Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by Daniel Okrent

  But in 1906, a few months after her death—around the same time the WCTU, with genuine relief, converted the remnants of her operation into a rather benign “clearinghouse for alcohol information”—associates learned something distressing about Mary Hunt. For years she had maintained a bank account in the name of something she called the Scientific Temperance Association (her WCTU work had been conducted through her Department of Scientific Instruction). Into this account she had deposited royalties on endorsed books published by A. S. Barnes & Company and Ginn & Company—money intended “in whole or in part for the maintenance of the work at 23 Trull St.”

  But those words shouldn’t serve as an epitaph for Mary Hunt. Something she had said in a congressional hearing back in 1886, before twenty-two million schoolchildren in a given year were administered their three-times-a-week serving of temperance education, is more appropriate: “The day is surely coming,” she had told the congressmen, “when from the schoolhouses all over the land will come trained haters of alcohol to pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon.” And would they ever.

  * Historians, demographers, and economists derive liquor consumption statistics from various data, including manufacturing records, tax receipts, and, provocatively, deaths by cirrhosis.

  * Some sources assert that The Drunkard was the most commercially successful American play until Uncle Tom’s Cabin surpassed it a few years later. It remained a staple of the temperance movement through much of the nineteenth century, eventually disappearing from view until 1964, when it was transformed into an unlikely (and short-lived) musical by the twenty-one-year-old Barry Manilow.

  Chapter 2

  The Rising of Liquid Bread

  C

  ARRY AMELIA MOORE GLOYD NATION was six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache. Her mother believed herself to be Queen Victoria. Her first husband was a rotten drunk. Her religious passions led her to sit on her organ bench and talk to Christ, “my constant companion,” playing a musical accompaniment as the conversation proceeded. She once described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” and she applauded the assassination of William O. McKinley, “a whey-faced tool of Republican thieves, rummies, and devils.” She said she published her newspaper, The Smasher’s Mail, so “the public could see by my editorials that I was not insane.”

  Well, maybe. But of all the liquor haters stationed along the steep and twisting path from temperance to Prohibition, none quite hated it with Carry Nation’s vigor or attacked it with her rapturous glee. In her autobiography, a document about as lucid as a swamp, Nation nevertheless approaches coherence when she describes the methodology that made her famous in her campaign against the “jointists”—that is, the saloon operators. In early 1901, the same year her put-upon second husband divorced her on grounds of desertion, she picked up the weapon that would become her Excalibur: a hatchet.

  This is how the Senate Bar, a Topeka saloon favored by state officials, fell to a Nation attack (or, using another of her neologisms, a “hatchetation”): “I ran behind the bar,” she wrote,

  smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer. Of course it began to fly all over the house. I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me.

  She concluded, “Mr. Cook was sheriff and I was treated very nicely by him and Mrs. Cook.”

  Nation had been wielding a prosaic armamentarium of rocks, hammers, bricks, lead canes, and iron rods before the hatchet made her famous. The hatchet soon transformed itself from weapon to symbol to calling card for her new career as a platform speaker (she sold miniature replicas everywhere she went). Though the Prohibition lectures she delivered on the vaudeville circuit sometimes found surprisingly attentive audiences (“They need me,” she explained), Nation was as likely to be the object of sport, especially when she spoke to college students. At Yale a group of undergraduates tricked her into posing with a tankard of beer in her hand while they puddled into laughter behind her. She wasn’t openly ridiculed at Harvard, but was nonetheless appalled by what she encountered there and urged parents to rise up against such “slaughter, bloody anarchy, and treason.” This dithyramb had a specific provocation: “While I was at Harvard,” she wrote with grave alarm, “I saw Professors smoking cigarettes.”

  It may have been easy to dismiss Nation as a sideshow, but like her nonviolent predecessors, she must have had something to do with the undeniable fact that the children and grandchildren of the Washingtonians’ generation were drinking much less hard liquor than had their forebears. All the prayer, the agitation, the indoctrination, and the political activity had to some degree worked. By the end of the nineteenth century, production and consumption of whiskey and other distilled spirits had declined substantially, to a per capita figure not radically dissimilar from what it would be a full hundred years later.

  But this change in habit disguised the cold fact that something had come along to replace the rotgut, moonshine, grain alcohol, and all those other cheap elixirs, as potent as battery acid, that had been the basic stock of the down-at-heels saloon. Picture Carry Nation in that Topeka bar, hatchet in hand, her black dress saturated in the liquid bursting from the faucets she had opened and from the rubber tubing she had slashed: just as Nation was drenched in beer, so was the entire country. In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of the stuff; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population’s capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.

