Drink (57 page)

Notwithstanding official sanctions, the doughboys, as their journals and letters reveal, did have access to alcohol in France. Bottles of wine were pressed on them by grateful French civilians, they were toasted by their allies, and they came across caches of temptation in the ruins of villages and farms. The Ninth Infantry, for example, en route to the front line, paused in the abandoned town of Montreuil, where they discovered substantial stocks of wine, cider, and brandy. When they resumed their march, “inebriated comics in some squads [were] now caparisoned in corsets, lace-trimmed drawers, and large organdy hats.”

In recognition of the ubiquity of alcohol on the western front, and of the near impossibility of keeping his men abstinent, General Pershing ordered that troops on active service in France might have access to light wines and beer. This practical measure attracted the ire of Prohibitionist congressmen, who demanded that the president censure Pershing. However, while politicians squabbled over the hygiene and morals of America’s fighting men, the troops themselves took solace from a bottle when the going was tough. The following extract from the diary of First Lieutenant Elmer Hess, Fifth Field Artillery, for May 31, 1918, illustrates the boost that they gained from a drink in the combat zone:

28 AMPHIBIANS

First Lieutenant Elmer Hess lived long enough to collect his bedroll, Ffinish the campaign, and return to a hero’s welcome in the United States, his chest decorated with the Silver Star and the French Croix de Guerre. However, by the time demobilization was complete, returning veterans were unable to toast their achievements on home soil with anything stronger than
Bevo,
a nonalcoholic malt liquor brewed by Anheuser-Busch. While the doughboys had been away fighting, America’s drys had achieved a victory as complete as that of the Allied powers in Europe. According to the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” The demobilized veterans reacted to the introduction of Prohibition with amazement and disbelief. Could it be true that a majority of their fellow citizens hated alcohol so much that they did not want a drop of it in their country? Had there been a vote? In retrospect, their suspicions were justified and their surprise was foolish. There had been no vote, but the country had been creeping toward Prohibition throughout the war years. State after state was turning dry: In 1912 there had been twelve dry states, by 1914 there were fourteen, and by 1916 twenty-three had amended their constitutions or introduced legislation to outlaw alcoholic drinks.

Moreover, Prohibition had been a key issue in the 1916 presidential elections. The ASL had become the best-organized lobbying machine in the United States. Its influence was such that at the eve of the elections it was indifferent as to which party won: Whatever the color of the next administration, Congress would be packed with ASL supporters. Before the results were announced, in the words of Wayne Wheeler, the svengali of the ASL, “the dry workers throughout the country were celebrating our victory. We knew that the Constitutional Amendment would be submitted to the states by the Congress just elected.”

When, in 1917, the issue of Prohibition had been threatened to be overshadowed by the entry of the United States into World War I, the ASL had turned the conflict to its advantage. The drain on resources created by alcoholic beverages was exaggerated in the most lurid language by ASL propagandists: “Brewery products fill refrigerator cars, while potatoes rot for lack of transportation, bankrupting families and starving cities. The coal that they consume would keep the railways open and the factories running.” Abstinence, meanwhile, was promoted as the key to victory over the beer-swilling Germans: “Prohibition is the infallible submarine chaser we must launch by thousands. The water-wagon is the tank that can level every Prussian trench. . . . Sobriety is the bomb that will blow kaiserism to kingdom come.”

The first wartime legislation to be used as a Trojan horse for Prohibition was the 1917 Food Control Act, whose aim was to husband the country’s resources for the war effort. Despite the fact that America was in no danger of famine, the drys ensured that the conversion of food into distilled liquors was forbidden by the act—a de facto prohibition on spirits. The Food Control Act further allowed the president, at his discretion, “to limit or prohibit the manufacture of beer or wine as he saw fit.” In the event, President Wilson decided to introduce a British-style restriction on American brewers in December 1917. The quantity of grain they were allowed for brewing was cut by 30 percent, and a legal maximum strength for beer was fixed at 2.75 ABV. In 1918, further austerity measures and restrictions were introduced via the Food Stimulation Act, which proscribed the use of grain for brewing until the war had ended and demobilization had been completed.

Although the brewers tried to fight back, they were tainted by their German heritage, which they had done so much to promote before the war. After 1917 they were forced to keep their heads below the parapet, as the American wartime press demonized Germany and its culture. Things Teutonic were boycotted or renamed—sauerkraut, for instance, became “liberty cabbage.” The drys were quick to identify this weakness and exploit it. In addition to linking beer drinking and kaiser culture in ASL propaganda, Wheeler wrote to the federal custodian of alien property to alert him to the menace posed to America by traitors in its midst.

Palmer duly investigated and concluded that the brewing companies, while American owned, had done their best to encourage kaiserism: It was “around the sangerfests and sangerbunds and organizations of that kind, generally financed by the rich brewers, that the young Germans who come to America are taught to remember, first, the fatherland, and second, America.”

At the same time as they were denying Americans access to spirits via food control legislation, and attacking brewers in the name of patriotism, the drys kept working on their principal objective—Prohibition via constitutional amendment. In August 1917 a bill was introduced to the Senate, where the prevailing mood was favorable. No one knew how long the war might last, and a measure that could only increase the fighting efficiency of the nation merited careful attention. Moreover, many senators felt the bill would “not really enact prohibition, but merely [submit] it to the states,” and that the states would never all go dry. Sensing that they were in a minority, and that the bill would be passed, wet politicians tabled an amendment that set a time limit of seven years for individual states to ratify the bill, which they believed would be insufficient for the required three-quarters majority to do so, and which therefore would prevent it from becoming law. The vote was taken, and the amendment adopted. The following December the bill was put to Congress, where it was approved by 282 votes to 128.
The Washington Times
insinuated that this apparently healthy majority reflected fear rather than a genuine interest in Prohibition: “Every Congressman knows that if the ballot on the constitutional amendment were a secret ballot, making it impossible for the Anti-Saloon League bosses to punish disobedience, the amendment would not pass.” To the consternation of the wets, the amendment was ratified by thirty-six states within fourteen months, followed quickly by nine more,
⁶³
and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States became law—America was officially dry.

