The most surprising foreign expression of the prohibitory impulse came in a decree issued by Czar Nicholas II in October 1914: from that point forward, it declared, the sale of vodka was forever banned throughout the Russian Empire. He may as well have ordered fish to leave the ocean. Within a year of the decree, a Petrograd newspaper reported that “tens of thousands of illicit distilleries” had opened for business. In the United States, however, Nicholas’s action was exalted by a spectrum of drys that ranged from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to radical elements of the labor movement. In 1919 the Central Labor Council in Tacoma would even attribute the success of the Russian Revolution to an unexpected by-product of the czar’s ruling: a clearheaded proletariat, no longer befogged by alcohol, was at last able to rise and throw off its chains. This was not entirely fanciful; Lenin himself said that “to permit the sale of vodka would mean one step back to capitalism.” It wasn’t until 1923, six years after the fall of the Czar, that spirits containing more than 20 percent alcohol were again made legal in the Soviet Union.
The Tacoma unionists were not alone on the left flank of the dry movement. The socialist leader John Spargo, biographer of Karl Marx and Eugene V. Debs, attacked the liquor trade as an exemplar of capitalism and liquor itself as a corrupter of human potential. The great black union organizer and pamphleteer A. Philip Randolph argued that Prohibition would bring lower crime rates, higher wages, less corrupt politics, and other benefits of particular value to the black community. No less radical a group than the Industrial Workers of the World believed liquor was the enemy of the working classes, a poison poured into their lives by capitalist exploiters intent on weakening them. In Oregon the IWW distributed leaflets cautioning workers that they “can’t fight booze and the boss at the same time.”
The Baptist and Methodist clergy; the Progressive Party and its allies; the women of the suffrage movement; the western populists; most southern Democrats; the Industrial Workers of the World; official sentiment in other Anglo-Saxon and nordic nations—was it any wonder that the Anti-Saloon League believed constitutional Prohibition was not only possible, but imminent? During the amendment debate Richmond Hobson had set the target: “I here announce to you the determination of the great moral, the great spiritual, the great temperance and prohibition forces of this whole Nation to make this question the paramount issue in 1916.” And then, he said, “We will have a President and a Congress that will give us what we want.”
JUST FIVE DAYS before the Hobson Amendment’s triumphant failure, Congress had enacted a much more modest measure called the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. The law empowered the Internal Revenue Service to tax, and thus to regulate, opiates, coca derivatives, and other drugs. On its face a tax measure, the Harrison Act in fact conferred on the federal government conventional police powers regarding a matter of personal behavior. The administration of Woodrow Wilson, true to its belief in a strong central government, supported its passage and could have seen it as the logical precedent for federal regulation of the liquor traffic.
Wilson was enough of a progressive to appreciate the argument, but he was enough of a realist to understand that his party’s growing strength owed much to Irish-American, Italian-American, and other ethnic Democrats in the big cities of the north. His closest aide, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, was a proud son of Jersey City’s Fifth Ward and a product of its redoubtable political machine. He was also former counsel to that city’s liquor dealers’ association and Wilson’s emissary to northeastern Democrats, whose clubhouse style was rather different from the president’s (Wilson’s handshake was once likened to “a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper”). To this part of the Democratic coalition, Prohibition was as welcome as a rash.
But the two other bulwarks of the party were for the most part as dry as powder. With the unreconstructed southerners, whose racial views he shared, Wilson had a natural affinity; in the populist economic views of the westerners, he saw a mirror of his antitariff, pro–income tax position. Wilson enjoyed the occasional highball (usually Scotch), and he believed that moderation was an acceptable form of temperance. But though he was generally dubious about prohibitory laws, he had little to gain from fighting the ASL. He risked nothing by dodging confrontation with the league. The northern ethnic voters who were the ASL’s natural enemy weren’t likely to seek refuge in the high-tariff, overwhelmingly Protestant, anti-immigration Republican Party. Wayne Wheeler observed that the Prohibition movement may not have had Wilson’s support, but “we did not have his open opposition.”
