One Summer: America, 1927 Read online

  Though the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition a legal reality by outlawing intoxicating drinks, it didn’t define how it would work or even indicate what was or was not an intoxicant. That required an additional piece of legislation, known as the Volstead Act, to deal with the details. The act was named for Andrew J. Volstead, a Minnesotan like Lindbergh, whose principal distinguishing feature was a spectacular mustache that hung from his upper lip like a bearskin rug. Though a nondrinker himself, Volstead was no zealot and would never have sought a national ban on alcohol. His name became attached to the legislation simply because he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and therefore required to draft it. Although Volstead’s name rang through the decade, he himself was thrown out by the electorate at the next election, and he returned to his hometown of Granite Falls, Minnesota, where he quietly practiced law and listed his principal hobby as reading the Congressional Record. Wayne Wheeler always claimed that he himself really designed and wrote the legislation, an assertion heatedly disputed by Volstead, though why either would want credit for the act is a reasonable question because it proved to be a strikingly ill-constructed bill.

  The Volstead Act was introduced to Congress on May 19, 1919. Its intentions, stated succinctly in a preamble, didn’t seem too alarming: “To prohibit intoxicating beverages, and to regulate the manufacture, production, use, and sale of high-proof spirits for other than beverage purposes, and to insure an ample supply of alcohol and promote its use in scientific research and in the development of fuel, dye and other lawful industries.” The phrasing may have been a little ungainly, but the sentiment didn’t seem too threatening. It was only in the fine print that the world discovered that the Volstead Act defined intoxicating liquor as anything with an alcoholic content greater than 0.5 percent—about the same level as sauerkraut. Many of those who had supported the Prohibition amendment had assumed that beer and unfortified wines would be spared. It was only now that it began to dawn on people just how sweeping—how dismayingly total—Prohibition was going to be.

  That was perhaps the most remarkable feature of all in the introduction of Prohibition to America—that it took so many people by surprise. As the social historian Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only Yesterday: “The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.”

  Prohibition was so flawed, and in so many ways, that even many of those who supported it in principle were appalled by how it developed in practice. For a start, it introduced an entirely new level of danger to American life. The national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced. Being a Prohibition agent was dangerous—in the first two and a half years of Prohibition thirty agents were killed on the job—but being in the vicinity of agents was often dangerous, too, for they frequently proved to be trigger-happy. In Chicago alone, Prohibition agents gunned down twenty-three innocent civilians in just over a decade.

  Despite the hazards, Prohibition agents were paid less than garbage-men, which all but invited corruption. A common ruse was for agents to confiscate liquor, then immediately sell it back to the original owners. Bribery was routine. The average speakeasy paid out about $400 a month to police and city officials, which worked out to about $150 million a year in bribes in New York City alone. In short, a lot of people made a lot of money from Prohibition.

  The temptations of corruption extended far beyond American shores. Canada, under pressure from the United States, made it all but impossible for its brewers and distillers to sell their products to Americans, but smugglers, ever resourceful, found an alternative in the form of the little-known territory of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, just off the southern tip of Newfoundland. Through an accident of history, these “two dots of gorse and granite” in the North Atlantic had belonged to France since 1763 and so were outside American and Canadian jurisdiction. Overnight, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon became the world’s greatest importer of alcoholic beverages. It brought in three million bottles of champagne, making it France’s biggest overseas market, along with vast quantities of brandy, Armagnac, calvados, and other spirituous refreshments.

  When asked by American authorities to explain how four thousand people had developed such a sudden attachment to alcohol, the governor replied, with Gallic aplomb, that he was unaware of any significant rise in alcohol imports and hadn’t noticed the two dozen large new warehouses that had sprung up around the main port at Saint-Pierre, but promised to look into the matter. Subsequently, he confirmed to the Americans that there was indeed a little wine on Saint-Pierre and Miquelon now, but it was all bound for the Bahamas, where drinking was legal. It was apparently just resting in Saint-Pierre.

