Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by Daniel Okrent

  As the stakes increased and as the WCTU and its allies gained adherents, so did the brewers’ tactics sharpen. By 1890 the terms “wet” and “dry,” as both adjectives and nouns (the latter spawning a plural form, “drys,” that could not have survived the Age of Spell-Check), had come into general use, an indication that the country at large had begun to divide itself over the Prohibition issue. The brewers took their campaign to the public, but not always in public; by surreptitiously paying newspaper editors to run anti-prohibitionist articles, they remained to a large degree offstage. When the purchase of editorial backing was insufficient, they set their sights on politicians. In 1900 a family friend wrote to Gustave Pabst about an Idaho alfalfa rancher and former U.S. senator named Fred T. DuBois who was trying to return to Washington: “I think it could be for the interest of the brewers to secure his cooperation—he is aggressive and able—if you think well of it—send me $1000–$5000. I think it will be the best investment you ever made.” As this took place in the era when U.S. senators were chosen by state legislators and not by popular vote, one can be confident that the money wasn’t meant to underwrite the purchase of bumper stickers. DuBois was returned to the Senate for another term, and the leading historian of the Pabst company suggests he did so with some of the family’s money tucked into his wallet.

  THE MOST FORCEFUL advocate of the brewers’ anti-Prohibition campaign was the most accomplished man in the industry, Adolphus Busch. The youngest of twenty-one children of a prosperous Rhineland merchant, Busch immigrated to the United States in 1857, went into the brewery supply business, and in 1861, at twenty-two, married Lilly Anheuser, the daughter of one of his customers. (The familial bond did not lack for further adhesive, as Adolphus’s brother Ulrich married Lilly’s sister Anna.) Adolphus soon took over the management of his father-in-law’s company and in time appended his surname to it.

  Busch was a genuine visionary. Where others saw brewing as a fairly straightforward enterprise, he saw it as the core of a vertically integrated series of businesses. He built glass factories and ice plants. He acquired railway companies to ferry coal from mines he owned in Illinois to the vast Anheuser-Busch factory complex sprawled across seventy acres of St. Louis riverfront. (A local joke: St. Louis was “a large city on the [banks of the] Mississippi, located near the Anheuser-Busch plant.”) Busch got into the business of manufacturing refrigerated rail cars and truck bodies that could be used not just by breweries but also by such substantial customers as the Armour meatpacking company. He paid one million dollars for exclusive U.S. rights to a novel engine technology developed by his countryman Rudolf Diesel, and for $30,000 purchased the painting of Custer’s Last Stand that, with the Anheuser-Busch logotype prominently appended, would soon grace the walls of thousands upon thousands of saloons. In 1875 Busch produced thirty-five thousand barrels of beer; by 1901, his annual output—primarily of a light lager named for the Bohemian town of Budweis—surpassed a million barrels. His brewery became so well known that it even inspired a popular song, the deathless “Under the Anheuser Bush,” by the authors of “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” (From the chorus: “Come, come, come and make eyes with me, / Under the Anheuser Bush.”)

  Adolphus had a potent personal aura. He spoke five languages, built palaces for himself and his wife in St. Louis, Pasadena, Cooperstown, and Wiesbaden, and traveled in a style appropriate for the monarch he was. Whenever Adolphus and Lilly returned from a trip to their home at Number One Busch Place (situated right on company property in St. Louis), brewery employees fired a cannon. Coupled with his company’s preeminence in the industry, his grand manner enabled him to dominate industry councils. This became especially clear in 1903, when he helped craft an agreement, eventually signed by nine breweries, to fund a committee “promoting anti-prohibition matters in Texas,” one of Anheuser-Busch’s largest markets. When some brewers expressed an unwillingness to continue underwriting the committee’s activities, Busch argued, “It may cost us millions and even more,” he wrote, “but what of it if thereby we elevate our position?” He concluded his appeal by offering another $100,000 of Anheuser-Busch support for the Texas campaign, money that would help fund such “anti-prohibition matters” as paying the poll taxes of blacks and Mexican-Americans who were expected to vote for legal beer, purchasing the editorial support of newspapers (according to an internal report, “We have sent checks in advance, and the average country editor, struggling to make a living, hates to return checks”), and engaging in some rather more mysterious activities. In 1910, after the brewers’ political agent in east-central Texas was able to undo a dry victory in Robertson County, he explained that he had engineered the reversal through means that “are best not written about.”

