Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (38 page)

Referring to Mabel Willebrandt’s canvassing of Methodist voters, he asked the overwhelmingly Protestant crowd: “What would the effect be upon these people if a prominent official of the government of the State of New York under me suggested to a gathering of the pastors of my church that they do for me what Mrs. Willebrandt suggests be done for Hoover?” Contrary to his expectations, he got a rousing reception from the Oklahomans present.

In cities with large ethnic minorities, especially where Prohibition had made brewery and distillery workers obsolete, the public response to Smith was ecstatic. In Milwaukee, his last major electioneering venue, he focused almost exclusively on Prohibition. “If there is any one subject above all others concerning which the welfare of the country requires plain speech and constructive leadership, it is the Volstead Act,” he told the crowd. He not only suggested that it be amended “to
allow each state to determine for itself what it wants to do about the question of local habits,” but for the first time proposed a referendum on Prohibition. “The cure for the ills of democracy,” he told them, “is more democracy. Hand this back to the people. Let them decide it.”

He also got in a sly dig at Mabel Willebrandt. “I shall let the Republican campaign managers worry about her. From comments in the public press all over the country, they have abundant reason to do so. We all have something to be grateful for. I haven’t got Mabel on my hands.”
⁵

Herbert Hoover, in his memoirs published twenty-three years later, claimed that “the Prohibition issue was forced into the campaign by Governor Al Smith” but made no reference to the religious polarization that was its most distinctive feature. Whatever his private misgivings may have been (in his memoirs he also claimed, with hindsight, “a reverse of enthusiasm” for the Volstead Act), he knew that in the eyes of the dry rural voters he was one of them — he had spoken out often enough on the evils of alcohol (“one of the curses of the human race”) to gain their lasting support.

In the last resort, the anti-Catholic, anti-minority, nativist themes proved compelling. Hoover won by 22 million votes to Al Smith’s 15.5 million, and by 444 electoral votes to 87. The election also resulted in the highest percentage of acknowledged drys ever returned to Congress. Even in New York, America’s wettest state, up-and-coming Democratic star Franklin D. Roosevelt only won the New York governorship (which Al Smith had vacated) by a small (25,000) majority.

Mabel Willebrandt was right: once again, the Prohibition issue had proved a deciding factor in politics. For all the needless tragedies it provoked, the corruption and damage to the body politic it generated, the myth of a God-fearing, prosperous, hard-working dry America was more attractive to a majority of voters than Al Smith’s realistic, more tolerant approach.

There were other reasons for Smith’s defeat. Hoover had been a popular secretary of Commerce, untainted by scandal. America was unprecedentedly prosperous, riding a stock market boom. More important, as Al Smith himself noted shortly afterward, “the time hasn’t yet come when a man may say his Rosary beads in the White House.”

Not only was the leading anti-Prohibitionist contender beaten, and removed from the presidential race for all time, but dry advocates
were able to claim that a new millennium was at hand, that after nine fumbling years the Volstead Act would at last come into its own.

Newly elected President Hoover did nothing to disappoint them. “I do not favor the repeal of the 18th Amendment,” he said in his acceptance speech. “I stand for the efficient enforcement of the laws enacted thereunder.” He described Prohibition as

a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose. It must be worked out constructively. Common-sense compels us to realize that grave abuses have occurred — abuses which must be remedied. . . . There are those who do not believe in the purposes of several provisions of the Constitution. No one denies their right to seek to amend it. . . . But the Republican Party does deny the right of anyone to seek to destroy the purposes of the Constitution by indirection.

The day after Hoover’s victory, anti-Prohibitionist Pauline Sabin resigned from the Republican party. In fact, repeal was only four years away.

Although the grounds for this dramatic change in mood would be overwhelmingly economic, one reason for the continued decline of the ASL involved Wheeler’s self-appointed propagandizing successor and perennial rival for ASL leadership, Bishop James Cannon. Doubts began to be cast on his fitness for the role even before Hoover became president.

