by Philipp Blom
On October 22, thirty thousand blackshirts marched on Rome. Portrayed by press photographers as a charismatic leader at the head of his troops, Mussolini in fact stayed behind, watching the risky progress from afar. Power was within reach, and it was all he wanted. In Naples two days later, he intoned in front of a crowd of sixty thousand people: “Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy.”21
·1920·
Moonshine Nation
The term “War Prohibitions Act” used in this Act shall mean the provisions of any Act or Acts prohibiting the sale and manufacture of intoxicating liquors until the conclusion of the present war and thereafter until the termination of demobilization, the date of which shall be determined and proclaimed by the President of the United States.
—National Prohibition Act, 1919
ON JANUARY 16, 1920, IN NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, A BOISTEROUS FUNERAL cortège could be seen wending its noisy way through the streets. The funeral had been organized by the Rev. Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player turned exuberant revivalist preacher, and the corpse the ten thousand revelers were burying was twenty feet long—an individual by the name of John Barleycorn. In towns throughout America, similar funerals were taking place, with thousands of similar churchgoers rejoicing at John Barleycorn’s demise.
Billy Sunday had named the enormous effigy after Jack London’s 1913 John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs, in which the author had described the ruination of his life of wealth and celebrity through his addiction to hard liquor. This tale of spiritual redemption was already a staple of publishing in the United States.
On the same day, in communities of a different stamp, less joyful mock funerals were also being held. Guests at Maxim’s and other expensive New York restaurants downed their last glasses sorrowfully, while at the famous Reisenweber’s cabaret café on Columbus Circle, every lady making an appearance at “the grave of drink” was presented with a powder compact in the shape of a coffin.
Ordinary folk by the hundreds of thousands were transporting bottles of alcohol in cars, grocery carts, and even babies’ carriages, while several more hundred thousand eager drinkers stood at their doorsteps peering anxiously out, waiting for them to arrive with the merchandise. While half the country celebrated, it seemed, the other half mourned and cursed. As midnight approached, the church bells began tolling; at the stroke of twelve, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution came into effect, banning the sale, manufacture, import, or export of “intoxicating liquors,” and with it the Volstead Act, enforcing the provisions of the amendment. Prohibition had begun: America was officially dry.
An American Culture War
PROHIBITION HAD BEEN FOUGHT and argued over for decades. The demon drink was guilty of most social evils, said its sworn enemies, the “drys,” and they had a point. Particularly among working-class families, men commonly drank away the better part of their meager wages on payday. When they came back from the saloon, many of them would vent their anger on their families. Alcohol was a social issue that made allies of suffragettes, social conservatives, socialists, fundamentalist preachers, and even the Ku Klux Klan. Billy Sunday had campaigned tirelessly against the evils of alcohol. “The saloon is the sum of all villainies,” he had preached. “It is worse than war or pestilence. It is the crime of crimes. It is the parent of crimes and the mother of sins. It is the appalling source of misery and crime in the land. And to licence such an incarnate fiend of hell is the dirtiest, lowdown, damnable business on top of this old earth. There is nothing to be compared to it.”1
But drunkenness, domestic violence, poverty, and public order were not the most important issues in the fight against drinking. The real front line in this war ran between small-town rural America and the big cities, and between old and recent immigrants. It was a battle for the soul of America.
The chief ideologues of Prohibition came from the more rural areas and were strongly supported by the evangelical churches. To a large extent, such as in the case of the crusading Billy Sunday himself, this was an older wave of immigrants and their first-generation American families—many of them farming people, pioneers with strong Protestant communities in the prairie states—against new arrivals from Italy, Germany, Ireland, and Central Europe who settled in the large cities, who were often Catholic, and for whom alcohol was part of everyday life. The great campaign for renewed morality was old America fighting new America, rural America fighting urban life, the nineteenth century fighting the twentieth. It was also to some extent a case of Protestant America fighting Catholic and Jewish America, though not on religious grounds. If the breweries were monopolized by families of German origin, the distilleries were largely controlled by Jews. Prohibitionist Arkansas congressman John Newton Tillman, addressing the House of Representatives in 1917, had listed the names of important figures in the liquor business—Steinberg, Schaumberg, Hirschbaum, and so on—and confidently declared: “I am not attacking an American institution. I am attacking mainly a foreign enterprise.”2 Tillman had been happy to overlook the contribution of the Virginia-born George Washington himself to the “mainly foreign” industry: the first president’s distillery can still be seen today, in excellent working condition, at his Mount Vernon estate.
The decisive push for the dry movement, however, came only with the war, as wartime prohibition laws were seen as a patriotic measure protecting the troops by reserving grain for bread and keeping soldiers and workers sober in the service of their country. As America was fighting the kaiser and his beer-swilling hordes, many of those producing America’s booze could be portrayed as unpatriotic, as could their products. “Brewery products fill refrigerator cars, while potatoes rot for lack of transportation, bankrupting farmers and starving cities. The coal that they consume would keep the railroads open and the factories running. Pro-Germanism is only the froth from the German beer-saloon. . . . Total abstinence is the impassable curtain barrage which we must lay before every trench. Sobriety is the bomb that will blow kaiserism to kingdom come,” proclaimed the superintendent of the Wisconsin Anti-Saloon League.3 If you were drinking, you were drinking with the enemy.
