Eight Million Sots in the Naked City

How Prohibition was imposed on, and rejected by, New York

Jackson Kuhl from the November 2007 issue

Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A. Lerner, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 351 pages, $28.95

The Diary of a Rum-Runner, by Alastair Moray, Mystic: Flat Hammock Press, 193 pages, $16.95

Smugglers of Spirits: Prohibition and the Coast Guard Patrol, by Harold Waters, Mystic: Flat Hammock Press, 186 pages, $16.95

During Prohibition an off-Broadway restaurateur smuggled liquor for his patrons’ enjoyment. He and several others would purchase the illegal hooch from a collection of offshore ships called Rum Row. Back on land, the men would pack the cases into a furniture-moving van and drive to a garage just outside New York. There they would wait until dawn, when fewer witnesses were about, to bring the booze into the city.

One day the men arrived at the garage and learned that revenue agents (the Bureau of Prohibition was part of the Treasury Department) planned to raid it overnight. Having no other hideout, they immediately drove their cargo to its destination, parking on the busy street outside the restaurant at the height of the dinner rush.

“Well,” the restaurateur recalled, “just to let you see what our average citizen thinks of this Volstead Act, what happened was this. We handed the cases across the sidewalk, and every person supping inside helped pass them to the cellar by forming a chain.…We got every blessed one in without any interference, even with the traffic cop at the corner looking on.”

Such anecdotes are chock-a-block in a new collection of books on American Prohibition. At the forefront is the New York schoolteacher Michael A. Lerner’s absorbing Dry Manhattan, which explains how temperance, a notion completely alien to New York, was imposed on its citizens and then repudiated. Almost simultaneously, Flat Hammock Press has published half a dozen accounts of Prohibition rumrunning, most of them reprints from the late ’20s and ’30s. Several shed light on how liquor was smuggled into the Big Apple.

These books are welcome relief from a recent wave of revisionist rotgut. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s website proclaims that “Prohibition did work” (the DEA’s emphasis), while ignoring the ban’s effect on violent crime. This message has been more fully expressed by historians of American temperance such as K. Austin Kerr and Jack S. Blocker Jr. In a February 2006 article in the American Journal of Public Health, Blocker wrote, “The conventional view that National Prohibition failed rests upon an historically flimsy base.…The failure of National Prohibition continues to be cited without contradiction in debates over matters ranging from the proper scope of government action to specific issues such as control of other consciousness-altering drugs, smoking, and guns.”

It is strange that the temperance movement would attract such modern support, since Prohibition was always a WASP phenomenon driven by condescension and disgust toward working-class ethnic groups, Catholics, and Jews. It was this very snobbery that doomed Prohibition within the polyethnic pandemonium that comprised the five boroughs in the Prohibition era, as Lerner explains in Dry Manhattan.

The fact that aridity gained a toehold in New York at all was the result of the labors of one William H. Anderson. In 1914 the Anti-Saloon League transplanted Anderson, then state superintendent of its Maryland branch, to New York, where he aimed to turn both state and city dry. The league differed from most earlier temperance organizations in that it sought to force its will through political means rather than evangelization to the masses.

H.L. Mencken called Anderson “the vampire and hobgoblin of every bartender’s nightmare,” responsible for shuttering almost half of Baltimore’s taverns during his roaringly successful seven-year tenure. If Anderson could duplicate his successes in New York—the wettest of America’s 48 states—the league hoped 35 other dominoes would follow, giving them the necessary three-fourths to pass a constitutional amendment forever banning alcoholic beverages from the United States.

Anderson went to work fashioning coalitions with church groups and like-minded reformers. He hired people to spread lies about wet or moderately dry politicians, going so far as to forge letters of support to officials from liquor interests. He successfully gerrymandered the state through “local option,” trimming small cities away from their surrounding counties (the rural areas more likely to vote dry) and getting cities with populations of more than 50,000 to vote on Prohibition on a district-by-district basis. Anderson continually introduced other dry legislation, most of which didn’t pass but kept wets on the defensive.

Even so, the dry agenda, as successful as it was in the Midwest, would have never taken New York or even the country had it not been for the Great War. During World War I a large swath of the population that opposed Prohibition was silenced. The Anti-Saloon League accused German-American brewers of sabotage by wasting grain and intoxicating fighting-age men, Lerner notes, while “Irish Americans were criticized for opposing the U.S. alliance with Great Britain, and Southern Europeans
and Eastern European Jews drew suspicion for their perceived radicalism.” An anti-Catholic strain bubbled to the top of Anderson’s speeches as he denounced high-ranking clergymen as the traitorous tools of wet interests. In 1917 the Anti-Saloon League helped pass wartime measures that gave the federal government control over food and fuel, banning the use of grain for distillation and giving President Wilson the power to regulate beer and wine manufacture.

By Christmas 1917, Congress had approved the 18th Amendment, and on January 16, 1919, the 36th state—Nebraska—ratified it, making Prohibition part of the Constitution. New York followed less than two weeks later.

Yet the league found it had made a conquest it couldn’t defend. Enforcement became an immediate problem. Although the Bureau of Prohibition had more agents than the FBI, relatively little money was appropriated for it because drys assumed bureau agents would be assisted by state and local police. The league wanted to keep its tentacles buried within the government, so the Volstead Act, co-written by Rep. Andrew Volstead (R-Minn.) and league lawyer Wayne Wheeler, bypassed the civil service system.

