supply routes served Chicago. Using contacts in the New York underworld, they arranged for alcohol caravans from the East Coast and also bought spirits from the violent Purple Gang, which controlled the Detroit entry point.

  In 1924, the most powerful mobster in Chicago, Dion O’Banion, the leader of the North Side gang, was murdered. With control of the Chicago beer market at stake, the North Side gang marked Torrio and Capone for death. After several bungled assassinations of both men, Torrio turned the business over to Capone, took $1 million and four guards to protect himself, and fled to Italy. By the late 1920s, Capone was the King of Beer in Chicago. He controlled breweries, employed one thousand people, paid off hundreds of elected officials and police, and supplied beer to twenty thousand speakeasies. Tied house took on a new meaning when a Capone lieutenant informed a speakeasy that it could carry only Capone’s brand of beer. In 1926, Capone’s organization grossed $70 million; three years later, it was $100 million, although the gang spent $30 million for protection in Chicago.

  In 1929, Capone went too far. To get rid of the hated North Side gang, now run by Bugs Moran, and gain control of all the liquor and rackets in Chicago, Capone sent four hired guns, including two dressed as Chicago police, to kill the rival gang’s leaders. Misidentifying one of the lieutenants as Moran, who was absent, the thugs invaded a meeting in a commercial garage. In what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, the five rivals and two unfortunate witnesses were lined up in front of the cement wall inside the garage and machine-gunned to death with more than one thousand bullets. Afterward, Moran told the police, “Only Capone kills like that.”12 He declined to say more then or later. Eventually, the police concluded that Capone and the Purple Gang were indeed involved. The Detroit gang supplied Capone, and Moran had tried to drop the Purples for a cheaper vendor. Although Moran survived, the death of his top aides ended the North Side gang, and Capone owned Chicago.

  The massacre proved a miscalculation. The police were furious at the misuse of their uniforms. They had cooperated with the bootleggers, they resented being mocked, and misuse of uniforms jeopardized their lives. The newspapers printed horrific photographs that sold a lot of copies and jarred the public into disgust with the criminal underworld. Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) presented unflattering portraits of Capone on film, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation declared Capone to be Public Enemy No. 1. If there was any moment when the public turned against prohibition, it might have been this mass carnage. Prohibition did not stop drinking, but it did promote thugs like Capone, who both got rich and paid no taxes. Capone never recovered from being portrayed as a ruthless mass murderer. Prosecutors could not pin the crime on him, however, and when he finally was sent to prison in 1932, it was for federal income tax evasion. He was released in 1939, when he was dying from complications from untreated syphilis.

  Not all bootleggers were like Capone. George Remus controlled alcohol in the greater Cincinnati area, which included parts of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The shrewd Chicago lawyer bought fourteen distilleries at the beginning of prohibition. Because distilling had been banned during the war, the sole value was in the inventory. Using political connections, Remus got rare permits to sell medicinal whiskey, to convert some spirits into industrial alcohol, and to distill additional industrial alcohol. Using fake permits and creative bookkeeping, he produced and sold far more spirits than his permits allowed, processed industrial alcohol into potable liquor, and supplied millions of gallons of spirits to drug stores and speakeasies throughout the region. He also owned breweries. Remus stored a large quantity of liquor at his farm near Cincinnati, and a federal raid in 1922 ended his career. To prevent confiscation, he turned his holdings over to his wife and went to prison. While he was in custody, she filed for divorce and took his money. After regaining his freedom, Remus had his revenge. In 1927, as his wife made her way to court to defend the divorce, he murdered her. The jury let him off, but she had already squandered the money.

  In Seattle, Roy Olmstead, a former police lieutenant, controlled imports from Canada. Unlike other illegal operators, Olmstead insisted that his henchmen go unarmed. The business was conducted entirely with payoffs. Olmstead purchased liquor legally in Vancouver and had it loaded onto Canadian vessels along with proper export paperwork. These large ships traveled through the Strait of Juan de Fuca into international waters in the Pacific Ocean where spirits were transferred to smaller ships, some of which traveled as far south as southern California, although Olmstead never dominated the market outside Washington State. The small, fast ships brought liquor into Puget Sound, where cargo was dumped on deserted beaches to be picked up a few hours later by car caravans. The spirits were not cut with moonshine. Olmstead operated a radio station out of his Seattle mansion; his wife read children’s bedtime stories on the air. The stories supposedly contained coded messages about the drop-off times and locations for the liquor.

