Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (14 page)

The raisin cakes were easily turned into something else. Wholesalers used demonstrators (often attractive, well-spoken young women) in large stores to draw attention to the wine-making possibilities of their cakes (or “bricks”) while ostensibly warning against fermentation — their straight-faced cautionary patter urging buyers “not to place the liquid in a jug and put it aside for twenty-one days because it would turn into wine . . . and not to stop the bottle with a cork because this is necessary only if fermentation occurs.” The bricks were sold with a label that read “Caution: will ferment and turn into wine.” The biggest beneficiary of all was Beringer Vineyards in Napa Valley, whose owners, Charles and Bertha Beringer, were the first to take advantage of the obscure Volstead Act loophole. Bertha Beringer, only 32 when Prohibition began, and recently wedded to Charles, was the real brains behind the scheme, saving the family business — and inspiring countless later competitors.

The year 1917 was a record vintage year for California wines, in terms of both quality and quantity. For the first time, owing to a wartime manpower shortage, Mexican workers were recruited for the harvest. The threat of Prohibition was already very real — thanks to Wheeler, servicemen in uniform were not allowed into bars or saloons — and Bertha saw the writing on the wall. But unlike many Napa Valley owners, who ploughed up their vineyards to plant fruit trees rather than be caught with large stocks of unsellable wine, she devised the “raisin cake”
in advance of
the Volstead Act. “Instead of converting their grapes into either grape juice or sacramental wines, Beringer Brothers will dry most of them,” the Saint Helena
Star
reported in September of 1919. The Charles Krug winery also beat the Volstead Act, investing in nonalcoholic grape juice and extract-making plants.

Other, less innovative vineyards went to the wall, in the first few years of Prohibition, after an initial selling spree — for in the first three months of Prohibition, the wineries were allowed to liquidate their stocks to private buyers, which they did at hugely inflated prices. But one famous Napa Valley vineyard, established in the nineteenth century by a French farmer from the Perigord, Georges de Latour (whose French vineyard had been wiped out by phylloxera), prospered for a wholly different reason.

Georges de Latour was a practicing Catholic, and an intimate friend of the archbishop of San Francisco, who instructed all the priests
in his diocese to buy their sacramental wine only from him. The amounts were so huge that it is clear that most of the priests must have been bootleggers as well, for the de Latour books show that all sorts of table wines were sold to the churches. Other famous vineyards established equally lucrative contracts with Californian rabbis, many of whom became, in effect, bootleggers for their flocks — the tide of rabbi guaranteeing virtual immunity from prosecution. The Prohibition Bureau’s estimate was that 678 million gallons of homemade wine alone were consumed between 1925 and 1929.

In New York, whereas many great restaurants simply closed down (their owners reluctant to break the law and unwilling to provide meals without vintage wines), speakeasies proliferated on a truly star-ding scale. By 1922, there would be at least 5,000, and by 1927, over 30,000 — twice as many as all legal bars, restaurants, and nightclubs
before
Prohibition. Some of them — such as the Twenty-One and the Stork Club — would survive repeated closures to become fashionable post-Prohibition restaurants, just as prominent bootlegging personalities such as William “Big Bill” Dwyer and “impresario” Larry Fay would eventually become respected, adulated “café society” figures.

The career of Sherman Billingsley, the owner-founder of the Stork Club — in its day the most famous speakeasy in America — revealed the extent of Prohibition’s “window of opportunity” — and how pre-1920 dry legislation provided bold entrepreneurs with valuable experience in skirting the Volstead Act’s laws. Oklahoma-born Billingsley began selling bootleg liquor in a drugstore when he was twelve. He was sixteen when he was first arrested, in Seattle, for contravening the local liquor laws. Soon afterward, he was running bootleg liquor from Canada and managing three speakeasies in Detroit; at nineteen, in New York, he was running a Bronx drugstore selling medicinal whiskey.

