Drink (58 page)

While the smuggling trade was significant, for the first few years of Prohibition the largest source of bootlegged hooch was industrial alcohol. Production of this useful chemical increased several fold, despite the reduced need for cordite in peacetime. Indeed, by 1926, American industry was consuming 150 million proof gallons of it annually,of which perhaps a third was diverted to the beverage market. As a precaution against such an eventuality, the Volstead Act had required that industrial alcohol be
denatured,
i.e., adulterated with chemicals that made it unpleasant or impossible to drink. However, the bootleggers soon learned how to remove, neutralize, or dilute denaturants, and their customers were prepared to put up with any traces that remained. Each gallon of industrial alcohol produced three gallons of mock whiskey, gin, or brandy, so that the overall volume of the illicit market equaled that of legal production prior to Prohibition.

The second largest domestic source of bootlegged booze was moonshine, i.e., spirits from clandestine stills. Moonshine had a long and honorable connection with the Appalachian Mountain region, where it had been made in significant quantities since the nineteenth century, and where craft distilleries rose to the occasion when demand leapt in 1920. The scale of the expansion of the moonshine industry can be gauged from the statistics of the Prohibition Bureau: In 1921 a total of 95,933 illicit stills were seized; in 1925 the figure was 172,537, and by 1930 it was 282,122. Moonshine could be rough stuff. Quality was sacrificed to quantity once the Volstead Act came into force. Distillers could not take the risk of aging their product to improve its flavor, so they added dead rats and rotten meat to it to achieve the same effect. The average glass of moonshine was on a par with gin-craze gin, and its pet names—Panther and Goat whiskey, Jackass brandy, Yack Yack bourbon—all suggesting a coarse strength, were similar in spirit to those that had emerged in eighteenth-century England. Moonshine and imperfectly renatured industrial alcohol poisoned thousands of Americans. Their deaths were given lurid coverage by the press, but instead, as the drys had hoped, of evoking disgust among readers, they attracted sympathy: It was wrong that people should have to risk their lives for a drink. Fortunately, the quality of moonshine improved with the increased availability of corn sugar, the production of which (a rare example of Prohibition benefiting the white economy) expanded sixfold between 1921 and 1929.

Both moonshine and industrial alcohol were often repackaged prior to sale. Since the real McCoy commanded higher prices than a quart of Jackass brandy, Appalachian hooch was often labeled as imported whiskey, rum, brandy, or gin. It was, after all, a sellers’ market, and powers of discrimination were on the wane. The process of making such delights was described by a Prohibition administrator in Pittsburgh to a Senate subcommittee in 1926: “You sent in an order for gin, and they would open a spigot on this big tank, run out so much alcohol, and so much water, and so much flavoring extract and coloring fluid, and throw that into the gin. If you wanted a case of scotch, open the same spigot, run the recovered denatured alcohol into a container in whatever quantity they wanted, the addition of water, a few drops of creosote or essence of Scotch, and a little caramel, and it would come to the bench for scotch.”

The wholesale trade in beverage alcohol catered not only to the home consumer but also to a thriving retail trade. The saloon was dead, long live the speakeasy! Americans did not wish to bid farewell to sociable drinking, and as saloons across the country closed, or struggled on as soda fountains, a multitude of illegal drinking places sprang up as substitutes. Speakeasies ranged from single rooms in tenement dwellings to palatial institutions equipped with restaurants, dance floors, and jazz bands. In New York, for example, illegal drinking establishments such as the Cotton Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, and 21 were the first true nightclubs the city had seen, offering food, drink, dancing, and entertainment to their clientele. They were patronized not only by the wealthy and dissipated but also by Broad-way stars and by New York’s intelligentsia, who were dubbed “gintellectuals” by the pioneer of American celebrity journalism, Walter Winchell. Speakeasies were staple fodder for the New York press, which reported who had been spotted where in its gossip columns, and noted the police raids on various joints in its crime pages. Collectively, they formed a never-ending carnival, which people might either join in or look on as observers through the eyes of their favorite columnists. Upton Sinclair, novelist, dry, and activist, suggested that they had dragged Bacchanalia into the twentieth century and that “Wine, Women, and Song” had been “modernized” into “gin, janes, and jazz.”

