Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by Daniel Okrent

  How does one begin to describe the impact of Wayne Wheeler? You could do worse than begin at the end, with the obituaries that followed his death, at fifty-seven, in 1927—obituaries, in the case of those quoted here, from newspapers that by and large disagreed with everything he stood for. The New York Herald Tribune: “Without Wayne B. Wheeler’s generalship it is more than likely we should never have had the Eighteenth Amendment.” The Milwaukee Journal: “Wayne Wheeler’s conquest is the most notable thing in our times.” The editorial eulogists of the Baltimore Sun had it absolutely right, while at the same time completely wrong: “. . . nothing is more certain than that when the next history of this age is examined by dispassionate men, Wheeler will be considered one of its most extraordinary figures.” No one remembers, but he was.

  Need it be said that after her only son’s death, Wheeler’s aged mother told reporters, “Wayne always was a good boy”? Certainly not to anyone who knew him when he was an undergraduate at Oberlin. Penniless when he arrived there in 1890, Wheeler supported himself by waiting on tables, serving as his dormitory’s janitor, teaching school every summer vacation, and selling a range of goods that began with books and programs for sporting events and ran to furniture, classroom supplies, and rug-making machines. He was a small man, maybe five feet six or five-seven, and even at the peak of his power in the 1920s he looked more like a clerk in an insurance office than a man who, in the description of the militantly wet Cincinnati Enquirer, “made great men his puppets.” Wire-rimmed glasses, a tidy mustache, eyes that crinkled at the corners when he ventured one of the tight little smiles that were his usual reaction to the obloquy of his opponents—imagine Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, but older and shorter, and carrying on his slight frame a suit, a waistcoat, and, his followers believed, the fate of the Republic.

  When Howard Russell recruited Wheeler to become one of the ASL’s first full-time employees, he was seeking “a loving, spirited self-sacrificing soul who yearns to help the other fellow.” In the janitor’s room in Oberlin’s Peters Hall, where they first discussed the job, the two men concluded their meeting by praying together for divine guidance. Years later Wheeler said he joined the ASL staff because he was inspired by the organization’s altruism and idealism. But despite all the tender virtues Wheeler may have possessed, none would prove as essential as a rather different quality, best summarized by a classmate’s description: Wayne Wheeler was a “locomotive in trousers.”

  In fact, “power plant” was more like it. While clerking for a Cleveland lawyer and attending classes at Western Reserve Law School, Wheeler nonetheless worked full time for the league, riding his bicycle from town to town so he could speak to more churches, recruit more supporters. After he earned his law degree in 1898 and took over the Ohio ASL’s legal office, his productivity accelerated with the additional responsibility. He initiated so many legal cases in the league’s behalf, delivered so many speeches, launched so many telegram campaigns, organized so many demonstrations (“petitions in boots,” he called them) and remained in such demand by Ohio congregations that Howard Russell was led to moan that “there was not enough Mr. Wheeler to go around.” If he had the time and the inclination to court a fellow Oberlin graduate with the euphonious name of Ella Belle Candy, it was partly because Ella’s businessman father, who believed in the cause, promised to provide the financial security that a league salary could not. They married in 1901.

  By then the ASL was well along in remaking Ohio politics. It had thirty-one full-time, paid staff members coordinating a legion of zealous pastors standing by on permanent alert. John D. Rockefeller, who was a lifelong teetotaler as well as America’s wealthiest Baptist, favored the organization with his financial support, matching 10 percent of whatever the league was able to raise from other sources. The objective articulated by Russell—to call to account politicians who committed “high crimes and misdemeanors against the home, the church and the state”—was no longer just an audacious threat; for scores of officeholders it had become chilling reality. By 1903, the year Wheeler became the ASL’s Ohio superintendent, the league had targeted seventy sitting legislators of both parties (nearly half the entire legislative membership) and had defeated every one of them.