  Prohibition bred great volumes of hypocrisy, too. In the summer of 1926, Colonel Ned Green, Prohibition administrator for Northern California, was suspended after it emerged that he held cocktail parties in the Prohibition administration offices in San Francisco. “I should have been suspended long ago,” he amiably told reporters.

  Even when the government seized illicit liquor, it didn’t look after it terribly vigilantly. In Chicago, in the summer of 1920, 134,000 gallons of whiskey—670,000 bottles—vanished from a warehouse where it was being stored following seizure. The nightwatchmen in charge professed—not altogether convincingly, it must be said—that they had not noticed anything amiss at any point in their recent shifts. Nationally, records showed that of 50 million gallons of whiskey held in government warehouses at the start of Prohibition, two-thirds was missing at the end of Prohibition in 1933.

  Prohibition laws were nearly impossible to enforce in any case because they were so riddled with loopholes. Doctors could legally prescribe whiskey for their patients, and they did so with such enthusiasm that by the late 1920s they were earning $40 million a year from the practice. In most cases, according to The New Yorker, the doctors simply handed out blank prescription slips. (In the week that Lindbergh flew to Paris, U.S. Prohibition commissioner James M. Doran authorized the production of an additional three million gallons of whiskey for medicine. When it was suggested that that was a lot of whiskey for such a narrow purpose, a Treasury official replied that stocks were rapidly depleted “from evaporation.”)

  Religious groups were allowed to stock alcoholic beverages for sacramental purposes, and that market proved remarkably robust, too. One winegrower in California offered fourteen types of communion wines, including port and sherry, suggesting that perhaps not all were intended to be wholly holy, as it were. In California the amount of land given over to growing grapes actually soared in the first five years of Prohibition, from 100,000 acres to nearly 700,000, and that wasn’t because people were suddenly eating a lot of raisins. It was because no wine was being imported, so there was a surge in demand for domestic grapes to satisfy a booming market.

  Although it was illegal to produce wine for private consumption, vineyard owners could send out packets of grape concentrate, which could be turned into wine at home. In case anyone missed the point, the packets came with warnings in large type that read: “Caution: Will Ferment and Turn into Wine Within 60 Days.” Unfortunately, for lovers of fine wine, grape growers grubbed up most of their existing vines and put in grapes that provided bulk but not quality. It would take California vineyards a generation to recover.

  The loss of liquor sales hit many restaurants hard. In New York the casualties included Shanley’s, Rector’s, Sherry’s, and Browne’s Chop House—all beloved institutions. Delmonico’s, the most venerable of all, held out until 1923 before finally throwing in the towel just short of its hundredth birthday. For the most part drinking was driven to speakeasies (a term that originated in the United States as far back as 1889, when it described any place that sold booze illegally). These establishments made up in imaginative naming what they generally lacked in elegance. Among the better-known spots were the Hyena Club, the Furnace, the Ha! Ha!, the Eugenic Club, the Sawdust Inn, and the Club Pansy. For those who liked music with their drinks, Harlem was the place to go. Ther
e people flocked to the Bamboo Inn, the Lenox Club, the Clam House, Small’s Paradise, Tillie’s Chicken Shack, the Cotton Club, and the memorably named Drool Inn, among many others. Sunday night was the biggest night. Patrons could experience some of the best and most original music performed by a galaxy of talents—Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Eubie Blake, Bessie Smith, Bill Basie (who would later become Count Basie), Louis Armstrong, and many, many more. Several Harlem clubs admitted whites only. The only blacks in the house were waiters and entertainers. The cover charges in the most popular places could be as much as $20—close to a week’s wages for an average working person—and a couple of rounds of drinks could easily add as much again.

  Attempts at enforcement were sporadic at best, but occasionally some authority or other would get serious about it. In March 1925, Emory Buckner, a successful lawyer, became Prohibition enforcer in New York and hit upon a new strategy that for a time struck a chill into the hearts of drinking people and those who supplied them.

