PROHIBITION OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IN USA

January 16, 1920, was the last day that Americans could legally buy a drink before both the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act went into effect. At the stroke of midnight, the country was set to go dry. In the great cities, revelers treated the evening like New Year’s Eve. Saloons, cafes, cabarets, dance halls, hotel bars, and gourmet restaurants hung festive decorations, served special food, and played music, while patrons ate, drank, and danced. All evening, celebrants downed glass after glass of their favorite and soon to be forbidden alcoholic beverages. No city turned out in greater force than did New York, which was often considered the wettest city on the continent. As midnight approached, the band played, and patrons raised their glasses ironically to toast the beginning of dry America. When the clock struck twelve, drinkers downed their last drop of legal liquor accompanied by cheers, jeers, whistles, and noisemakers. Then celebrants looked at their empty glasses and called for another glass. In most places, waiters obliged. How long did prohibition last in New York? About two minutes, or however long it took to obtain a new glass.

Whenever a substance is banned, two things happen. First, the price goes up, and second, the product returns in a more concentrated form, or a replacement appears. The high risk of handling an item that has low value leads to potent substitutes that can be readily made, shipped, and stored. Thus, the ban on opium under the Harrison Act (1914) yielded heroin, the war against cocaine in the 1970s produced crack, and the prohibition of alcohol caused a shift from beer to hard liquor, and the substitution of opiates. In many parts of the country, the illegal production of beer was problematic. The beverage spoiled quickly, it was too bulky to hide, and hijacking of delivery trucks was common. Distilled spirits were cheaper to produce, storage was easier, and the higher price per gallon for spirits helped compensate for the risk of handling an illegal substance. Beer existed during prohibition, especially in New York, Chicago, and a few other great cities, but the standard drink was distilled spirits. Prohibition brought back the very hard liquor that the original temperance movement had despised.

In the early 1920s, supplying liquor was largely a mom-and-pop operation. Saloons and restaurants tried to stay open and serve customers alcoholic substitutes for their regular drinks. Bootleggers supplied imports immediately. In 1920, a pilot landed a cargo of eighteen cases of Canadian liquor at an airstrip near Des Moines, Iowa. Asking $250 per twelve-bottle case, more than six times the pre-prohibition price, he sold out in two hours and flew away before the police even knew he had arrived. This type of high-quality imported liquor was likely to be cut with low-quality local spirits, which moonshiners instantly supplied. Distillation was simple, and kitchen stills and bathtub gin became a reality. This new moonshine, unlike commercial American whiskey, was not aged. White lightning was colorless and biting, and it usually had to be drunk with a flavorful mixer to mask the foul taste. Soft drinks and fruit juices were favored.

In North Georgia and other parts of Appalachia, farmers who had always done a certain amount of home distillation of corn liquor for family and friends were happy to expand production to meet market demand. Hardware stores sold portable stills. Retail prices for moonshine shot up three to five times. High prices provided the incentive to scale up production, even when distillers balanced the chances of being caught by federal agents. A short prison term might be a bargain if they could make enough money selling illegal moonshine before they were arrested. After World War I, the value of the dollar, compared with other global currencies, had risen so high that the United States lost its grain export markets. The twenties brought low farm prices and rising farm foreclosures, so wherever grain was grown, some farmers liquefied their crops to make moonshine. Poor white women and African Americans were also involved in small-scale rural distillation. In addition, blacks commonly tended white-owned stills, which made them vulnerable to arrest.

In the Midwest, some farmers also defied dry expectations. Irish and German Catholic immigrants had settled Carroll County, Iowa, in the mid-1800s, and they had never accepted local, state, or national prohibition. The county priest assured locals that illegal liquor was no sin; indeed, the priest allowed moonshine to be distilled in the church basement. When federal prohibition arrived, Joe Irlbeck was a twenty-year-old farm laborer who was shocked to find that spirits cost $10 a gallon. He needed a quart to drink for the weekend, and that would cost nearly half a week’s pay. So he decided to distill his own liquor. In the twenties the county’s struggling farmers formed a co-op to sell corn and rye to Irlbeck, who eventually ran one of the biggest moonshine operations in the United States. The county produced a high-quality product, Templeton Rye, which was sold locally, but to gain wider distribution, the distiller had to deal with mobsters, including the Al Capone gang in Chicago. Templeton Rye commanded the highest price of any domestic product in Chicago’s speakeasies. Although the liquor contained some rye, it was mostly sugar, which distilled more quickly.1

A wet consensus, a wet sheriff, and payoffs protected moonshine in Carroll County, but danger came from the federal Prohibition Bureau’s Benjamin F. Wilson, who knew the area. The honest, diligent, and resourceful Wilson was an exceptional agent. Most political appointees like him had a bad reputation. Brooklyn US attorney William Ross called them “absolutely crooked.”2Variety observed in 1922, “The federal men . . . are doing more to make prohibition detested than anyone else, even the drys.”3 That year, Wilson raided Carroll County. Using thirty-eight search warrants, he seized 2,500 gallons of mash and 125 gallons of spirits. Sixteen moonshiners eventually pled guilty and paid small fines. Local juries would not convict violators, so Wilson brought the cases in federal court in Fort Dodge. Wilson staged only sporadic raids in the county because he had to operate elsewhere in Iowa. Carroll County residents were not afraid of Wilson’s infrequent visits. They made a lot of liquor and money during his absence.

Carroll County residents were more afraid of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been organized in neighboring dry evangelical Protestant counties. Concerned about the government’s lax enforcement of prohibition, the Klan invaded Carroll County to impose its own peculiar form of law and order. One Ku Kluxer explained that an excellent way to obtain liquor was to seize it while marauding with the Klan. In many parts of the United States, the Klan attacked distilleries or wet shipments. “If local officials cannot enforce the law,” vowed one Klan leader and Methodist minister in Denver, Colorado, “we should teach them how.” The Indiana Klan’s magazine, the Fiery Cross, promised, “The Klan is going to drive bootlegging out of this land.”4 In Williamson County, Illinois, the federal Prohibition Bureau agent in charge deputized hundreds of Klansmen from neighboring counties to assist in a series of simultaneous raids. The resulting deadly mayhem led higher-ups in the Prohibition Bureau to replace the head agent.

In most rural areas, farmer-distillers had to be wary. Neighbors might call the authorities, or producers might turn in their rivals to reduce competition and gain a local monopoly. To be allowed to distill for commercial sale required campaign contributions, payoffs, or bribes to elected officials, who often allowed the moonshining to continue but insisted on a large share of the profits. Local markets were necessarily small because the population was small, many people were abstainers, and others lacked cash. To make significant money, the farmer-distiller had to join a larger distribution network. The stills were in the country, but the thirst was in the cities. Distillers in Carroll County, Iowa, looked to Des Moines and Chicago. Making contacts with buyers could be risky, producers could be cheated out of payments, or urban gangs might come to steal liquor from a known still or even demand the sale of the entire property at a very low price.