Billingsley opened the Stork Club, with money from Frank Costello, New York’s leading gangster, in 1927, and the nightly presence there of Walter Winchell, America’s most famous syndicated gossip columnist (his drinks, and meals, were on the house), made it
the
place to be seen. A raid in 1931 led to its temporary closure, but the “right people” soon flocked to the new address on Fifty-third Street, undeterred by sky-high prices (a $20 cover charge, $2 for a carafe of plain water).

There were hundreds of lesser-known private drinking clubs, where affluent members could store their own liquor. According to humorist Robert Benchley (himself a serious drinker), there were thirty-eight speakeasies on East Fifty-second Street alone, and potential buyers were so convinced that every house there was a speakeasy that one householder — rather in the manner of today’s New York car owners, notifying potential burglars of “no radio” — put up a notice on her front door: “This is a private residence. Do not ring.” McSorley’s saloon in Greenwich Village never bothered to reduce its potent beer to near beer — its popularity with the police and local politicians such that it was never raided once. A new type of nightclub became fashionable: the expensive, barely clandestine night spot run by socialites (Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club) and showbiz veterans (Belle Livingstone’s Country Club on East Fifty-eighth Street and “Texas” Guinan’s El Fay Club on West Forty-fifth Street). These typically included cabaret shows, dancing girls, and exotic acts. Prohibition encouraged the emergence of uniquely colorful women, whose wit and toughness attracted huge numbers of admiring customers. Belle Livingstone, a much-married ex-Broadway showgirl (her husbands included a paint salesman, an Italian count, a Cleveland millionaire, and an English engineer), charged a $5 entrance fee and $40 for a bottle of champagne. Mary Louise “Texas” Guinan was a former star of silent westerns, ex-circus rider, and vaudeville singer whose generous disposition was legendary. She even urged Walter Winchell, one of her devoted admirers, to promote, in his columns, speakeasies owned by less fortunate competitors.

The trashing of the Times Square area of New York, once the site of large numbers of respectable bars and restaurants, began with Prohibition, for not all speakeasies were furnished in the Louis XV style like the luxurious five-story Country Club. Most were dark, sordid clip joints haunted by bar girls pushing foul drinks in exchange for the promise of spurious sex to come. In Cincinnati, the attractive Across the Rhine beer gardens soon became a distant memory.

Some Prohibition advocates felt that “wide-open” towns such as New York and Chicago should be brought to heel, and called for more Prohibition agents and harsher laws (which were in fact introduced in 1925). Others became disenchanted for different reasons. Senator Thomas B. Watson (Democrat, Georgia), a lifelong dry, shocked the
Senate by drawing attention to “murder and other outrages carried out by Prohibition agents” in his state.

There was an almost immediate, nationwide change in drinking habits. It became the thing to do, among students, flappers, and respectable middle-class Americans all over the country, to defy the law — as much a manifestation of personal liberty as a thirst for alcohol.

Other changes manifested themselves. The saloon had been an almost exclusively male preserve, but the new speakeasies welcomed women. The cocktail was largely born as a result of Prohibition, because this was the only way of disguising the often horrible taste of homemade gin or flavored wood alcohol. And tens of thousands of people would die before Prohibition was over, poisoned by wood alcohol and moonshine.

W
ith Prohibition, America was all set for a wild drinking spree that would last thirteen years, five months, and nine days. It would transform the country’s morals; alter American attitudes toward law enforcers, politicians, and all those in authority; and herald a new mood of cynicism, along with an often justified conviction that the courts dispensed a form of two-tier justice based on class, wealth, and rank. And even if the Prohibition phenomenon itself, which was largely responsible for this general, unfocused resentment, was soon forgotten, for other reasons the mood of distrust has persisted to this day.

The Prohibition era has been chronicled in hundreds of films and classics, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
. Underworld figures such as Al Capone, catapulted onto the world scene by Prohibition, became in time mythic heroes, as did the bootleggers’ nemesis, Eliot Ness.