This was obvious in two of Wilson’s most important appointments. The ascension to cabinet rank of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan brought Prohibition sentiment into the highest reaches of the executive branch. Daniels’s General Order 99 eliminated the traditional “wine mess” (it was in fact more likely to be stocked with bourbon or rye than wine) from all U.S. naval installations. This was an expression of his own dry views, but it was also a form of populist leveling: alcohol had long been denied to sailors, and Daniels’s order was a conscious effort to apply the same rules to their officers. The New York Herald dubbed Daniels “Sir Josephus, Admiral of the USS Grapejuice Pinafore,” but he was unmoved.
For his part, Bryan, who was loyally mindful of Wilson’s noncombatant stance in the liquor wars, generally soft-pedaled his antialcohol position once he joined the administration; in 1914 he even opposed the Hobson Amendment, considering it a futile distraction from more pressing issues. But when Bryan’s official duties ran up against his personal dedication to abstinence, a lifetime of teetotalism could not be suppressed. This became apparent barely six weeks into his tenure as secretary of state. The occasion was Bryan’s first formal diplomatic function, a luncheon in the Presidential Suite of the Willard Hotel honoring James Bryce, who was about to return to London after six years as British ambassador to the United States. The guests, largely other ambassadors and their wives, had just taken their seats at the brightly decorated tables when Bryan rose to speak. His welcome contained a message that would have been no less surprising at a diplomatic event had he delivered it in pig latin: there would be no wine served at the luncheon. The deep ruby liquid in the glasses was grape juice.
Not since he’d strapped the Cross of Gold to his back in 1896 had Bryan given such ripe material to his detractors. His guests were politely accepting; the Russian ambassador, who told his luncheon companion that he “had not tasted water for years,” managed to survive the meal because he had been forewarned by Bryan and “had taken his claret before he came.” But the press shredded Bryan, and some northeastern Republicans began to disparage the Wilson-Bryan foreign policy as “grape juice diplomacy.” Although Bryan did get some support, it was likely to invite derision—for instance, George Bernard Shaw offered his approval of the alcohol-free policy and earnestly suggested that the Bryans introduce vegetarianism to the diplomatic circuit as well.
The Prohibition forces, especially in Washington, had long been accustomed to the ridicule of the well-born, the well-connected, and the self-contented—the people Congressman Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota called “sporty” and the WCTU characterized as “so-called respectable.” As far back as the 1870s, when “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes was First Lady and presided over a dry White House, the bemused secretary of state, William M. Evarts, said that at state dinners “the water flowed like champagne.” But by the time Bryan resigned as secretary of state in 1915 to express his disagreement with Wilson’s increasingly belligerent policy toward Germany, ridicule and mockery bore a puny sting. The dry movement was cresting, and Bryan—three times defeated for the presidency, more than twenty years removed from Congress, now exiled from the cabinet—threw himself into it.
The campaign he joined was by this point firmly under the control of the Anti-Saloon league. The ASL’s assiduous attention to Congress had made wet politicians wobble, uncertain politicians sprint for dry shelter, and dry politicians flex
their biceps. Heading toward the 1916 elections, the league’s grassroots activities suggested that each of these tendencies would soon be amplified. The forty tons a month of printed matter that had poured from the league’s Westerville printing plant in 1912 had grown to ten tons a day. Threatened by dry boycotts, the New York Tribune, the Chicago Herald, and the Boston Record, among other papers, had ceased accepting liquor ads. In some states, polling lists were dissected and scrutinized by “Captains of Ten,” each captain charged with determining the wetness or dryness of all ten voters on his or her list. In Illinois ASL leaders claimed that the system enabled them to acquire data on every voter in the state. Nationwide, league expenditures approached the 2009 equivalent of $50 million annually. ASL founder Howard Hyde Russell, long removed from daily management of the organization, was, he said, “engaged almost continuously in holding luncheon-meetings for manufacturers, business and professional men,” and in 1916 alone raised money for the amendment campaign in more than a hundred cities. That was probably more productive, if less entertaining, than the “water wagon tour” he led the year before, a cross-country automotive caravan on the Lincoln Highway, complete with male vocal quartet.