Unlike the saloons they replaced, speakeasies were patronized by both sexes. American women had expanded their domain beyond the home during the war. They had become wage earners in their own right and, courtesy of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, had gained the right to vote. They began drinking in public in numbers during the Prohibition years; indeed, the removal of the prior taboo on women in saloons can be counted as one of the triumphs of Prohibition. Not only did women begin to tipple away from home duringthe Volstead era, they also started drinking ardent spirits. It made little sense to bootleg beer or other weak drinks, and the standard fare at respectable speakeasies was cocktails. The fruit juices, bitters, and sugar they contained masked the dubious pedigree of the alcohol that gave them their kick.

Cocktails spread from the public to the private sphere during Prohibition. Far fewer American households had servants in the 1920s and the formal dinner parties that had characterized the Victorian Age were impossible to stage without them. Instead, people entertained each other with cocktail parties, which required, in comparison, minimal preparation. By 1923 a journalist was able to comment, “There are not many ladies in well-to-do houses now—certainly in the Eastern States—who are not experts at mixing cocktails.” The trend did not pass unnoticed by federal authorities. In 1924, the Prohibition commissioner, Roy Haynes, appealed to the patriotism of women tempted to serve “pre-Prohibition” (i.e., alcoholic) cocktails because of the demands of fashion: “It is outrageous that in any American home the household should feel more ashamed of not having liquor to serve their guests than ashamed to violate and trample under their feet the Constitution of the United States.” Such views, however, were contrary to the spirit of the age. A retrospective article published in
Vogue
in 1930 identified cocktail drinking as a key attribute of the “secure leaders of fashion” who were idolized by young American women: “They are athletic. They were the first to smoke because they liked it, and probably the first to drink cocktails.”

The demand for cocktails stimulated invention. New recipes were created, and old ones improved, including the dry martini. This faultless elixir was developed in New York in the 1920s and celebrated by its gintellectuals. According to H. L. Mencken, the dry martini was “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet”; and Ogden Nash lauded the mixture in “A Drink with Something in It”:

Dorothy Parker, epitome of the modern girl, immortalized its effects in a ditty:

America’s women were imitated by its students. Drinking flourished on hitherto dry campuses, and students paid their way through college by bootlegging or bartending in speakeasies. During their vacations they flocked to fashionable watering holes in the great cities, adding their thirsts to those of the resident multitudes. So great was the demand in New York that in 1929 its police commissioner estimated it was home to thirty-two thousand drinking places—double the number of saloons and illegal joints it had contained in the pre-Prohibition era.

Americans who lacked the time to visit speakeasies could buy their liquor at other retail outlets. These were numerous, if not ubiquitous: At the height of Prohibition
The New York Telegram
sent a team of reporters to investigate where alcohol was for sale in the city. They found it on offer in “dancing academies, drugstores, delicatessens, cigar stores, confectionaries, soda fountains, behind partitions of shoe-shine parlors, back rooms of barbershops, from hotel bellhops, from hotel headwaiters, from hotel day clerks, night clerks, in express offices, in motorcycle delivery agencies, paint stores, malt shops, . . . fruit stands, vegetable markets, groceries, smoke shops, athletic clubs, grillrooms, . . . chophouses, importing firms, tea-rooms, moving van companies, spaghetti houses, boarding houses, Republican clubs, Democratic clubs, laundries, social clubs,” and last, but not least, “newspapermen’s associations.”

