According to the custom of the day, Irwin had been no more direct when referring to Margaret Lear’s rape, which he called “the nameless crime.” He had less scruple about identifying the concoction he believed Coleman had been drinking as “nigger gin,” a catchall term for the cheap stuff marketed to impoverished southern blacks at fifty cents a pint (wholesale price for Levy’s: twenty-seven cents).* Irwin mentioned other distillers in the “nigger gin” business, among them men with such suspicious names as Weil, Dreyfuss, and Blutenthal. The dry Nashville Tennessean, which leapt onto the story as if it were a chariot sent from heaven, listed the local joints owned by whites who sold Levy’s gin to blacks. It asked its readers to “set aside all other reasons for the crusade against the saloon and consider this one—the Negro problem.” The front-page editorial, bordered in black, continued, “The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, property, and the repose of the community.” A white clergyman warned Nashvillians, “This gin, with its label, has made more black rape fiends, and has procured the outrage of more white women in the south than all other agencies combined. It is sold with the promise that it will bring white virtue into the black brute’s power.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal, a wet paper, demurred; it was “an insult to the South and all the good women of this section,” editors wrote, to blame the crime on the distiller and absolve “the poor black beast” who committed it.
Beyond the national readership Collier’s enjoyed, newspaper readers in cities from Atlanta to Los Angeles learned about Lee Levy and his gin, even if its name was suppressed. Although Levy remained in the liquor industry, he and his business partner were convicted of sending “improper matter through the mails” and expelled from the distillers’ Model License League. The federal judge who sentenced them said he went light on the penalty—$900 in fines—because a postal inspector claiming to be an Arkansas liquor dealer had entrapped them: “I am opening a place in Argenta Ark,” the inspector had written on his order for twenty-four quarts, “and I can use Your Black Cock Gin to advantage.”
AT FIRST GLANCE, a form of race hatred could have been seen as the motivation of the second component of the dry coalition, the bien-pensant northeasterners who would come to be known as progressives. When the twenty-three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Albany early in 1882 to begin his first term in the New York legislature, he was horrified by the twenty-five Democratic members of Irish extraction who sat across the aisle. “They are a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue,” he wrote in his diary. The typical Irish member of the Assembly, he added, “is a low, venal, corrupt and unintelligent brute.” Among them were some who could not “string three intelligible sentences together.” Roosevelt characterized one particularly loathsome assemblyman, “Big John” McManus, as “unutterably coarse and low.” Chief among Big John’s sins: he owned a saloon. Roosevelt disliked McManus to such a degree that he once chased off the much larger man by threatening to “kick you in the balls.”
But even more than their personal distaste for the Irish Democrats, Roosevelt and his allies detested the political culture they represented. Just as the urban saloon served as mail drop, hiring hall, and social center for the immigrant masses, so too was it birthplace, incubator, and academy for the potent political machines that captured control of the big cities of the East and Midwest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In New York in 1884, twelve of the twenty-four members of the board of aldermen owned saloons, and four others owed their posts to saloon backing. In Detroit, where the saloonkeepers’ political arm—the Keep Your Mouth Shut Organization—controlled only one-third of the city’s legislative seats, their fraternal order attempted to compensate for this minority status by endorsing a “Saloon Slate” of municipal officials who swore not to enforce closing hours. For more than three decades Chicago’s First Ward remained in the absolute control of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, proprietors of a saloon called the Workingmen’s Exchange, and in Boston, where a settlement house worker said “the affiliation between the saloon and politics was so close that for all practical purposes the two might have been under one and the same control,” a ward politician named Patrick J. Kennedy launched a political dynasty from his tavern in Haymarket Square.
The connection between liquor and politics was not a new one. When twenty-four-year-old George Washington first ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he attributed his defeat to his failure to provide enough alcohol for the voters. When he tried again two years later, Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider, and beer his election agent had handed out—roughly half a gallon for every vote he received. In the city slums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the various comforts and services offered by the neighborhood saloon put its proprietor in an ideal position to dispense, along with beer and liquor, the coin of political patronage: credit, favors, jobs. In the poorest neighborhoods, where a harder currency—the cash to buy another drink—was scarce, selling one’s vote for the price of a bar tab was a common transaction. Consequently, when the brewers looked at the saloon, they saw more than a source of profit. They saw as well the guarantor of the political power they needed if they were to hold off the growing armies of temperance.
