When European settlers arrived in North America in the 17th century, they brought with them a variety of habits, including the consumption of alcohol. In Europe, people drank it practically every day and it was known that it was possible to get rich by producing it. This tradition was carried across the Atlantic to new settlements. Among the founders of the first colony in Plymouth in 1620 was a brewer who also made beer in the new colony. As more and more colonies were established on the east coast of America, beer, wine and other strong alcoholic beverages became increasingly popular. Workers and farmers drank alcohol at every meal, both in place of their morning coffee and in place of their afternoon tea at five o’clock.
But it wasn’t just thirsty people who were thirsty for alcohol; the colonial authorities were also happy to see its inhabitants drinking, because it meant they got a tax on alcohol, one of the colony’s most reliable cash earners. People needed a special licence just to produce beer, and if they didn’t have one, they risked paying a very heavy fine. The first beer licence in America was issued in 1634, followed by a series of regulations governing the alcohol content of beer and setting prices.
Alcohol was unknown to the Indians. They used peyote or crystal meth as a medicine or to intoxicate themselves. When new settlers arrived in the 16th century, they were offered alcohol during negotiations. During the Indian wars, Indians also came into contact with soldiers who drank even stronger alcoholic drinks. Wowoka, a kind of Indian prophet and leader of the so-called spiritual dances, which ended in stupor and ecstasy, advised his followers not to drink alcohol, because he had seen the devastating effect of this ‘fire water’ on the natives. But no one listened, and the number of drunken Indians grew, so President Thomas Jefferson banned the sale of alcohol on Indian reservations in 1802, and from 1832 it was extended to Indians elsewhere in the Americas. It was not abolished until 1953.
The Church saw drunkenness as a sin, but took no action, as wine was often part of medicine and in some places even replaced water. However, as alcohol imports from Europe were very expensive, many colonies decided to produce their own alcohol. German and Dutch settlers led the way, and beer was widely drunk, especially in New York and Milwaukee, and cider was often sold.
At the beginning of the 18th century, another drink became very popular, in fact it had a real boom. It was rum, which found its way from the Caribbean islands to North America. A gallon of rum cost 2 shillings in 1730 and the production of rum between four walls became so widespread before the American War of Independence that some breweries had to close their doors.
But not everyone was a fan of alcohol consumption. The temperance movement had supporters as early as 1789, when Benjamin Rush, a physician – who was also one of the signatories of America’s Declaration of Independence – wrote a report on the harmful effects of alcohol on the human body. He was the first to point out that drinking alcohol was becoming a medical and psychological problem. In the early 19th century, Massachuetts legislated that alcohol could only be bought in large quantities in an attempt to limit the daily binge drinking of its residents.
But some US states were already “dry” before Prohibition. Maine was the first, followed by 13 other states. Smugglers who smuggled alcohol into a state where drinking was banned could face a fine of $1000. However, American whiskey, made by Scottish and Irish immigrants, was also becoming increasingly popular. The indebted state decided to tax whiskey production, leading to a veritable armed uprising of the producers, which was only quelled by the army. The leaders of the uprising were sentenced to prison terms and some were hanged.
But all this didn’t help much, so societies to fight alcoholism started to emerge. In 1869, the Prohibition Party entered American politics, and by 1872 it had its own candidates in the presidential elections. Its members included several congressmen and even the Governor of Florida. A similar movement was the WCTU (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union). Its members visited schools and taught children about the dangers of alcohol consumption, and they also went to taverns and demanded their closure. There were nearly 260,000 members and they succeeded in getting a measure passed so that those who drank alcohol could not become teachers.
No more beer
The WTCU was the forerunner of the “Anti Saloon League” (ASL), founded in 1893, which tried to influence politicians to ban drinking alcohol. Its members included such influential figures as John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Meanwhile, the transport of alcohol from one US country to another was already very restricted in the 1890s. Shipments had to adhere strictly to the regulations of the country to which the alcohol was destined.