  Busch’s motives went beyond the merely pecuniary: “Besides losing our business by state-wide prohibition,” he wrote during the Texas battle, “we would lose our honor and standing of ourselves and our families, and rather than lose that, we should risk the majority of our fortunes.” It was the sort of call to arms that inspired both employees and competitors, and that led to something of a national festival in 1911, when Adolphus and Lilly’s golden anniversary was marked by celebrations in thirty-five cities. A similar nationwide outpouring of respect and love from the brewing industry occurred two years later, when Adolphus Busch died, at the age of seventy-four, from cirrhosis of the liver.

  IN 1915, when the formal effort to put the prohibition of alcoholic beverages into the Constitution was just beginning to accelerate, the members of the USBA found a catalog of the sins of the saloon nailed to their figurative door. As summarized by Hugh Fox, an English vicar’s son whom the brewers had hired to be their chief strategist, it sounded like an index to the most fevered of WCTU dreams: “selling in prohibited hours, gambling, selling to intoxicated men, rear rooms, unclean places, invading residential districts, the country saloon, the social evil, selling to minors, keeping open at night, brewers financing ignorant foreigners who are not citizens, the American bar, brewery-controlled saloons, cabarets, Sunday selling, treating, free lunch, sales to speakeasies, bucket trade, signs, screens, character of the men, too many saloons.”

  It’s unlikely that anyone had produced so succinct a summary of the transgressions of the saloon business in the four decades since Mother Thompson had fallen to her knees in a Hillsboro joint. But this particular compilation did not come directly from the prohibitionist camp. It was assembled by William Piel, a Brooklyn brewer, to indicate the extent of the mess in which the brewers now found themselves. Despite the millions they had expended to combat the temperance forces, despite the tens of millions who enjoyed (or depended upon or were enslaved by) their product, the brewers had a serious problem.

  You could tell how serious it was just from the circumstances of Hugh Fox’s presentation: he spoke at a meeting of the “joint harmony committee” of brewers and distillers. For these two to harmonize was as likely as a group of alley cats howling a major chord. Although the beer men and the liquor men had occasionally attempted to come together over the preceding decades to fight the temperance troops, each side was convinced that association with the other would be more like infection. In 1871, when both groups were still trying to reduce the federal alcohol tax that had survived the Civil War, a trade magazine called the American Brewers’ Gazette and Distillers’ Journal lopped off the second half of its title when the brewers declared that their interests and the distillers’ were “not only not identical, but, on the contrary, decidedly inimical.” In the ensuing years, even as the distillers organized themselves into a powerful trust consisting of eighty-one companies spread from Maine to California, the brewers regarded them as lepers. The distillers produced “the worst and cheapest kind of concoctions,” Adolphus Busch told a friend, while the brewers made “light, wholesome drinks.”

  The distillers were equally narrow in their perceived self-interest. When they adopted a program of saloon reform under the rubric of the Model License League, wh
ereby the number of saloon licenses would be limited by law, and bad conduct (selling to minors, ignoring closing hours, and so on) could lead to revocation of a license, they effectively put themselves in permanent opposition to the brewers—who happened to own most of the saloons the Model License League would limit. “You cannot prevent prohibition by maintaining that beer is less harmful than whiskey. The strength of the [Prohibition] movement is due to the prejudice against the saloon,” the Cincinnati distiller Morris F. Westheimer told one of the meetings ostensibly called to bring the two camps together. Westheimer pointed out that the distillers, much of whose business had largely moved from dependence on sale by the drink to sale “in the original package,” would “prosper without the saloon.” And he told the brewers that if they chose to go it alone and continue to assault the distillers in their effort to save their own necks, the distillers would agitate to close the saloons altogether. He concluded, “Your separation would force us to cooperate with the enemy.”

