FbF Book Club – Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Okrent, 2010)

Niccolo Soldo

Jan 18, 2024

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Previous Entry – Chapter 2: The Rising of Liquid Bread

The United States of America is not only a vast country geographically with a massive population, it is also a country of continuous change, whether culturally, economically, socially, or demographically. Yet there are some threads that do reach back to its earlier times, one of the most notable being the progressive one that began in New England prior to the American Revolution.

The third chapter of this book starts out at Oberlin College in the first half of the 19th century. Many of you are familiar with Oberlin because it is associated with some of the more progressive currents in US politics today. The fact of the matter is that Oberlin was progressive since its founding by two Presbyterian clergymen in 1833. It is a progressive institute by design. Frances Willard, a star in the earlier days of the Temperance Movement was the product of two Oberlin graduates. The Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, a transplant from Iowa, was drawn to Oberlin, Ohio where he went on to form the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the organization that was most responsible for lobbying the US Government to enact Prohibition:

The Anti-Saloon League may not have been the first broad-based American pressure group, but it certainly was the first to develop the tactics and the muscle necessary to rewrite the Constitution. It owed its success to two ideas, one core constituency, and an Oberlin undergraduate who sat in the front row of the balcony of the First Congregational Church on a June Sunday in 1893 and heard Russell outline his plan to deliver the nation from the death grip of alcohol.

The Anti-Saloon League (founded in 1893) decided to take a radically different approach to lobbying for Prohibition than the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) that came before it. Where the WCTU would involve itself in all sorts of causes in order to create a vast coalition that would support its drive against the production and distribution of alcohol, the ASL chose an approach that was totally the opposite; a laser-like focus on the single issue of Prohibition:

“The Anti-Saloon League is not in politics as a party, nor are we trying to abolish vice, gambling, horse-racing, murder, theft or arson,” one of its early leaders said. “The gold standard, the unlimited coinage of silver, protection, free trade and currency reform, do not concern us in the least.”

This was their strategy, one that allowed them to avoid the pitfalls of internal dissension that plagued the WCTU due to it having so many different groups at cross-purposes with one another. Politically agnostic, they aimed to control the swing vote in all elections, allowing them to use that as leverage with candidates. Regarding Russell: “…..[he] liked to cite rail baron Jay Gould’s credo—that he was a Republican when he was in Republican districts, a Democrat when he was in Democratic districts, but that he was always for the Erie Railroad.” This was pragmatism over idealism.

Russell was also lucky; he could rely on the Baptist and Methodist churches as the bedrock of his movement, and with its parishioners he could mobilize in massive numbers:

To gather the support needed to fund the group’s efforts and to line up those 10 percent of the voters who could tip the balance on election day, Russell and his colleagues mobilized the nation’s literalist Protestant churches and their congregations. Any pressure group would be fortunate to be blessed with a constituency like this one. It was scattered across the American landscape, yet easily reached when there was a message to deliver or an action to initiate. By its self-definition, it wore the mantle of moral authority. In its religious ardency, it was prepared for apocalyptic battle. The Anti-Saloon League was, its own slogan affirmed, “the Church in Action Against the Saloon.”

The leadership, the staff, and the directorates of the ASL and its affiliate organizations were overwhelmingly Methodist and Baptist. Clergymen occupied a minimum of 75 percent of the board seats of any state branch.

The ASL had a political project with a very large in-built constituency fired up by a clear and simple moral message. Russell had picked up a $1 million bill off of the sidewalk. With the WCTU lamenting the death of its leader, Frances Willard (and building up a Cult of Personality around her), the ASL had quickly moved ahead of it and became the leading organization fighting alcohol production and consumption.1 All he needed now was a general to marshal these resources to spread the Gospel of Prohibition across the whole of the USA.

Enter Wayne Bidwell Wheeler.

“A locomotive in trousers”

Okrent sings Wheeler’s praises:

How does one begin to describe the impact of Wayne Wheeler? You could do worse than begin at the end, with the obituaries that followed his death, at fifty-seven, in 1927—obituaries, in the case of those quoted here, from newspapers that by and large disagreed with everything he stood for. The New York Herald Tribune: “Without Wayne B. Wheeler’s generalship it is more than likely we should never have had the Eighteenth Amendment.” The Milwaukee Journal: “Wayne Wheeler’s conquest is the most notable thing in our times.” The editorial eulogists of the Baltimore Sun had it absolutely right, while at the same time completely wrong: “. . . nothing is more certain than that when the next history of this age is examined by dispassionate men, Wheeler will be considered one of its most extraordinary figures.” No one remembers, but he was.

“No one remembers, but he was.”

It wasn’t until I read this chapter that I learned about Wheeler, and I consider myself to be quite well-informed when it comes to American History. He was later described thusly:

“[he] controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents . . . , directed legislation for the most important elective state and federal offices, held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties, distributed more patronage than any dozen other men, supervised a federal bureau from the outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.”