Getting the goods to market posed a challenge. State and federal authorities, acting on tips, set up roadblocks. Hijackings were a greater problem. Rivals stole the loads, or sometimes the thief was the pre-arranged buyer, so payment would not have to be made for a shipment. Thugs or prohibition agents sometimes stole cars or trucks, and sometimes drivers got shot. There were dangerous high-speed chases on unpaved roads. Few distillers drove their own loads because if they were caught, authorities would search the farm, destroy the still and any alcohol, and seize the property. Any property used in the production, distribution, or sale of alcohol was subject to forfeiture. A distiller risked grain, firewood, the still, liquor inventory, and the farm; a driver could lose only an automobile. In 1924, the Prohibition Bureau seized 5,214 such automobiles. To escape police and hijackers, drivers used Whiskey Sixes: six-cylinder Buicks or Studebakers with souped-up engines, heavy springs, and extra storage compartments. Southern drivers tested their cars in races against each other, which later became the basis for the NASCAR racing industry.5

Rural moonshiners could not, however, slake the thirst of the cities. One possibility was to act within the Volstead Act to produce beer that had less than half a percent alcohol. In 1918, Anheuser-Busch spent $10 million to build a giant near-beer brewery in St. Louis. Heavily advertised, Bevo sold well for a few months in 1920, but sales quickly dropped after drinkers found that Bevo lacked a kick. Production dwindled, although Iowans liked to spike near beer with hard liquor, including Templeton Rye.

The best way to make non-alcoholic beer was to brew regular beer and then remove the alcohol. This process led to the diversion of the original alcoholic beer to speakeasies. In 1922, 200 of 500 licensed brewers were cited for violations. “The working classes demand their beer,” declared Governor Emanuel Philipp (R-WI) in 1920.6 In the mid-1920s brewers sold non-alcoholic malt syrup and malt extract. When customers added water and yeast, the substance turned into beer or malt for distillation. Robust sales continued until the end of prohibition. “If you really want to know,” Gussie Busch later said, “we ended up as the biggest bootlegging supply house in the United States.”7

Urban distillation was one possibility, but it had limitations. Only the smallest kitchen stills could be hidden in a city. Even then, neighbors who learned about the activity might demand free liquor, which cut into profits. Producers also used small kitchen alcohol cookers to remove poisons from industrial alcohol. Italian women frequently ran these businesses, and they sometimes made wine as well as liquor. Criminal gangs quickly gained control. In Brooklyn, the mobster Frankie Yale paid Italian families $15 a day to maintain stills in their homes. In Pittsburgh, working-class women who produced or sold small amounts of alcohol were the most likely wets to be arrested. The police searched homes without warrants, looking both for alcohol and for signs of union organizing. Cities also had large commercial stills, but getting grain or other material without being noticed was a problem. Such distilleries could only be operated with payoffs to police and elected officials. The quality was low, the technology was unsophisticated, and these distilled products were often mixed with other, higher quality liquors.

Another source of liquor throughout the twenties was industrial alcohol, which was distilled legally by special federal permit in large quantities. Alcohol was used in paint, in antifreeze, and as a solvent in many mechanical processes. Production rose from 28 million gallons in 1920 to 81 million gallons in 1925, when chief prohibition enforcer Lincoln Andrews estimated that 90 percent of all bootleg liquor contained at least some denatured industrial alcohol. To prevent its use in beverages, the government required the industry to add toxic chemicals to this alcohol. As a practical matter, it was cheaper and easier for the industry to distill pure alcohol (which could be drunk) and then add poison. This gave unscrupulous manufacturers the ability to divert some drinkable product for illegal sale as a beverage prior to treatment. While most additives had a foul smell or taste, this was not always true. Some industrial processes required tasteless and odorless poisons. Druggists bought bootleg denatured alcohol for $3.50 to $4.00 per gallon rather than pay $5.00 for legal alcohol, which included $4.18 of tax and considerable red tape.

Bootleggers often cut their own product by adding cheap industrial alcohol. An illegal side industry developed in removing toxins; if they could be purged, then industrial alcohol might yield a big profit. Unfortunately, the amateur chemists sometimes produced deadly results. As injuries and deaths grew, so did the public outcry, but both the government and dry forces wanted to punish drinkers of industrial alcohol. After several New Yorkers died and hundreds were sickened by bad liquor in late 1926, Wayne Wheeler said, “The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable, when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide.” The wet Senator Edward Edwards (D-NJ) denounced the Anti-Saloon League lobbyist for condoning “murder.”8 Wheeler’s callousness fitted with the dry view that all alcohol was a poison. In 1930, there were 625 deaths from bad alcohol in New York City.

The safest way to supply America’s thirst, it turned out, was to import alcohol. Cheap tequila and other distilled products made specifically for Americans crossed the porous Mexican border into Texas, Arizona, and California. “Texas will not be bone dry nor even approximate that state,” concluded one journalist in 1922, “until Mexico, the great source of supply, takes the pledge.”9 Alcohol tourists flooded Tijuana and other border towns. West Indian rum, Spanish and Portuguese wines and brandy, and Scots, Irish, and Canadian whiskey made its way, along with moonshine, via Nassau in the Bahamas to Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, the state with the longest coastline in the United States. Bellhops in Miami took liquor orders while escorting guests to their rooms. Scotch was $6.00 a quart, less than half the price in New York.

In the absence of beer, Americans wanted to replace domestic whiskey with a similar product. One possibility was Scotch, but Americans were not drawn to the smoky taste, the price was steep, the voyage was long, and getting large transatlantic ships past the US Coast Guard was hard. Trying to avoid antagonizing the United States government over prohibition, the British stopped direct shipments to America. In the earliest days of enforcement, the shipping industry believed that the Eighteenth Amendment did not apply outside the traditional three-mile limit. Passengers and crew drank while crossing the Atlantic. Then the Treasury Department declared that no ship that docked in the United States could carry alcohol inside the three-mile limit. After diplomatic protests, the State Department allowed foreign ships to enter American waters with alcohol on board so long as it was locked up. In return, the three-mile limit was extended to twelve miles. American ships, however, had to be bone dry. The travel industry was in turmoil, as Americans booked sailings on foreign vessels, and domestic lines vainly used games, films, or music as attractions to offset the loss of liquor.