During the First World War, anti-German sentiment spread in America and German immigrant breweries made a loss. The Governor of Wisconsin publicly declared, “We have German enemies on the other side of the ocean. And we have German enemies in our own country. And our worst German enemies, the most insidious and dangerous, are Papst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.”
He gave the names of the most famous breweries run by immigrants of German descent. This statement was not only directed against Americans of German descent, but also expressed concerns against all foreigners who had come to America to advance their interests. Prohibition thus encouraged xenophobia, not only against German immigrants, but also against French, Italian and Eastern European immigrants. During the First World War, almost 20 American states were already flirting with prohibition. In addition, the US army needed the grain to feed its soldiers and horses and therefore had little left over for making alcoholic beverages.
At the turn of the century, the abstinence movement was already part of everyday American life. By then, almost one in ten Americans had signed a Declaration of Abstinence. Activists were hard at work, lecturing on the harms of alcohol, lobbying politicians, printing books, organising international meetings and petitioning. The Anti-Saloon League, which started out as a local organisation in Ohio and quickly spread across America, was at the forefront of all these movements. The collaboration of the WTCU and the ASL and the suffragette groups proved to be successful and no mass movement in America has had such breakthrough power.
The much-anticipated social reform that would have led to a ban on drinking alcohol failed to come to life during the First World War. Although it was the tactics of the WTCU and the ASL that were largely responsible for the National Prohibition Act of 1919 and, the following year, for the passage of the 18th Constitutional Amendment, which constitutionally endorsed Prohibition. This introduced Prohibition throughout the Americas. It did not prohibit the drinking of alcohol, but only its manufacture and sale. This opened the way for alcohol to be manufactured and sold illegally.
But if there was a mass movement to ban drinking, there was an equally mass movement to oppose it. It included rich and poor, locals and immigrants, farmers, priests and politicians. They had many reasons to oppose Prohibition, that is, the 112 words of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the executive Volstead Act, which effectively enforced Prohibition. “The ‘wets’ did not give up and, after 14 years, succeeded in ending Prohibition.
When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it practically spelled the end of the fifth largest industry in America – the production and sale of beer and liquor. The closure of breweries and distilleries put tens of thousands of people out of work, the state budget was depleted as there was no more revenue from the liquor tax, and clandestine factories and liquor bars developed, which, of course, paid no taxes.
The Prohibition movement was financially strong and strategically well organised. The “Wets”, i.e. the pro-drinkers, were not well organised before Prohibition, nor as vocal as their opponents, who called themselves “Drys”, or drys. But their moment came when Prohibition came into force throughout the country. There was no less drinking in America, probably more. There was not less crime, but more. People were not more law-abiding, but less and less so.
A large part of the Americans who originally supported Prohibition withdrew, remained silent and drank in silence. Average citizens felt only the negative consequences of Prohibition. They had to pay more taxes to compensate for the loss of revenue from alcohol sales. If they had a drink or two after work, they did not feel drunk, but were convinced that it was their right. Even though the law forbade it, they would go to illegal speakeasies and throw back a glass of whisky or beer.
Then, of course, they read with indignation the reports of gangster gangs fighting each other, usually over control of the illegal alcohol trade, and counted the dead. They were aware of the hypocrisy of politicians who publicly advocated Prohibition while secretly maintaining contacts with illegal alcohol importers.
Entrepreneurs noted that their employees were no more productive than they were before Prohibition, and in some places there was even talk in the factories that there would be riots if there was no beer. The problems that Prohibition sought to eradicate – drunkenness, domestic violence, crime, overcrowded prisons and poor public health – still persisted stubbornly.
All these interest groups opposed to Prohibition were only loosely connected until the first anti-Prohibition organisations were formed at the end of the 1920s, and by the time Prohibition was abolished in 1933, there were already 40 such groups. During this time, the brewing industry was trying to get through difficult times.
Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis brewing concern which, among other things, produces Budweiser, the first beer to be distributed nationwide, began making soft drinks, corn syrup, selling eggs and several other soft drinks, Papst Brewery moved into the dairy industry, making ice cream and cheese, De Coors sold malted milk and china, and six distilleries were licensed to make whiskey, but only for medicinal purposes.
Busch, an entrepreneur, decides to fight Prohibition fiercely. He bribed politicians and journalists and gave money to black and Mexican people in Texas, hoping they would at least vote to legalise beer.
The German-American Association, which originally set out to preserve German culture in America, turned after the end of World War I into an organisation to “fight the prohibitionists’ attacks on German customs and traditions”, and soon gained two million members in cities where many German immigrants lived. But even within the alcohol industry itself there was no unity. Brewers often spoke out against the producers of spirits, pointing the finger at them as the cause of their misfortune, claiming that beer was supposedly a healthy drink. Even the organised workers were predominantly “wets” or wet.
In January 1931, the National Committee of the American Federation of Labour called for a change in the Volstead Act, on the grounds that American taxpayers, members of the working class, should foot the bill for those who were involved in “organised crime, bad morals and poisoned citizenship”. Prohibition was supposed to be a fiasco and a tragic mistake.
The thorny road to Prohibition
But all this – the zeal of some who saw alcohol as the work of the devil, the concern for the health of the nation, and the political ambitions of others – was not enough to get the whole country to give up drinking alcohol. The reasons for the introduction of Prohibition were deeper, manifold and complex.
When America entered the war in 1917, the US Congress passed a provision that controlled the distribution and consumption of alcohol among the US military in very strict terms. This was a great political and moral success for the Prohibitionists, who had been active in the country for several decades. While it was not a total ban on alcohol consumption, the entry into the war was a great ally to the demands of the Prohibitionists, who argued that alcohol consumption was immoral and unpatriotic. The American soldier was not only fighting against the enemy, but also against bad drink.
Propagandists claimed that their soldiers were actually crusaders fighting an enemy that was evil and disgusting, not least because of their unbridled consumption of alcohol. Drunken German soldiers kill, rape and burn, they claimed.
In 1916, America was still in the midst of a presidential election, but no presidential candidate, neither Democrat Woodrow Wilson nor Republican Charles Hughes, had Prohibition on his list of promises. Nevertheless, the issue occupied the whole country, as opponents of alcohol also advocated women’s suffrage, which attracted many women of the fairer sex to the side of the alcohol opponents.
Meanwhile, American soldiers who fought in France in World War I were of the opposite opinion. General John J. Blackjack Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Corps in France, wrote in the American press in December 1917:
“While I wholeheartedly support a ban on US troops, the situation in France is completely different from that in the United States. Few French people drink water the way we do. They drink wine instead. This is mainly because the water supply in France is not as good as it is here. French wine is light and not intoxicating. That is why you will hardly meet a drunk French person.”
Unlike French and British troops, American soldiers were not given wine to drink, but water. In February 1918, President Wilson received six million signatures from women demanding a ban on the production and sale of beer. Although he was personally against it, he could not ignore the political importance of the message and on 30 November ordered a complete shutdown of the breweries.
Preacher Billy Sunday raised his hands in front of the assembled crowd and shouted, “I am a sworn, eternal and uncompromising enemy of the liquor trade! I will fight with all the power I have against this accursed, filthy and despicable business!”
The crowd cheered him enthusiastically. The charismatic preacher was just one of many religious enthusiasts who passionately campaigned for Prohibition. But religion was not the only driving force that put alcohol prohibition at the forefront of the political struggle, with talk of broken families and domestic violence, rising crime and overcrowded prisons, the health consequences and the damage to the economy.