This description suggests to us that Wheeler was for a time the éminence grise of the United States of America. If he was so powerful, why is he not a household name today? My guess is because Prohibition failed, and because its failure was both recognized by almost everyone, and because some of its advocates did not have what was and is perceived to be malicious intentions. Let’s revisit the question of Wheeler’s anonymity at the end of this series.

Wheeler (“a locomotive in trousers”, as per a school classmate) was a man of limitless energy. Working part-time for the ASL while studying law at Case Reserve University, he took over the legal office of the organization’s Ohio branch and began to organize, speak publicly, mobilize telegram campaigns, lead demonstrations, and file lawsuits upon lawsuits after receiving his law degree. He made the ASL a fixture in Ohio politics, and began attracting national attention. John D. Rockefeller, America’s wealthiest Baptist and teetotaler, began to support the organization financially. So meteoric was his rise and so successful were his efforts that “By 1903, the year Wheeler became the ASL’s Ohio superintendent, the league had targeted seventy sitting legislators of both parties (nearly half the entire legislative membership) and had defeated every one of them.”

By now, it was time to test the ASL’s strength on a higher level. They decided to oppose the incumbent candidacy of Ohio Governor Myron T. Herrick, a popular Republican backed by a powerful machine and lots of money. Okrent:

Wheeler and the ASL crushed him. They sponsored more than three hundred anti-Herrick rallies throughout the state, mobilizing their supporters in the churches by invoking Herrick’s role in modifying the local-option bill and by suggesting that the governor—“the champion of the murder mills”—was a conscious pawn of the liquor interests. When the Brewers’ Association sent out a confidential letter urging its members to lend quiet but material support to Herrick (his Democratic opponent was a vocal temperance advocate), Wheeler said he “got [a copy of the letter] on Thursday before election, photographed it and sent out thousands of them to churches on Sunday.” In what was at the time the largest turnout ever for an Ohio gubernatorial election, every other Republican on the statewide ticket was elected, but Myron T. Herrick’s political career was over.

This was the biggest scalp that the ASL had collected to date, and they had done it even without Rockefeller’s financial support, as he had temporarily withdrawn it due to his support for Herrick. Wheeler was in a celebratory mood: ““Never again will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.”

This quote is very interesting, because it pits church AND state against business interests…something that runs counter to the USA’s pro-business orientation.

The ASL’s string of successes worried brewers. These were not the schoolmarms of the WCTU. The ASL was a professional, disciplined, well-organized, and frightening juggernaut:

IN JANUARY 1909 Hugh Fox of the United States Brewers’ Association sent his membership a letter that bordered on the apoplectic. He asked the brewers to consider “what we have to reckon with—That the League has over 800 business offices, and at least 500 men and women on its regular salary list, in these offices alone? That besides this, that it employs large numbers of speakers on contract, from the governor of Indiana down to the local pastor of the Methodist Church? Do you realize,” he continued, “that the men who are managing these movements have capitalized the temperance sentiment which has been evolved in a century of preaching and agitation?”

“A coalition of racists, progressives, suffragists, populists, and nativists”

The above is how Okrent characterized the anti-alcohol coalition that had coalesced by the turn of the century. To the 21st century mind, this combination riddles the brain as the contemporary versions of these forces are often each other’s mortal enemies. Today’s progressives see racism as the worst secular sin, with slavery the USA’s original one. Feminism, today’s stand-in for suffragists, can never countenance a political alliance with populists like Donald Trump.

Politics are ever-changing, which is why such a coalition made sense in those days even when it appears nonsensical to our present eyes. More importantly, these other forces were happy and quite willing to use the ASL’s sole issue to push their own interests. Like all coalitions, this one was a marriage of convenience and naked self-interest. Wheeler and the ASL were happy to ally themselves with these disparate groups as the organization was pragmatic by design and in strategy. This alliance gave them the critical mass to achieve their overarching goal.

“The South has a negro problem”

The most important Prohibitionist organizations and figures by this point in time came from the North, and cold calculus drove them to conclude that the way to win over the South to the cause was to appeal to the fear of Southern Whites in regards to the former Black slave population that had been emancipated by Lincoln and the Civil War. We must keep in mind that the author of this book is a contemporary liberal, but we will give him the benefit of the doubt regarding his arguments for the sake of brevity.

Okrent states that the South was slow to the cause of Prohibition because it was subconsciously (and sometimes overtly, depending on the participants) linked to Abolitionism. He goes on to say that the end of the Reconstruction era in the South opened up the space for Southerners to embrace the movement as attitudes towards alcohol were already similar to the ones in the North. Okrent:

Still, although the North and the South had similar attitudes toward liquor, wrote the Washington correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution in 1907, “the South has the negro problem.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, he elaborated by recalling the Reconstruction era and the “terrible condition of affairs that prevailed when swarms of negroes, many of them drunk with whisky . . . roamed the country at large.” It was a familiar characterization, and its reach extended beyond the boundaries of the old Confederacy. Frances Willard herself had adopted the imagery, asserting that “the grogshop is the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of great dark faced mobs.”

