Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 23

Al Capone was not only Prohibition’s most notorious gangster – he was also its philosopher: ‘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 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 it’s hospitality.’

Prohibition was a disaster for America because it turned mobsters into public servants. Tony Berardi, a Chicago photographer who lived through Prohibition and frequently encountered Capone, says: ‘At least 75 per cent of the people in this country didn’t like Prohibition. That law made Capone a brewer. Hell, nobody would ever have known about this guy if it wasn’t for Prohibition. He figured this was the way to make an easy buck. People enjoyed it, people wanted it and he was going to supply it.’

Scorning the new law, ordinary citizens viewed their illicit suppliers with some affection. As a 1931 editorial in Collier’s stated: ‘So long as a vast public insists upon drinking alcoholic beverages somebody will supply the trade, whatever the cost in money, corruption or crime. Criminals under existing conditions do work which otherwise respectable citizens want done.’

How was so abused a law ever passed? Prohibition, in the words of a prominent temperance leader, was ‘an honest effort to do away with a terrible evil’.1 The Prohibition movement had grown steadily over many years. It exploited many fears: some were real, others were based on ignorance or prejudice. It symbolized rural America against the big city, native American against immigrant, Puritan against Catholic, put-upon woman against drunken man, white against black. Above all, it personified the church against the saloon. In time it became profit-minded capitalist against drink-sodden, absentee worker. During the First World War it triumphed as American patriot over German brewer.

America changed rapidly in the late nineteenth century. No longer a predominantly farming and frontier society, peopled by Protestants of English-speaking stock, it was becoming a nation of big cities filled with Catholics from countries like Ireland, Poland and Italy. Their attitude towards drink disturbed the long-standing temperance movements which were almost exclusively Protestant in membership.

Traditional forms of temperance did not rule out moderate drinking but pseudo-scientific evidence was now produced to show that Americans were degenerating through drunkenness. Prohibitionists claimed this was racial suicide and that drunkards must not be allowed to breed. In 1876 the National Temperance Almanac blamed ‘King Alcohol’ for most of America’s poverty, crime, insanity and premature deaths. It had infused millions with the ‘spirits of demons and degraded them below the level of brutes’. Worst of all it had ‘introduced among us hereditary diseases, both physical and mental, thereby tending to deteriorate the human race’.

Alcohol, prohibitionists maintained, increased sexual desire. Propagandists demanded that all alcoholic drink be avoided: ‘The control of sex impulses will then be easy and disease, dishonour, disgrace and degradation will be avoided.’2 Venereal disease was branded as the inevitable consequence of a night out at the saloon. In the South prohibitionists allied with white Democrats who were easily convinced that alcohol unhinged the Negro’s lust for white women.

The Prohibition party was founded in 1869, seeking the direct election of its own candidates. It failed and was overtaken in the 1890s by the Anti-Saloon League which endorsed candidates from either of the major parties provided they backed Prohibition. Up until then only three states had been consistently ‘dry’ but the league’s policy of infiltration succeeded. Dry laws began to be passed in many states as the League’s 50,000 field workers played Republican and Democrat candidates off against each other.

The ‘wet’ lobby, funded largely by brewers, wine-makers and distillers, failed partly because it was divided. Grape growers in California tried to gain absolution from the league by supporting attacks on saloons and spirits. Brewers claimed beer was the temperance drink and tried to shift the blame on to hard liquor. The distillers claimed that the places themselves were the problem – the saloons owned by the brewers – not gin or whiskey.

What destroyed the Wets was that brewers of German origin funded pro-German organizations such as the German-American Alliance. This characterized Prohibition as a stand against ‘German manners and customs and the joviality of the German people’. When America joined in the First World War against Germany the alliance was ordered to disband. The brewers tried to buy up newspapers to fight Prohibition but were exposed as plotting to stop America entering the war on the Allied side.