Like medieval sumptuary laws, and unlike prior amendments to the Constitution, the Eighteenth was a proscriptive piece of legislation, which took away rights rather than guaranteed them. The restrictions it introduced had to be implemented, and the Volstead Bill, named after its sponsor, Andrew Joseph Volstead of Minnesota, and drafted by Wayne Wheeler, set out the mechanics of enforcement. Its sponsor, although partial to an occasional drink, was a disciplinarian at heart who believed “law regulates morality, law has regulated humanity since the Ten Commandments,” and hence had no qualms in attaching his name to what he considered to be a useful exercise in social engineering. The bill was debated at length in Congress and subjected to a string of amendments. President Wilson vetoed it in its final form for technical reasons, but the House and the Senate overrode him and the Volstead Act was adopted in October 1919.

It was prima facie a Draconian piece of legislation: Violators of its provisions might be punished with substantial fines, prison terms, and confiscation of their property; and infringements were to be investigated by a force of fifteen hundred agents, who were endowed with intrusive powers of search and seizure. It was also horribly flawed: Two classes of Americans—medical patients and religious communicants— were still allowed to purchase alcohol for pleasure. The distillation of alcohol for industrial purposes was also exempted, as was home brewing and cider making, for the Volstead Act envisaged a damp, not dry, America. It was no crime under its provisions to drink alcohol—people were permitted to consume their pre-Prohibition stocks and any other booze they might come across. Its potential for confusion was immense and its oppressive nature was bound to be resented. Congressman Crago of Pennsylvania predicted, while the act was being debated, that it would result in “a discontent and disregard for law in this country beyond anything we have ever witnessed before.” He was right.

The start of Prohibition, in January 1920, was marked by Americans in a variety of ways, some auspicious, others less so. The drys were jubilant. Church bells rang out to commemorate victory; Billy Sunday, the celebrity dry evangelist, staged a mock funeral for John Barleycorn in Norfolk, Virginia. “The reign of tears is over,” he claimed. “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.” Some communities really believed that all crime was alcohol-inspired and sold off their jails. The wets, in contrast, were pragmatic, or opportunistic. The Yale Club laid down a sufficient stock of wine to last for fourteen years; and within a minute of the Volstead Act coming into effect six armed bandits robbed two railroad cars in Chicago of a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of whiskey intended for medical use. Before the law was twenty-four hours old, two similar robberies had occurred in the same city—a foretaste of the crime wave to come.

Since it was not an offense to drink per se, and the act had not—as if by magic—dried up the thirst of the country’s wets, anyone willing to take the risk of supplying them with hooch could be certain of handsome rewards. Demand was vibrant: After all, once Americans had liquor in their clutches they could drink it with impunity at home. The Volstead Act created its own species of criminal—the bootlegger—a smuggler ready to disobey the Constitution in order to sell alcohol to his or her countrymen. The subcategory who specialized in international trade, known as rum-runners, were the most glamorous class of bootleggers, especially those who ran in their goods by water—over the warm blue Caribbean, the steel-gray St. Lawrence, across the Gulf of Mexico, and through Pacific swells. America’s neighbors took advantage of their activity. The Bermudas, and various small Caribbean islands, developed statistically prodigious thirsts; Canadian provinces quickly repealed their own Prohibition laws in order to profit from tax revenues on liquor sales south.

The prince of the rum runners, whose surname has entered the language as a byword for quality, was William S. McCoy. An ex- merchant seaman, McCoy was working as a yacht builder in Florida at the outbreak of Prohibition. Sensing the opportunities for gain, he purchased an old fishing schooner, the
Henry L. Marshall
, registered her in the Bahamas under the British flag, loaded her holds with scotch, and set sail for the Georgia coast. He dropped anchor in St. Catherine’s Sound and disposed of his cargo to a prearranged buyer for a price that covered the cost of his boat. Over the next three years, McCoy expanded his fleet, acquiring the
J. B. Young, The M. M. Gardener,
and his favorite, the schooner
Arethusa
. After the loss of his original boat, which was taken by the U.S. Coast Guard while under the command of a subordinate, he did all his business from international waters, i.e., more than three miles offshore. His customers would motor, row, or sail out to him to make their purchases: “They would come wobbling and bouncing out in their little open craft, one man steering, the other pumping for dear life, and swing in under my schooner’s lee. Usually it was too rough to tie up. Four of us would hold the skiff away from our side with oars and boat hooks, and we would throw the . . . liquor out to the crew. The buyer would toss a roll of bills to me. ‘Twelve thousand dollars for two hundred cases, Bill,’ he would shout. . . . My reputation and the white form of the
Arethusa
riding on the Row was all the advertisement I needed.” McCoy never watered his liquor and never dealt with gangsters, hence his reputation for probity and the birth of the term
the real McCoy
for an article of genuine quality. In 1924 he was captured aboard the
Arethusa
by the Coast Guard, tried for violations of the Volstead Act, and spent eight months in jail. Upon release he retired from rum-running and passed the remainder of his life as a real estate investor in Miami. The adventures of McCoy and his fellow rumrunners captured the imagination of the public to the extent that
Outlook
magazine commented in 1924 that prohibition was satisfying “three tremendous popular passions . . . the passion of the prohibitionists for law, the passion of the drinking classes for drink, and the passion of the largest and best organized smuggling trade that has ever existed for money.”