  Buckner inaugurated a policy of padlocking any premises found to be in violation of the Volstead Act. The law allowed him to shut such premises for a year without going to court. So now, instead of arresting a few hapless and expendable waiters and bartenders, as generally had been the case before, it was possible to hit the owners themselves where it most hurt, on their balance sheets. Buckner announced plans to shut down a thousand establishments in New York, and he started with the most famous and visible places like the El Fay Club, owned by racketeer Larry Flynn, run by former film actress Texas Guinan, and Owney Madden’s Silver Slipper. This was a direct attack on the city’s more sophisticated drinkers, and they reacted with something approaching panic.

  Happily for the clubs, the crisis proved to be temporary. Prohibition was much too lucrative to be easily defeated. At least one club used the padlocking as a cover; it left its front entrance sealed and welcomed customers back through a more humble entrance at the rear. Others simply moved to new premises with different names, so that the El Fay Club became successively the Del Fay Club, Fay’s Follies, Club Intime, Club Abbey, the Salon Royal, and the Three Hundred Club—though generally they were all known as Texas Guinan’s after their celebrated proprietress. Guinan was a slightly larger-than-life character. Originally from Waco, she was forty-three years old in 1927 and of a fair size, with platinum hair and a great toothy smile. It was her custom to insult her customers, especially if they weren’t spending freely, and she was much loved for it. Her catchphrase was: “Hello, sucker.” Most of her clubs were small and packed. The girl dancers were frequently all but naked and often appallingly youthful. Ruby Keeler started at Tex Guinan’s when she was just fourteen and left three years later to marry Al Jolson—who was, like many another, smitten with her trim figure and slight but fetching lisp. Another Guinan dancer, Ruby Stevens, became better known later as Barbara Stanwyck.

  Guinan acted as master of ceremonies. She loved her girls but didn’t take their talents too seriously. “Now this little gal isn’t much of a singer,” she would say. “She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she’s the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand.” (“Giving a big hand” was said to be another Guinan coinage.) So celebrated did Guinan become for being padlocked that the theatrical managers the Shubert brothers starred her in a Broadway revue called Padlocks of 1927.

  Since clubs might be shut down at any moment, the minimum amount of money was spent on comforts and décor. Customers didn’t seem to mind as long as they could get a decent drink. For more public and rooted places like hotels, the options were far fewer. The bar in the Knickerbocker Hotel (reputed birthplace of the dry martini) took in $4,000 a day before Prohibition, a sum not easily replaced. Without its bar takings, the Knickerbocker went under. So, too, did the Manhattan Hotel, where the Manhattan cocktail was first created. Some hotels tried to survive by offering what were known as “setups”—ice, seltzer, Angostura bitters, and so on—to which the customer could add his own alcohol, but that hardly compensated for all the lost liquor business. Others continued selling alcohol discreetly in the hope that it would somehow escape official notice. Sooner or later they were nearly always disappointed.

  In March 1926, Buckner padlocked the dining room of the Hotel Brevoort for six months. That meant that it lost not only all its liquor revenue but also its luncheon and dinner business. It couldn’t even serve its guests breakfast, so many clients abandoned it altogether. Eventually, Raymond Orteig succumbed and closed the Brevoort.

  Buckner’s padlocking policy caught on and was employed all over the country, including on a redwood tree in California in which was found an illegal still (though this sounds suspiciously like a publicity stunt). Altogether in 1925, the peak year, authorities padlocked some 4,700 premises across America.

  Interestingly, Buckner didn’t actually believe in Prohibition and admitted that he enforced it because it was the law and not out of any moral conviction. “I am not very much interested in it, except as a legal problem,” he explained. He made no secret of the fact that he had often imbibed drink himself (though not since being appointed district attorney). The whole thing was a terrible mistake, in his view. “It has brought about a vicious criminal situation, with its offshoots of perjury, murders, the moral poisoning of public officials, assaults, thefts and all manner of interrelated lawbreaking. All the good which the law may produce is worthless compared to the chain of serious crimes which it is producing every day.”