The fact was that Americans liked to look in the glass. By 1900, there were 300,000 pubs and saloons in America serving only alcohol. It was the social sense of large numbers of Americans that made preachers into social reformers; they had campaigned for the abolition of slavery decades before, and now they were making their voices heard for the prohibition of alcohol.
Preachers such as Billy Sunday, Chrales Finney and Lyman Beecher printed their sermons on the dangers of alcohol and distributed them in every town in the country. Nevertheless, alcoholism in early 20th century America was deep-rooted and caused serious problems. In New York, between 1900 and 1909, there were an average of 526 deaths from alcoholism each year.
But as ubiquitous as the temperance movement was, without the decisive influence of Wayne Wheeler it would never have achieved the strength needed to change the US Constitution. Wheeler was the leader of the militant Anti-Saloon League ASL. He finished his schooling in Oberlin, then worked as a janitor, salesman and teacher to finance his further studies. Under him, the Prohibition movement became quite united. Until then, the differences between the various Prohibition movements had limited their influence, even though millions of people were signing petitions to ban the sale of alcohol and joining various anti-alcohol associations.
The WTCU also worked on other issues unrelated to Prohibition, such as women’s suffrage and social reforms, while the newly founded Prohibition Party also worked on forest preservation and the organisation of a public post office. Le Wheeler and his followers devoted themselves exclusively to the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol. In doing so, he first put pressure on politicians and legislators at local level and then at national level. There was a relatively large body of anti-alcohol legislation in America, but it varied widely in scope, sanctions and success. Wheeler sought to make a single law out of this conglomeration of regulations.
He campaigned for a law banning the production and sale of alcohol in all states. This required an amendment to the Constitution. He worked in a lawyer’s office in Cleveland, and in his spare time he cycled tirelessly from city to city, organising meetings. He organised a telegram campaign in which citizens were to bombard their MPs with telegrams demanding a ban on drinking alcohol. He made numerous speeches, as did other ASL members.
His methods were so effective that ASL-backed candidates for political office soon took over the Ohio legislature. After this triumph, Wheeler was able to declare, “Never again will a political party be able to ignore the protests of the church and the moral strength of the state.”
Wayne Wheeler became the most important symbol of Prohibition in America. He then travelled to Washington and threatened: “We will vote against any politician who does not support our bill and give our vote to candidates who do.”
And indeed, although still in a minority, he has always managed to get enough votes from his constituency to prevent the election of many candidates. The election of 1916 was decisive: Woodrow Wilson was elected President, and there were enough “dry” representatives in both houses of Congress to pass the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1917. By early 1919, the law had been ratified by all US states, and the Volstead Act gave Prohibition a foothold on the ground in 1920. The long road to Prohibition was complete, but no one could have imagined what would come next.
Prohibition lasted for 13 years and ended because of the wishes of the population. The success or failure of this experiment is still being debated today. Some statistics point to at least partial success. For example, between 1916 and 1922, arrests for drunkenness or public drunkenness were halved, and alcohol consumption fell to only 30 per cent. Cirrhosis of the liver, one of the main causes of death from excessive alcohol consumption, fell from 29 cases per 100,000 population to only 10 cases in 1929, and treatment for alcoholism in psychiatric clinics was halved.
However, the murder rate remained the same as before Prohibition. Alcohol was almost more readily available during Prohibition than before, thanks to the many illegal bars and street vendors. What is forbidden is, of course, tempting.
Illegal pubs boom
Although Prohibition had been announced for a long time, a wave of protests swept America when it was introduced. Many Americans considered alcohol to be an integral part of their lives, and Prohibition would violate one of the fundamental constitutional rights spoken of by the founding fathers of the United States of America.
On 17 January 1920, when the Volstead Act came into force, their constitutional right to live as they chose was violated. One day before that, the streets and roads of America were a madhouse. Carts and trucks full of liquor were taking the last bottles to the shops and citizens were stocking up on the last of their legally purchased alcohol. Prices skyrocketed, and a bottle of whisky could cost as little as 30 dollars. What the writer Mark Twain predicted many years ago has come true: “Prohibition increases drunkenness behind closed doors and in dark corners; it neither cures nor reduces drinking.”