Frances Willard, that paragon of Progress, was “problematic” by today’s standards.

Patronizing attitudes towards Blacks were common when arguing in favour of Prohibition:

Even those who affected concern for black southerners indulged in similarly toxic rhetoric, often salted with a patronizing helping of pseudoscience. “Under slavery the Negroes were protected from alcohol,” proclaimed an official publication of the Methodist Church, and “consequently they developed no high degree of ability to resist its evil effects.” An editorialist in Collier’s assured his readers that “white men are beginning to see that moral responsibility for the negro rests on them, and that it is a betrayal of responsibility to permit illicit sales of dangerous liquors and drugs.”

More:

But in that same speech, delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1917 (and encompassing in its ample length references to Martin Luther, Pope Urban II, four former senators from Maine, Lord Chesterfield, Robert Bruce, and “the Prince of Peace Himself”), the quotable Congressman Tillman also said liquor “increases the menace of [the black man’s] presence.” In Thomas Dixon Jr.’s widely read novels from the first decade of the twentieth century, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman— the source material for D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation— black men with “eyes bloodshot with whisky” wander the streets and invade the homes of whites, their extravagant drunkenness intensifying the constant threat of plunder and rape.

A prohibitionist amendment was on offer in Tennessee in 1887, but failed due to the Black vote. This gave an opening to segregationists in the South to accuse brewers and distillers of “controlling the Black vote”, and more importantly, to strip Blacks of the vote altogether. They could use Prohibition as an excuse to do it. Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Mississippi went on to link laws on Prohibition with Jim Crow shortly thereafter with success.

Nativism

In the previous chapter, we were acquainted with negative attitudes on the part of the Temperance Movement and others towards the Germans, the USA’s leading brewers. This nativism was also an opportunistic cudgel used by non-nativist forces in the grand coalition led by the ASL. Okrent relates the story of a Jewish distiller from St. Louis and how he was made the centre of a national story involving a Black man raping a White woman in Louisiana. Like all newcomers, Jewish Americans were viewed with suspicion, but it anti-Irish sentiment dwarfed what they experienced in the 19th century:

When the twenty-three-year-old Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Albany early in 1882 to begin his first term in the New York legislature, he was horrified by the twenty-five Democratic members of Irish extraction who sat across the aisle. “They are a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue,” he wrote in his diary. The typical Irish member of the Assembly, he added, “is a low, venal, corrupt and unintelligent brute.” Among them were some who could not “string three intelligible sentences together.” Roosevelt characterized one particularly loathsome assemblyman, “Big John” McManus, as “unutterably coarse and low.” Chief among Big John’s sins: he owned a saloon. Roosevelt disliked McManus to such a degree that he once chased off the much larger man by threatening to “kick you in the balls.”

It was the political culture that most disturbed men like Roosevelt, especially because it threatened their rule. Political machines like Tammany Hall in Manhattan were ruled by the Irish, and the saloon played a key role in its existence:

But even more than their personal distaste for the Irish Democrats, Roosevelt and his allies detested the political culture they represented. Just as the urban saloon served as mail drop, hiring hall, and social center for the immigrant masses, so too was it birthplace, incubator, and academy for the potent political machines that captured control of the big cities of the East and Midwest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In New York in 1884, twelve of the twenty-four members of the board of aldermen owned saloons, and four others owed their posts to saloon backing.

…….

For more than three decades Chicago’s First Ward remained in the absolute control of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, proprietors of a saloon called the Workingmen’s Exchange, and in Boston, where a settlement house worker said “the affiliation between the saloon and politics was so close that for all practical purposes the two might have been under one and the same control,” a ward politician named Patrick J. Kennedy launched a political dynasty from his tavern in Haymarket Square.

These men too had an interest in shutting down the saloons. It wasn’t an altruistic one, but rather entirely self-serving:

……the immigrant composition of the machines’ support was an affront to the native Protestant’s sense of his own prerogatives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was carrying the torch for female suffrage when she described the horrifying prospect of “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence . . . making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble.”

Forces began to line up on each side of the issue, with the momentum clearly on the side of the Prohibitionists. Okrent ends this chapter with:

Wayne Wheeler said, “This one thing we do.” But if the “one thing”—Prohibition—could only be achieved by making common cause with other groups whose goals could be made to line up with its own, the ASL could be very accommodating. Soon its march to victory was propelled forward by the three remaining groups in the dry coalition of convenience—the populists, the suffragists, and the nativists, who would push Prohibition into the Constitution with peculiar implements: a tax, a social revolution, and a war.

Each of the five groups allied to the ASL could now clearly see Prohibition as a powerful tool in helping them achieve their own narrow political goals. The stars were aligning for Wheeler and the ASL.

Next Entry – Chapter 4: “Open Fire on the Enemy”

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