Drink (59 page)

The item most American consumers aspired to purchase was an automobile. In 1921 the nation had nine million cars; by 1929 over twenty-six million of them were on its roads. Prior to this expansion, it had been hoped that driving would discourage drinking. Temperance was “the friend of machinery,” and no sane person would wish to compromise the pleasures of driving by getting
stewed to the gills
⁶⁴
before taking to the road. However, the reverse proved to be the case. Automobiles facilitated bootlegging. If Prohibition had been introduced in the age of the horse and cart it might have stood a chance of success, but cars enabled bootleggers to cover vast distances quickly. They often worked in armed convoys and held regular firefights with Prohibition agents, whose trigger-happy ways led to a fashion in Michigan for windshield stickers reading, DON’T SHOOT, I’M NOT A BOOTLEGGER.

The rapid increase in the number of automobiles extended the reach of bootleggers into small rural communities, whose residents hitherto had had to rely on the exemptions to the Volstead Act in favor of sacramental wine and medicinal hooch when they wanted a drink. The exemption in favor of religious drinking was exploited with considerable zeal: In 1925 the Federal Council of Churches reported to its members that “nearly three million gallons of sacramental wine were taken out of government warehouses in 1924,” only a quarter of which had ended up on the altar. A similar proportion of medicinal alcohol went astray. Together the markets for communicants, Jews, and invalids, whether genuine or bogus, enabled a number of California winemakers to hang on through Prohibition. While their overall number declined by 80 percent post-Volstead, the quantity of wine they made under bond did not decrease proportionally. Indeed, the average annual output of bonded wineries during Prohibition was eight million gallons, much of which was consumed by healthy atheists.

Those California vineyards that did not supply the bonded market prospered by going into the juice grape business. Whereas many had anticipated ruin in the Volstead era, instead they enjoyed a boom. The total area of vineyards in the state increased from 300,000 acres in 1919 to 400,000 in 1923, to 650,000 acres in 1928. Not only were more grapes planted under Prohibition, but the prices they commanded soared. In the best pre-Prohibition years prices had been twenty-five dollars a ton. The first Prohibition era harvest averaged fifty dollars a ton; in 1921 it hit a Prohibition high of eighty-two dollars a ton. It fell back from this spike, but for most of Prohibition prices exceeded those commanded when America had been wet.

Demand for grapes was driven by the “nonintoxicating cider and fruit juices” exemption to the Volstead Act, which allowed the manufacture of such drinks for use in the home. The principal out-of-state destination for California “juice” grapes was New York, followed by Chicago. These places were supplied via a market at the Pennsylvania Railroad yard, to which growers shipped their products in refrigerated cars. The scale of business was titanic: “In 1928 one buyer bought 225 carloads (3,100 tons) of grapes in a single purchase.” As
Business Week
observed, “The only inference is that these grapes went to someone who is manufacturing wine in vast quantities.” The periodical labeled the Penn yard “the Wall Street of the grape auction business” and described the procedure by which grapes were sold on to the public: “The ordinary speculator buys two or three cars and has them shipped to a siding in his own neighborhood. Then he sends word around and families gather for the year’s supply of wine. To cart away their purchases they come with toy wagons, wheelbarrows, and even baby buggies.” The Manhattan Produce Yard became so clogged up with prams when a grape delivery arrived that its administration banned them altogether from its grounds.

In order to exploit the juice grape market systematically, and to utilize winemaking equipment lying dormant, the Californian Vineyardists Association (CVA) was organized in 1926, with the intention of producing and selling concentrated juice. Despite the probability that such concentrate would be used to make wine, the legality of manufacturing it was cleared with Washington. The CVA established a commercial subsidiary, Fruit Industries, Inc., to sell its new product, which it branded Vine Glo. Advertisements were placed in local and national media that hinted at its potential:

Americans wishing to enjoy some “true-to-type” port or claret could purchase by mail order or through pharmacies. They were delivered a five- or ten-gallon keg by Fruit Industries personnel, who would add water to the concentrate, start fermentation and return in sixty days to bottle the product and retrieve the keg. Vine-Glo was a commercial success and inspired copycat products, including Bacchus wine bricks, which were marketed as “solidified merriment.” Such was the impact of juice grape and concentrate sales that American per capita consumption of wine grew while the Volstead Act was in force.

Nineteen twenty-eight, the year that wine bricks hit the market, was a watershed year for Prohibition. The drys, on the defensive, succeeded in strengthening the mechanics of enforcement; the wets, bolstered by explicit backing from labor organizations and prominent capitalists, began to build up momentum toward repeal. Moreover, Prohibition was a pivotal issue in the 1928 presidential election. For the first time since its introduction, voters could chose a self-confessed wet candidate—the Democrat, Alfred E. Smith. His Republican opponent, Herbert Clark Hoover, was, in contrast, in favor of continuing Prohibition, which he described as “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far reaching in purpose,” and vowed to improve the enforcement of the law as it stood. The election was notable for the malicious personal attacks on Smith, a Catholic, who was vilified as a papist drunk intent on turning America into a Vatican fiefdom. The popular historian H. L. Mencken summed up the state of the nation on the eve of the polls: “If Al [Smith] wins tomorrow, it will be because American people have decided at last to vote as they drink. . . . If he loses, it will be because those who fear the pope outnumber those who are tired of the Anti-Saloon League.” Smith lost by a convincing margin.