In recent days, trucks carrying Canadian whisky have been crossing the border in large numbers, hiding their supplies in forests and caves for later illegal sale. Illegal distilleries have sprung up in American basements and remote forests.
Even those who are supposed to be the guardians of the law have ignored prohibition. When George Cassiday was arrested in 1930, he was carrying six bottles of gin. Arrests of individual small-time liquor smugglers were routine at the time, but Cassiday’s list of clients, whom he regularly supplied with alcohol, included many Congressmen.
Cassiday was the “man with the green hat” for the police, and they had been watching him for a long time. At the time of his arrest, he admitted to 25 illegal alcohol transactions. He was charged and sentenced to one year in prison. He later said that he had supplied 80% of all congressmen with alcohol.
But Cassiday was just an insignificant fish breaking the Prohibition rules. In New York alone, some 100,000 illegal liquor bars are believed to have operated in a short period of time. Already, gangsters were dividing up towns and countryside into zones of influence, making millions from alcohol, and chaos and violence were rife on the streets. More and more government officials were bribed to turn a blind eye or two, allowing gangsters to produce and sell alcohol that was often of dubious quality and even harmful to health.
Charles F. Fitzmorris, Chicago’s police chief, was convinced that 60% of his officers were involved in alcohol smuggling. Prohibition was not even an hour old when, at 12.59 a.m. on 17 January 1920, six armed men stole two lorries full of whisky intended for medical consumption. In the following years, the scoundrels stole around one million litres of the country’s denatured alcohol, which was deliberately adulterated with methanol by the producers to render it inedible. The gangsters mixed water and other substances with the alcohol to suppress the foul smell and then sold it. As such, it could cause blindness, neurological damage and even death. In Hartford, it killed 59 people.
Every law has legal loopholes that can be exploited, and so it was with Prohibition. Priests could still be given wine to use in religious services. By the 1920s, a wine industry had already developed in rural areas, especially in California. The law allowed the ‘head of the family’ who registered as a winegrower to produce 755 litres of wine a year for ‘home consumption only’, tax-free. This allowed 1 000 bottles of wine to be filled, or three bottles a day. Grape growers pressed the grapes into special blocks to be used for making juice. But it was clear to everyone that they were intended for making wine.
Unusually, the Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was responsible for implementing the Prohibition laws, and set up a special unit (the Prohibition Unit) with headquarters in Washington and branches across the country. This unit was headed by John F. Kramer, a lawyer and Lutheran Sunday preacher, with nine assistants in charge of specific parts of the country. Federal police agents called “prohis” were responsible for field work.
One of the few such female agents was Daisy Simpson, previously a police officer in charge of San Francisco’s “red-light districts”. In February 1925 alone, she made – often under the guise of a maid and cook – eight arrests, seized 10,000 bottles of beer, 60 bottles of gin and 12 cases of whiskey, and poured 38,000 litres of wine down the gutters during raids in Napa Valley wine country.
In the early years, the police were very keen to carry out raids. They broke into factory sheds and hiding places, smashed alcohol stills, overturned beer barrels, axed whisky crates and poured them into drainage ditches. Police raids on illegal speakeasies, where many Americans gathered in the evening, attracted particular media attention.
The establishment of illegal pubs was, in fact, inevitable. The attraction of the illegal offer and the glamorous atmosphere of the pubs was irresistible. The clouds of smoke in the meagre lighting, the provocatively dressed waitresses, the danceable jazz music, the singing of famous singers and the slogan that had to be said at the side entrance to enter the bar at all fired the imagination of the visitors and constituted the high point of the day’s events.