Canadians generously stepped in to quench the thirst of their American neighbors. During the war Canada had imposed prohibition, and at the end of the war every province except Quebec remained dry. Canadian law allowed local distillers to make spirits for sale inside the United States so long as they paid a $20 per gallon export tax. Several large distilleries opened in Vancouver, British Columbia, to serve the West Coast. The liquor, however, was mediocre, and these export houses, as they were called, did not survive the end of prohibition. More successful was the major Ontario distillery Hiram Walker, which exported Canadian whiskey across the Detroit River into the Midwest. In 1922, one journalist estimated that one thousand cases a day crossed the river. In Saskatchewan, Samuel Bronfman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, shipped spirits across the border to North Dakota. Realizing that the larger market was in the East, Bronfman moved to Montreal, constructed a giant distillery, and bought the firm of Seagram’s. The House of Seagram both imported Scotch and made high-grade Canadian whiskey.

Some of Bronfman’s liquor reached the Midwest through Detroit, but most of the product was shipped down the St. Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean, where Canadian vessels supplied dozens of mother ships that were anchored in international waters just beyond the three-mile limit of the United States. Collectively, these ships stretched from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, south to Norfolk, Virginia, and they became known as Rum Row. Small, fast vessels moved the liquor from Rum Row to the shore. After the limit was extended to twelve miles, one smuggler commented, “What is a mile or two extra? Now we have better and faster boats.”10 This part of the East Coast was rich in coves and private beaches close to such major markets as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. After goods were landed, they could also be transported by automobile caravans to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or even as far west as Chicago.

Canadian liquor often arrived at the anchored ships in broad daylight, but the US Coast Guard legally could do nothing except watch it being unloaded. At night, speedboats that operated without lights darted from hidden spots along the coast to make a quick rendezvous with the anchored ships. Off-loadings were completed in minutes, and the speedboats reached shore long before the Coast Guard could do so. This was not an accident. The bootleggers had used public records to find out where the Coast Guard vessels had been built, they had gone to those shipyards and studied the blueprints, and then they had commissioned the same shipyards to build boats that were faster. Many speedboats used cheap surplus World War I aircraft engines. In 1925, the Prohibition Bureau estimated that only 5 percent of the liquor illegally entering the United States was stopped. The most famous rum-runner was Bill McCoy, who refused to cut liquor, honored business arrangements, and never cheated. His quality goods were labeled the Real McCoy, a brand of high reputation and premium price.

The most desirable coastal landing areas created opportunities for political corruption and graft. Atlantic City was a playground city a short distance from New York, a day trip by train or car. Long known as a place to drink, gamble, and score a prostitute, this beach mecca became a major landing spot to supply high-end liquor to the New York market. The resort was run by the Republican county treasurer Nucky Johnson and his brother, the sheriff. They demanded cash, which had to be spread around to any number of people, as well as a plentiful supply of alcohol to keep Atlantic City oiled for tourists and businessmen. At least some of the liquor sold there, however, was not Canadian whiskey, but the good stuff cut with second-rate local moonshine.11

The tough men who ran illegal gambling and prostitution moved quickly to take over the liquor industry. The connection was natural, since drinking had often been associated with vice. In 1920–1921 John Torrio and his deputy, Al Capone, left New York, where they were minor racketeers, to move to Chicago. The pair rapidly took over prostitution and alcohol on the South Side. They brewed beer in a big way, while two hard liquor supply routes served Chicago. Using contacts in the New York underworld, they arranged for alcohol caravans from the East Coast and also bought spirits from the violent Purple Gang, which controlled the Detroit entry point.

In 1924, the most powerful mobster in Chicago, Dion O’Banion, the leader of the North Side gang, was murdered. With control of the Chicago beer market at stake, the North Side gang marked Torrio and Capone for death. After several bungled assassinations of both men, Torrio turned the business over to Capone, took $1 million and four guards to protect himself, and fled to Italy. By the late 1920s, Capone was the King of Beer in Chicago. He controlled breweries, employed one thousand people, paid off hundreds of elected officials and police, and supplied beer to twenty thousand speakeasies. Tied house took on a new meaning when a Capone lieutenant informed a speakeasy that it could carry only Capone’s brand of beer. In 1926, Capone’s organization grossed $70 million; three years later, it was $100 million, although the gang spent $30 million for protection in Chicago.

In 1929, Capone went too far. To get rid of the hated North Side gang, now run by Bugs Moran, and gain control of all the liquor and rackets in Chicago, Capone sent four hired guns, including two dressed as Chicago police, to kill the rival gang’s leaders. Misidentifying one of the lieutenants as Moran, who was absent, the thugs invaded a meeting in a commercial garage. In what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, the five rivals and two unfortunate witnesses were lined up in front of the cement wall inside the garage and machine-gunned to death with more than one thousand bullets. Afterward, Moran told the police, “Only Capone kills like that.”12 He declined to say more then or later. Eventually, the police concluded that Capone and the Purple Gang were indeed involved. The Detroit gang supplied Capone, and Moran had tried to drop the Purples for a cheaper vendor. Although Moran survived, the death of his top aides ended the North Side gang, and Capone owned Chicago.

The massacre proved a miscalculation. The police were furious at the misuse of their uniforms. They had cooperated with the bootleggers, they resented being mocked, and misuse of uniforms jeopardized their lives. The newspapers printed horrific photographs that sold a lot of copies and jarred the public into disgust with the criminal underworld. Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) presented unflattering portraits of Capone on film, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation declared Capone to be Public Enemy No. 1. If there was any moment when the public turned against prohibition, it might have been this mass carnage. Prohibition did not stop drinking, but it did promote thugs like Capone, who both got rich and paid no taxes. Capone never recovered from being portrayed as a ruthless mass murderer. Prosecutors could not pin the crime on him, however, and when he finally was sent to prison in 1932, it was for federal income tax evasion. He was released in 1939, when he was dying from complications from untreated syphilis.

Not all bootleggers were like Capone. George Remus controlled alcohol in the greater Cincinnati area, which included parts of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The shrewd Chicago lawyer bought fourteen distilleries at the beginning of prohibition. Because distilling had been banned during the war, the sole value was in the inventory. Using political connections, Remus got rare permits to sell medicinal whiskey, to convert some spirits into industrial alcohol, and to distill additional industrial alcohol. Using fake permits and creative bookkeeping, he produced and sold far more spirits than his permits allowed, processed industrial alcohol into potable liquor, and supplied millions of gallons of spirits to drug stores and speakeasies throughout the region. He also owned breweries. Remus stored a large quantity of liquor at his farm near Cincinnati, and a federal raid in 1922 ended his career. To prevent confiscation, he turned his holdings over to his wife and went to prison. While he was in custody, she filed for divorce and took his money. After regaining his freedom, Remus had his revenge. In 1927, as his wife made her way to court to defend the divorce, he murdered her. The jury let him off, but she had already squandered the money.