Roosevelt and the other Protestant aristocrats who championed urban reform saw the very same thing and did not find it pleasing. The corrupt culture of the political machines (the saloon-controlled New York board of aldermen was known as the “Boodle Board”) was violently offensive to reformist sensibilities; the immigrant composition of the machines’ support was an affront to the native Protestant’s sense of his own prerogatives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was carrying the torch for female suffrage when she described the horrifying prospect of “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence . . . making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble.” Substitute Tom, Dick, and Harry for Lydia, Lucretia, and Fanny, and if their last names remained unmistakably pure, the prevailing progressive sentiment would have been identical to Stanton’s.
At the same time, many progressives who despised the immigrants’ way of life sought to improve it. Through charity, activism, and government action, the progressives believed they could make the lives of immigrants better, more stable, more conventional—in a word, more American. Not for a minute did they see the assimilation of the great wave of immigrants as an easy task; David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, who was a dedicated dry and a political ally of Roosevelt, wrote that “most of them . . . are very different from the Anglo-Saxon—very much less capable of self-government, and on the whole morally and socially less desirable.” But if the saloon could be abolished through the sort of aggressive government intervention the progressives favored, there was a chance, said H. D. W. English, president of the Pittsburgh Civic Commission, that the “polyglot class” could be lifted up from “his dirt and beer.”*
To the immigrant workingman, of course, elimination of the saloon would be an act of repression. As Arthur S. Link wrote about the men and women of the progressive movement, “The fact that they were potentially or actively repressive does not mean that they were not progressive.” They were dry not because they hated alcohol, but because they hated what alcohol did to those who did not encounter it in crystal goblets arrayed on white tablecloths. “When the laboring man works eight hours and spends none of his time at the saloon, he will save up more money and better his economic status,” wrote the influential editor William Allen White in what sounded like progressive sentiment at its noblest. “When the workingman spends his evenings at home or at the library, and has good books and a gramophone and an automobile, society will be better off.” But three decades later in his autobiography, White employe
d some unfortunate imagery that, however rueful it might have been, reflected a chillingly suggestive attitude toward the immigrant’s plight. The reformers of the first decade of the twentieth century, he wrote, “believed faithfully that if we could only change the environment of the under dog, give him a decent kennel, wholesome food, regular baths, properly directed exercise, cure his mange and abolish his fleas . . . all would be well.”
Other prominent figures of the progressive movement, such as the settlement house pioneers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, supported Prohibition not out of an antipathy to the mores of the urban immigrants but because of a genuine empathy. Their commitment to the dry cause arose from the same instinct that had led the best of the abolitionists—those who not only objected to slavery but believed the black man to be the white man’s equal—into the temperance movement. Neither were they unsympathetic to the impulses that led men to saloons. Though Addams never wavered in her support for Prohibition, she believed that “if alcohol was associated intensively with these gross evils, it was also associated with homely and wholesome things,” notably the conviviality that drink could bring to the dull grayness of the urban slums. Unlike Addams, her fellow Chicago reformer Episcopal priest Samuel R. Fellows did not understand what it was about the saloon that gave its clientele their homely pleasures. In 1895 he opened a place on Washington Street that had a bar, barmaids, spittoons—all the trappings of the saloon but two: the second o (he called it the Home Salon) and the booze. It did not last.
The progressives also exalted the methodology of science, under the meticulous supervision of a self-selected elite. The archtypical progressive agency for scientific inquiry was launched by the president of Columbia, the president of Harvard, the Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania, and forty-seven other men whose good fortune could in most cases be attributed either to blue chips or silver spoons. The Committee of Fifty for the Investigation of the Liquor Problem bore a name as imposing as its membership and a mission worthy of both: countering the hegemony of misinformation and propaganda fostered by Mary Hunt’s Scientific Temperance campaign—not in behalf of the wet cause, but with loyalty only to the facts.
The Committee of Fifty left two enduring legacies. First, it produced several academically sound studies of the physiological effects and the social consequences of alcohol. These were of course uncorrupted by Huntian mythology, but they were also free of liquor industry eyewash and aristocratic contempt for the dry point of view; in fact, after considering the findings of the committee’s investigators, Charles W. Eliot, the Harvard president, forswore the moderate drinking in which he had long indulged and became a teetotaler.
The Fifty’s other bequest was the blue-ribbon committee approach, which in its careful incrementalism confirmed literary critic Van Wyck Brooks’s assertion that the progressives were “born middle-aged.” Like the Fifty, these committees invariably were composed of a self-selected elite who investigated facts, discussed solutions, emerged into the public square with a lengthy report, and then attempted to institutionalize the solutions through legislative action.