  The newly elected Ohio legislature installed that year was custom-built by the ASL—Wayne B. Wheeler, general contractor. Now it could enact a law that had long been the league’s primary goal: a local-option bill placing power over the saloon directly in the hands of voters. If Cincinnatians voted wet, Cincinnati would be wet, and if Daytonians voted dry, their town would be dry. Once different versions of the measure had passed both houses of the legislature, Governor Myron T. Herrick persuaded members of the conference committee to adopt some modifications he deemed necessary to make the law workable and equitable. “Conference committees are dangerous,” Wheeler believed, partly because they made it possible for governors to step in and preempt the ASL’s legislative agenda. Playing for stakes greater than those the league had ever risked before, Wheeler decided to take on Herrick.

  He was not an easy target. A successful lawyer and banker in Cleveland, Herrick was the political creation of Senator Mark Hanna, the Republican Boss of Bosses who had also invented William O. McKinley.* Herrick had been elected governor with the largest plurality in Ohio history, had substantial campaign funds of his own, and had gladdened many a church-minded heart when he vetoed a bill that would have legalized racetrack betting. Additionally, Ohio Republicans had lost only one gubernatorial election in two decades.

  Wheeler and the ASL crushed him. They sponsored more than three hundred anti-Herrick rallies throughout the state, mobilizing their supporters in the churches by invoking Herrick’s role in modifying the local-option bill and by suggesting that the governor—“the champion of the murder mills”—was a conscious pawn of the liquor interests. When the Brewers’ Association sent out a confidential letter urging its members to lend quiet but material support to Herrick (his Democratic opponent was a vocal temperance advocate), Wheeler said he “got [a copy of the letter] on Thursday before election, photographed it and sent out thousands of them to churches on Sunday.” In what was at the time the largest turnout ever for an Ohio gubernatorial election, every other Republican on the statewide ticket was elected, but Myron T. Herrick’s political career was over.

  Money sometimes being thicker than alcohol, Wheeler’s opposition to so prominent a member of the business establishment temporarily led John D. Rockefeller to reduce his financial support for the ASL. But Wheeler was unfazed. “Never again,” he said, “will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.” Or, more accurately, never again would they ignore Wayne B. Wheeler, who was now launched on a national career that would eventually make him, in the words of an ASL associate, the figure who “controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents . . . , directed legislation for the most important elective state and federal offices, held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties, distributed more patronage than any dozen other men, supervised a federal bureau from the outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.”

  IN JANUARY 1909 Hugh Fox of the United States Brewers’ Association sent his membership a letter that bordered on the apoplectic. He asked the brewers to consider “what we have to reckon with—That the League has over 800 business offices, and at least 500 men and women on its regular salary list, in these offices alone? That besides this, that it employs large numbers of speakers on contract, from the governor of Indiana down to the local pastor of the Methodist Church? Do you realize,” he continued, “that the men who are managing these movements have capitalized the temperance sentiment which has been evolved in a century of preaching and agitation?”

  Thomas Gilmore, Fox’s counterpart over at the liquor distillers’ office, told his employers at their 1908 convention in Louisville tha
t the ASL was “the most remarkable movement that this country has ever known.” But in Gilmore’s lexicon “remarkable” could encompass his belief that the league was also “the most autocratic, the most dictatorial, as well as the most dangerous power ever known in the politics of this country.” The brewers’ man and the distillers’ man seemed to be on the same page, but in fact their organizations still refused to come together. Christian Feigenspan, a powerful New Jersey brewer, declared that “many of the brewers see their salvation” in separating themselves from the distillers. Pittsburgh distiller A. J. Sunstein saw his industry’s deliverance in “reducing the number of licenses”—that is, closing down a lot of brewery-owned saloons. Seemingly disinterested parties like Arthur Brisbane, the influential Hearst editor and columnist, campaigned aggressively for what he called “suppression of whiskey traffic and the encouragement of light wine and beer.”

  The alcohol industry would have been fortunate had their opponents been similarly divided. In fact, the various factions of the growing antialcohol alliance could be encompassed by no imaginable organization: Billy Sunday, meet Jane Addams: you may never realize it, but you’ll be working together now. Industrial Workers of the World, shake hands with the Ku Klux Klan: you’re on the same team. But what had become known as the “Ohio Idea”—the ASL’s determination to isolate antialcohol sentiment from all other causes and ideologies—enabled the league to regard all the disparate drys as allies. In the two decades leading up to Prohibition’s enactment, five distinct, if occasionally overlapping, components made up this unspoken coalition: racists, progressives, suffragists, populists (whose ranks also included a small socialist auxiliary), and nativists. Adherents of each group may have been opposed to alcohol for its own sake, but each used the Prohibition impulse to advance ideologies and causes that had little to do with it.