In Seattle, Roy Olmstead, a former police lieutenant, controlled imports from Canada. Unlike other illegal operators, Olmstead insisted that his henchmen go unarmed. The business was conducted entirely with payoffs. Olmstead purchased liquor legally in Vancouver and had it loaded onto Canadian vessels along with proper export paperwork. These large ships traveled through the Strait of Juan de Fuca into international waters in the Pacific Ocean where spirits were transferred to smaller ships, some of which traveled as far south as southern California, although Olmstead never dominated the market outside Washington State. The small, fast ships brought liquor into Puget Sound, where cargo was dumped on deserted beaches to be picked up a few hours later by car caravans. The spirits were not cut with moonshine. Olmstead operated a radio station out of his Seattle mansion; his wife read children’s bedtime stories on the air. The stories supposedly contained coded messages about the drop-off times and locations for the liquor.

Under the personally wet president Warren Harding, Prohibition Bureau agents were political hacks with little law enforcement experience. A good many had taught Methodist Sunday school, which was one way to get a recommendation from Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League, and others were crooks or con artists who joined the bureau to get into the liquor racket. Agents could dispose of seized alcohol as they saw fit, and they often took spirits home to drink or sell. The bureau encouraged its agents to use violence. Seattle US attorney Tom Revelle told Senator Wesley Jones (R-WA), “Some of them [bootleggers] deserve a good killing, and I am not losing any sleep if now and then a bootlegger is killed.”13 After Harding died in August 1923, President Calvin Coolidge tried to reform the Prohibition Bureau. Because Wheeler refused to put federal agents under the civil service until 1927, reforms were modest, but one-third of the agents were dismissed for such matters as incompetence, theft, or alcoholism. At the time, the dry forces, probably still a majority in the country, wanted better enforcement.

Elected officials from the country’s wettest states disagreed. Governor Albert Ritchie (D-MD) proposed that federal agents conduct raids only with the cooperation of local authorities. In effect, he wanted non-enforcement of prohibition in Maryland. In New York, the Anti-Saloon League had pushed the Mullan-Gage Act, a draconian state prohibition enforcement law, through the rural-dominated legislature in 1921, and the law had led to the defeat of the dry Republican governor Nathan Miller by the wet Democrat Al Smith the following year. An Irish Catholic, Smith had already served as governor from 1918 to 1920, when he had been defeated in the Harding landslide. Smith despised prohibition for the attack on personal liberty, the assault on immigrant cultures, and the loss of alcohol tax revenue, but he was also a personal wet who served alcohol in the governor’s mansion in Albany.

In 1923, the newly wet New York legislature repealed the state’s enforcement act. Under pressure from both sides, Smith hesitantly signed the bill, and after 1923 the only enforcement in the nation’s most populous state came from the Prohibition Bureau. New York City had just 129 federal agents, though the US attorney estimated that 1,500 were necessary for effective enforcement of the law. From then on, dry Democrats considered Smith an enemy whose entire politics was defined by his wetness. William Jennings Bryan did not mince words: “When the governor of the largest state in the union boldly raises the black flag and offers to lead the representatives of the outlawed liquor traffic in their assault upon the nation’s honor and the people’s welfare, he must expect resistance from the defenders of the home, the school, and the church.”14 Billy Sunday commented, “Governor Smith and that bunch of Tammany rough-necks can’t ride into the White House on a wine keg or a barrel of beer.”15

In the 1924 election, Coolidge ran on the promise to improve prohibition enforcement, while the Democrats bitterly split at the national convention, held in New York, between the wet Smith and the dry William McAdoo of California, a former secretary of the treasury who was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law. The most beloved Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, pressured delegates to reject Smith. If they backed Smith, the dry Bryan vowed to come into their state or district and campaign for a primary opponent. No elected Democrat wanted to face that prospect. Smith’s supporters, however, were furious at the presence of the Ku Klux Klan at the convention. The Klan, which backed McAdoo, wanted a dry party; it was so powerful that the party defeated a proposal to condemn the Klan. The deadlocked convention compromised by ignoring prohibition and nominating the obscure conservative Wall Street attorney John W. Davis. Progressive Democrats bolted to the wet senator Robert LaFollette (R-WI), who ran on the Progressive Party ticket. Given the country’s prosperity, neither Davis nor LaFollette had a chance, and the incumbent Coolidge won easily.

In Seattle, better enforcement in 1924 meant that federal agents put a wiretap on Roy Olmstead’s telephone. Although Olmstead gave only cryptic instructions over the phone, the Prohibition Bureau raided Olmstead’s house and took away his papers, which enabled them to develop a case. Olmstead’s attorney assured his client that the wiretap, done without a court order, violated the Fourth Amendment, but the trial judge disagreed, and Olmstead was convicted in 1926. Olmstead v. United States (1927) went to the US Supreme Court, which voted 5–4 to uphold his conviction. There was to be no Fourth Amendment protection for bootleggers. Many constitutional lawyers condemned the decision, and Congress later passed a statute requiring a court order prior to any wiretap. In the 1920s the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, routinely sided with the government in prohibition cases. Although Taft personally opposed prohibition, he hoped that the court’s tough approach would force eventual repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. If the court sided with bootleggers, the amendment would remain on the books, and liquor would stay untaxed.16

Prohibition had led to other changes in the way alcohol was obtained and used. One way to get legal alcohol was to have a physician write a prescription for whiskey or beer, which many states allowed. These prescriptions turned drug stores into liquor stores. In 1916, Charles Walgreen owned nine pharmacies in Chicago, and by the end of the 1920s he operated 525. Legal alcohol profits enabled him to expand the empire quickly. A number of drug outlets, however, ignored federal recordkeeping; customers balked at being listed as liquor purchasers; or stores preferred to sell more profitable moonshine rather than the heavily taxed alcohol available from authorized distillers. A New York official told the New York Times, “When licenses to sell liquor for medicinal purposes were given to ex-saloonkeepers instead of to legitimate dispensers, the world knew we were not sincere.”17 Though state law controlled the amount of alcohol that could be purchased at one time, patients could buy liquor from multiple stores. Physicians could write unlimited prescriptions, and druggists had a powerful incentive to maximize total sales.

