The Cornbread Mafia: A Homegrown Syndicate's Code of Silence and the Biggest Marijuana Bust in American History (6 page)

Though the whisky stills never stopped for the war, the end of fighting allowed the distilling industry to really cook. By the end of the nineteenth century, Marion County produced bourbon with labels like "Cumberland," "Rolling Fork," "Grand Springs," "Maple Grove," "Old Happy Hollow," "Falcon," "Fern Hill," "Burks Spring," "Colonel Blair," "Nick Blair," "Blair's Old Club," "Mattingly and Moore," "Callaghan," "R. Cummins," "Cummins Sour Mash," "Ballard and Lancaster," "Smith and Smith,""Wm. Birkle,""J. G. Mattingly and Sons," "J.C.W.," "Marion County," "Marion," "Belle of Marion," "Belle of Loretto," and "Faymus," a bourbon whose brand seemed to encourage both egotism and bad spelling; it would be popular today.

Of course, given this output of world-renowned whisky, the retail consumption of the local product must have been, as William Bradbury noted in his letter, "enormous" and with "no restraint." So enormous that a substantial antidrinking movement began to brew-and not just in morally upright places but in Kentucky, too.

On June 8, 1872, on the grounds of St. Mary's College, the St. Charles Total Abstinence Society held a public rally. At two o'clock that afternoon, the college brass band, in uniform, struck up a bouncy yet sober tune and marched through the college gates to the campus, followed by hundreds of citizens of both sexes, to an opening on the campus where a stage had been erected for the speakers and benches placed on the lawn for the audience.

To combat this rising dry tide, distillery leaders banded together into a national association to protect their interests in Washington, forming the Wholesale Liquor Dealers' and Distillers' Association of the United States in 1893 and electing John B. Wathen, of Lebanon, as its first president.

"It looks as if the distillers and reform extremists will have to get together on a compromise middle ground," Wathen told the Washington Post from the lobby of the Raleigh Hotel in D.C. on April 1, 1901. "And it is probable that ultimately the anti-saloon people will assent to a more strict regulation of the saloons.... It is impossible to enforce prohibition in cities, and attempts to do so only result in multiplying boot-leggers. In Kentucky the distillers now sell in some of the best cities in prohibition districts great quantities of whisky."

Despite the organized opposition from the distillers, the temperance movement called a local option election in Lebanon in March 1907. Certainly Wathen and his fellow distillers felt confident that the wet votes would beat out the dries, especially in Lebanon-but they weren't taking any chances, either, which got them into trouble. News of the election made it to the New York Times:

LEBANON, KY., GOES DRY Several Prominent Men Arrested on Bribery Charges

LEBANON, Ky., March 25-A local option election was held here to-day, and the city went "dry" by 63 votes. A procession of 2,000 women and children paraded the principal streets, shouting and cheering for the abolishment ofsaloons.

Warrants were sworn out for S. N. Wathen, president of the Kentucky Distillers Association, and Col. Wallace Cardwell of the governor's staff, and about twelve other citizens, charging them with bribery.

fill gave bonds except for Wathen and Cardwell, who insisted on going to jail, but were allowed to go free. Ex-Chief of Police Yowell was arrested for carrying concealed weapons. Lebanon is in one of the largest distilling counties in the State.

Of course, the Wathens didn't give up the fight.Three years later the local option appeared on the ballot in Lebanon again. On August 11, 1910, Lebanon burst at the seams, with ten thousand people downtown, according to the Lebanon Enterprise, but they hadn't all come just to vote on whether liquor should be sold there; the circus was in town at the same time.' atmosphere in the crowds appeared as pleasant as the weather, nothing like the nastiness that had characterized the election three years before. Both sides were well organized, but this time the wets managed to get more honest votes than they had before, and the drys lost sixty-four votes.' That night the wets celebrated by getting drunk at the circus.