Among these proliferating committees, two assumed the challenge of unpacking one of the most prominent, and most profoundly flawed, alcohol-related reforms of the era. New York State’s comprehensive effort to regulate its saloons had been pushed through the legislature by John Raines, a formidable politician (one colleague called him “eagle-faced”) from the Finger Lakes region. Among the provisions of the Raines Law, as it became known, was a Sunday closing rule aimed at the saloons—a particularly potent measure because Sunday, when workers controlled their own time, had always been the saloonkeeper’s best day. Conveniently, the law exempted many of its advocates from its strictures: because the preferred weekend dining and drinking places of the well-to-do were hotel restaurants, Raines crafted the measure to exclude any establishment that served meals and had at least ten bedrooms. As in the south, it was prohibition for the other guy, not for me.
But Raines failed to anticipate the resourcefulness of his law’s targets. Instead of being weakened, the measure strengthened the saloon business immeasurably. In Brooklyn alone, where there had been thirteen hotels before the Raines Law, there were soon more than two thousand—virtually all of them saloons whose back rooms or upstairs spaces had been subdivided by the addition of flimsy walls, made accommodating by the provision of threadbare cots, and turned profitable by the new business they immediately and inevitably attracted: prostitution. The requirement that these “hotels” offer food was solved with the invention of the “Raines sandwich,” described by Jacob Riis as “consisting of two pieces of bread with a brick between . . . set out on the counter, in derision of the state law which forbids the serving of drinks without ‘meals.’ ”
This did not sit well with the reformers. Soon the eradication of the saloon/hotels became the primary goal of a new body, the Committee of Fourteen.* This time, though, the Episcopal rectors, settlement house officials, Columbia professors, and other progressive notables on the committee (including the future secretary of war and secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson) welcomed three new allies to the committee. The newcomers hated the saloon just as much as the reformers, but in some ways they came from a different planet: all three were members of the Anti-Saloon League, including Howard Hyde Russell, its founder.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Progressive support for Prohibition was further cemented by prohibitionist support for the progressives’ favorite causes. In 1906 the ASL endorsed the initiative and referendum movement, which would grant citizens the right to enact (or revoke) state laws by popular vote. When the progressive stalwart Hiram Johnson was elected governor of California in 1910, his running mate was A. J. Wallace, a Methodist minister who was president of the state branch of the ASL. Worker’s compensation statutes made for especially tidy progressive/prohibitionist co-ventures, for once these most progressive of labor laws were enacted, large employers took a sudden interest in workplace safety and their employees’ drinking habits. Hugh Fox of the United States Brewers’ Association sent a bulletin to his members: “The passage in many states of Worker’s Compensation laws, which placed the burden of proof on the employer instead of the employee,” was a catastrophe for the beer industry. U.S. Steel, Pittsburgh Steel, and other industrial giants “have all declared against the saloon,” Fox wrote, and some, like the Diamond Watch Company, announced they would fire any worker known to drink “intoxicating liquors.”
These corporations were profoundly unprogressive institutions, of course, and they had other reasons to want to take drink away from their employees. (As Dr. Thomas Darlington, a former New York City health commissioner who had gone to work for the steel industry’s trade association, explained in 1914, “the use of liquor has a direct bearing upon wages; if a man is addicted to alcohol he wants more money for the family.”) But the politics of Prohibition had become so knotted with unlikely alliances, conflicting motives, and disingenuous arguments that a three-cushion shot (progressives to ASL to industrialists) around an issue like worker’s compensation didn’t seem odd at all. Summarizing the Anti-Saloon League’s single-issue focus, Wayne Wheeler said, “This one thing we do.” But if the “one thing”—Prohibition—could only be achieved by making common cause with other groups whose goals could be made to line up with its own, the ASL could be very accommodating. Soon its march to victory was propelled forward by the three remaining groups in the dry coalition of convenience—the populists, the suffragists, and the nativists, who would push Prohibition into the Constitution with peculiar implements: a tax, a social revolution, and a war.
* Another of Hanna’s protégés, even if from the distance of a century, was Karl Rove, the political mind behind George W. Bush. “Some kids want to grow up to be president. Karl wanted to grow up to be Mark Hanna,” a friend told Esquire magazine in January 2003. “We’d talk about it all the time. We’d say, ‘Jesus, Karl, what kind of kid wants to grow up to be Mark Hanna?�
�” In many ways, though, Rove’s feel for hardball politics suggested that the historical figure he most resembled was Wayne B. Wheeler.
* A magazine description of nigger gin: “There was a brief wave of heat as from a match, then a flash of sweetish, pungent, bitter vapor which seemed to leave all the membranes of the throat covered with a lingering, nauseating mustiness.”
* Historian James H. Timberlake noted that the progressives’ cousins in the social Darwinist camp saw the same degradation in the saloons but regarded it as a virtue: they believed that “alcohol, by killing off generation after generation of the unfit, was acting as a progressive factor in natural selection and improving the race.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 7