Some saloons, restaurants, and hotel bars remained open throughout prohibition, but these older drinking establishments had been located to gain public notice; now that alcohol was illegal, they attracted too much attention. A few locked their doors and used back entrances. Some closed voluntarily; others were raided, padlocked, and ceased to operate. Of prewar licensed saloons in New York City, 80 percent were gone by 1924. The saloon tie to politics also ended. Under the Volstead Act, any building where liquor was sold could be seized by the federal government and padlocked for up to one year. In 1928, federal agents in Chicago closed seven hundred places. Landlords afraid of being padlocked often refused to rent to bootleggers. Accordingly, bootleggers often owned their own buildings, but they used dummy corporations to hide ownership. The loss of a place for a year was just a cost of doing business. A hotel, however, could not risk closure. Hotel bars mostly turned into tea rooms or retail space, and room prices rose. Famous gourmet restaurants, such as Delmonico’s in New York, that had made their profit out of liquor sales went dry, lost customers, and were shuttered.

Drinking customers migrated to speakeasies and private clubs. Ranging from dangerous basement dives that sold unsafe industrial alcohol to upscale establishments like New York’s 21 Club, which handled only the highest quality imported liquors at very high prices, speakeasies tried to meet the urban demand for alcohol. To be discreet, a typical speakeasy lacked any sign, and the large, thick, and plain wood door often contained either a peephole for the bouncer to see out or a small opening where the potential customer could be screened. Some “speaks” admitted only members or friends of members who knew the correct code words or had printed passes. Others took a chance on almost anyone who did not look like a federal agent. Local police officers were usually welcome. Their visibility tended to preserve order. “The first day we opened up the police came right in, four of them,” recalled one New York speakeasy owner, “to be stood drinks, and I’ve had these four cops on my side in this business from that day on.”18

Unlike old-fashioned saloons, speakeasies admitted women. When both men and women entered the doorway, outsiders, including members of the Anti-Saloon League, were less likely to suspect that alcohol was being served. Décor and attractive male bartenders were used to draw women, who came alone, with friends, or with dates. The presence of couples discouraged fights. The author Stanley Walker observed, “Soon after 1920, raving hordes of women began to discover what their less respectable sisters had known for years—that it was a lot of fun, if you liked it, to get soused.”19 Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, was shocked at how much his star reporter, Lois Long, drank as she made the nightly rounds of speaks.

Female public drinking was associated with looser sexuality. In the 1920s, young women who wore short skirts, drank alcohol, and lived hedonistically were called flappers. Variety claimed that flappers were “as free with their persons . . . as a longshoreman.”20 Of the flapper, Helen Lowry wrote in the New York Times, “She is the first woman in history that has not been checked at home when man went forth alone in search of his pleasures. And because of her we have with us the most merry, the least jaded night life yet.”21 Freer sexuality may have led to a decline in prostitution. Many drinking houses expected barmaids to sell sex. In 1926, the old-fashioned moral reformers who belonged to the Committee of Fourteen found 360 of 392 speakeasies in New York harboring prostitutes, but skeptics doubted these numbers because it was hard to tell a prostitute from a woman expressing sexual liberation.

The New Yorker, launched in 1925, celebrated night life by promoting high-end nightclubs such as the Palais Royal, Moulin Rouge, Bal Tabarin, and Montmartre. Such clubs featured liquor, music, and dancing. Cabarets provided professional entertainment. New Yorkers had many choices, including bohemian cafes in Greenwich Village, mixed race “black and tan” spots in Harlem, and exclusive Fifth Avenue clubs. Nightclubs were lavishly decorated to encourage big spending, and they were expensive. Nightclubs projected an exclusive image but actually mixed different types of people, including wealthy stockbrokers, Broadway stars, celebrity writers, fashion models, flashy hucksters, scam artists, and sinister gangsters. “Never before has there ever been such a meeting ground of the very highest and the very lowest of human society,” noted the Smart Set in 1927.22

Harlem had many speakeasies and nightclubs. Ninety percent were white-owned and white-operated. Half of the rest were white-owned but run by African Americans, and the rest were black-owned and operated. Most were restricted either to white patrons, like the famous Cotton Club, or to blacks, but both races mingled in some places, which probably could not have occurred without prohibition. Breaking the racial taboo was as defiant as breaking the liquor law. Whites and blacks drank together, listened to jazz together, danced together, and occasionally slept together. Older black leaders in Harlem favored prohibition, opposed interracial nightclubs, and feared that the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment might lead to the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but young African American writers like Langston Hughes frequented Harlem speaks.23

While whites used Harlem as a playground, poor black residents were regulars at neighborhood hootch joints or rent parties. Because rents were high in Harlem, and because few African Americans had good jobs, paying rent was always a problem. Resourceful tenants temporarily removed furniture from their apartments to hold a party with free food, music, and space for dancing. Guests paid a small admission charge, which went toward the rent. Patrons brought their own alcohol or bought small amounts at the party. Some tenants held rent parties every week, particularly on weekend nights. To attract guests, operators passed out handbills on the sidewalk, called down from windows, or simply allowed jazz to waft through the neighborhood. Only African Americans were welcome at these events. Because the Prohibition Bureau had very few black agents, a raid was unlikely.

A few owners or operators of speaks became famous. None was more colorful than Texas Guinan, a silent screen star who left California to run a speakeasy in New York. She had grown up in Texas, loved to ride horses, played vaudeville, and became America’s first film cowgirl. At her nightclub, Tex knew how to put on a show. She fondly greeted regular customers by name, tried to cheer up those who seemed depressed, and emphasized that having a good time was more important than drinking, which was just a way to get started on having a good time. She had a big heart. Once, when the journalist Heywood Hale Broun tried to impress his girlfriend by ordering an overpriced bottle of bad champagne, Tex insisted that he buy a regular drink. Later, she told him that she knew his weekly salary, and she had no intention of letting a regular like him go bankrupt on champagne designed for out-of-town suckers.

Drinking also took place discreetly in ice cream stores, soft drink shops, beauty parlors, and funeral homes. Another new type of watering hole in the twenties was the roadhouse, as rising automobile ownership enabled drivers to enjoy liquor out of town. Customers were not likely to be seen, which made these highway resorts good for a tryst. Disguised as restaurants, roadhouses often provided elegant meals, a romantic atmosphere, danceable music, perhaps gambling, a few rooms available to rent for the night, and maybe even discreet prostitution. Other roadhouses were abandoned barns. Federal raids were unlikely, and payoffs were lower than in cities because there were fewer people to silence. The liquor was usually inexpensive, but it might be unreliable moonshine made on the premises.