The historian Andrew Sinclair has aptly summed up the Prohibition movement:

Pabst and Busch were German therefore beer was unpatriotic. Liquor stopped American soldiers from firing straight therefore liquor was a total evil. Brewing used up 11 million loaves of barley a day which could have fed the starving Allies, therefore the consumption of alcohol was treason. Pretzels were German in name therefore to defend Old Glory they were banned from the saloons of Cincinnati. Seven years after the war a Pennsylvania doctor was still suggesting the name of German measles be changed to victory or liberty measles.3

In 1917, overcome with war hysteria, Congress passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution: the Senate by sixty-five votes to twenty and the House by 282 to 128. For Prohibition to be binding on the entire republic thirty-six state legislatures would now have to support the amendment. The wet, big-city states could have blocked it but they dried out and forty-five states voted for Prohibition in sixteen months. In 1919 Andrew Volstead, an obscure congressman from Minnesota, sponsored the law enforcing the amendment. Prohibition began on 16 January 1920. The Drys had won.

Or had they? The rich had already bought their way out by hoarding huge stocks of drink. The Yale Club laid down fourteen years’ supply (thus outlasting Prohibition by forty days). In the weeks before the law came into forces Christmas and New Year revelries became wakes for liquor itself. Prohibition’s tragic side-effects appeared before it began, as hundreds of carefree drinkers died from whiskey made from wood alcohol.

The 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act were both full of loopholes. The manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors, their import and export, were all prohibited but buying and drinking the stuff were not. Liquor itself was not banned nor was the use of home-brewing or wine-making equipment. Making wine, beer and cider at home was still legal. The term ‘intoxicating’ proved indefinable in the courts. ‘Alcoholic’ might have been less ambiguous. Near beer remained legal but had to be made from real beer with the alcohol extracted. That extract was sure to find its way back into real but ‘bootleg’ beer.4

Also exempt was industrial alcohol which bootleggers easily acquired to make spirits. Prohibition agents retaliated by adding undrinkable, poisonous denaturants such as iodine and sulphuric acid to the alcohol. The bootleggers simply added more flavouring and sold the lethal mixture to a gullible public. Thousands died.

Medicinal alcohol was also exempt. Doctors made $40 million a year signing prescriptions for whiskey. The same went for sacramental wine. Sales boomed, giving the impression that Prohibition coincided with a miraculous upsurge in religious observance.

The law was also confounded by confused and corrupt application. Many states had laws in conflict with the Volstead Act. Michigan sentenced a mother of ten children to life imprisonment on her fourth conviction for possessing alcohol. According to federal law she had not even committed a crime. If all these laws had been strictly enforced the courts would have been overwhelmed. Most charges were thrown out on technicalities, some genuine but most conjured up by corrupt judges. If a federal Prohibition agent was zealous he would be fired or transferred for upsetting local politicians. If he was corrupt he might be fired by Washington.

The agent’s hapless predicament must have made him profoundly cynical. His job was thankless and dangerous. Agents were often killed but they also had a habit of killing innocent mothers and children in shoot-outs with bootleggers. Anti-Prohibitionists ensured such deaths were widely reported, bringing hatred down on all agents. Working for low pay, they were more likely to become corrupt than risk their lives enforcing an unpopular law. President Hoover estimated that 250,000 agents would have been needed to enforce it properly. Even at its height the Prohibition Bureau employed only 2300 agents nationwide. Agent turnover was 100 per cent every three years. Meanwhile in each state the job of director of prohibition provided limitless opportunities for graft. Even top Washington officials were taking kickbacks from bootleggers who soon became so rich that they could buy anybody who had a price.

The business knew no frontiers as Americans soon tired of home-brewed beer and rotgut spirits. They wanted the real thing. ‘Rum-runners’ stepped in to supply Scotch whisky, London gin, Jamaican rum, French champagne and cognac. Ocean-going ships would anchor just outside America’s 12-mile limit, on ‘Rum Row’, and home-grown gangsters would use speedboats to run the ‘rum’ ashore. The US coastguard was predominantly honest. It arrested thousands of smugglers and confiscated their ships but the task was overwhelming. America’s immense coastline provided many ‘rum points’ where drink could be landed without fear of detection. Ports in Cuba and the Bahamas flourished on re-exporting spirits to Florida, only a day’s sail away. At first most of the liquor was American rye and bourbon, shipped out of the USA before Prohibition. Supplies were soon exhausted and Nassau’s huge warehouses were stocked up with millions of gallons of Scotch.