  Nearly everyone recognized Prohibition as a colossal failure, and yet the nation persevered with it for thirteen years. A poem in Franklin Pierce Adams’s popular newspaper column “The Conning Tower” in the New York World perfectly caught the official attitude:

  Prohibition is an awful flop.

  We like it.

  It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.

  We like it.

  It’s left a trail of graft and slime,

  It’s filled our land with vice and crime,

  It don’t prohibit worth a dime,

  Nevertheless, we’re for it.

  It was in fact because Prohibition wasn’t working very well that Wheeler and his supporters insisted that the government poison industrial alcohol. Other denaturants such as soap or detergents would have worked just as well at making drinks unpalatable, but hard-core drys weren’t satisfied with that. Wheeler sincerely believed that people who drank poisoned alcohol got what they deserved. It was, in his view, “deliberate suicide.” The Reverend John Roach Straton, last seen here hoping for the speedy execution of Ruth Snyder, was even more unyielding. When he learned that the governor and the attorney general of Indiana had both given small doses of whiskey to desperately ill loved ones on doctor’s orders, Straton declared: “They should have permitted the members of their family to die, and have died themselves, rather than violate their oaths of office.”

  In June 1927, Prohibition seemed set to endure forever. In fact, it was about to have a turning point. Though there was no sign of it quite yet, for Wayne Wheeler the summer of 1927 would prove to be both the worst summer of his life and the last one.

  * * *

  * The force was later increased slightly, but at no point exceeded 2,300 agents.

  13

  After presenting Charles Lindbergh with his Distinguished Flying Cross in Washington on June 11, Calvin Coolidge didn’t hang around. As soon as he could decently get away, he went with Mrs. Coolidge to Union Station, where a special train was waiting to take them and a small army of reporters and presidential staff—some seventy-five people in all, along with two collies and a pet raccoon named Rebecca—to South Dakota for a long summer vacation. Coolidge suffered from chronic indigestion and asthma, which left him eager to flee muggy Washington for clean western air. It was the first time that the White House had decamped to such a distant spot.

  In effect, the seat of government of the United States for the next thre
e months would be Rapid City High School. The Coolidges themselves, however, were to be based thirty-two miles away at a residence called the State Game Lodge at the foot of Mount Harney in Custer State Park. “State Game Lodge” sounds rather grand, but the Coolidges’ accommodation was in fact just a sitting room and bedroom, with a bathroom down the hall. They didn’t mind in the least. It was a simpler age.

  President Coolidge delighted in seeing himself in newsreels. Because he did not reach the game lodge until after dusk, the next morning he had the whole presidential party—now grown to some two hundred people with the addition of local officials and support staff—reload every bag and suitcase into cars, drive two hundred yards down the road, and reenact the presidential arrival as the cameras recorded the fictitiously historic moment.

  For the state of South Dakota, the president’s presence was a very big deal. The state desperately wanted to be perceived as an attractive destination for tourists. The thought occurred to someone that if the president was seen to be enjoying himself fishing in South Dakota’s sparkling waters, then other anglers might be tempted to travel there as well. To make sure the exercise was a success, two thousand full-grown trout were sent from the state trout hatchery at Spearfish. These trout—all large, sluggish, and hand-fed from birth—were secretly confined to a placid stretch of stream outside the Coolidge residence by submerged nets strung strategically between the banks. To his hosts’ dismay Coolidge declared that he had no interest in fishing. Eventually he was persuaded to give it a try. Dressed in a business suit, he dipped a baited rod in the water. Instantly the starving fish erupted in a silvery frenzy around the hook, and a moment later Coolidge lifted a wriggling prize from the water. He beamed from ear to ear and could barely be coaxed away from the stream after that. He and Mrs. Coolidge dined proudly on his caught trout daily even though they were, by all accounts, almost inedible. Coolidge didn’t like dealing with worms, however, and had his Secret Service men bait his fish hook for him. Apart from the worms, he was immensely happy.