But the political immorality in high places that allowed the lawbreakers to flourish — and that marked the 1920s in other ways — has
been largely ignored or forgotten. It is as if those Americans who experienced the Prohibition years were determined to put them out of their minds as soon as it was repealed. Their reaction was understandable. Compared to the years of the Harding presidency, at the beginning of Prohibition (1920-1923), major scandals such as those that brought about the collapse of the Italian Christian Democratic hegemony looked like trifling peccadilloes.

For gangsters, bootleggers, and speakeasies to flourish, the liquor had to come from somewhere. The story of George Remus, the German-born American who became the richest bootlegger of all, shows how simple it was to lay one’s hands on almost limitless quantities of whiskey without resorting to rumrunners or homemade stills — and often without even formally breaking the law.

Remus exemplified the new breed of American. His father, Franck Remus (who dropped the Germanic spelling of his first name after immigrating to America), came from Friedeberg, near Berlin. The history of the Remus family is a textbook illustration of the appalling health hazards prevalent in the nineteenth century. Franck’s parents both died a few weeks after his birth, probably from cholera, and he subsequently became an apprentice in a woolen mill. There, he did well, marrying Maria Karg, the mill owner’s daughter, in 1871. They had three girls, but all died in infancy. Their fourth child, George Remus, lived, and when he was four and a half years old, the three of them left for Milwaukee, then almost a German enclave, where several members of the Karg family had already settled.

In Milwaukee, tragedy continued to dog the Remus family. Maria gave birth to two more sons, who also died in infancy. She then had three more children, all girls, who lived, followed by a third son, Herman, who, as a child, was hit on the back of the head by a flying brick, and as a result became mentally unstable. He died in 1918.

Try as they might, the panel of psychiatrists who, at the request of the court, examined George Remus before his trial, and spent hours debriefing him on his antecedents, found “no record of suicidal or criminal tendencies upon the part of any member of this family.” “None of the family could be called ‘alcoholic,’ “ the panel wrote, “although many of them, as is common with their countrymen, drank considerable beer. George Remus’s father drank only moderately, usually on Saturdays.”

George was a good child in every way, an older sister, Mrs. Gabriel Ryerson, told the panel, “talkative, energetic, a book lover, careful in his appearance, and very seldom had to be scolded. He always looked on the bright side of things and had a sense of humor.” Although Remus himself remained a lifelong teetotaler and nonsmoker, he was “fond of parties, always celebrating good news or success, dismissing discomforts of all kinds with feelings of lightheadedness. Irritations were never of long duration.” Although he was quick-tempered, his sister recalled, he was affectionate, made friends easily, and had a natural sense of responsibility, even as a child. He had been confirmed in the Lutheran Church (though neither George Remus nor his family were particularly religious), but was sufficiently intrigued by the dogma of various churches to attend Catholic, Presbyterian, and occasionally Christian Science church services. Apparently, none fully satisfied him. “My religion,” he told the panel, “is to pay my obligations and keep my word.” He was “dubious about the hereafter and did not worry much about it.” Despite his short, stocky build (in his early photographs he resembles Danny de Vito; in his later ones, Mussolini) and his one indulgence — good food — he became a strong swimmer and a much-sought-after member of the Illinois Athletic Club’s water polo team. The examining psychiatrists found him “alert, friendly, courteous and perfectly willing to cooperate in every way.”

As Remus told the panel, despite his mother’s relatively prosperous background, his family fell on hard times shortly after settling in Milwaukee. Frank, no longer a weaver but a lumber scorer, became crippled with articular rheumatism, a virtual invalid no longer able to work.

They left for Chicago, and soon young George Remus, still in his early teens, became the family’s mainstay. An uncle, George Karg, had a drugstore there, and George left school to work as his assistant. When his uncle decided to sell his shop, George obtained a bank loan and bought and ran the store himself, with a much increased profit. He was only nineteen, but had by this time become a licensed pharmacologist (by making himself out to be older than he was). He never graduated, displaying, as a student, the same headstrong qualities that were to plague him in later life. Just before his final examination, he led a student walkout to protest the behavior of an unpopular teacher, and
when the teacher took his revenge, handing out punitive low grades, Remus never returned to school.