  This is probably most clearly the case among the racists—specifically, those arrayed across the southern states in the resentful formation that had arisen from the ruins of the Civil War and the reforms of Reconstruction. Before the Civil War the South had been slow to enlist in the temperance movement, in part because of its connection to abolitionism. Once white southerners reclaimed their dominance after the end of Reconstruction, alliance became much easier. Still, although the North and the South had similar attitudes toward liquor, wrote the Washington correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution in 1907, “the South has the negro problem.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, he elaborated by recalling the Reconstruction era and the “terrible condition of affairs that prevailed when swarms of negroes, many of them drunk with whisky . . . roamed the country at large.” It was a familiar characterization, and its reach extended beyond the boundaries of the old Confederacy. Frances Willard herself had adopted the imagery, asserting that “the grogshop is the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of great dark faced mobs.”

  Even those who affected concern for black southerners indulged in similarly toxic rhetoric, often salted with a patronizing helping of pseudoscience. “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol,” proclaimed an official publication of the Methodist Church, and “consequently they developed no high degree of ability to resist its evil effects.” An editorialist in Collier’s assured his readers that “white men are beginning to see that moral responsibility for the negro rests on them, and that it is a betrayal of responsibility to permit illicit sales of dangerous liquors and drugs.” In Congress a boldly disingenuous Representative John Newton Tillman of Arkansas tried to make the case that Prohibition would bring an end to southern lynchings, for fewer black men would commit horrible crimes if liquor were unavailable.

  But in that same speech, delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1917 (and encompassing in its ample length references to Martin Luther, Pope Urban II, four former senators from Maine, Lord Chesterfield, Robert Bruce, and “the Prince of Peace Himself”), the quotable Congressman Tillman also said liquor “increases the menace of [the black man’s] presence.” In Thomas Dixon Jr.’s widely read novels from the first decade of the twentieth century, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman— the source material for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation— black men with “eyes bloodshot with whisky” wander the streets and invade the homes of whites, their extravagant drunkenness intensifying the constant threat of plunder and rape. In Dixon’s cosmos, the black man was “half child, half animal . . . whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger.” Carnality wasn’t a necessary element of the white southerner’s blind fear; to some, the risk to their perceived dignity was nearly as frightful. Civil War hero General Robert F. Hoke’s daughter Lily was convinced that the men of North Carolina would vote dry in an imminent 1908 Prohibition referendum “because the people do not wish drunken Negroes to push white ladies off the sidewalks.”

  What these same people also did not wish was the continued presence, granted by the loathed Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of the black man in the voting booth. Despite the antiliquor position taken by Booker T. Washington and some other southern black leaders, white prohibitionists in many states had stopped trying to convince black men to support their cause after black votes defeated a no-liquor amendment to the Tennessee constitution in 1887. Failing to persuade, the drys chose instead to demonize. They conjured not an argument but an image: the waking nightmare of a black man with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a ballot in the other. It was this perceived threat that had set off what C. Vann Woodward would call “the third national prohibition wave,” which crashed ashore in 1906 in a Democratic primary campaign in Georgia (the first two waves, Woodward said, were set in motion by the Washingtonian Movement of the 1840s and the rise of the WCTU in the 1880s). Gubernatorial candidate Hoke Smith—General Hoke’s nephew, as it happened—set out to persuade white Georgians that the black vote was controlled by the liquor interests, an argument that assured his election and enabled him to push through in his first year as governor a one-two combination of laws that took both ballot and bottle away from the state’s black citizens. First Smith signed a measure summarily disenfranchising Georgia’s black voters by means of a viciously effective grandfather clause; once that was done—once the ballot was ripped from the hands of black men who might have voted wet—the passage of harsh local-option laws was a snap.