  Under the personally wet president Warren Harding, Prohibition Bureau agents were political hacks with little law enforcement experience. A good many had taught Methodist Sunday school, which was one way to get a recommendation from Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, and others were crooks or con artists who joined the bureau to get into the liquor racket. Agents could dispose of seized alcohol as they saw fit, and they often took spirits home to drink or sell. The bureau encouraged its agents to use violence. Seattle US attorney Tom Revelle told Senator Wesley Jones (R-WA), “Some of them [bootleggers] deserve a good killing, and I am not losing any sleep if now and then a bootlegger is killed.”13 After Harding died in August 1923, President Calvin Coolidge tried to reform the Prohibition Bureau. Because Wheeler refused to put federal agents under the civil service until 1927, reforms were modest, but one-third of the agents were dismissed for such matters as incompetence, theft, or alcoholism. At the time, the dry forces, probably still a majority in the country, wanted be
tter enforcement.

  Elected officials from the country’s wettest states disagreed. Governor Albert Ritchie (D-MD) proposed that federal agents conduct raids only with the cooperation of local authorities. In effect, he wanted non-enforcement of prohibition in Maryland. In New York, the Anti-Saloon League had pushed the Mullan-Gage Act, a draconian state prohibition enforcement law, through the rural-dominated legislature in 1921, and the law had led to the defeat of the dry Republican governor Nathan Miller by the wet Democrat Al Smith the following year. An Irish Catholic, Smith had already served as governor from 1918 to 1920, when he had been defeated in the Harding landslide. Smith despised prohibition for the attack on personal liberty, the assault on immigrant cultures, and the loss of alcohol tax revenue, but he was also a personal wet who served alcohol in the governor’s mansion in Albany.

  In 1923, the newly wet New York legislature repealed the state’s enforcement act. Under pressure from both sides, Smith hesitantly signed the bill, and after 1923 the only enforcement in the nation’s most populous state came from the Prohibition Bureau. New York City had just 129 federal agents, though the US attorney estimated that 1,500 were necessary for effective enforcement of the law. From then on, dry Democrats considered Smith an enemy whose entire politics was defined by his wetness. William Jennings Bryan did not mince words: “When the governor of the largest state in the union boldly raises the black flag and offers to lead the representatives of the outlawed liquor traffic in their assault upon the nation’s honor and the people’s welfare, he must expect resistance from the defenders of the home, the school, and the church.”14 Billy Sunday commented, “Governor Smith and that bunch of Tammany rough-necks can’t ride into the White House on a wine keg or a barrel of beer.”15

  In the 1924 election, Coolidge ran on the promise to improve prohibition enforcement, while the Democrats bitterly split at the national convention, held in New York, between the wet Smith and the dry William McAdoo of California, a former secretary of the treasury who was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law. The most beloved Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, pressured delegates to reject Smith. If they backed Smith, the dry Bryan vowed to come into their state or district and campaign for a primary opponent. No elected Democrat wanted to face that prospect. Smith’s supporters, however, were furious at the presence of the Ku Klux Klan at the convention. The Klan, which backed McAdoo, wanted a dry party; it was so powerful that the party defeated a proposal to condemn the Klan. The deadlocked convention compromised by ignoring prohibition and nominating the obscure conservative Wall Street attorney John W. Davis. Progressive Democrats bolted to the wet senator Robert LaFollette (R-WI), who ran on the Progressive Party ticket. Given the country’s prosperity, neither Davis nor LaFollette had a chance, and the incumbent Coolidge won easily.

  In Seattle, better enforcement in 1924 meant that federal agents put a wiretap on Roy Olmstead’s telephone. Although Olmstead gave only cryptic instructions over the phone, the Prohibition Bureau raided Olmstead’s house and took away his papers, which enabled them to develop a case. Olmstead’s attorney assured his client that the wiretap, done without a court order, violated the Fourth Amendment, but the trial judge disagreed, and Olmstead was convicted in 1926. Olmstead v. United States (1927) went to the US Supreme Court, which voted 5–4 to uphold his conviction. There was to be no Fourth Amendment protection for bootleggers. Many constitutional lawyers condemned the decision, and Congress later passed a statute requiring a court order prior to any wiretap. In the 1920s the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, routinely sided with the government in prohibition cases. Although Taft personally opposed prohibition, he hoped that the court’s tough approach would force eventual repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. If the court sided with bootleggers, the amendment would remain on the books, and liquor would stay untaxed.16

  Prohibition had led to other changes in the way alcohol was obtained and used. One way to get legal alcohol was to have a physician write a prescription for whiskey or beer, which many states allowed. These prescriptions turned drug stores into liquor stores. In 1916, Charles Walgreen owned nine pharmacies in Chicago, and by the end of the 1920s he operated 525. Legal alcohol profits enabled him to expand the empire quickly. A number of drug outlets, however, ignored federal recordkeeping; customers balked at being listed as liquor purchasers; or stores preferred to sell more profitable moonshine rather than the heavily taxed alcohol available from authorized distillers. A New York official told the New York Times, “When licenses to sell liquor for medicinal purposes were given to ex-saloonkeepers instead of to legitimate dispensers, the world knew we were not sincere.”17 Though state law controlled the amount of alcohol that could be purchased at one time, patients could buy liquor from multiple stores. Physicians could write unlimited prescriptions, and druggists had a powerful incentive to maximize total sales.