A Virginian, nominal Democrat, prominent member of the Methodist Episcopal church, and member of the ASL executive since 1902, Bishop Cannon was a difficult man to like. Even his closest Methodist colleagues considered him a cold fish who had never been known to laugh and seldom smiled. This puritanical Protestant Ayatollah disapproved of most if not all pleasurable activities, including gambling. He was against dancing, theatricals, and any games, sports, or art that provided glimpses of “the female person.” He inveighed against Sarah Bernhardt (“an actress of brilliant powers but unsavory moral ideals”) when she came to America to perform
Camille
, and against Marie Curie, the world-famous physicist, for allegedly living in sin with her equally famous scientist companion (to whom she was in fact married), claiming that “she has lost forever her claim to a place among the great men and women of the world.” And, of course, he
considered Roman Catholicism “the mother of ignorance, superstition, intolerance and sin.” New York, his pet hate, was “Satan’s beat.”
⁶

A scrutiny of Bishop Cannon’s financial dealings, begun in the press almost accidentally following routine inquiries into the failure of a brokerage firm with which he was associated, revealed questionable, and perhaps indictable, practices on his part. The firm, a bucket shop, had bought $477,000 worth of stocks for him, selling them for $486,000, and Cannon’s profit — $9,000 — had been nearly four times what he had actually invested ($2,500). In pre-crash America, this would normally have attracted litde attention — but Bishop Cannon was one of the nation’s foremost anti-gambling scourges, and his own investment had been nothing less than a prodigious gamble.

As always in America, once the media had trained their sights on a target, they started delving into his past. Reporters discovered that while administering a girls’ school during the First World War, Bishop Cannon had hoarded flour, then sold it on the black market at a considerable profit, narrowly escaping prosecution. His biographer, Virginius Dabney, the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
editor, would also show that he had made false income tax returns to conceal the transaction.

Reporters now embarked on a full-scale investigation of his private life, and what they found was hilarious: the narrow-minded bigot turned out to have feet of clay. The scourge of innocent pleasure-lovers was a modern equivalent of Molière’s
Tartuffe
.

On one of his frequent trips to New York during the presidential campaign, Cannon had made the acquaintance of Helen McCallum and Joan Chapman in the lobby of the McAlpin Hotel in New York, where he was staying. He introduced himself as “Stephen Trent, writer,” gave McCallum twenty dollars, and would subsequently pay her rent.

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Despite the fact that Bishop Cannon’s wife was terminally ill with cancer, he came to New York to see McCallum with increasing frequency, even leaving Washington on November 25, 1928, the day after his wife suffered a paralytic (and eventually lethal) stroke, to be with his new friend, spending the night in New York. He returned just in time for his wife’s death, and funeral, but returned to New York — and McCallum — the following day.

Subsequently, Helen McCallum became an almost, but not quite,
constant companion: she was with him in Jerusalem in 1929, and during an extensive trip to Europe in 1930, both times masquerading as his secretary on all-expenses-paid junkets. Rumors that Bishop Cannon was also dating a friend of McCallum’s, Cary McTroy, and might even have married her secretly, made Helen seek out the press and show them some of the bishop’s intimate letters to her.

Bishop Cannon and McCallum would eventually marry, but in the meantime he got into trouble of another type: this time he was charged with mishandling Republican campaign funds. He had allegedly received $65,000 but had accounted for only $17,000. Cannon dismissed the allegations as a “popish plot,” but never offered a satisfactory explanation to the investigating Senate Lobby Committee. Nor did its members press hard for an answer: a majority were prominent drys, and several were on the ASL payroll.

A final indignity was in store: on their honeymoon in Brazil, after a hasty wedding in London, Bishop Cannon learned that members of his own Methodist church had formally accused him of “gross moral turpitude.” He managed to overcome this hurdle as well, but only by invoking irregularities in the way his accusers had invoked the “Methodist Discipline.”