A lot of drinking took place at home because the law allowed domestic production of fruit wine or cider. A head of household could ferment up to two hundred gallons of fruit juice a year for family use. Grape juice, sugar, and yeast were the only necessary ingredients. California vintners shipped Alicante grapes to make wine, but they also dried grapes, pressed them into bricks, and sold them to make reconstituted grape juice. Vino Sano Grape Brick came with instructions to add water to make juice but warned that sugar and yeast would create an alcoholic beverage. Brick sales soared. The wet editor Arthur Brisbane promoted Vine-Glo: “The Grape Growers are not held responsible for the laws of nature, which seem to have no sympathy for Prohibition, and turn innocent Grape Juice into Wine.”24 Or perhaps one knew a rabbi or Catholic priest, real or fake, who might provide wine in return for a contribution. Home spirits distillation was riskier, because even a small amount of untaxed moonshine could bring a stiff fine, jail time, and possible confiscation of real estate.

One could buy moonshine, but amateur distillers tended to be ignorant and poorly educated. Some moonshine was poisonous redistilled industrial alcohol, and some was equally poisonous wood alcohol. Not every producer knew or cared that the use of a car radiator as a still was dangerous because the lead contaminated the liquor. To mask moonshine’s bad taste, flavorings were added, including Jamaican ginger extract, which led to the product called “jake.” Much of what was sold as jake was poisonous. It might kill, or it could cripple the victim, causing what was called jake leg. In 1930, fifty thousand poor people in Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Cincinnati were paralyzed. For home consumption, it was best to buy from a reputable bootlegger. Finding such a vendor was difficult, but once found, the customer treasured the seller. The youthful writer Bernard DeVoto supplied the Harvard faculty with liquor. A master of the back roads in Vermont, he bought excellent liquors and French wines in Montreal before evading US Customs to slip back into the United States.

Because the safest place to drink without being arrested was at home, the middle class invented the home cocktail party. Hostesses issued written invitations, and dress was often formal. Cocktails were modern and sophisticated, and women found taking a mixed drink to be an adventure. Because the mediocre bootleg spirits had to be cut with a mixer to be palatable, the hostess prepared cocktails in the kitchen and then passed them around the living room on a tray. Men drank martinis and Manhattans, while women took sweeter drinks such as gin fizzes or lime rickeys. Both drank highballs: liquor with club soda, tonic water, or ginger ale served in a tall glass over ice. The New Yorker published street prices for alcohol as well as recipes for mixed drinks. Fashionable stores sold serving trays, cocktail shakers, tall highball glasses, and stirring sticks. Canapés were also provided, but at many parties the purpose was to get smashed. The question was which gave out first, the liquor or the guests.

House parties could be grand affairs. The owner of a mansion might entertain hundreds of guests, many of whom he had never met. They were not friends but people who had heard that there was a party, knew that alcohol would be available, and owned an automobile to get there. The bootlegger George Remus loved to entertain this way in Cincinnati, although he frequently got bored and retreated to his library to read a book. The fictional Jay Gatsby also held big parties at his house on Long Island Sound. “The fashionable rich,” complained the Ladies Home Journal in 1923, “demand their rum as an inalienable class privilege.”25 So did the middle class. In the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt (1922), real estate broker George Babbitt and his middle-class friends drank cocktails while endorsing prohibition for the working class.

The class bias of prohibition was extraordinary. The Yale Club legally served prewar alcohol to its members, but working-class speakeasies were raided. “It makes for hypocrisy and class hatred,” said the New York World.26 Louis Swift, the wealthy Chicago meatpacker, told a journalist that prohibition was good for the working class. He held a cocktail in his hand as he made the remark. Speaks near factories were closed when employers tipped the Prohibition Bureau. Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, defended prohibition despite the class bias. Workers used to spend entire paychecks in saloons; now they bought consumer goods. Small-town drys cared only about the drinking of Catholic and Jewish immigrants and African Americans who were either working class or poor. Wets were, accordingly, “un-American.” Before prohibition, drys had denounced the saloon for victimizing the drinker. Now they denounced the drinker for defying the Constitution. “If they do not like the way things are being done,” advised the Methodist Board of Temperance, “let them go back to Europe.”27

Youth drinking was another feature of the 1920s. Elders were alarmed that young men and women drank together. To the young, who had missed the moral zeal of the Progressive Era, the idea of prohibition seemed bizarre and unfair. In 1926, a poll found that four-fifths of Yale University students opposed prohibition; nearly half favored a government alcohol monopoly. One Columbia University student observed, “They say we should cultivate respect for the prohibition law because they fixed it so it can’t be repealed. Queer reason for respecting a law!”28 Drinking was just one way young Americans rebelled. Flappers talked dirty, bobbed their hair, wore short skirts, put on lipstick, and carried flasks in their boots. The automobile made a love nest for premarital sex, which was contemplated and discussed even if uncommon. Much of what happened in the twenties was a youthful show put on to shock strait-laced older people. There was quite a bit of play acting.

Through self-promotion, the Prohibition Bureau agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith frequently made the New York Times. Einstein was a natural actor, and he loved faking his identity to catch liquor violators. He appeared to care less about prohibition and more about being able to con crooks. At one time or another he pretended to be a rabbi, a violinist, a fisherman, a baseball player, an ice man, and an undertaker. His victims fell for his phony lines and tried to sell Einstein liquor, whereupon the game was up. In 1925, jealous superiors fired Einstein and Smith. Another publicity hound was Eliot Ness of the Untouchables, an elite unit of the Prohibition Bureau that had been hand-picked for being free of corruption. Ness vied with Internal Revenue for taking credit for ending Capone’s career.

The chief enforcer in the United States was Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who was the highest-ranking woman in the federal government. Before prohibition she drank alcohol, but she believed in law enforcement. From 1921 to 1928, she was the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department in charge of liquor prosecutions. Early on, she realized that enforcement funds were inadequate, that there were too few agents, that small fry were arrested while powerful gangsters were ignored due to lack of local police cooperation. She disapproved of the wiretap in the Olmstead case. In 1928, Willebrandt strongly backed the dry Herbert Hoover for president. She had known Hoover from her days in California, and she hoped that his enforcement would be more energetic than Coolidge’s. A vigorous campaigner among dry women’s groups, she expected to be named attorney general. Hoover won, but she was not nominated. She returned to California to practice law, and in 1930 she became the top lawyer for the California Fruit Growers Coop, which produced grape concentrate to make wine.