Frank Sinarta and Humphrey Bogart shook hands here, as did Ernest Hemingway , Norman Mailer, John Steinbeck, Jean Harlow and others. Most of these pubs were, of course, run by the Mafia and made a fat profit. In New York, Lucky Luciano made $12 million a year from 1925 onwards from the bars. Of this, almost two thirds was spent on bribes to the police and various officials and suppliers.
Some of the bars, including the most famous and Al Capone’s favourite, the Green Mill, also had a hidden side exit through which patrons could escape during the raid. The Club 21 taproom had 2000 bottles of alcohol stored in the basement. At the push of a button, the bar sank, creating a mould instead, and all the bottles fell into the cellar, which had its own water drain. The police agents were left empty-handed.
Mafia enters the alcohol market
But for the whole of America, there were only 1500 federal police agents on the ground to fight Prohibition, far too few to be successful everywhere, so they concentrated mainly on the big cities, while hardly any rural areas were tackled. In addition, by 1930, 17,816 Prohibition agents had been dismissed for lying, stealing, accepting bribes and lying in court. Corruption was the cancer of the struggle to enforce Prohibition.
Although the illegal brewing of spirits was widespread, the illegal import of alcohol by sea was also a lucrative business. The first line of defence against this practice was the US Coast Guard, which was given 25 old destroyers for this purpose, which were no longer needed after the end of the First World War. But the destroyers were too big for the job, and would have had to be refitted and thousands of sailors employed. “A lot of noise for nothing” commented the newspapers on the use of destroyers.
The smuggling of alcohol, especially spirits, brought in money, met needs and allowed intrepid lawbreakers, often of dubious character, to become known throughout the country. The transport of illegal alcohol to the bars was called ‘bootlegging’. This term, which has passed into common usage, dates back to the American Civil War, when soldiers smuggled small bottles of whisky stuck in their boots into camps.
Illegal production of spirits did not begin with Prohibition. It existed before Prohibition, when individuals made spirits in remote distilleries or at home to evade taxes. Such distilleries were not uncommon in the forests of the South and the Northeast, and rum from the Caribbean was transported to America in small boats and sailing ships.
But it was only after Prohibition that bootlegging became a booming business. From 1921 to 1925, federal agents closed 700,000 distilleries producing high-strength spirits. In New York State, a typical illegal distillery could produce up to 380 litres of alcohol a day at a cost of 13 cents and sell it for a dollar or three.
The making of spirits was often a cottage industry, the most famous such drink being ‘Bathroom Gin’, the production process of which was relatively simple. A mixture of mashed fruit, potatoes, carrots and corn sugar was fermented using a small still. This produced a very strong alcohol, sometimes up to 100 %, to which a mixture of glycerine and juniper oil was added to give it at least some flavour, before it was diluted with water to reduce the alcohol level. It was bottled in a bath tub, which was the only one with a suitable tap for adding water. It tasted disgusting, although fruit juice and other refreshments were added.
Before Prohibition, mafia groups were mainly involved in fraud, extortion, gambling and prostitution, but very quickly realised that alcohol could bring them significantly more money. According to the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Mafia had a revenue of $326 million in 1930, more than half of it from alcohol sales.
Undoubtedly, the city’s very location near Canada made Chicago an ideal place to organise a smuggling empire. As profits grew, the Mafia realised that it had to work together, because it was the transport that made alcohol smuggling an act that went beyond local confines. Only when transport was arranged could the various mafia groups forge alliances. Canadian whisky from Chicago was supplied by the Purple Gang from Detroit, which had direct contact with neighbouring Canada.
In Cleveland, mobster Moe Dalitz used planes and boats to transport alcohol across Lake Erie, then shipped his products to partners in Ohio and Pennsylvania. He also made contacts with Meyer Lansky in New York, who then used his own truck hire companies to ship the alcohol to illegal bars.