The Cannon story became a favorite ongoing topic in the American press, and the ASL’s reputation suffered in consequence. An unrelated, but devastating ASL scandal broke with the indictment of the league’s New York state superintendent William Hamilton Anderson, eventually convicted for embezzlement.

Another prominent Prohibition personality, the incorruptible Mabel Walker Willebrandt, was also very much in the news just after Hoover’s election. For all the new president’s public praise (he kept her on as deputy attorney general), she resigned her post in May of 1929.

Although there were rumors she had fallen foul of her new boss, Attorney General William D. Mitchell, and that congressmen with bootlegging connections and prominent Catholics had also lobbied for her removal, the truth was far simpler: after eight years on an inadequate government salary as the single mother of an adopted daughter, the “Prohibition Portia,” as Al Smith called her, craved a more financially rewarding life.

Fruit Industries, Inc., a conglomerate representing most of the California grape growers, promptly hired her as its legal counselor
on a huge retainer. It proved a wise move. Thanks to Willebrandt’s Washington connections, grape farmers, in the first year of Hoover’s presidency, obtained large government subsidies and federal loans.

Willebrandt was useful to her new employers in other ways. Fruit Industries manufactured raisin cakes called Vine-glo, a popular raw material ingredient for homemade wine. Willebrandt’s appointment was sufficient to deter Prohibition agents from prosecuting the company for infringing the Volstead Act, and Vine-glo sales boomed. A direct competitor — Vino-Sano Inc. — was not as fortunate. Its warehouses were raided and its raisin cakes confiscated, to such an extent that its president asked Willebrandt to be
its
legal counsel as well. She primly refused.

Although there was never any proof that Willebrandt herself encouraged her former Prohibition agents to persecute a business rival, she had shown, in her dealings with Remus, a ruthlessness that was peculiarly suited to the business world. She was also among the first of America’s top government servants to set a much-abused precedent: crossing over into a lucrative private sector job to take advantage of expertise acquired in government service.

For all his public support of the Prohibition status quo, Hoover was fully aware of its destructive potential. To give the impression that he was sensitive to advocates of change, he did what all governments do to avert criticism: he set up a nongovernmental organization to deal with it.

The Wickersham Commission, named after its president, a distinguished lawyer, was supposed to assess the worth of the Volstead Act. Its terms of reference were, however, deliberately vague, and by the time its ambiguous findings were published, in 1931, America had been shaken by a cataclysmic event that would leave its imprint on the country right up to entry into the Second World War — the stock market crash of October 1929, triggering the Depression.

It was not just that disposable income shrank to such an extent that people could no longer afford bootieg liquor prices, and that many speakeasies lost their clients — though fashionable clubs such as the Twenty-One and the Stork Clubs still enjoyed affluent show business crowds. Far more important was the growing awareness among economists and business leaders, as well as private citizens, that by banning liquor, the government had, since 1920, cut itself off from extremely
valuable tax revenue. In the affluent 1920s, this had not been of overriding importance. But as one depression year followed the next, with no sign of an upturn, with rival government departments scrambling for shrinking federal funds, and with states cutting back on essential expenditures because widespread unemployment was leading to huge shortfalls in tax revenues, the folly of it all struck home.

The irony was that some of the new sponsors of repeal had been, in the past, the staunchest advocates of a totally dry America. The Du Ponts, one of America’s most powerful families, had been as uncompromising as Henry Ford in enforcing a “no drink, no saloon” rule wherever there were Du Pont munitions factories. New converts in their wake included Elihu Root, a prominent corporation lawyer, the CEOs of Standard Oil and Macy’s, and influential bankers such as Pauline Sabin’s husband. Their membership in the AAPA — the American Anti-Prohibition Association — was not simply another nail in what was fast becoming an ASL coffin: it signified that the pendulum was in motion, and that the “establishment” was preparing to burn what it had worshipped for so long.