  Westheimer delivered his speech in 1914, but for all its mighty rhetoric and persuasive logic, he might as well have been talking to a classroom of kindergartners. For by then, the enemy didn’t particularly need the cooperation of anyone who wasn’t part of the broad and highly unlikely alliance now spearheaded by a potent organization called the Anti-Saloon League. The league had been founded in 1893 by the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, but it was not Russell’s way to claim parentage. “The Anti-Saloon League movement,” he said many years later, “was begun by Almighty God.”

  * Some temperance activists did acknowledge that beer was not as dangerous as the hard stuff. Rev. Lyman Beecher (father of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) said that beer “enables the victim to come down to his grave . . . with more of the good-natured stupidity of the idiot, and less of the demonic frenzy of the madman.”

  * Although these gutters were likely designed strictly to drain away spillage, Powers reports that in her research for Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920, she learned that they were commonly called “pissing troughs.”

  * Distillers played this game, too. For fifty-two years, Chicago liquor dealers published a trade journal called The Champion of Fair Play.

  Chapter 3

  The Most Remarkable Movement

  T

  HE TOWN OF Oberlin, Ohio, named for an Alsatian cleric who ministered to the poor, was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian clergymen who chose “to plant a colony somewhere in this region whose chief aim will be to glorify God & do good to men.” From its very beginning the colony and the eponymous school at its heart attracted men and women desperate to change the world. Oberlin College was the nation’s first coeducational institution of higher learning and among the first to admit black students. Frances Willard’s parents gave up their prosperous farm in upstate New York to study at Oberlin; pioneer feminist Lucy Stone was an early graduate. The Oberlin community possessed deep conviction (it was a central cog in the Underground Railroad), and its own style of passionate intensity: at one point, dietary restrictions at the college were so severe that in addition to alcohol, tea, coffee, and meat, the list of proscribed foods included pepper, gravy, and butter.

  Before Howard Hyde Russell found his way to this moral Eden, he had been a prosperous lawyer in Iowa. But at twenty-eight, urged on by what a sympathetic biographer called “the prayerful influence of his wife,” Russell was gripped by a conversion that pulled him to Oberlin. Ordained at thirty-one, he occupied a series of ever-larger pulpits over the next five years and then returned to northeastern Ohio to create the founding cell of what would become an organization with dues-paying adherents numbering in the millions. The Anti-Saloon League may not have been the first broad-based American pressure group, but it certainly was the first to develop the tactics and the muscle necessary to rewrite the Constitution. It owed its success to two ideas, one core constituency, and an Oberlin undergraduate who sat in the front row of the balcony of the First Congregational Church on a June Sunday in 1893 and heard Russell outline his plan to deliver the nation from the death grip of alcohol.

  The two ideas that drove the ASL were focus and intimidation. The decision to declare war on alcohol and only on alcohol—to choose one target at which all the organization’s weapons could be fired—was a direct rebuke to the unfocused efforts of both the WCTU and the Prohibition Party. Frances Willard’s “Do Everything” policy had been distracting (how could members concentrate on the Prohibition effort if they were also supporting the Armenians against the Turks, as they did in 1895?) and divisive (it was a rare antialcohol industrialist who would cooperate with an organization led by a socialist, even if a Christian one). The Prohibition Party was no better; among the many reasons for its dismal electoral record—it had never garnered more than 2.2 percent of the vote in a presidential election—was its earnest devotion to a list of diffuse (and sometimes nutty) causes ranging from government ownership of public utilities to judicial review of post office decisions. The ASL would abide no such diversions. “The Anti-Saloon League is not in politics as a party, nor are we trying to abolish vice, gambling, horse-racing, murder, theft or arson,” one of its early leaders said. “The gold standard, the unlimited coinage of silver, protection, free trade and currency reform, do not concern us in the least.” They cared only about alcohol, and about freeing the nation from its grip.