During the war, the role of government itself had changed. Income tax and conscription had been introduced, and the gargantuan task of organizing wartime supplies, production, and logistics had been taken over by central government agencies. In this climate of government control and patriotic fervor, the Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1917 and ratified in 1919 without encountering significant opposition. It was as if America had gone dry almost without noticing.
Early Optimism
PROPONENTS WERE CERTAIN that Prohibition would bring universal happiness with very little fuss. “There will not be any violations to speak of,” opined New York’s supervising revenue officer, and prominent dry politicians and campaigners agreed wholeheartedly.
It wasn’t quite that easy. Perhaps out of complacency or perhaps out of a lack of political will, from the very beginning the Bureau of Prohibition was woefully underfunded and understaffed. Fifteen hundred officers were supposed to police the entire territory of the United States, including the coastline and the longest land border in the world—the 5,525-mile border with Canada. In addition, the fact that the agents were paid between $1,200 and $2,000 per year, worse than garbagemen, was a virtual guarantee that many of them could be persuaded to look the other way if encouraged with discreet donations.
To make matters worse, the law supposed to make the Eighteenth Amendment enforceable, the Volstead Act, sported a panoply of interesting exceptions and compromises that were soon exploited. Alcohol was allowed to be produced and sold for industrial, medical, and ritual purposes. In consequence, industrial ethyl alcohol was sold in ever-greater quantities, and when the government began adding lethal methyl alcohol to make it undrinkable and people died, the authorities were accused of being complicit in murder.
Doctors and apothecaries, on the other hand, found Prohibition a boon. Soon some three hundred thousand prescri
ptions for whisky were being issued every year, and one doctor estimated that his colleagues made roughly $40 million annually out of this new medical need. Wine producers experienced a similar blessing, as orders for communion wine skyrocketed, even if very little of it ever reached an altar. Inventive grape growers also offered thickened grape juice for home consumption; the sweet liquid might accidentally begin to ferment if left unguarded for too long.
Home brewing became a hugely popular pastime as well as a useful second income for countless families. A popular jingle of the period paints the picture neatly:
Mother’s in the kitchen, washing out the jugs
Sister’s in the pantry, bottling the suds
Father’s in the cellar, mixing up the hops
Johnny’s on the front porch, watching for the cops.
In 1921, 95,933 illicit distilleries, fermenters, and other moonshine installations were seized by the overworked authorities; by 1930, this number had almost trebled. In the same year, some forty million gallons of spirits, malt liquor, wine, cider, and other alcoholic beverages were also seized—the tip of an enormous alcohol iceberg. (The Russian experience had been similar: less than a year after the tsar’s 1914 decree banning the sale of vodka “forever” in the Russian Empire, tens of thousands of illegal distilleries had started up.)
In addition to home production, liquor smuggling, known as “bootlegging,” became increasingly lucrative and professionalized, the single most important factor in the growth of organized crime. Imports of whisky into Canada quadrupled after 1920, despite the fact that home consumption of whisky remained constant. Along a border that had too few agents for too much difficult and lonely terrain, smuggling booze was almost too easy. According to General Lincoln C. Andrews, assistant secretary of the treasury in charge of enforcing the Prohibition laws, his agents succeeded in intercepting only about 5 percent of the smuggled liquor.
Prohibition proved to be a farce, and a costly one. Soon a wave of prosecutions overwhelmed the courts; by 1929, half a million arrests had been made under the Volstead Act, and the prison population had swollen to double the capacity the prisons had been built for. Even a draconian five-year prison term plus a $10,000 fine for first offenses did not improve compliance. Average Americans simply did not want Prohibition.
As the saloon went the way of the dinosaur, a new kind of establishment opened its doors throughout the cities: discreet establishments behind the façade of restaurants, hairdressers’ salons, or other shops. Thirsty members of the public would first undergo inspection and then would be ushered into these “speakeasies,” where no wish would remain unfulfilled. Soon this arrangement was so ubiquitous that a journalist suggested that the entire history of the United States could be summed up in eleven words: “Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, Two flights up and ask for Gus.”4
The threat of arrest was always present, but it only served to add spice to the already lively entertainments offered in the speakeasies. Illegality was a kick, and it changed the interaction between customers. While drinking establishments had previously been a purely male domain, speakeasies also welcomed women, who would then not only drink but also smoke cigarettes, listen to jazz, and dance, sometimes with men of a different race. If convention outside these walls was against it, it simply had to be fun. In the speakeasies, millions of Americans of all classes discovered a new freedom of manners and a casual disregard for social conventions and for the law.