The core unit of both the political effort and the fund-raising apparatus was the league’s massive speakers’ operation, which by the late stages of the amendment campaign had more than twenty thousand trained lecturers ready to deliver the ASL gospel and to reap the ASL tithe (by policy, the ASL would not provide organizations with a speaker to explain the former if he was not allowed to solicit the latter). Promotional materials enumerated the qualities of each speaker: Ira Landrith, an Ohio leaflet indicated, was “the peer of any man on the American platform,” whereas L. J. Taber “appeals especially to farmers, although capable of addressing Opera House Audiences.” As different as they might have been, both the peerless Landrith and the capable Taber, like all the league’s envoys, were urged to follow the ASL’s formal “Suggestions to Speakers,” which explained in minutest detail when to arrive, where to stand, where to position ushers with the collection trays, how long to talk, and when to make the financial pitch. “Do not beg,” speakers were admonished. Instead, make the audience “feel that it is a privilege to have a part in the great fight.”
Presumably these directives were not imposed on the league’s stars, its so-called honorarium men—the highly paid speakers who drew the largest audiences and could raise the largest sums. The honorarium speakers were generally the driest of the congressional drys, men like Senator Wesley L. Jones of Washington and Representative Alben Barkley of Kentucky (who would become Harry Truman’s vice president in 1949). The biggest draws, however, were two men no longer in public office, Bryan and Hobson. Untethered from the Wilson administration, Bryan used the ASL circuit both to serve the cause and to maintain his presence in the national arena. In a single week in 1915, delivering an average of ten speeches a day, he addressed more than a quarter million Ohioans. In Ann Arbor five thousand students turned out to see him; in Philadelphia he demonstrated a new piece of histrionic business before an audience of twenty thousand when he fell to his knees and begged the assembled to pledge total abstinence. “It is a little easy to laugh at Mr. Bryan for doing things like this in times like these,” the New Republic said. “It is even a little hard not to.” But more than twelve thousand Philadelphians took up his pledge.
Bryan’s lecture agent for the Chautauqua circuit, Charles F. Horner, advised his client to continue to devote “a great deal of attention to the prohibition proposition”; this was what audiences wanted. In one year the ASL alone paid Bryan $11,000 to take his righteous thunder to the dry masses—in 2009 terms, roughly $135,000. But this was easily topped by Hobson, who averaged $19,000 (more than $200,000 in 2009 dollars) during the eleven years he spent on the road for the ASL. His early fame and his years declaiming his “Great Destroyer” speech (and distributing it, too—he estimated he had handed out more than two million copies) had made him a proven draw; the prominence he had acquired through his eponymous amendment magnified his appeal. Hobson was negotiating fees with the ASL and the WCTU barely two weeks after the 1914 vote on his amendment, during his last weeks in Congress, and soon he was back on the sawdust trail with an updated version of “The Great Destroyer.” he gave eighty-three speeches for the ASL in a single summer and continued at such a pace that his wife complained to league management. “His strength and health mean nothing to you but they mean everything to me,” she wrote. She also thought it was dangerous for “a man of his national reputation” to give speeches “on street corners after dark.”
It was no doubt a relief to Mrs. Hobson when her husband was unable to come to terms with the WCTU. Anna Gordon—the political, spiritual, and legal heir to Frances Willard—saw proof of her once-powerful organization’s waning influence in the behavior of her own members, who now gave their cash and their pledges to the ASL. “[We] lack the funds to push work we call on them to do,” she told Hobson, and therefore the WTCU had to decline his offer of services. You could hear Gordon’s sigh in the ensuing sentence: “The Anti-Saloon League has money.”