But the drys were far from finished fighting. As the wets enjoyed their victory, the drys were distilling a campaign of enforced temperance nationally. To accomplish their goal, they would require a US constitutional amendment. The temperance movement saw its crusade as a logical extension to the end of the forced imprisonment of slavery; only this time, the movement wanted to rid the world of its voluntary imprisonment to alcoholic beverages. The drys believed that once America sobered up, it would realize what shackles liquor had been.

By the summer of 1917, forty-five years after the Total Abstinence Society rally at St. Mary's College, the temperance movement in Lebanon received a huge shot in the arm: its third visit from William Jennings Bryan, who spoke to a gathered crowd of one thousand or more about the need to support the outlawing of liquor for the cause of the Great War brewing in Europe.

"The war is proving a substantial factor in hastening the day of Nationwide and world-wide-prohibition," Bryan said, predicting a global end of liquor in less than twenty years. "No doubt, you can pass prohibition by 100,000 majority in Kentucky if ever the people get a chance to vote on the question."

In July 1917, the Department of Justice began enforcing the "Reed bone-dry law," which banned the import of liquor into dry states, "even though those States may not prohibit such importation, and even though the States by law specifically permit such importation."

At 11:00 p.m. on September 8, 1917, a Saturday, the manufacture of all whisky in the United States ceased when the prohibition clause of the Food Control Act took effect. Millions of bushels of grain that would have been ground up for whisky would now be released for food to feed the growing Allied armies in Europe.

The closing of the distilleries, at least at first, did not spell doom for men like Charles Kobert, Hans Mueller, Charles Burks, John B. Wathen and other Marion County men likewise engaged (although Kobert and Mueller would later sell their interest to John B. Wathen's son, John A.). Economic forecasts claimed that the losses from the distilling halt during the war would be more than offset by the greater prices the distillers would obtain for their products already manufactured. In the hills of Marion and Nelson Counties, the five-story warehouses containing thousands of handmade fifty-gallon barrels were filled with whisky that matured in price as well as age. Some officials speculated that whisky would sell for $15 a gallon within a year, affording distillers enormous profits that would more than compensate for the loss of capital invested in plants.

But the predictions of great wealth didn't pan out. By January 1919, the three major distilleries in Marion County, then the largest distilling county in the commonwealth, had been sold-and at pennies on the dollar of what they were once worth. According to the Lebanon Enterprise:

The Mueller, Wathen & Kobert distillery, perhaps one of the best known in Kentucky, was sold at public auction to the highest bidder last Saturday. The plant, which was built at an original cost of thing like $52, 000 and which at one time was valued by its owners at $150, 000, was purchased by R. N. Wathen, one of the members of the firm, for $18,650.

The Wathens had built the Rolling Fork and Cumberland distillery in 1875 just outside of Lebanon's corporate limits. Recognized as one of the best-equipped distilleries in the state, the Rolling Fork sweet mash house had a capacity of four hundred bushels a day, and the Cumberland sour mash house had a one-hundred-bushel capacity. The grounds had four warehouses with room for forty thousand barrels, its own cooperage plant and stock pens to slop seven hundred cattle.

Three days after R. N. Wathen bought his own family's distillery for nothing, the superintendent of the R. Cummins & Co. distillery in Loretto bought his workplace for $6,205-less than one-third of what Wathen had paid for his. The buildings of the Cummins distillery cost $55,000 alone. One warehouse, erected just a few years before the forced closure, cost $7,000 itself. The deed to Burks Spring, the distillery that would one day produce Maker's Mark, had already exchanged hands.

That February the Lebanon City Council met on its regular Tuesday night, but "very little business of interest was transacted"-except for saloons and quart houses renewing their liquor licenses but renewing them for six months instead of a year because liquor sales would expire nationwide on July 1.

On the last day of June 1919, the legal sale of alcoholic liquors ceased in the United States, not yet because of the constitutional amendment but rather because further wartime prohibition measures went into effect on Monday night at midnight.

"In many cities," the Enterprise reported, "it was a night of revelry, but in Lebanon no celebration marked the passing of the `product that made Kentucky famous.'There were, however, many `last go rounds,' and dealers were taxed to take care of the trade."