  Some saloons, restaurants, and hotel bars remained open throughout prohibition, but these older drinking establishments had been located to gain public notice; now that alcohol was illegal, they attracted too much attention. A few locked their doors and used back entrances. Some closed voluntarily; others were raided, padlocked, and ceased to operate. Of prewar licensed saloons in New York City, 80 percent were gone by 1924. The saloon tie to politics also ended. Under the Volstead Act, any building where liquor was sold could be seized by the federal government and padlocked for up to one year. In 1928, federal agents in Chicago closed seven hundred places. Landlords afraid of being padlocked often refused to rent to bootleggers. Accordingly, bootleggers often owned their own buildings, but they used dummy corporations to hide ownership. The loss of a place for a year was just a cost of doing business. A hotel, however, could not risk closure. Hotel bars mostly turned into tea rooms or retail space, and room prices rose. Famous gourmet restaurants, such as Delmonico’s in New York, that had made their profit out of liquor sales went dry, lost customers, and were shuttered.

  Drinking customers migrated to speakeasies and private clubs. Ranging from dangerous basement dives that sold unsafe industrial alcohol to upscale establishments like New York’s 21 Club, which handled only the highest quality imported liquors at very high prices, speakeasies tried to meet the urban demand for alcohol. To be discreet, a typical speakeasy lacked any sign, and the large, thick, and plain wood door often contained either a peephole for the bouncer to see out or a small opening where the potential customer could be screened. Some “speaks” admitted only members or friends of members who knew the correct code words or had printed passes. Others took a chance on almost anyone who did not look like a federal agent. Local police officers were usually welcome. Their visibility tended to preserve order. “The first day we opened up the police came right in, four of them,” recalled one New York speakeasy owner, “to be stood drinks, and I’ve had these four cops on my side in this business from that day on.”18

  Unlike old-fashioned saloons, speakeasies admitted women. When both men and women entered the doorway, outsiders, including members of the Anti-Saloon League, were less likely to suspect that alcohol was being served. Décor and attractive male bartenders were used to draw women, who came alone, with friends, or with dates. The presence of couples discouraged fights. The author Stanley Walker observed, “Soon after 1920, raving hordes of women began to discover what their less respectable sisters had known for years—that it was a lot of fun, if you liked it, to get soused.”19 Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, was shocked at how much his star reporter, Lois Long, drank as she made the nightly rounds of speaks.

  Art Janik opened his speakeasy in Milwaukee in 1931, but he also operated legally after repeal until 1937. Art Janik, Arthur S. Janik Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS-01862

  Female public drinking was associated with looser sexuality. In the 1920s, young women who wore short skirts, drank alcohol, and lived hedonistically were called flappers. Variety claimed that flappers were “as free with their persons . . . as a longshoreman.”20 Of the fla
pper, Helen Lowry wrote in the New York Times, “She is the first woman in history that has not been checked at home when man went forth alone in search of his pleasures. And because of her we have with us the most merry, the least jaded night life yet.”21 Freer sexuality may have led to a decline in prostitution. Many drinking houses expected barmaids to sell sex. In 1926, the old-fashioned moral reformers who belonged to the Committee of Fourteen found 360 of 392 speakeasies in New York harboring prostitutes, but skeptics doubted these numbers because it was hard to tell a prostitute from a woman expressing sexual liberation.

  The New Yorker, launched in 1925, celebrated night life by promoting high-end nightclubs such as the Palais Royal, Moulin Rouge, Bal Tabarin, and Montmartre. Such clubs featured liquor, music, and dancing. Cabarets provided professional entertainment. New Yorkers had many choices, including bohemian cafes in Greenwich Village, mixed race “black and tan” spots in Harlem, and exclusive Fifth Avenue clubs. Nightclubs were lavishly decorated to encourage big spending, and they were expensive. Nightclubs projected an exclusive image but actually mixed different types of people, including wealthy stockbrokers, Broadway stars, celebrity writers, fashion models, flashy hucksters, scam artists, and sinister gangsters. “Never before has there ever been such a meeting ground of the very highest and the very lowest of human society,” noted the Smart Set in 1927.22

  Harlem had many speakeasies and nightclubs. Ninety percent were white-owned and white-operated. Half of the rest were white-owned but run by African Americans, and the rest were black-owned and operated. Most were restricted either to white patrons, like the famous Cotton Club, or to blacks, but both races mingled in some places, which probably could not have occurred without prohibition. Breaking the racial taboo was as defiant as breaking the liquor law. Whites and blacks drank together, listened to jazz together, danced together, and occasionally slept together. Older black leaders in Harlem favored prohibition, opposed interracial nightclubs, and feared that the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment might lead to the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but young African American writers like Langston Hughes frequented Harlem speaks.23