Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (37 page)

It all began on New Year’s Day, 1927, with scores of emergency admissions to New York’s Bellevue Hospital. There were forty-one deaths there that day, and the Department of Health announced there had been 750 such deaths in New York alone during 1926.

Although no entirely accurate nationwide statistics are available, it is probable that by 1927 such deaths may have exceeded the 50,000 mark — to say nothing of hundreds of thousands more nonfatal cases resulting in blindness or paralysis. In 1930, the Prohibition Bureau reported that in a single, small county in Kansas — an exceptionally dry state — there had been over 15,000 victims of adulterated liquor.

Bootleggers like Remus, Olmstead, and McCoy, who refused to deal in adulterated liquor, were extremely rare. In Roy Haynes’s day, fifteen chemists were on hand to examine samples of all seized liquor. In very few cases did they discover genuine brand whiskey, gin, or wine.
At their most harmless, the bootleggers’ wares were diluted; in the majority of cases, the chemists found liquor made of pure grain to which coloring and flavoring had been added; moonshine — from corn meal, molasses, fruit, vegetables or sugar — presented graver risks. In some cases denatured alcohol had been redistilled to remove the poison. But in others the hooch was outright poison — wood alcohol. “Of 480,000 gallons of confiscated booze analyzed in New York in 1927, 98 percent contained poisons,” said a Prohibition Bureau report. The New York
Telegram
collected over 500 samples of liquor from four hundred speakeasies. Fifty-five of them were found to contain significant traces of wood alcohol, and lesser poisons were found in seventy more.

Under Volstead Act provisions, the manufacture of denatured alcohol was not only legal, but tax exempt. The denaturing substance was usually methanol, and methanol was extremely poisonous. Three glasses could be lethal, explaining the steady rise in the death toll from 1920 onward. The Volstead Act’s provisions that industrial alcohol should be made undrinkable included no proviso that its contents should be labeled “poison,” and this was nothing more than “legalized murder,” wrote Dr. Nicolas Murray Butler of Columbia University.

So, for the first time, in early 1927, Wayne Wheeler, that master manipulator and moral scourge of godless drinkers, found himself on the defensive. Although he denied any liability, it was a fact that the ASL had originally sanctioned the use of methanol when Volstead Act provisions were being drawn up, and had lobbied against any mandatory “poison” labels on denatured alcohol. Wheeler had boasted of the ASL’s key role in drafting the act so loudly, and so frequently, that he lacked all credibility now that he denied responsibility for some of its provisions.

In 1927 cartoons and editorials he was depicted as a poisoner, and a callous one at that, for his response to the attacks against him was surprisingly inept. At first he claimed that only one such death had occurred since 1920; then, when this was ridiculed by experts, he suggested, in a press statement, that “the government is under no obligation to furnish people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide.”
¹
This was a monstrously hard-hearted reaction
from the leader of an organization heavily subsidized by the Protestant church, leading to further press attacks on him in an admittedly overwhelmingly wet press.

His clumsiness reflected not only his increasingly precarious health but his loosening grip on Congress — and the ASL itself, for Wheeler’s prickly arrogance had made him many enemies within the organization. His loss of face, and clout, had begun in 1925: in a move intended to curb Wheeler’s inordinate political powers, and his hold on Congress, President Coolidge appointed Lincoln C. Andrews, a forceful retired brigadier general, as assistant secretary of the Treasury, with overall responsibilities for Customs, the Coast Guard, and the Prohibition Bureau.

The nomination undermined the position of Prohibition Commissioner Haynes, a Wheeler appointee and his pliant stooge, but it also eroded some of Wheeler’s own authority, for Andrews himself began keeping Wheeler at arm’s length, and a number of congressmen, past victims of Wheeler’s strong-arm tactics, now began an open revolt against him. And as his own power declined, a number of new, or long-dormant, anti-Prohibition associations began gathering strength.