The politics of alcohol began to change during Coolidge’s presidency. Better enforcement had failed to dry out the cities, and gang wars had become more violent. By the mid-1920s, growing numbers of Americans questioned the wisdom of prohibition. In 1926, Al Smith sponsored a referendum in New York State calling for modification, which won by a 3 to 1 margin. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, under the leadership of Ella Boole, seemed out of touch with public opinion when it demanded tougher penalties, and the Anti-Saloon League lost much of its power when Wayne Wheeler died suddenly in August 1927. Wheeler was a lawyer, a brilliant lobbyist, and a subtle political strategist who understood how to keep Congress on the dry side. The Ohio Republican resisted actions that he thought would undermine prohibition. To Wheeler, the law worked well enough in small-town America that it deserved to remain in place. He was optimistic that education and proper assimilation of immigrants to the standards that he espoused would dry out the cities in another generation.

Wheeler insisted that prohibition not become a partisan issue. If one party went wet, the wet party might eventually gain power and destroy prohibition. To prevent that result, dry majorities were needed in both parties. After Wheeler died, the ASL’s Washington lobbyist was James Cannon, the Methodist bishop of Virginia. Not only was Cannon a moralist blind to political complexities, but he was also an ardent southern Democrat. His lack of influence with the Republican majority in Congress weakened the ASL, and his strident demand that the Democratic Party be dry clashed with the growing influence of wet urban Democrats inside the party. Booming industrial cities in the 1920s were beginning to tilt power in that direction. The ten most populous cities grew by 24 percent in the 1920s, when the entire country gained only 16 percent. Urban growth was concentrated in wet New York, Chicago, and Detroit.

In 1924 and 1926, Al Smith easily won two new two-year terms as governor of the battleground state of New York, the most populous state, and in 1928 he ran for president a second time. William Jennings Bryan had died in 1925, which put dry forces at the Democratic National Convention on the defensive. Party leaders saw Smith as the strongest candidate. To placate Bishop Cannon and the dry southerners, the platform was wishy-washy on prohibition. Smith was nominated with the understanding, arranged by party leaders, that he would downplay the issue. The nominee, however, was a product of New York City’s Tammany Hall, a political machine rooted in saloons. Just before the convention adjourned, Smith announced that he favored modifying the Volstead Act to allow beer or beer and light wine. He shrugged off saloons as “defunct.”29 Excluding brief stays at the governor’s mansion in Albany, the parochial Smith had never lived anywhere except New York City. In supporting alcohol, he spoke from the heart, and no doubt most of the city’s residents agreed with him. To dry southerners, however, he had betrayed the convention agreement, and he seemed to be sneering at ignorant rural hicks.

Then Smith dropped the bombshell that the head of the Democratic National Committee would be John Raskob, a former Republican donor, a General Motors executive, a militant wet, and a fellow Roman Catholic. Indeed, Smith and Raskob had met through service at Catholic charities. The appointment signaled that Smith was pro-business, and the party chair raised so much money that the Democrats outspent the Republicans, which was unusual. Raskob feared federal power and wanted the Democrats to be a wet business party. The executive was close to Pierre du Pont, another wet business leader who had organized the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) with the insight that income taxes on the rich could be reduced if prohibition was repealed. Many southern Democrats despised northern capitalists, liked income taxes, and regarded drinking as the bane of the urban masses. Those southerners found Smith’s views and actions galling, even before they considered the religious dimension.

Given the recent activity of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, it was hard to see how Smith’s religion was not going to be an issue in 1928. In the North, where most rural Protestants were Republicans, the issue was not important, but rural dry southern Democrats who disliked Smith as an urban wet could not help but play the religious card. Bishop Cannon wanted to teach his party not to take the South for granted. He had no use for a wet Democratic Party. “I have been fighting the liquor traffic all my life,” he wrote Bishop Warren Candler of Georgia.30 Smith’s wet Catholicism led Cannon to back the dry Quaker, Herbert Hoover, and Cannon’s power was such that Virginia voted Republican. Smith also lost North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as the border states of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Although the loss was later seen as proof of widespread anti-Catholicism, most commentary at the time stressed Smith’s liquor stand as the key to his southern debacle.

Smith did gain wet-urban-Catholic votes in the North, mostly from immigrants who registered and voted for the first time. From 1896 to 1924, with the exception of Wilson’s first election, Republicans had carried the country’s twelve most populous cities, but the great wet cities voted Democratic in 1928. Smith won the customarily Republican wet states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island on a tide of new voters. The Republican vote in both states remained the same, but the Democratic vote soared. In Chicago, 61 percent of Smith’s voters had never before cast ballots. Smith also carried his native New York City, but not by enough to overcome the dry Republican majority in rural upstate New York. While the militantly wet Smith lost his home state and thereby forfeited any chance to be the party’s nominee a second time, his protégé, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who waffled on prohibition, got more upstate votes, narrowly won the New York governorship, and emerged as a strong presidential contender for 1932.

Waffling captured the public mood in 1928. Coolidge’s pledge to improve enforcement had failed in areas where wet defiance was commonplace. In 1920, there were 1,520 federal agents; ten years later, 2,836. During the 1920s, New York City had thirty thousand speakeasies and nightclubs. The Prohibition Bureau budget had increased from $4.75 million in 1921 to $12.4 million in 1929, but it did not seem to matter. Federal and local courts were clogged with liquor cases, and routine business cases were caught in the jam. In the federal courts in New York City, prohibition cases were two-thirds of criminal cases from 1920 to1922. Plea bargaining, new to federal court, became rampant, and Volstead Act violators usually got off with small fines. There was little interest in sending moonshiners or bootleggers to prison, which cost taxpayer money. The fines, however, made up for the loss of alcohol taxes. Courts scheduled bargain days, where hundreds of violators who pleaded guilty to lesser charges in mass proceedings paid their fines immediately.

The wet state of Maryland had never passed an enforcement statute, so the only prohibition cases in the Free State were in federal court, but the number of Prohibition Bureau agents was insufficient to make even a small dent in the Baltimore liquor traffic. By 1929, the states of Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Montana had joined New York in repealing state dry statutes, and so, they, too, lacked state enforcement. States spent little on enforcement; in 1927 twenty-eight states spent nothing. In Virginia, dry laws were mainly used by politically connected bootleggers to ruin competitors or to harass poor whites and African Americans who tried to sell liquor. In California, enforcement depended on county prosecutors. In wet San Francisco, the district attorney brought only a few cases; in Los Angeles, police ignored major bootleggers but arrested many Mexican Americans who sold small amounts of alcohol.31

Although Hoover won the 1928 election largely thanks to prosperity, he also played the prohibition card. Raised as a dry Quaker, Hoover was married to a prohibitionist, but his record was not that of a teetotaler. He did not believe 2.75 percent beer was intoxicating, he had opposed wartime prohibition, and he had once owned an excellent wine cellar. While secretary of commerce in the 1920s he had sometimes stopped for a cocktail at the Belgian embassy, which was wet foreign soil. Like many moderates, he did not necessarily see legal compulsion as the best solution to the liquor problem. He was deeply offended by the rise of organized crime among bootleggers, and in 1928 he supported the Anti-Saloon League’s call for better enforcement. The dry forces believed that Hoover’s election had been a referendum on prohibition and that they had won a convincing victory. In early 1929, the ASL asked Congress to increase the number of Prohibition Bureau agents, but conservative Republicans in Congress opposed any increase in government spending. Members may also have sensed a lack of public support for more agents.