  There was nothing mysterious about this change. Immigration was responsible, of course, at first from Ireland and Germany. The Germans brought not only beer itself but a generation of men who knew how to make it, how to market it, and how to pretend it was something it was not. The four-year-old United States Brewers’ Association declared in 1866 that hard liquor caused “domestic misery, pauperism, disease and crime.” On the other hand, the brewers maintained, beer was “liquid bread.”*

  It also was the substance that composed the ocean upon which a vast new armada of saloons was launched. As the cities filled with immigrants; as a similar settlement of the West accelerated, particularly in the predominantly male lumber camps and mining towns (the states in the Northwest, wrote historian John Higham, “were competing with each other for Europeans to people their vacant lands and develop their economies”); and as a clever and worldly young brewer named Adolphus Busch figured out that pasteurization kept beer fresh enough to ship across the country on the newly completed transcontinental railroad, it became the national beverage.

  That the proliferation of saloons was abetted by immigrants (usually German or Bohemian), largely for immigrants (members of those nationalities, but also Irish, Slavs, Scandinavians, and many, many others), was not lost on the moralists of the WCTU and other temperance organizations. As early as 1876 Frances Willard had referred in a speech to “the infidel foreign population of our country.” Near the end of her career, Willard called on Congress to pass immigration restrictions to keep out “the scum of the Old World.” In the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges of northern Minnesota, congressional investigators counted 256 saloons in fifteen mining towns, their owners representing eighteen distinct immigrant nationalities. “If a new colony of foreigners appears” in Chicago, the muckraker George Kibbe Turner wrote in 1909, “some compatriot is set at once to selling them liquor. Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Poles—all the rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn to Chicago—have their trade exploited to the utmost.” U.S. census figures indicated that 80
percent of licensed saloons were owned by first-generation Americans. Among the rapidly proliferating unlicensed operations, the percentage could only have been higher.

  There was no typical saloon. In Portland, Oregon, for instance, you could take your beer at August Erickson’s polished mahogany bar, a wonder of marketing and craftsmanship wrapping around all four sides of a grand room nearly the size of a city block. But farther down Burnside Street, you were likely to find a dark, fetid place whose most notable feature was the metal trough that ran below the bar on the patrons’ side, stinking of spilled beer and, according to historian Madelon Powers, the urine of customers whose bladders were temporary holding tanks for the beer they gulped by the gallon.* Lucy Adams, a schoolteacher who arrived in Portland in 1902, described a scene that could have existed outside both Erickson’s and the rougher places: “The stench of stale beer and whiskey often mixed with the nauseating smell of vomit on the sidewalks, and drunken staggering men blocking my way almost turned my stomach.” From some saloons, she added, “I saw men and women and even children emerging onto the sidewalk carrying pails of beer to take to their homes.” Jacob Riis noted the same phenomenon in New York: “I doubt if one child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent away empty-handed.” A growler was a metal pail, its inside often smeared with lard. This may have corrupted the flavor, but it had an economic benefit: it kept down the foam, leaving room for more beer.

  In all, the best estimates indicate that the number of saloons in the United States increased from 100,000 in 1870 to nearly 300,000 by 1900. In Leadville, South Dakota, population 20,000, there was one saloon for every 100 inhabitants—women, children, and abstainers included. San Francisco in 1890 might have seemed barely more saloon-sodden than that, reporting one for every 96 residents—but this was a measure only of the city’s 3,000 licensed establishments, while less restrictive estimates threw in an additional 2,000 unlicensed places. Visiting Cincinnati at the peak of her renown, Carry Nation was asked why she had not taken to the local streets with her hatchet. Her answer would have been just as apt in dozens of American cities: “I would have dropped from exhaustion before I had gone a block.”

  Jacob Riis had more energy than Nation did, perhaps because his weapons—a camera and a notebook—were less taxing to use than her hatchet. Conducting research in 1889 and 1890 for what would become his epoch-shaping exposé How the Other Half Lives, Riis set out to count Manhattan’s saloons south of Fourteenth Street. When he wrote up his findings he decided to make his point about “the saloon’s colossal shadow” over the lives of the immigrant poor by juxtaposing the number with a count of churches in the same area. Saloons won in a landslide, of course, 4,065–111. More to the point, though, was Riis’s observation that in the saloons “the congregations are larger by a good deal [than in the churches]; certainly the attendance is steadier and the contributions more liberal the week round, Sunday included.”

  It may have been a rueful acknowledgment, but Riis knew the intensity with which the huddled masses yearned to drink freely. If you considered the nasty living conditions that Riis and others chronicled, it was difficult not to see that the saloon offered something very valuable: in the best cases companionship and comfort, in the worst an escape into oblivion. After a visit to some of the city’s tenements, Henry Codman Potter, Episcopal bishop of New York, expressed wonder “not that the poor creatures who live in them drink so much, but they drink so little.” In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair—an antialcohol campaigner for decades—described why his brutalized Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, habitually followed a day’s labor in the “steaming pit of hell” that was the meatpacking plant with a trip to the saloon: he was seeking “a respite, a deliverance—he could drink! He could forget the pain, he could slip off the burden, he could see clearly again, he would be master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will.” In a word, “His dead self would stir in him.” Jack London, who knew whereof he spoke, gave saloon culture a more exalted coloration: in the saloon, he wrote, “life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness.”