By 1926, several articulate and increasingly powerful lobbies had emerged, campaigning for a return to pre-1920 state liquor laws and even for outright repeal. These were no easily dismissed lobbies sponsored by former brewing and distilling vested interests. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the Crusaders, and the Moderation League, mostly composed of middle-class professionals, lawyers, and businessmen, had all been in existence since the early 1920s, had no connections with the liquor industry, and were now attracting considerable media attention for the first time — with prominent personalities joining their ranks. Various state bar associations, as well as the powerful American Bar Association, were now also daring to challenge the legality of the Volstead Act, drawing attention to the abuses it occasioned; the American Federation of Labor (AFL), representing the views of all but a tiny minority of factory workers, had never given up the struggle for legal 2.5-proof beer, and in 1927 was making its influence felt in Congress as never before. Anti-German sentiment was receding at last: the American Legion, to which millions of First World War veterans belonged, was
also turning against the ASL, and would soon urge an end to Prohibition.

But what worried Wheeler most in 1927 was another “women’s war” phenomenon, waged this time by the wets, and headed by America’s most prominent female Republican. Pauline Morton Sabin, granddaughter of a Republican governor and daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the Navy, was a dyed-in-the-wool, mainstream Republican. After marrying a wealthy banker (himself a prominent anti-Prohibition campaigner), she had risen through the Republican ranks to become president of the Women’s National Republican Club and the first female ever appointed to the previously all-male Republican National Committee. As a vocal anti-Prohibitionist, she sacrificed her long-standing Republican convictions for her new cause, exploiting the growing, nationwide resentment at corruption and two-tier justice, displaying formidable debating and organizing skills.

Wheeler was by now a very sick man, with severe heart and kidney afflictions, but was refusing to let up. On April 23,1927, he confronted Clarence Darrow in a contradictory debate on Prohibition at Carnegie Hall. So weak was he that his opening statement had to be read by an underling, and the audience, overwhelmingly pro-Darrow, interrupted him with cruel catcalls. Wheeler responded with considerable bravado. “According to the wets I am dangerously ill and about to quit prohibition work,” he told them. “This is unmitigated bunk. My health is better than the wets wish it was and it is getting better every week.” In fact, he only had another five months to live, and in the brief period left would face increasingly serious challenges.

That same April, Wheeler had advance warning that Andrew Mellon, Coolidge’s closest cabinet colleague, intended letting both Haynes and Andrews go, and the following month, though in constant pain, he lobbied Congress and the White House to get the decision overthrown. But he was no longer the dreaded “big boss,” and Coolidge ignored his entreaties, replacing Haynes with James M. Moran, who was no friend of Wheeler’s.

The ASL was now in danger of splitting into pro-Wheeler and pro-Moran factions, and had lost the cohesion that had made it so powerful. The crisis was compounded by a growing cash crisis: affluent sympathizers were now more reluctant to give as much to the ASL as they
had in the past. For the first time, the league’s public relations and publishing budget had to be trimmed.

Wheeler returned one last time to Oberlin, his alma mater, for graduation exercises, to bask in the adulation he knew he would always find there. This was where his ASL career had begun, and he was still an icon to present and past students. He then decided to rest up in his small summer house in Little Point Sable, Michigan, to prepare for the grueling 1928 presidential campaign that lay ahead.

Tragedy continued to dog him. A few weeks after his holiday began, a gasoline stove exploded in the kitchen, inflicting horrible, lethal burns on his wife. At the sight of her in flames, his father-in-law, Robert Candy, dropped dead of a heart attack. Wheeler attempted to resume his ASL career, but he was a broken man.

In early September Wheeler lapsed into a coma and died. The “dry boss” was duly eulogized by the very ASL personalities who had turned against him. There would be “no successor to Wheeler,” the ASL pledged. This was deliberately ambiguous praise, for though it consecrated his role in bringing the Volstead Act into being in the first place, it also implied that Wheeler, especially in the last few years, had misused his powers, overstepped his role, and offended too many people. Bishop James Cannon, the head of the Methodist Church and a prim hypocrite who had frequently clashed behind the scenes with Wheeler, immediately did his best to assume the “big boss” mantle.