As a substitute for more agents, Senator Wesley Jones (R-WA), one of the ASL leaders in Congress, introduced a bill to increase penalties for violating the Volstead Act. Whereas the old law called for first offenders to receive a prison term of six months and a maximum fine of $1,000, the new statute, called the Jones Act, imposed five years and $10,000 for a first offense. In addition, possession of alcohol in a speakeasy became a federal crime. A customer who failed to report any illegal sale that he had witnessed could be charged with a felony. Coolidge signed the “five and dime” law as his term expired. Harsh penalties were supposed to end moonshining and bootlegging, but prosecutors disliked the Jones Act. Plea bargains became more difficult, which further clogged the courts, and jurors in wet areas resisted convicting violators when jurors felt that the punishment was extreme.

Facing mounting criticism over the failure of enforcement, including public reaction to the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Hoover appointed a commission headed by the respected attorney George Wickersham to ponder national law enforcement policies. The Wickersham Commission took testimony for two years. The evidence overwhelmingly showed that prohibition was not being enforced and realistically could not be enforced short of creating a national police state. Few Americans liked that idea. The Prohibition Bureau was corrupt and incompetent, and the idea of joint federal-state law enforcement failed whenever the two sets of officials operated under different principles, political constraints, and legal systems. Federal prisoners rose from three thousand in 1915 to twelve thousand in 1930; one-third were liquor violators. State prisons were similarly crowded.

In 1931, the Wickersham Commission was ready to report, but the group was badly split. Nine of eleven members stated that the public did not support the Eighteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, five wanted to pursue better enforcement, while six called prohibition unworkable. Of this latter group, four wanted to modify the Volstead Act to allow beer and light wine, and two urged repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which was politically impossible in 1931. Forewarned about the split and alarmed by how his dry backers would react, Hoover demanded that the report unanimously stress better enforcement. Privately, he called the report “rotten.”32 The original split, however, was leaked to the press, and Hoover’s emphasis on enforcement sounded limp. For two years the administration had awaited a report that blandly embraced failed policies; the report made the government look inept. Even without the Great Depression, Hoover was in deep political trouble because of the failure of prohibition.

By 1931, the dry movement had produced decidedly mixed results. The politically crooked, vice-ridden saloon was dead, and overall drinking was reduced. In the early 1920s, per capita alcohol consumption may have dropped by two-thirds from its prewar level, but it rebounded later in the decade until it was about one-third below the prewar rate. Much of the lower consumption during prohibition was due to the high price of alcohol, which particularly affected working-class drinkers. The generation that came of age at that time drank little in later years, and per capita alcohol consumption did not regain its prewar peak until 1973.33 At the same time, prohibition had failed to dry out America, as supporters had promised that it would. In mid-decade, prohibitionists believed that the dry dream would be realized if only more effort was put into the cause. Thirst, however, never ceased, and allowing thugs like Al Capone to murder and rob to supply liquor seemed like a dubious price to pay for pursuing what Hoover had called the “noble” experiment. Nobility and Capone were words unlikely to be linked. Then there was the matter of the lost taxes, not just Capone’s untaxed millions but the amounts that could be raised from alcohol taxes and license fees. As the Great Depression worsened, government revenues slumped at all levels, demand for public services increased, and the possibility of alcohol revenues became increasingly attractive.

NOTES

1. On Carroll County, see Bryce T. Bauer, Gentlemen Bootleggers (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014).
2. Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 71.
3. “Cabaret,” Variety, July 14, 1922, 11.
4. Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol (New York: Norton, 2016), 134, 136.
5. Daniel S. Pierce, Real NASCAR (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
6. “Beer Approved, Whisky Doomed,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1920, section 1, 4.
7. Daniel Okrent, Last Call (New York: Scribner, 2010), 251.
8. Ibid., 287.
9. “Decrease in Crime,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1922, section 1, 1.
10. “Seizure Annoys Rum Row,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1923, section 1, 4.
11. See the television series Boardwalk Empire.
12. Edward D. Sullivan, Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929), 193.
13. Philip Metcalfe, Whispering Wires (Portland, OR: Inkwater Press, 2007), 262.
14. David Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 227.
15. “Billy Sunday Flays Wets,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1923, section 2, 1.
16. Robert Post, “Federalism, Passive Law, and the Emergence of the American Administrative State: Prohibition and the Taft Court Era,” William and Mary Law Review 48, no. 1 (2006): 1–183.
17. “City’s Prohibition Farce,” New York Times, February 5, 1922, 89.
18. Lerner, Dry Manhattan, 82–83.
19. McGirr, War on Alcohol, 108.
20. “Is Times Square Wild?” Variety, December 29, 1926, 25.
21. Helen B. Lowry, “New York’s After-Midnight Clubs,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, February 5, 1922, 25.
22. Lerner, Dry Manhattan, 143.
23. Ibid., 131–132, 199–226; McGirr, War on Alcohol, 110–115.
24. Okrent, Last Call, 335.
25. Kathleen Drowne, Spirits of Defiance (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 133.
26. New York World quoted in “Prohibition That Prohibits,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1925, A4.
27. Lerner, Dry Manhattan, 117.
28. Drowne, Spirits of Defiance, 10.
29. Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil (New York: Norton, 1976), 184.
30. Robert A. Hohner, Prohibition and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 223.
31. McGirr, War on Alcohol, 92–93.
32. Ibid., 226.
33. Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption during Prohibition,” American Economic Review 81, no. 2 (1991): 242–247. See also Angela K. Dills and Jeffrey A. Miron, “Alcohol Prohibition and Cirrhosis,” American Law and Economics Review 6, no. 2 (2004): 285–318; Angela K. Dills, Mireille A. Jacobson, and Jeffrey A. Miron, “The Effect of Alcohol Prohibition on Alcohol Consumption: Evidence from Drunkenness Arrests,” Economics Letters 86, no. 2 (2005): 279–284.

Written by W.J. Rorabaugh in "Prohibition- A Concise History", Oxford University Press, UK, 2018, chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.