DRY HISTORIANS AND PUBLICISTS generally tiptoe around Richmond Hobson. There are plenty of reasons: the sometimes absurd theatricality; the righteousness worn not just as a cloak but as a banner; the speeches saturated in the melodramatic nonsense typical of Mary Hunt’s Scientific Temperance Instruction, which he had been fed while at the Naval Academy (“If both parents are alcoholics, one child out of every seven will be born deformed and will be incurable”). One ASL officer told Peter Odegard, the first serious scholar to write about the league, that “on Hobson’s first visit [to a particular town] he was worth more than they paid him as a subscription getter; that on his second he was probably worth his salary, but that if he spoke a third time in the same place, he positively did damage to the temperance cause.”
His skills as a political strategist, however, were keen. This was demonstrated most vividly in the letter he sent in March 1915 to Ernest H. Cherrington, the man who ran the ASL’s vast publishing efforts. “We must not let liquor [interests] fight off submission beyond the reapportionment of 1920,” Hobson wrote. “We must put over submission of the amendment next year.” Hobson had recognized the tremors of a vast demographic shift that would transform the nation. In 1910, 46 percent of Americans lived in cities. Continuing immigration, the prolific birthrates of the largest immigrant groups, and the accelerating flight from the farms to the cities meant that by 1920 the urban population was almost certain to be a majority. After the constitutionally mandated decennial census, congressional districts would be redrawn, with results that could be catastrophic for the drys.
Cherrington was the worldliest and the most emotionally moderate member of the ASL’s leadership. He genuinely believed that the solution to the nation’s drinking problems lay not in coercion but in education. But he also believed that “when the great cities of America actually come to dominate the state and dictate the policies of the nation, the process of decay in our boasted American civilization will have begun.” Less than two weeks after hearing from Hobson, Cherrington sent a letter to James Cannon Jr., chairman of the ASL’s committee on constitutional revision. If the Eighteenth Amendment didn’t pass the House of Representatives by 1920, Cherrington explained, “it will then be possible to re-district the states so as to absolutely insure for the liquor forces more than one-third” of the House. In any subsequent reapportionment, the rural/urban balance and the native-born/foreign-born balance would only tilt further toward the wets. “One thing is sure,” Cherrington continued. “If we are to save the situation so far as the Congress to be elected in 1916 is concerned, the work must be done at once or it will be too late.”
By election day that year, the ASL’s leadership, its publicists, and its fifty thousand lecturers and fund-raisers and vote counters on the front lines had completed their work. Two years earlier, terrified members of the House Judiciary Committee had
been unwilling even to take a vote on the Hobson Amendment. Now the ASL had responded to what Wheeler considered the primary lesson he’d learned during his early battles with Mark Hanna: the need to “make it safe for a candidate to be dry.” While the rest of the nation remained in suspense as the votes in the 1916 presidential balloting were counted in California—the state’s thirteen electoral votes would reelect Wilson—the managers of the Anti-Saloon League slept comfortably.
“We knew late election night that we had won,” Wheeler would recall a decade later. The league, he wrote, had “laid down such a barrage as candidates for Congress had never seen before and such as they will, in all likelihood, not see again for years to come.” Every wet measure on every statewide ballot was defeated. Four more states had voted themselves dry, including Michigan, the first northern industrial state to make the leap. Some form of dry law was now on the books in twenty-three states. And Wheeler wrote, “We knew that the Prohibition amendment would be submitted to the States by the Congress just elected.”
* Not that he was particularly enlightened about women in general: Hobson thought that any woman who experienced carnal desire was a “sex pervert,” and attributed promiscuity to the effects of alcohol. He wasn’t crazy about sexual urges in men, either, but accepted their evolutionary necessity.
** On August 13, 1906, two white men were shot, one fatally, in Brownsville, Texas. Soldiers in the all-black 25th U.S. infantry regiment, billeted in nearby Fort Brown, were held responsible, despite the lack of reliable incriminating evidence and the existence of much that was exculpatory. The soldiers, unable to tell investigators who might have been responsible for the shootings, were ordered dishonorably discharged by President Roosevelt, without trial, for their putative failure to cooperate. In 1972 Richard M. Nixon ordered honorable discharges entered into the military records of all of the accused men.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 11