The Canadian border presented an even worse problem. Canada aped America with its own form of Prohibition but liquor exports remained legal. In Windsor, just across the river from Detroit, breweries and distilleries boomed. Most of their output was smuggled into the USA across the Great Lakes. Canada banned exports to America but instead the manufacturers filled in a form saying the beer or whiskey was bound for Cuba or the French islands of St Pierre and Miquelon. Canadian customs men asked no questions and wry headlines in local newspapers reported that barges had broken all records by sailing to Cuba and back twice in one day – a total of 10,000 miles! As everybody knew, they were simply ferrying the liquor over to Detroit. Americans were consuming a Niagara of Seagram’s and a few coastguard patrols did little to stop them.

Within a decade the lobby for repealing Prohibition became impossible to ignore. It consisted partly of avenging American brewers and distillers, lusting for lost profits. They had never given up the fight, whereas the groups which had coerced and blackmailed politicians into passing Prohibition basked idly in victory, naively assuming the law alone would command obedience. The lobbyists were boosted by a largely emotional response to the mass unemployment which followed the Wall Street crash. Certainly repeal would bring back many legitimate jobs, but that argument would have counted for little if Prohibition had achieved its goal of extinguishing drinking and drunks.

In fact Prohibition worsened America’s drinking habits. Many bibbers switched from beer, whose qualities home-brewers could not match, to hard liquor with the colour and flavour of genuine spirits. Such spirits only resembled the real thing because of poisonous additives. The deaths they caused argued eloquently for the return of legal distilling.

Even some temperance leaders had come to doubt the role of law in curbing private vices. Rufus Lusk of the Crusaders lamented the rise of neat gin, formerly known as a ‘nigger drink’, at society dinner tables. He attributed the cocktail craze to the scarcity of good wine. ‘It is natural that the country should have turned to strong drink. It is easier to handle and gets quicker action.’

Bay rum was the worst evil. Thousands drank this ‘canned heat’. Others extracted it through a handkerchief. So many people were crippled for life by drinking adulterated Jamaica ginger that they formed a pressure group to get damages from the government.

‘Where do people drink today?’ Lusk wailed. ‘Practically everywhere…. In New York there is a beer saloon on 51st Street where anyone may walk in and buy potent and potable beer for 25 c. a stein. Ten waiters work at a furious pace to serve the thirsty customers…. The high-class speakeasies as represented by the New York nightclubs have provided more sumptuous bars than were ever known in the days of legalized liquor.’

Before Prohibition people rarely served hard liquor at home or in their office but now almost everyone had a liquor closet. Drinking in hotel rooms became so bad that hoteliers built in bottle-openers to protect their furniture. Lusk was horrified at the increase in drinking by young people: ‘Hip flasks flourish at dances, picnics and excursions.’ One morning a wealthy Cleveland businessman made a shocking discovery in his daughter’s car: ‘He opened the door and was amazed to find a bottle of liquor and a contraceptive device. He told her good mother what he had discovered and at the breakfast table they asked the girl bluntly if she was drinking liquor and she said, “Why, Daddy, don’t be so old-fashioned.”’

Summing up the impact of Prohibition Lusk wrote, ‘People are drinking different stuff under different conditions but they are drinking as much alcohol as they ever did.’

On 5 December 1933 Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the 21st Amendment. America was wet again, but in fourteen years Prohibition had wrought appalling social damage. It had criminalized a $2 billion business and handed it to gangsters. Organized crime’s road to riches was paved with the good intentions of the temperance movement. That was bad enough. Far worse, this gift of boundless wealth would revolutionize organized crime, turning it into an indestructible feature of American life. Gangster syndicates would become the nation’s Fifth Estate. Prohibition was the making of the mob.