  The typical saloon featured offerings besides drink and companionship, particularly in urban immigrant districts and in the similarly polyglot mining and lumber settlements. In these places, where a customer’s ties to a neighborhood might be new and tenuous, saloonkeepers cashed paychecks, extended credit, supplied a mailing address or a message drop for men who had not yet found a permanent home, and in some instances provided sleeping space at five cents a night. In port cities on the East Coast and the Great Lakes, the saloonkeeper was often the labor contractor for dock work. Many saloons had the only public toilets or washing facilities in the neighborhood, and by the 1890s most saloonkeepers had realized there was indeed such a thing as a free lunch—the complimentary spread they’d use to lure customers and promote the sale of beer. Jon M. Kingsdale, a historian of saloon life, described the free lunch offered by a typical working-class saloon in Chicago’s Seventeenth Ward: “a choice of frankfurters, clams, egg sandwiches, potatoes, vegetables, cheeses, bread and several varieties of hot and cold meats.” Other places may not have been quite so openhanded, but even a humble assortment of sardines, pickles, pretzels, and crackers guaranteed the one thing a hungry saloongoer could count on: the food would be so salty that only another schooner of suds could quell his thirst. The sardines “were more than fish,” wrote George Ade in The Old-Time Saloon. “They were silent partners.”

  A naïf wandering into a saloon in, say, 1905 would have been struck not only by the generous buffet but also by the decorations that surrounded it. One ornament on many saloon walls was a cast-iron hatchet with a die-cut profile of Carry Nation’s face adorning the blade and the slogan “All Nations Welcome But Carrie” in bas-relief on the handle. (Although christened “Carry,” Nation used both spellings.) Even the dingiest of dives was almost certain to have on the wall above the back bar a large chromolithograph of Cassily Adams’s famous Custer’s Last Fight or some comparable heroic scene. Another standard adornment was a painted mirror, usually depicting a female nude, ample of flesh and suggestive of pose. Someone unfamiliar with saloon economics might understandably wonder how it was that a saloonkeeper could buy such relatively lush appurtenances while peddling something as cheap as beer.

  In fact, the saloonkeepers didn’t buy the paintings or the mirrors, or in many cases the furniture, the brass footrails, the iron or porcelain spittoons, even the cutlery in the drawers and the glassware shelved beneath the bar. They didn’t have to pick up the tab for the food, either. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, saloonkeepers had become subsidized servants of the institutions that paid for everything: the breweries themselves.

  It was an obvious evolutionary step. As pasteurization, refrigeration, and an efficient network of rail lines developed, so did national brewing companies. The consequent competition was played for higher stakes than before, and the surest way a brewer could secure his piece of the local action was through the “tied house.” If a saloon operator would agree to serve only one brand of beer, the brewer would provide cash, loans, and whatever other emoluments were necessary to furnish the place, stock the lunch table, meet the license fee (which in some cities ran as high as $1,500), and when necessary line the pockets of a politician or three.

  A modest personal investment could thus be leveraged into a going business. Wrote George Kibbe Turner, “No man with two hundred dollars, who was not subject to arrest on sight, need go without a saloon in Chicago.” At one point half the city’s population patronized a saloon on an average day, a flood accommodated by the competition among the breweries: if Gustave Pabst’s agents bankrolled a place on one corner, you could count on Adolphus Busch’s men showing up to finance another one across the street. By 1909 some 70 percent of American saloons—in New York and Chicago, more than 80 percent—were owned by, in debt to, or otherwise ind
entured to the breweries.

  This was a fortress worth defending. Escalating competition within the industry did not keep the brewers from lining up shoulder to shoulder when confronted with a common enemy. When they first came together to oppose the excise tax on alcohol that had been levied to finance the Civil War, they expressed their solidarity by conducting their convention proceedings entirely in German. At the end of the war, although they couldn’t get rid of the tax, they did lobby successfully to have it reduced from a dollar a barrel to sixty cents per. Only slowly did it dawn on them that the more their industry was intertwined with the needs of the federal government, the likelier they were to acquire allies in the fight against the temperance movement. By 1875 fully one-third of federal revenues came from the beer keg and the whiskey bottle, a proportion that would increase in the years ahead and that would come to be described by a temperance leader in 1913, not inaccurately, as “a bribe on the public conscience.”

  But even with a bribe securely in place, the brewers could not ignore the growing antialcohol sentiment challenging their very existence. In 1867 the United States Brewers’ Association by formal resolution characterized the temperance movement as “fanatical” and vowed to oppose any candidate “of whatever party, in any election, who is in any way disposed toward the total abstinence cause.” Soon the brewers began to create and support a string of propaganda and lobbying organizations whose names never quite said what they really were: the first was the National Protective Organization, which became the Personal Liberty League, which in time was supplanted by the National Association of Commerce and Labor. It would have been just as accurate to call any one of them Euphemists for Legal Beer.*