All these interactions have been very difficult to manage. That is why the mafia bosses met in a klamma to resolve the disagreements that had arisen. So the mafia leaders from Newark, New York, Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia got together in Atlantic City and agreed on their spheres of influence. Thus was born a mafia cartel that controlled the liquor business from Boston to Philadelphia.
The most famous of all the Mafiosi was, of course, Al Capone, but he was not the only one, or even the first. As a young man, he worked as a brothel supervisor under mob leader Tony Torrio, and it was only when he had three bullets in his body, fired by a rival mob group, and almost miraculously survived, that Torrio realised his time was up and handed over the reigns to Capone.
The second in line of the most famous Prohibition gangsters was Charles Lucky Luciano. As a young man, he was friends with other gangsters who would later become famous; Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. It was Luciano who opposed the rivalry, convinced that there was more than enough work to go around, because Americans were drinking more than ever. He was convinced that the old generation of gangsters had been run over by time and that it was time for them to back off, whether they wanted to or not.
He initiated the creation of the “Commission”, a kind of umbrella organisation of mafia groups. Each group was to continue to do its own business, but the mafia leaders, who were at the same time members of the Commission, were to meet regularly to settle their differences. The result was an extremely powerful organised crime organisation that continued to operate after Prohibition ended in 1933. The narcotics were the order of the day, and business was good because the organisational structure had already been set up during Prohibition.
The Prohibition-era violence was undoubtedly escalated by the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when seven men stood against the wall of a garage on the north side of Chicago. They were following the instructions of armed men dressed as policemen, some of them in plain clothes. Seconds later, 45 bullets ripped through them. The only survivor of the massacre was a German Shepherd.
Police investigators did not even need to interview witnesses, as it was clear who was behind the killing. The people killed were members of the Bugs Moran mafia gang (one survived, but died in hospital), a bitter rival of Al Capone. Despite the agreements, clashes between mafia groups were the order of the day in Chicago. But this time it was different. The event was so bloody that there was not a newspaper reader who did not condemn it.
Even members of other mafia groups were convinced that Capone had crossed all the lines. Capone was also frightened by the publicity that would mark the beginning of the end of his reign. He became the most famous gangster in American history, but he ended up paying a heavy price. The public expected the police to take appropriate action. That is when the name of Eliot Ness and his group of “incorruptibles” came to the public.
Eliot Ness and the “incorruptible”
In 2014, several US Senators proposed naming the headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Washington after police agent and Treasury official Eliot Ness. This would not have been wrong if his actions had been in keeping with the fame he enjoyed. Indeed, many critics have criticised Ness for presenting the Prohibition era as a mythological version of events rather than the truth, despite his undeniable successes during Prohibition, through his many books describing his work, his interviews, his television shows and his films.
“Naming a building after the man who brought down Al Capone? You might as well name a building after Batman,” wrote Daniel Okrent, author of the bestseller The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
Ness was born in 1903 to Norwegian immigrants and convinced teetotalers, a bakery owner and a conscious middle-class American. He helped his parents in the bakery, delivered newspapers and was a model student. He was very fond of reading crime novels. In 1925, he graduated from the University of Chicago and worked as a researcher in a financial institution. His brother-in-law, meanwhile, had become head of the FBI’s Chicago division, just as Al Capone was at the height of his powers.
Meanwhile, Chicago’s new police chief, Mike Hughes, has put hundreds of new officers on the streets to make good on his promise to clean up the city of the mafia. The Internal Revenue Service has begun to look into Capone’s financial machinations and Attorney General Johnson has ordered the police to go into Capone’s field operations and disrupt them. It was for this task that Johnson recruited Ness, who assembled his own team of trusted associates to carry out the task. Capone thus found himself between two millstones.
Ness was considered incorruptible and refused a weekly bribe of 2000 dollars (his annual salary) right from the start to turn a blind eye and leave Capone alone. “I am only the son of a poor baker, but Eliot Ness cannot be bought for 2000 dollars a week, nor for ten or a hundred thousand. Nor for all the money you have in your filthy hands,” was his reply to Capone.