  In the ensuing months, additional Prohibition laws, often congenitally linked to Jim Crow voting laws, were enacted not only in North Carolina (Lily Hoke had been right), but in Oklahoma and Mississippi as well. Discriminatory voting laws in Alabama enabled a local Baptist publication to predict a coming dry victory in that state with great glee: “The stronghold of the whiskey power in the state has been eliminated by the disfranchisement of the Negro, and others like him.”

  The sentiment was grotesque but the analysis was sublime. The brewers’ extensive efforts to secure the support of blacks had marked them as the enemy of southern whites and as nakedly cynical, too. No one believed that their persistent opposition to poll taxes, for instance, arose from any nobler instinct than their deep affection for profits. In Texas, Adolphus Busch’s staff of field agents included four black men “competent to handle the colored voters,” in the words of one indiscreet manager. Their competence was amplified by a kit each one carried, consisting of the powers of attorney and the cash necessary to pay an individual’s poll tax, a few pieces of wet propaganda, and a poster of Abraham Lincoln.

  The distillers, supported by the wholesalers who distributed their products, didn’t need to meddle in the feudal southern political system to incite the region’s rage. For all the high-minded rhetoric they offered in opposition to the saloon, they were doomed to ignominy because of who they were and how they went about marketing their products. It certainly didn’t help that the distilling business had become a largely Jewish industry—perhaps not as uniformly as the beer industry was German, but close enough to inspire the mistrust and loose the venom of nativist big
ots. When John Tillman explained to his congressional colleagues how he wished to save the Negro from lynching by denying him his liquor, he made it clear who was guilty of debauching the black man. Reading from a list of liquor industry figures, Tillman asserted that their names—Steinberg, Schaumberg, and Hirschbaum, for example—demonstrated that “I am not attacking an American institution. I am attacking mainly a foreign enterprise.” This perception was not limited to the South. Even McClure’s magazine, that paragon of muckraking probity, referred in 1909 to the “acute and unscrupulous Jewish type of mind which has taken charge of the wholesale liquor trade of this country.”

  In one spectacularly combustible instance, a St. Louis distiller fed the stereotype with a marketing effort that dry forces turned into a national scandal. Lee Levy had been in the liquor business in Texas for nearly twenty years when he arrived in St. Louis in 1902, at the age of forty-six, and set up a distillery on the north side of town near the Mississippi River. Within four years he had succeeded well enough to earn himself a listing in The Book of St. Louisans, a directory of the city’s “leading living men.” Two years after that he was described in Collier’s by Will Irwin as “A gentleman of St. Louis taking his fat, after-dinner ease, sitting on plush, decked with diamonds, lulled by a black cigar, and planning how he shall advance his business.” This was not meant as a compliment.

  Levy’s appearance (if you can call it that—there’s no reason to think Irwin had ever met him) in one of America’s largest and most influential magazines was prompted by an incident in Shreveport, Louisiana, in which a black man named Charles Coleman was charged with the rape and murder of a white fourteen-year-old named Margaret Lear. Coleman’s trial took four hours, the jury presented a guilty verdict after three minutes of deliberation, and he was hanged in the Shreveport jail one week later. (Coleman was spared a less punctilious lynching only by the array of state militia circling the courthouse.) The terrible story made it into the pages of Collier’s because Coleman had been drunk, and because Irwin had been traveling the South looking into how liquor was sold to the region’s blacks. He had no idea exactly what Coleman had been drinking, but he took a leap and suggested it might have resembled the item that had been found in the pocket of a black man charged with rape in Birmingham: a half-empty bottle of gin bearing a brand name, an illustration, and the words “Bottled by Lee Levy & Co., St. louis.” The brand name did not appear in Collier’s because, Irwin wrote, “If I should give its name here . . . this publication could not go through the mails.” The illustration did not appear because, as a U.S. attorney would later assert in court papers, “said picture is wholly unfit to be further described in this instrument, and a further description thereof would be an insult to this honorable court.” The brand name of Levy’s product was Black Cock Vigor Gin. The figure portrayed in the illustration was a white woman, mostly nude.