True to his word, Hoover reformed Prohibition enforcement. Attempts were made to raise the abysmal standards of Prohibition Bureau agents. The entire service was made to sit the civil service exam. Only 41 percent passed after two attempts. Most of those who failed were dismissed and replaced. In 1929 the Jones Act was introduced, which stiffened penalties against violators of the Volstead Act. An amendment to it raising the appropriations of the Prohibition Bureau to the stupendous sum of $256 million (from around $12.5 million) was approved, then dropped—the drys were leery of making an unpopular law an expensive one. They had claimed that Prohibition would be cheap and virtually self-enforcing, which clearly had not been the case. Most important, in May 1929, Hoover appointed a commission under George W. Wickersham to perform the first federal review of law enforcement in the United States. Violent crime, much of it related to bootlegging, had become the principal domestic political issue since his election. On February 14 of the same year, members of the gang of Alphonse Gabriel “Scarface” Capone had lined seven members of a rival organization against a warehouse wall and gunned them down. The circumstances of the murders caught the imagination of the public—the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was symptomatic of everything that had gone wrong in America since Prohibition had been introduced. The man behind the massacre likewise typified the kind of citizen who was profiting from the blunder. Al Capone was a second-generation Italian American who had left school at fourteen after beating up a teacher, and who seemed destined for a career in petty crime until the Volstead Act appeared. Thereafter, his star ascended, until he was accounted Public Enemy Number One. Capone, never shy of publicity, put his philosophy on record: “I make my money by supplying a public demand. 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 businessman. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”

29 LOST

The “great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose,” which President Hoover had been elected to defend, was being abandoned as a failure in the few places where it had been attempted outside of the United States. By the time Hoover assumed office, Communist Russia had re-legalized beer and wine and was about to commence the state manufacture of vodka by the workers for the workers. Iceland and Norway had flirted with and given up on Prohibition, Sweden had decided against it in a 1922 referendum; indeed, only Finland and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island soldiered on as dry lands. Although drink control legislation brought in as austerity measures during World War I lingered on the statute books in Great Britain, in general the waters of temperance were receding. They never had been very deep in France, and while absinthe remained banned, drinking was otherwise encouraged in the Roaring Twenties. French winemakers, who had lost two of their principal export markets—claret to America and champagne to Russia—sought to compensate through the promotion of their product to their fellow countrymen. Their efforts were supported by a state
Office International du Vin
whose mission was to endorse the benefits of wine drinking. The government also took steps to improve the quality of French wines. The concept of the present-day
appellations controlées
was introduced, which decreed that only wines from carefully defined regions might be labeled as such, and furthermore that the growers in each region were limited to using “grape varieties hallowed by local, loyal, and established custom.” The improved product was marketed as quintessentially French, the key to good health, amiable humor, and long life.

Lest any French person doubt the benefits that flowed from drinking French wine, medical, martial, and cultural evidence in its favor was brought to their attention. The medical case for wine was established by the testimonials of doctors. According to one such pundit, “Urban and rural people can and should drink a liter of unfortified wine per day with meals for their own good and the prosperity of the land.” French wine drinkers interested in the technical details of how wine improved their well-being were advised by Dr. Jean-François-Napoléon Dougnac that it was a “radioactive foodstuff, for grapes store solar radiation and devour mineral elements from the soil.” At the time a mild dose of radioactivity was thought to be good for one—various continental spas boasted of the Geiger count of their mineral water, but in the opinion of Dr. Dougnac this was nothing compared to the potency of wine, whose “radioactive properties” stimulated the organs and glands, augmented the red blood cell count, positively influenced the nutritional process, and regulated “the tone of the vagosympathetic system.” As proof of such stimulatory powers, Dr. Dougnac cited the case of an “American teetotaler who was cured of his fatigue and neurasthenia by Saint-Émilion.” Moreover, wine was not merely a restorative but also a prophylactic against various waterborne diseases. “If you drink Chablis with your oysters,” French seafood lovers were counseled, “you will never get typhoid fever.”

Statisticians also chipped in in favor of wine by pointing to its beneficial effects on the human lifespan. From 1928 onward, medical students in Paris were taught that wine drinkers had an average life expectancy four years greater than water drinkers, and that the longest-lived people in France were the inhabitants of Bordeaux. The raw data was supported with anecdotal evidence: The centenarian Dr. Guéniot, author of
Living to Be One Hundred
, recommended the consumption of wine with meals to those who wished to imitate him.

Wine, according to its supporters, not only enabled the French to live longer, it also enhanced their fighting qualities. According to the testimony of a doctor who had served on a recruiting board during World War I, “We were able to note that among the young men called for army duty, those from wine growing regions were the most muscular, alert, and lithe, as well as the strongest, biggest, and leanest.” French poilus who had lacked such congenital advantages were nonetheless thought to have benefited from their pinard ration. Indeed, such was the battlefield reputation wine had won in World War I that should there be another war, it would be at the top of any French general’s requisition list. According to no less of an authority than Marshal Philippe Pétain, “Of all the supplies sent to the army during [WWI], wine was surely the most highly anticipated and appreciated by the soldier.” Finally, arguments were advanced in support of the significance of French wine in Gallic culture. An expert warned that without wine “the French race would lose its true character and become a bland people without any personality.” French drinkers responded to the advice of their doctors, politicians, and nationalists by upping their consumption, from about 120 liters per head per annum prior to the war, to 168 liters a decade later, confident that wine was both a healthy and patriotic beverage.