By 1923, America was considered by one observer to be neither wet nor dry, but rather “amphibious.” Perhaps the archetype of its amphibians was President Harding, who set a bad example to the nation by drinking in the White House while vowing to enforce the Volstead Act in the role of chief executive. Whiskey was his favorite poison, which he knocked back in his “study” with his gang of Ohio cronies. An account of this place shows that saloon style had not perished with the saloon: “Trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand,” and there was “a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.” When Harding died midterm, his successor, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who was reelected as president in 1924, pursued a policy of benign neglect toward Prohibition. With such mixed messages from the top, even the Prohibition bureau developed amphibian traits. For instance, the director of Prohibition enforcement in northern California confessed in public “that he did drink occasionally because San Francisco is a wet community, and that he also served liquor to his guests because he was a gentleman and ‘not a prude.’”

Widespread and flagrant disobedience to the Volstead Act was made easier by the incompetence of the federal body that had been created to enforce it. Ever since its inception the Prohibition Bureau had made a reputation for itself as being violent, inefficient, and corrupt. Its organization was flawed, and its agents were second-rate. Their average wages—between twelve hundred and two thousand dollars a year in 1920—“compared unfavorably with those of garbage collectors.” Not only were the rewards poor, the work was also dangerous. By 1923, thirty Prohibition agents had been killed in action. They had taken quite a few civilians with them, indeed had committed some spectacular murders that had turned public opinion against them. In consequence, a career in Prohibition enforcement offered little to an honest man. Turnover was rapid, and one in twelve agents was dismissed for cause. Recorded grounds for dismissal included “bribery, extortion, theft, violation of the National Prohibition Act, falsification of records, conspiracy, forgery, [and] perjury.”

There were honorable exceptions, such as Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, who between them arrested nearly five thousand violators and confiscated five million bottles of illicit booze. They worked as a team, often in disguise, and their disparate physical appearances gave them the appeal of a double comedy act. The newspapers followed their raids, noting new disguises or ruses that had enabled them to deceive bootleggers and speakeasy proprietors. Izzy, labeled “the master mind of the Federal rum-ferrets,” often tipped off reporters before a bust, and this hunger for publicity led to his downfall. In 1925 both he and Moe were dismissed “for the good of the service”—their stellar performances had set their colleagues in too unfavorable a light.

The disappointing form of Prohibition agents was outstanding in comparison to the other groups of people whom the Volstead Act had envisaged would assist in its enforcement. State legislatures were dilatory in introducing the necessary supplementary legislation, even those that had been dry pre-Prohibition. Some, like New York, legislated for state Prohibition only to withdraw it. The Mullan-Gage Law it passed in 1921 was repealed in 1923 after it had paralyzed the courts with liquor offenses. Private citizens were disinclined to inform on or to testify against bootleggers, and juries were loath to give guilty verdicts. Dry sentiment, when put to the test, had evaporated.

The organizations and individuals who had campaigned for Prohibition found themselves on the defensive in the 1920s. They were held accountable for the failings of an unenforceable law as well as the culture of violence it had spawned. They responded by going into denial: In 1925, for instance, faced with evidence that that the nation’s youth were turning to the bottle, Wayne Wheeler claimed that things had never been so good. Prohibition-era drinks were so bad and so expensive that no one could fall in love with them: “The cost and quality of post-Volsteadian drinks does not create a habit as did the licensed intoxicants,” ergo: “The American youth problem is less serious than that in other countries.”

Moreover, America underwent profound changes in the Prohibition years, but these were not the changes for which the drys had hoped. Instead of becoming pious models of self-restraint, Americans had launched themselves into a frenzy of crime and consumerism. Although the drys held their noses and tried to reconcile such behavior with temperance, they misinterpreted the spirit of the age, and their post-Volsteadian publicity only succeeded in demonstrating the extent of their anachronism. A 1924
Atlantic Monthly
article on the impact of
consumptionism,
for example, predicted that this new phenomenon would lead to voluntary abstinence. At its dry author saw it, consumptionism, defined as “the science of compelling men to use more and more things,” was “bringing it about that the American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” And “consumptionism cannot suffer drink because in drink men find a substitute for that satisfaction which is in the acquiring of luxuries.” In other words, the opportunity to go shopping would extinguish the desire to binge. After all, “The purpose of Prohibition was not to make more valuable citizens. The purpose was to make for valuable consumers.”