The group he gathered around him numbered a dozen men, whom he selected from a pool of 50 candidates. These were men who had proved themselves to be fearless and incorruptible. Some of them were also veterans of the First World War. They were no older than 30, physically strong and willing to work round the clock. “I need a good telephonist who can get on the line at a moment’s notice and eavesdrop, a good chauffeur, because the success of the operation depends on being able to overtake the gangsters in the car, a good accountant who knows Capone’s balance sheets and who works methodically to detect financial fraud and tax evasion.”
Ness and his team have provided high-profile campaigns that have captivated the media. This was very embarrassing for Capon, even though these were largely tailor-made media campaigns. The plan was a complete success. Capone, who was a kind of Robin Hood for some media, was relatively popular with readers. Now the ‘good guys’ were up against the ‘evil criminal’ who was responsible for the St Valentine’s Day massacre.
Capone’s main income came from illegal distilleries and breweries, and Ness and his group turned to these. He intercepted trucks full of alcohol, broke into pubs unannounced and smashed bottles and kegs of liquor. Capon’s earnings crashed. Nevertheless, one could not help feeling that in many cases these were media operations that did not bring Capon to his knees. After all, Capone was giving the people something they wanted – a sip of alcohol.
In 1934, Ness went to Cleveland and became the successful head of the city’s security bureau. But his career went downhill fast. An unpleasant divorce, a presence at parties where alcohol was plentiful, a drunken car accident he tried to cover up – all this undermined his credibility.
Time for a glass of beer
The famous Budweiser workhorse walked with lumbering steps through the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, home of the Anheuer-Bush Brewing Company, pulling a cart full of cases of beer. Here began a propaganda trail that ended in Washington, outside the White House, where a case of beer was to be presented to the US President.
The campaign was launched on 7 April 1933, just two weeks after the US Congress amended the Volstead Act and redefined the limits of alcoholic beverages. Now, the limit for alcohol in a drink was raised from 0.5% to 3.2% – and beer was back on the shelves.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly signed the bill into law and said with relief, “Now it’s time for a glass of beer.” By the end of the year, Prohibition was a dim memory. In December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the US Constitution repealed the Prohibition Act, which made it a crime to sell, transport and consume alcohol. Thirteen years later, it was once again legal to make and sell alcohol.
Who made the officially permitted profits from alcohol during Prohibition? Millionaires became pharmacists. An American could buy alcohol for as little as six dollars without breaking the law. He could get a prescription from a doctor for three dollars, pop into a nearby pharmacy and take home his ‘medical’ alcohol for another three dollars. He was able to repeat the process in less than a week. During Prohibition, US doctors wrote $40 million worth of prescriptions and pharmacists also enjoyed the extra profits. The Walgreens chain of pharmacies enjoyed a huge boom during Prohibition. The Chicago-based company expanded from 20 pharmacies to 525 by the end of the decade.
One of the biggest opponents of Prohibition was the Anti-Prohibition Association (AAPA), which in 1926 already had 726,000 members. The annual membership fee of one dollar was symbolic, and some influential people, including members of the Du Pont family, were also members. The association printed leaflets and pamphlets and made Prohibition the focus of the US presidential election. Among his campaign promises, Franklin D. Roosevelt also promised to abolish Prohibition if elected US President.
AAPA’s influence increased when it began to link up with other organisations fighting Prohibition. Among them was the well-known and highly influential Women’s Organisation for Prohibition Reform (WONPR).
Of course, changing the US Constitution was not an easy task, as it required a lot of political will. Even after Prohibition was repealed, individual US states still had time to determine when the repeal would take effect, and some were quite hesitant. Mississippi remained “dry” until as late as 1966. However, some local laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol are still in place today. The great irony is that this is the case in Moore County, Tennessee, home to the distillery of the famous whiskey producer Jack Daniels.