Wheeler had been looking forward to the 1928 presidential nomination campaigns. He wanted to make sure that — as in 1924 — he would prevent Al Smith, still the veteran governor of New York State, from gaining the nomination. But times were changing, and so had the party’s mood. Its delegates to the 1928 Democratic Convention in Houston were well-behaved, with not a drunkard in sight. William Jennings Bryan, the indefatigable Democratic Prohibitionist, was dead, and Cannon lacked Wheeler’s political skills.

In a series of ASL meetings and press articles just before the convention, Cannon did his best to imply that Al Smith, if elected, would turn out to be a “cocktail President.” Again and again, he quoted an article in the
Nation
. “Do you believe in electing to the Presidency a man who drinks too much for his own good, and is politically a rampant wet? Does Al drink, and does he drink too much? I am reliably
informed that he drinks every day, and the number of his cocktails and highballs is variously estimated at from four to eight.”
²

Slurs of this type were only moderately effective: public opinion was now far more blasé. Besides, though it was known that Al Smith was no teetotaler, he had been a popular, competent governor, and unlike many politicians — some of them toeing the dry line — had never been seen the worse for drink.

With the support of up-and-coming Democratic personalities such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, to say nothing of Tammany Boss George Olvany — a rough, tough, hard-drinking Irish thug — Smith easily won the nomination.

Almost half of his telegram accepting the Democratic nomination dealt with Prohibition — proof that it remained America’s most crucial political issue. Whoever won, he wrote, would have to deal with a situation “entirely unsatisfactory to the great mass of our people.” Without formally calling for its repeal, he urged a return to “democratic principles of local self-government and state’s rights” — in other words, a return to pre-1920 local option laws. There were reports that Smith himself would have preferred a stronger statement but was advised against it by Roosevelt, aware of the lasting importance, especially in rural areas and in the South, of the dry vote.

Once the presidential contest between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith began, Bishop Cannon concentrated all his efforts on another issue he knew prejudiced, narrow-minded (and as they were then called) “nativist” voters would respond to — the Democratic candidate’s Catholic faith.

Because the Vatican’s
Observatore Romano
had referred in an editorial to Prohibition’s ineffectiveness (“it has become so useless not to say dangerous that it would be better to abolish it”), Cannon argued — first in an article for
Outlook
magazine, then in innumerable speeches around the country — that should Smith become president, “he is likely to be tremendously influenced by the views of the Pope and the Romish cardinals,” even suggesting that, if elected, he would turn part of the White House into a permanent guest house for the Pope.

His blatant bigotry emphasized the gulf between “old” and “new” Americans and the latent hostility of the former. In Cambridge, Maryland, he told a rally that Smith courted

. . . the Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles and the Russian Jews. That kind has given us a stomach-ache. We have been unable to assimilate such people in our national life, so we shut the door on them. But Smith says “give me that kind of people.” He wants the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York.
³

Mabel Willebrandt also joined in the fray, though she avoided any racist invective. Addressing mass meetings of her own Methodist Episcopal church, she urged Protestants to show their support for Hoover by writing in and pledging their vote to him.
⁴

Prohibition and the Catholic issue dogged Al Smith’s campaign from start to finish. In Oklahoma City, a dry stronghold, he expected a hostile reception, for Ku Klux Klan crosses had lined the railroad tracks of his campaigning train. The KKK was almost as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black, and was one of the most uncompromising advocates of a dry America.

Decidedly nervous, he met the challenge directly. “An effort has been made to distract the attention of the electorate and fasten it on malicious and un-American propaganda; I specifically refer to the question of my religion,” he told a large crowd inside the Oklahoma City Coliseum. “I can think of no greater disservice to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines. It is not only contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, but of the Constitution itself.”