Mob Rule
LEGIONS OF POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS encouraged “businessmen” willing to satisfy the huge and obvious need without the sanction of government. The most famous of them advertised himself as a used furniture salesman. His name was Alphonse Capone, and he had set up shop in Chicago. Like others in the same line of work, Capone was alive to the hypocrisy of the system. “I make my money by supplying a public demand,” he commented. “If I break the law, my customers, who number hundreds of the best people in Chicago, are as guilty as I am. The only difference between us is that I sell and they buy. Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a business man. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”5
The spoils of this illegal trade were enormous. At the height of his success, Capone was earning between $60 million and $100 million a year from beer sales alone. In addition to this were hard liquor, gambling, and other lucrative business opportunities. As a good businessman, Capone sought to reinvest and diversify. Rackets forced owners of laundries and other businesses to buy protection from gangsters. Those who refused would be clubbed senseless or would find their businesses bombed or burned down and their staff assaulted. In some cases they were simply killed. In Chicago, the “bakers, barbers, electrical workers, garage men, shoe repairers, plumbers, garbage haulers, window cleaners, milk salesmen, confectionary dealers and undertakers” were all paying protection; any customer having his trousers pressed in a laundry was effectively paying fifty cents per pair to the Mafia.6
In the face of such immense commercial opportunities, Capone and the six hundred faithful associates who lent their fists, sawed-off shotguns, pistols, Thompson machine guns (or “Tommy guns”), sand-filled socks, brass knuckles, and switchblades to his service had to contend with stiff competition from other businessmen, who were invariably organized according to whichever of the great recent urban immigrant populations they belonged to: Sicilian, Irish, or Jewish. Soon Chicago alone counted about four hundred Mafia-related murders and a hundred bombings annually as the different gangs fought turf wars.
Where murders had once been cumbersome, requiring lethal skill, and getaways had been perilous and slow, hired killers wielding Tommy guns could now take their victims for a ride by luring them into cars or simply abducting them to be killed outside the city, where a body could be dumped by the roadside or encased in the concrete foundations of a new building whose contractor was almost certainly on the mob’s payroll. Alternatively, murderers could carry out a drive-by shooting, spraying the victim or the building in which he was suspected to be with a shower of bullets from the passing car, and then simply blending into the traffic.
The most famous of these gangland killings, however, was more artisanal in nature. Its victim, Dean O’Banion, “a connoisseur of orchids and of manslaughter,” was by day a florist and by night a bootlegger who had more than twenty kills to his name and whose operation cut painfully into Capone’s profits. O’Banion always carried three guns, but on one occasion when three men he obviously knew came into his flower shop, he trusted them well enough to shake the hand of one of them in greeting. The other man did not let go and clasped O’Banion’s hand while his two associates shot him repeatedly. What happened then is the stuff of Mafia legend, as Andrew Sinclair recounts: “O’Banion had a first-class funeral, gangster style: a ten-thousand-dollar casket, twenty-six truckloads of flowers, and among them a basket of flowers which bore the touching inscription ‘From Al.’”7
Chicago was only the most famous and most brazen of territories the Mafia carved out for itself during Prohibition as police and other law-enforcement agencies looked on, always a step behind, always underfunded, dogged by corruption, and plagued by a steady stream of resignations from the service as agents found that their meager pay was not worth risking their lives for. The other side, by contrast, always had plenty of new recruits, new weapons, and new cars. Similar stories could be told about other urban centers, such as New York and Atlantic City. Prohibition had produced a new class of criminal and had led millions of ordinary citizens to casually break the law.
How could a law that had initially passed with relatively little opposition and had even enjoyed a degree of popular support be so disastrous in its implementation? First of all, the times had changed. If the Eighteenth Amendment had been passed by Congress largely because of the high patriotic feeling during the war, this emotion had now been reversed. “Spartan idealism was collapsing,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen,
a brilliantly perceptive eyewitness of the period. “People were tired of girding their loins to serve noble causes. They were tired of making the United States a land fit for heroes to live in. They wanted to relax and be themselves.”8
But the opposition to Prohibition rested on more than just a wish to return to civilian life. It was caused by a deep suspicion of the motives of those moral guardians whose disciplined campaign had resulted in making America dry. In particular, the younger generation simply did not believe that their elders had the moral authority to force them to do anything. “The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us,” wrote John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly. “They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the [eighteen-]eighties.”9
But it was not only the bitter disappointment and the cynicism of a generation who found that the ideals they had been brought up with had been little more than wartime propaganda. Prohibition was also the expression of a culture war that divided the United States and, to a lesser extent, all Western countries, a war not only on alcohol but also on cigarettes, jazz, “degeneracy” and lax morals, young people and their “petting parties,” women’s short skirts and short hair, and close dancing. As early as 1914, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs had banned all forms of dancing that sounded too little like decent, traditional entertainment and too much like fun: “tango and the hesitation waltz . . . the gunny hog, turkey trot, Texas Tommy, hug-me-tight, fox trot, shimmy dance, sea-gull swoop, camel walk, and skunk waltz.”10