Comments

Ska|10.26.07 @ 11:20AM|#

My favorite part of having a drink at Claudio's in Greenport is knowing that during prohibition the place was a warehouse for illegal booze. Prohibitionists drive me to drink.

|10.26.07 @ 11:56AM|#

Of foreign imports, an estimated two-thirds came over the border by land from Canada. The rest arrived via Rum Row, a flotilla of ships with holds full of hooch brought in from Canada, Britain, and elsewhere.

maple sucking, puck slapping rum runners...

BTW: Diary of a Rum Runner has been out of print for years. I would like to get a copy as it is part of local folklore where I live.

|10.26.07 @ 11:57AM|#

Fun informative posting! Thanks, Jackson.

|10.26.07 @ 11:58AM|#

Aresen, take a bow. BTW my maternal grandparents were Canucks.

The Rest Of The English Langua|10.26.07 @ 12:14PM|#

Fuck "chock-a-block."

dhex|10.26.07 @ 12:42PM|#

this was a very neat article!

Jackson Kuhl|10.26.07 @ 1:07PM|#

Aresen,

Findeth what you seek here.

I highly recommend it. There's a great series of entries regarding a flapper turned rum-runner, and Moray's capture of her jazz-age slang is alone worth the price.

VM|10.26.07 @ 1:18PM|#

"Of foreign imports, an estimated two-thirds came over the border by land from Canada. The rest arrived via Rum Row, a flotilla of ships with holds full of hooch brought in from Canada, Britain, and elsewhere. "

think: that scene in the Untouchables with the mounties (Aresen? Dief the Chief? Eddie Shore?) and KC's group - where Sean Connery shoots the dead guy - great scene!

Jackson - fantastic phrase, "flapper turned rum runner". love it!

|10.26.07 @ 2:06PM|#

I think prohibition failed because alcohol was already culturaly acceptable. The drug prohibitionists have successfully vilified drugs, because they cause death, insanity, and harm. Funny they have never tried to ban cars, those things cause 41,000 deaths in the US every year.

|10.26.07 @ 2:09PM|#

VM

In Canada, that scene from The Untouchables induced mass cringes in every theater in which it was shown.

For a parallel: Imagine a movie portrayal of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in which the American Seventh Cavalry* on horseback** commanded by George Patton* won the battle.***

*Not there.
**No longer used horses.
***Didn't happen.

VM|10.26.07 @ 2:19PM|#

Aresen-

no doubt!

actually, if I may suggest a different parallel (but Rommel's comments in the movie "Patton" certainly were spot on; and the similar scene in "The Big Red One" was also good!) -- I'd like to liken the cringe to any time Jar Jar was on screen!

Plus, had THE SHAT (NOT ALAN THICKE) been in charge, it would have been different!!!

Paul|10.26.07 @ 2:22PM|#

Sort of kind of thread jack (apologies in advance):

NPR claims that Prohibition works, too. Well, ok, not "Prohibition" but prohibition (small p).

Not once in the story do they make the connection with the drug war, leading one to ask the obvious questions regarding banning any illegal substance and addiction issues. If smoking bans work, then so must every other narcotic ban, no?

Paul|10.26.07 @ 2:26PM|#

Funny they have never tried to ban cars, those things cause 41,000 deaths in the US every year.

No kidding, gun violence only kills around 12,000.

|10.26.07 @ 2:44PM|#

"THE SHAT"

CRINGE

|10.26.07 @ 2:48PM|#

So the responsibility for all of the alcoholism in the United States can be placed at the feet of Canada, eh? The Canadian menace strikes again.

Thomas Paine\'s Goiter|10.26.07 @ 2:49PM|#

Anyone that hasn't should read The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol when they get a chance. It's surprisingly captivating.

Paul|10.26.07 @ 2:52PM|#

Anyone that hasn't should read The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol when they get a

I got the "spirits of America" in my living room every friday night.

|10.26.07 @ 2:56PM|#

Just like a puck slapper to bring a Thicke to a Shat fight.

The Hanson Brothers|10.26.07 @ 3:00PM|#

The machine took my quarter.

Ogie Ogelthorp|10.26.07 @ 3:10PM|#

*drops gloves*

|10.26.07 @ 4:47PM|#

Prohibition failed not because people realized it "wasn't working" or whatever. It goes directly to taxes. The US was in the midst of the depression when the government realized there was lots of money to be had legalizing booze and then taxing it.

|10.26.07 @ 6:04PM|#

Prohibition wasn't a failure.

That is, if your name was Bronfman or Labatt.

;)

BakedPenguin|10.26.07 @ 7:01PM|#

Or Capone.

|10.26.07 @ 7:08PM|#

Jackson Kuhl

Thanks for the link. Missed it earlier.

|10.26.07 @ 10:52PM|#

The US was in the midst of the depression when the government realized there was lots of money to be had legalizing booze and then taxing it.

I've always thought a campaign to legalize pot based on the tax revenue it could generate might get some real traction. I wonder if anyone's done a study estimating that?

|10.27.07 @ 12:01AM|#

I think income tax is the major revenue source now and if you have income from selling pot, it's taxable. So pot is already taxed.

BakedPenguin|10.27.07 @ 9:05AM|#

george - technically, so was alcohol during Prohibition (that's how they got Capone). The point is still valid, though because people who have to hide what they're doing to make money will have to hide the money as well.

I think it's a good idea - especially if the additional source of income for farmers means that we can stop their welfare subsidies.

|10.27.07 @ 6:02PM|#

Anyone that hasn't should read The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol when they get a chance. It's surprisingly captivating.

TPG, I just checked and it's available at the public library here. I'll check it out Tuesday. God I love the internet.

|10.28.07 @ 9:46PM|#

Rum row sounds awesome.

Imagine, a giant flotilla of boats, stuffed to the stern with booze.