Lebanon's four saloons and two quart houses had all employed extra help to keep up with the countdown's business; several closed down before the midnight deadline because they had run out of anything to sell. The evening train, which arrived in Lebanon from eastern Kentucky every night at 7:40, added an extra coach for several days to accommodate the increased traffic for those who needed to come the one hundred miles to Lebanon for "wet goods."

One dealer told the Enterprise that his business would be fine if the wartime prohibition lasted only three or four months, saying that everyone had enough stock stored away for this length of time-seemingly telling the newspaper that he and everyone else were moving immediately into the illegal whisky trade until things lightened up.

"We had disposed of practically all of our stock," said the dealer. "We were having many calls for case lots but we had none on hand. We could have supplied a few mixed cases, but most of the buyers did not wish these, so we decided to close up until the drouth passes over."

On Monday evening, America's last wet night, J. W. Reidel's saloon closed first, locking its doors at 7:00 p.m. after running out of stock. The Vaughn Hotel bar closed at about 9:30, just before B. J. Mattingly's saloon. No one knew how long the wartime ban would last; many were in denial that the new dry laws were permanent. Surely they would last only a few months.

The first night after official prohibition began, someone robbed the Vaughn Hotel bar by busting through a bolted door that connected the saloon with the baggage room of the hotel, stealing $150 in "prohibited" liquor (worth $1,957 in 2011 dollars) and more than a dozen bottles of Champagne. An automobile, police speculated, had aided the escape.

On August 1, the Enterprise reported the net effect of the first dry month of Lebanon's history:

AN UNUSUAL RECORD

Since July 1, when the "whole darn world went dry," there has been a marked falling off in the number of arrests in this city. Police Judge John Thomas stated yesterday that during the month ofJuly, just closed, there was one arrest for drunkenness. And this one, he said, was not a local man but one who came in on a train. In June there were between 80 and 90 arrests, but, of course, it would be unfair to compare July, or any other month, with June for the reason it was the month before prohibition became effective.

By February 1920, the prohibitionists were ready to declare mission accomplished. Looking back at 1919, with half the year wet and the other half dry, the supporters of forced temperance saw night followed by dawn. On February 27, Dr. G. G. Thornton wrote in the Lebanon Enterprise regarding 1919:

During the first six months (wet) there were 232 arrests for all causes, against 56 during the last six months (dry). Arrests for drunkenness during the first six months were 180, against 12 during the last six months. For other causes 53 arrests were made during the six months wet, against 44 during the six months dry. Who will look at the above figures and say that you can't help to make people better by legislation? This is better than I hoped for this soon and it is getting better all the time.

What Dr. Thornton called a plan to "make people better by legislation" began a thirteen-year crime wave across the country that ran deep into Marion County. The magic law of Prohibition forced the breadwinners of families on the brink of starvation into the criminal underworld to make a living by evading state and federal agents for doing what their families had done legally and peacefully for generations.

It wouldn't be long before outside criminal elements flocked to Marion County and its warehouses of earthly delights-and a dark period of theft, murder and other crime slowly took hold in the once-harmonious (although regularly intoxicated) communities. With the once-proud distilleries that dotted the county before Prohibition now crumbling in disrepair, those who had earned a living at those distilleries took their knowledge into the nearly impenetrable wooded knobs.

Moonshiners thrived everywhere in America during Prohibition, especially in those states contained by the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, but Kentucky had a few advantages over its neighbors to the south.

First, its proximity to thirsty northern cities like Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland; and second, in the case of Marion and Nelson Counties, firsthand knowledge of the distilling process on a commercial level.

Also, most moonshiners elsewhere used inefficient pot-bellied stills that made batches of no more than fifty gallons per day, which are fine for small-time operations. But in Marion County, moonshiners constructed versions of the steam stills that their former employers had used-clean and efficient, even a crude steam still could produce three hundred gallons of moonshine a day. More-efficient ones could produce up to one thousand gallons a day, like this one:

HUGE STILL IS DESTROYED BY OFFICERS