AMERICA ON THE WAGON

By Edwin Cooney

As Americans awakened on Saturday, January 17th, 1920, many were, presumably, suffering through the last hangover they’d ever experience. The production, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors was now illegal as well as unconstitutional—and every red-blooded citizen knew that patriotic Americans upheld the Constitution of the United States!

Prohibition had been coming on with increasing intensity since the formation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1873 and the founding of the Anti-Saloon League twenty years later. While the women of the WCTU took on numerous social reform battles, especially women’s suffrage, the Anti-Saloon League under the firm hand of Wayne Wheeler (“The Dry Boss”) of Oberlin, Ohio, fought in both major political parties solely for the abolition of intoxicating beer, wine and liquor. His tactics were what we today call “single issue pressure politics”.

There were two forces behind the WCTU and the ASL. The first was the moral persuasion of the rural Evangelical Protestant churches and the second was the ill-informed and unrepresentative political structure of the state legislatures and, ultimately, that of the national Congress.

Additionally, there was an overwhelming desire for social reform that was shared by farmers, urban labor and highly educated and motivated progressive “muckrakers.”

On successive days, December 17th and 18th, 1917, the House and Senate passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawing the production, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. By January 16th, 1919, the required three-fourths of the states had passed the amendment. (Only two defiant states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, rejected the amendment). Thus, the nation was ready to pass the Volstead Act (named after House Judiciary Committee Chairman Andrew Volstead, Republican of Minnesota, although many believed it was actually authored by ASL “Dry Boss” Wayne Wheeler.)

As for the enforcement of Prohibition, the devil was in the details. The task of enforcing Prohibition was given to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. (Note: When Calvin Coolidge appointed J. Edgar Hoover Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 -- it didn’t become the FBI until 1935 -- Hoover resisted any responsibility for enforcing Prohibition.)

Warren Harding wasn’t as bad a president as he is usually depicted, but his handling of Prohibition was one of his “bads.” In May 1921, a cabinet member (probably Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon) along with two undersecretaries were assigned to study and administer Prohibition enforcement. The upshot was the creation of the Prohibition Unit and the assignment of a national enforcement agent who, in turn, assigned Prohibition Directors in each of the 48 states. However, poor salaries, poor personnel selection, and the lack of standards for evaluating job performance left room for organized crime to easily establish a system for bribing law enforcement officials to protect the speakeasy and even the moonshiner. That, along with late night White House liquor and poker parties, may well have weakened the Harding administration’s influence at enforcement.

Following the sudden and tragic death of President Harding on August 2, 1923 in San Francisco, the silent penurious Puritan New Englander Calvin Coolidge was responsible for enforcing Prohibition. Mr. Coolidge simply didn’t believe in big government, so he pretty much left Prohibition alone.

In 1925, Mr. Coolidge appointed retired Army General Lincoln C. Andrews as Assistant Treasury Secretary. Andrews sought to solidify the efforts of the Customs Department, the Coastguard and the Prohibition Unit to tackle the problem. The enforcement effort was seriously under funded. For example, the Customs Department employed only 170 agents to cover the Mexican and Canadian borders around the clock and around the year. The cost for administrating Prohibition rose from six million dollars in 1921 to thirty million by the late 1920s. By the early thirties, it was estimated that it would cost three-hundred million dollars. The 1927 Prohibition Act did streamline efficiency and strengthen both administrative and personnel practices, but it was too little, too late.

By then, stories of raids on speakeasies and the arrests of mayors, sheriffs and even members of Congress were all too common.

When Herbert Hoover became president, he finally began serious enforcement of Prohibition. Hoover directed Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to attack Prohibition in two ways. The Treasury began investigating the tax returns of men such as Chicago’s Al Capone. The Treasury also began raiding speakeasies and the places where gangsters stashed their supply of booze. Perhaps Prohibition’s greatest heroes were agents such as “Izzy” and Moe from New York, Frank Hamer, and Cherokee Tom Threepersons from Texas and, most dramatically and successfully, Eliot Ness who personally raided Capone’s Chicago territory.

By 1932, the public realized that Prohibition was too expensive and too impractical for a nation starved for jobs and a government crying for tax revenue. In February 1933, a defeated progressive Republican Senator, John Blaine of Wisconsin, introduced the Twenty-first Amendment which repealed the Eighteenth while allowing the states that chose to be dry to remain so. It would be ratified on December 5th.

Meanwhile, in March 1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act legalized “3.2 beer” and wine and FDR signed the bill on March 23rd. It became effective on Saturday, April 8th. That day Anheuser-Busch sent a case of beer to the White House on a wagon hauled by six Clydesdale horses.

As FDR’s beer came off the wagon, America followed.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY