One Summer: America, 1927 (24 page)

Nothing, however, was stranger than that it became the avowed policy of the United States government to poison a random assortment of citizens in an attempt to keep the rest of them sober. Wilson Hickox was unusual only in that well-off people generally weren’t the victims, since they were careful to get their booze from reliable suppliers. That was why people like Al Capone did so well out of Prohibition: they didn’t kill their customers.

Hickox died because of a problem that hadn’t been fully thought through when Prohibition was introduced—namely, that alcohol is used for all kinds of things besides drinking. It was (and in many cases still remains) an essential ingredient in paint thinners, antifreezes, lotions, antiseptics, embalming fluid, and much more. Thus, it was necessary to allow its continued production for legitimate purposes. Inevitably, some of that still-legal alcohol (actually a great deal: sixty million gallons a year, by one estimate) was diverted into the bootleg trade. To render industrial alcohol disagreeable for drinking, the government took to denaturing it—that is, dosing it with poisons such as strychnine and mercury, which had the power to blind, cripple, or kill those who drank it. Denatured alcohol became “America’s new national beverage,” in the cheerful words of one Prohibition official.

Figures vary wildly on just how many people died wretchedly from drinking denatured alcohol. Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont in their authoritative book
Eating in America
report that 11,700 people died in 1927 alone from imbibing drink poisoned by the government. Other sources put the number much lower. However small or large the total, it is surely the most bizarrely sinister episode in American history that officialdom was prepared to deliver to its own citizens an agonizing death for engaging in an act that had until recently been an accepted part of civilized life, was still legal nearly everywhere else in the world, and was patently harmless in moderation.

Almost everything about Prohibition was either inept or farcical. The U.S. Department of the Treasury was charged with enforcing the new laws, but it wholly lacked the necessary qualifications, funding, or zeal for the job. Starved of resources by Congress, the Prohibition Department hired just 1,520 agents and gave them the impossible task of trying to stop the production and consumption of alcohol among 100 million citizens (or about 75,000 people per agent) within an area of 3.5 million square miles while simultaneously policing 18,700 miles of coastline and border from smugglers.
^*
The federal government expected the states to take up the slack and enforce the laws, but the states were almost everywhere severely disinclined to do so. By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.

The economic cost to the nation was enormous. The federal government lost $500 million a year in liquor taxes—nearly a tenth of national income. At state level the pain was often even greater. New York before Prohibition relied on liquor taxes for half its income. It is little wonder that states were reluctant to find the money in their reduced budgets to prosecute a law that was impoverishing them.

Speakeasies proliferated wildly. One block in midtown Manhattan was found to contain thirty-two places where one could get a drink. Liquor was so freely available, and often so little hidden, that Prohibition seemed sometimes barely to exist. In Chicago, where some twenty thousand saloons remained in business, bars in some neighborhoods operated openly and didn’t pretend to be anything else. In New York, the number of drinking establishments was put at thirty-two thousand, double the pre-Prohibition total.

And of course the stuff that was sold in these new establishments was entirely unregulated. In Chicago, a municipal chemist tipped some bootleg whiskey down a sink and watched in astonishment as it sizzlingly ate through the porcelain. Curious to know what exactly
was
in bootleg whiskey, the
New York Telegram
employed a chemist to test 341
samples brought from city speakeasies. Among the ingredients he isolated were kerosene, nicotine, benzene, benzol, formaldehyde, iodine, sulphuric acid, and soap. About one in six samples, he found, posed a serious threat to health.

A reasonable question is how all this came to be. The answer resided, to an exceptional degree, in a mousy little man with a neat mustache and pince-nez spectacles. Despite his manifestly unthreatening appearance, Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was for a time the most feared and powerful man in America, and—unless you believe that people should die in agony for having a drink—possibly the most misguidedly evil as well.

Wayne Bidwell Wheeler was born in 1869 and grew up on a farm in eastern Ohio. There one day he was carelessly speared in the leg with a pitchfork by an inebriated farm employee. Though he seems not to have been otherwise directly inconvenienced by insobriety, Wheeler developed an almost evangelical zeal to drive drinking out of American life.

After qualifying as a lawyer, he became superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) in Ohio and there quickly showed a flair for political manipulation. In 1905 he took on the popular governor of Ohio, a man who had been elected two years earlier by the widest margin in that state’s history and was often mentioned as a future presidential candidate—but who, unfortunately, did not support the ASL’s wish to make Ohio dry. The man in question was Myron T. Herrick, who was about to learn that it never paid to oppose Wayne Bidwell Wheeler. A master propagandist, Wheeler never deviated from a single purpose, which was to drive from office any politician who didn’t wholeheartedly support Prohibition, and he would use any means necessary to get his way. Often he employed private eyes to dig up dirt on politicians who failed to support him with sufficient enthusiasm, and he viewed blackmail as an entirely legitimate means to achieve his desired ends.

Nothing mattered to him but making America dry. Where other temperance groups involved themselves in all kinds of side issues—tobacco, short skirts, jazz, even post office policy and government ownership of
utilities—Wheeler never strayed from his single monotonous message: that drinking was responsible for poverty, broken marriages, lost earnings, and all the other evils of modern society.

By opposing Wheeler’s call for state prohibition, Herrick made himself look out of touch and uncompassionate. He was overwhelmingly defeated and never held elective office again. Instead, the rising star of Ohio politics became Herrick’s spectacularly undistinguished lieutenant governor, Warren G. Harding. Across America, politicians quickly learned either to support Wheeler and the Anti-Saloon League or to give up any hope of being reelected.

