Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (2 page)

Rather than confront the driver, Remus walked away. Shortly afterward, he gave himself up. As the
Cincinnati Enquirer
wrote the following day (October 7,1927), “Thus did the much tangled domestic affairs of George Remus, once the multi-millionaire bootlegger king of Cincinnati, come to a sudden — and dramatic — climax.”

The trial of George Remus for his wife’s murder — and its spectacular conclusion — became the 1920s equivalent of the O. J. Simpson case. Reporters arrived from all over the United States, Canada, and even Europe — a special press room was set aside for them in the tiny courthouse. Proceedings were reported extensively in newspapers nationwide, the
Cincinnati Enquirer
running an almost verbatim account of the trial, from beginning to end.

George Remus would have remained an obscure Chicago criminal lawyer with an interest in law reform and a passionate opposition to the death penalty had Prohibition not turned him, in the space of four years, into a megastar millionaire. His
crime passionnel
stemmed not only from this sudden change in fortune, but from Imogene’s sudden passion for Remus’s nemesis, handsome young Justice Department agent Franklin Dodge, and her own considerable greed. Overwhelmingly, American men sided with George Remus, and even many staid, middle-class American matrons felt that Imogene “had had it coming to her.”

For all the sordid details revealed during the trial, enabling Remus to present his case as an avenger rather than a murderer, Prohibition itself was the real culprit. Had there been no Volstead Act, he told the court, “I would not be here.” The “greatest social experiment of modern times,” as President Calvin Coolidge described it, brought with it irresistible temptations in the wake of unprecedented corruption.

The story of George and Imogene Remus is all part of that “noble experiment.” George Remus’s background, as a German-born “new American,” was relevant to the unprecedented (and, to most Europeans, at least, deluded) attempt at the regulation of social behavior, for with hindsight, the Prohibition phenomenon can be seen not just as a well-meaning, albeit absurd, attempt to stamp out drunkenness, then regarded as society’s most devastating scourge (graver even than TB, the other great affliction of the time, for it affected the mind as well as the body), but as a watershed marking the end of one American era and the beginning of another.

Beyond the debate on the rights of reformers to regulate social behavior by force, restricting individual freedom in the name of better health, morality, and godliness, Prohibition was the rearguard action of a still dominant, overwhelmingly rural, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, aware that its privileges and natural right to rule were being increasingly threatened by the massive arrival of largely despised (and feared) beer-swilling, wine-drinking new American immigrants.

Old-established Americans, most of them Protestants, of overwhelmingly British lineage, regarded themselves as the natural guardians of traditional values, and were determined to maintain their moral and religious standards by almost any means. They were also intent on preserving their own considerable privileges. As historian Andrew Sinclair later wrote,
¹
the Prohibitionists’ victory in 1920, turning the whole of the country dry, was “the final victory of the defenders of the American past. On the rock of the 18th Amendment, village America made its last stand.”

America’s Marxists, a very small minority even in the heyday of Marxism, saw Prohibition in a very different light. For them it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the “dominant bourgeoisie”
to duck the
real
issues — poverty, slum housing, economic exploitation of all kinds — using the Prohibition campaign as a pretext to deflect attention from the fact that the working classes were paying a huge price for the American industrial revolution. They argued that the ideals the Prohibitionists considered most important — godliness, industry, sobriety, thrift — were deliberately, and with consummate hypocrisy, advocated to compel the underprivileged to accept their fate and inferior status. Sobriety was simply a “plutocratic weapon” employers used to make wage slaves work harder and faster on the factory assembly lines. The underlying assumption was that if the workers refrained from drink, their one easily available pleasure, they could then get by on their miserable wages.
²

The story of Imogene and George Remus, and of their nemesis, Prohibition — in retrospect one of the greatest of American disasters, and in its day “without a doubt the most important question in American life”
³
— is oddly relevant today. In its simplistic determination to strike at the root of a “social evil” without any thought of the consequences, or of the means required to enforce it, Prohibition was a striking example of the American propensity to believe that society was infinitely malleable and that all it would take to rid America of its blemishes and turn it into a promised land would be a few well-meaning laws.

It also embodied a number of righteous beliefs — in the perfectibility of human nature and the legitimacy of the moral imperative to improve the health and well-being of the masses whether they liked it or not — that revealed a perennial American naiveté of the type embodied by successive generations of idealist-politicians.

The persistence and skill with which the architects of Prohibition pleaded their cause over most of a century, winning state after state until an overwhelming majority in Congress voted for the Eighteenth Amendment, was a textbook example of successful lobbying. All practitioners of that art have since, consciously or unconsciously, emulated the tactics of the Anti-Saloon League and its ruthless legal adviser and political power broker Wayne Wheeler. But the incompetence that followed was equally exemplary — as if the very politicians who had brought Prohibition into being were determined to do everything in their power to ensure its failure.

Despite its almost risible collapse, Prohibition’s lessons are valuable — and have still not been learned. Some of its methods were strikingly similar to those used today to fight drug abuse, with equally disappointing results, and today’s controversy over drugs could, with only minor semantic changes, apply to the Prohibition controversy almost a century ago. “Prohibition is what makes drugs so profitable, yet the thought of legalizing their distribution, even with rigid controls and treatment programs, arouses the fear of infecting millions of addicts,” wrote Max Frankel in the
New york Times
Sunday magazine recendy.
⁴
That fear, if valid, explains the central dilemma expressed two years ago by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “The nation’s choice of policy,” he wrote — legalization or prohibition — “offers a choice of outcomes.” Neither alternative seemed to him entirely satisfactory: legalization entailed increased public health problems, whereas prohibition led to an enormous increase in crime. Identical concerns were expressed by equally baffled social reformers as far back as 1890.