  Strategically focused, the ASL could more effectively apply its intimidating tactics. “Intimidation” might seem too tough a word for the forthright application of democratic techniques, but as practiced by the ASL, democracy was a form of coercion. Russell was direct about this: “The Anti-Saloon League,” he said, “is formed for the purpose of administering political retribution.” The ASL did not seek to win majorities; it played on the margins, aware that if it could control, say, one-tenth of the voters in any close race, it could determine the outcome. Russell liked to cite rail baron Jay Gould’s credo—that he was a Republican when he was in Republican districts, a Democrat when he was in Democratic districts, but that he was always for the Erie Railroad. The ASL had no problem supporting a Republican today and a Democrat tomorrow, so long as the candidates were faithful on the only issue the league cared about. As an ASL official in Pennsylvania put it, there was “one big question mark before the name of every candidate for public office. Is he right on this question?”

  To gather the support needed to fund the group’s efforts and to line up those 10 percent of the voters who could tip the balance on election day, Russell and his colleagues mobilized the nation’s literalist Protestant churches and their congregations. Any pressure group would be fortunate to be blessed with a constituency like this one. It was scattered across the American landscape, yet easily reached when there was a message to deliver or an action to initiate. By its self-definition, it wore the mantle of moral authority. In its religious ardency, it was prepared for apocalyptic battle. The Anti-Saloon League was, its own slogan affirmed, “the Church in Action Against the Saloon.”

  The leadership, the staff, and the directorates of the ASL and its affiliate organizations were overwhelmingly Methodist and Baptist. Clergymen occupied a minimum of 75 percent of the board seats of any state branch. “The real secret of the League’s success,” wrote the generally unsympathetic Frank Kent of the Baltimore Sun, “is its unrivaled opportunity to reach the hundreds of thousands of churchgoers while they are in church and through their pastors.” An annual “Field Day” brought ASL representatives to more than thirty thousand congregations nationwide, there to present the league’s program and to fill the collection plate with the pledges that funded its activities. Pastors in country, town, and city stood at the ready should they be asked to deliver a particular message on a particular Sunday. “I can dictate twenty letters to twenty men in twenty parts of the city and thereby set 50,000 men in action,” said an ASL spokesman in Philadelphia. “I can name 100 churches that can marshal 20,000 men in Bible classes al
one.”

  Once the ASL had established its capillary network of churches, it did not take long for it to replace the WCTU at the head of the Prohibitionist column. This was assured to some degree by Frances Willard’s death in 1898, but even more so by the deflected attention of WCTU leaders, who preferred to devote their energy and their accumulated political capital to the beatification of their beloved leader. In one day twenty thousand people made the pilgrimage to WCTU headquarters in Chicago to view her casket. Not long after, headquarters was relocated to her Evanston home, a tidy piece of Methodist gingerbread she called Rest Cottage. Several rooms were turned into a Frances Willard museum, the whole presided over by Anna Gordon, Willard’s secretary, companion, and heir. In the Capitol Building in Washington, hers was the first likeness of a woman to be represented in Statuary Hall, alongside Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Robert E. Lee. Her birthday became an official school holiday in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Kansas.

  The WCTU continued to grow after Willard’s death, but the cult of personality devoted to the woman who, almost two decades later, was still being called “our lamented leader” placed her successors in permanent shadow. The organization remained a powerful army, but command and control of the Prohibition movement passed into the hands of the ASL.

  IN 1908 the Reverend Purley A. Baker, a fearsome Methodist preacher from Columbus who had succeeded Howard Russell as the ASL’s national superintendent, engaged in a little boasting: “In no instance has the League ever nominated a candidate for public office,” Baker said. “Nevertheless, we are the most skillfully and completely organized political force in the country.” And that was before Wayne Bidwell Wheeler put his hand on the wheel.