Under Wheelerism, as the ASL’s strategy became known, much of America was dry long before Prohibition was enacted. By 1917, twenty-seven states were completely dry and several more were preponderantly dry. It was possible to travel across much of the country—from Texas to the Dakotas, from Utah to the Eastern Seaboard—without passing through a single area where a drink could be had. Only in a few scattered outposts, mostly cities and industrial areas where immigrants congregated in large, thirsty numbers, was it still legally possible to get a drink. These, however, were the places where drinking was most stubbornly ingrained and where the ASL stood little chance of changing local or state laws. But then Wheeler got what was for him a lucky break: World War I.

When the First World War broke out, most Americans were content for it to remain a distant, European conflict. But then Germany made some tactical blunders that wholly changed that sentiment. First, it began bombing civilian targets. We have grown used to wars that target civilians, but in the 1910s killing innocent people by intent was widely seen as a barbarity. When the Germans began, as a kind of experiment, sending a plane to Paris each afternoon at about five o’clock to drop a single bomb on the city, President Woodrow Wilson was so incensed that he sent a personal letter of protest to the German authorities.

Then, worse, Germany announced that it would target passenger ships at sea. In May 1915, a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner
Lusitania
as it sailed in neutral waters off the Irish coast near Kinsale.
The ship sank in just eighteen minutes, taking with it 1,200 people. A third of the victims were women and children; 128 of the dead were Americans whose country was not even at war. Outrage was immediate, but Germany made matters infinitely worse by declaring—almost unbelievably—a national holiday to celebrate the slaughter. Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, head of the German Red Cross in the United States, said that those aboard the
Lusitania
got no more than they deserved. He was expelled from America and was lucky to get away with his life.

Others did not fare so well. A German man in St. Louis who was believed to have spoken ill of his adopted country was set upon by a mob, dragged through the streets tied up in an American flag, and hanged. A jury subsequently found the mob leaders not guilty on the grounds that it had been a “patriotic murder.” German businesses were boycotted or had bricks hurled through their windows. People with German names frequently decided for safety’s sake to change them to something less obviously Teutonic. One such was Albert Schneider, who became better known the following decade as the murder victim Albert Snyder. Restaurants stopped serving German food or gave it non-German names; sauerkraut famously became liberty cabbage. Some communities made it illegal to play music by German composers. Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in
any
language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.”

It escaped no one’s attention that American breweries were nearly all owned by men of German extraction and presumed German sympathies. Temperance advocates seized on this to make beer drinking seem an all but treasonous act. “We are fighting three enemies—Germany, Austria and Drink,” asserted Kellogg’s, the cornflakes company, in a patriotic ad that ran just after America joined the war. In point of fact, the claim had substance. The National German-American Alliance, an organization largely funded by the breweries, turned out to have lobbied
not only against Prohibition but also, and more deviously, on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm. It was not a combination that won it many friends.

The rise in anti-German sentiment gave a huge boost to the temperance movement. The Eighteenth Amendment, banning the production and consumption of alcohol, swept toward ratification, guided expertly through one state legislature after another by a freshly energized ASL. On January 16, 1919, Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, giving the three-quarters majority necessary for the law to be enacted and to go into effect one year later.

Though the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition a legal reality by outlawing intoxicating drinks, it didn’t define how it would work or even indicate what was or was not an intoxicant. That required an additional piece of legislation, known as the Volstead Act, to deal with the details. The act was named for Andrew J. Volstead, a Minnesotan like Lindbergh, whose principal distinguishing feature was a spectacular mustache that hung from his upper lip like a bearskin rug. Though a nondrinker himself, Volstead was no zealot and would never have sought a national ban on alcohol. His name became attached to the legislation simply because he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and therefore required to draft it. Although Volstead’s name rang through the decade, he himself was thrown out by the electorate at the next election, and he returned to his hometown of Granite Falls, Minnesota, where he quietly practiced law and listed his principal hobby as reading the
Congressional Record
. Wayne Wheeler always claimed that he himself really designed and wrote the legislation, an assertion heatedly disputed by Volstead, though why either would want credit for the act is a reasonable question because it proved to be a strikingly ill-constructed bill.

The Volstead Act was introduced to Congress on May 19, 1919. Its intentions, stated succinctly in a preamble, didn’t seem too alarming: “To prohibit intoxicating beverages, and to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes, and to insure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye and other lawful industries.” The phrasing may have been a little ungainly, but the
sentiment didn’t seem too threatening. It was only in the fine print that the world discovered that the Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor as anything with an alcoholic content greater than 0.5 percent—about the same level as sauerkraut. Many of those who had supported the Prohibition amendment had assumed that beer and unfortified wines would be spared. It was only now that it began to dawn on people just how sweeping—how dismayingly total—Prohibition was going to be.

That was perhaps the most remarkable feature of all in the introduction of Prohibition to America—that it took so many people by surprise. As the social historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in
Only Yesterday:
“The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.”

Prohibition was so flawed, and in so many ways, that even many of those who supported it in principle were appalled by how it developed in practice. For a start, it introduced an entirely new level of danger to American life. The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced. Being a Prohibition agent was dangerous—in the first two and a half years of Prohibition thirty agents were killed on the job—but being in the vicinity of agents was often dangerous, too, for they frequently proved to be trigger-happy. In Chicago alone, Prohibition agents gunned down twenty-three innocent civilians in just over a decade.