For all its outrageously intolerant overtones, its hypocrisy and double standards, Prohibition represented a genuine attempt to better the lives of people. That it did them instead untold harm — that America has never fully recovered from the legacy of those thirteen years — should come as no surprise. As history keeps telling us — but do we ever listen? — the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

T
here was a time in America when liquor was regarded as God’s gift to mankind and a panacea for almost every type of ailment. The last half of the eighteenth century was “the most intemperate era in American history.”
¹
The going price for a muscular slave was twenty gallons of whiskey; farmers found whiskey distillers gave them a far better price for grain than millers; and the “good creature of God” —
aqua vitae
, the very stuff of life — was food, medicine, and, even more than in Europe, the indispensable lubricant for civilized, enjoyable social intercourse.

From the time they were born, Americans acquired a taste for liquor: as babies, their bottles were laced with rum to keep them “pacified”; later, “able-bodied men, and women, too, for that matter, seldom went more than a few hours without a drink.” Here is the
Old American Encyclopedia
(1830) describing pre-independence drinking habits:

A fashion at the South was to take a glass of whiskey, flavored with mint, soon after waking. . . . At eleven o’clock, while mixtures, under various peculiar names — sling, toddy, flip, — solicited the appetite
at the bar of the common tippling-shop, the offices of professional men and counting rooms dismissed their occupants for a half hour to regale themselves at a neighbor’s or a coffee-house with punch. . . .
²
At the dinner hour. . . whiskey and water curiously flavored with apples, or brandy and water, introduced the feast; whiskey or brandy and water helped it through; and whiskey or brandy without water secured its safe digestion. . . . Rum, seasoned with cherries, protected against the cold; rum, made astringent with peach-nuts, concluded the repast at the confectioner’s; rum, made nutritious with milk, prepared for the maternal office.

Most early settlers were hard drinkers, and while the Puritans preached against every form of pleasurable self-indulgence, they outlawed drunkenness, not drinking. This would have been unthinkable, for the Bible itself was full of references to the joys, and blessings, of liquor. The Book of Proverbs contains this eulogy, that would have been in its place on the wall behind every bar in the land: “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy heart. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”

With this type of biblical
leitmotif
, it was no surprise that clergymen were among the biggest tipplers of all. At every house-call they were offered drinks, rum or cider was served almost continuously during their stay, and when they left they had to take a farewell drink for politeness’ sake. Some clergymen made twenty such calls a day. No wonder a noted Temperance figure in Albany noted in 1857 that to his knowledge, “fifty percent of the clergy, within a circuit of 50 miles, died drunkards.” The Reverend Leonard Woods, professor of theology at Andover Seminary, recalled in 1880 that among his acquaintances were at least forty ministers, “who were either drunkards, or so far addicted to drinking, that their reputation and usefulness were greatly impaired, if not utterly ruined.”

City authorities invariably granted licenses to saloons close to churches, the rationale being that the priest and his flock would meet there between services. All ordinations, weddings, and especially funerals turned into prolonged drinking bouts, some of them phenomenal. In
The Great Illusion
Herbert Asbury cites the cost of liquid refreshment at a Virginia funeral at four thousand pounds of tobacco, and at a preacher’s widow’s funeral in Boston, the mourners put away
over 51 gallons of Malaga. Any communal physical effort — whether harvesting, road-building, or wood-cutting — was an excuse for a binge. Workers’ wages came, in part, in the form of liquor, and days off to get drunk were part of an unwritten agreement between employer and laborer.

The massive consumption of hard liquor had been a feature of “New Continent” life ever since the earliest colonization stages: as early as 1630, Peter Stuyvesant noted that “one quarter of New Amsterdam (as New York was then called) is devoted to houses for the sale of brandy, tobacco and beer.” In pre-independence times, the colonies’ judges were so frequently drunk at the bench that heavy fines were instituted for those proved incapable during court proceedings.

In some parts of rural America, liquor was used as currency, with prices displayed in terms of whiskey pints or gallons. Farm laborers, including slaves, got ample liquor rations. Kegs of whiskey, with tin cups attached, were at the disposal of ships’ crews and passengers on flatboats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There were barrels of rum on tap in shops for favored customers, and even court sessions were an excuse for drinking: the liquor consumed by judge and jury during proceedings was a legitimate court expense. With rum, applejack, and blackstrap (rum and molasses) a few pence a quart, eighteenth-century Americans, whether rich or poor, slaves or free men and women, appear to have gone through life in a semiperpetual alcoholic haze. In the early nineteenth century, Asbury noted, “so much rum was available in the Massachusetts metropolis that it sold at retail for fourpence a quart. West Indian rum, supposed to be better than the New England product, was only twopence more.”

The New Continent passion for liquor reflected the settlers’ own cultural origins — in no way was it
sui generis
. The early immigrants came from a land — Britain — where eighteenth-century pub owners routinely displayed the notice “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence.” Hogarth’s “Gin lane” immortalized the degradation of London’s wretched “lumpen proletariat.” Cheap gin first made its massive appearance in London in 1724, and became an immediate addiction (much like crack or heroin today) to wretched, underpaid, unrepresented slum dwellers, so much so that the “Gin Act,” passed by Parliament, attempted to contain this plague — to little effect, for, as Henry Fielding, the writer and social reformer, noted in a pamphlet published
in 1751, “should the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height, during the next twenty years, there will be by that time very few of the common people left to drink it.” Some at least of Fielding’s “common people,” intent on a different, less miserable life, must later have joined the ranks of America’s eighteenth-century settlers.