Lady Drys: 1920s Prohibition and the Women Who Supported It
It’s 1922, and you’re on a stakeout in New York City, standing in the shadows on the corner of West 52nd Street. If you believe the rumors, this spot is home to more than 30 illegal speakeasies. You squint at the suspiciously long line of patrons queuing up outside the bodega. You doubt they’re there for candy bars and cigarettes this late on a Wednesday night.
You swallow your nerves as you watch another tipsy group of girls disappear into the bodega. Then you smooth down your dress, pat your purse to make sure your flask and funnel are easily accessible, and join the line. Your mission tonight is a routine one for an undercover Prohibition agent: infiltrate the speakeasy, order a drink, and discreetly pour the liquor into the flask when no one is looking. The alcohol will serve as evidence in court, and give the chief the probable cause he needs to raid the establishment. You’ll mingle and dance just long enough to count exits and learn employees’ names. You’ll slip out and return to the Bureau only after you’ve stayed long enough to avoid suspicion…but not long enough that you get caught. But then again, who would suspect a woman of such subterfuge? Especially given how many other girls are all around you, partying the night away.
Lots of women fought to make America dry. They stood at the forefront of the temperance movement, campaigning to get rid of alcohol. They were a big reason why Prohibition became a Constitutional Amendment. They fought for it in speeches and marches and helped police it as law enforcement agents. What was it about the cause that called to so many women? What made them hitch their wagon to this monumental task?
Grab your ax, a badge, and a righteous attitude. Let’s go traveling.
my resources
Books and Academic Journals
Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, New York: Crown, 2006.
Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, New York: Scribner, 2010.
Christine Sismondo, America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Saloons, Speakeasies, and Grog Shops, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Keven McQueen, Offbeat Kentuckians: Legends to Lunatics, Kuttawa: McClanahan Pub House, 2001.
Joseph Collins, “Social Relevance of Speakeasies: Prohibition, Flappers, Harlem, and Change,” Senior Independent Study Thesis, The College of Wooster, Spring 2012. https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=4819&context=independentstudy
Film
Prohibition, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, written by Geoffrey C. Ward, aired October 2, 2022, PBS, 96 minutes. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/#watch
Online Sources
Elizabeth Sholtis, “Shaking Things Up: The Influence of Women on the American Cocktail,” The Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review, July 23, 2020, accessed January 13, 2023. https://vtuhr.org/articles/10.21061/vtuhr.v9i0.4/
Jessie Kratz, “On Exhibit: ‘Lady Hooch Hunter,’” The National Archives: Pieces of History, April 7, 2015, accessed January 13, 2023. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/04/07/on-exhibit-lady-hooch-hunter/
“Flasks in Stockings of Flappers at Exclusive School Brings Arrest of Church Organist as Rum Seller,” The Washington Times from The Archive of American Journalism, July 23, 1922, accessed January 13, 2023. https://thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/flasks-in-stockings-of-flappers-at-exclusive-school-brings-arrest-of-church-organist-as-rum-seller/
Olivia B. Waxman, “The Surprisingly Complex Link Between Prohibition and Women’s Rights,” TIME, January 18, 2019, accessed January 13, 2023. https://time.com/5501680/prohibition-history-feminism-suffrage-metoo/
Katie Thornton, “Women Campaigned for Prohibition- Then Many Changed Their Minds,” National Geographic, November 2, 2020, accessed January 13, 2023. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-women-overturned-prohibition
Ted Richthofen, “Women During Prohibition,” Colorado Encyclopedia, October 25, 2022, accessed January 13, 2023. https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/women-during-prohibition
Daniel Okrent, “Prohibition: Speakeasies, Loopholes and Politics,” Interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, May 10, 2010, accessed January 14, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/137077599/prohibition-speakeasies-loopholes-and-politics
“Rumunners Delivered the Good Stuff to America’s Speakeasies,” The Mob Museum: Prohibition- An Interactive History, accessed January 14, 2023. https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-rise-of-organized-crime/rum-running/
“Mabel Willebrandt: Prolific Prosecutor of Prohibition Laws,” The Mob Museum, October , 2016, accessed January 23, 2023. https://themobmuseum.org/blog/mabel-willebrandt-prolific-prosecutor-of-prohibition-laws/
“Prohibition Agent Hannah Brigham,” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, May 26, 2020, accessed January 23, 2023. https://www.atf.gov/our-history/prohibition-agent-hannah-brigham
“History of WCTU,” Frances Willard House Museum and Archives, accessed January 23, 2023. https://franceswillardhouse.org/frances-willard/history-of-wctu/
“Carrie Nation, Saloon Wrecker, Whipped By Women,” The San Francisco Call via The Library of Congress Chronicles of America, January 25, 1901, accessed January 23, 2023. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1901-01-25/ed-1/seq-1/#words=saloons+Carrie+Nation+saloon+CARRIE+SALOON+NATION+Saloon
“Introduction: Truth-Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells,” Frances Willard House Museum and Archives, accessed January 23, 2023. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/introduction?path=index
“Frances Harper and Black Women in the WCTU: Truth-Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells,” Frances Willard House Museum and Archives, accessed January 23, 2023. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/willard-and-wells/black-women-and-the-wctu
Mark Lawrence Schrad, “Hatchet Nation,” Slate.com, September 7, 2021, accessed January 23, 2023. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/carry-nation-biography-reasons-for-activism.html
“Prohibition Agent Georgia Hopley,” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, August 23, 2019, accessed January 23, 2023. https://www.atf.gov/our-history/prohibition-agent-georgia-hopley
Sascha Cohen, “No Unescorted Ladies Will Be Served,” JSTOR Daily, March 20, 2019, accessed January 23, 2023. https://daily.jstor.org/no-unescorted-ladies-will-be-served/
Jessie Kratz, “First Lady of the Law: Mabel Walker Willebrandt,” The National Archives: Pieces of History Blog, March 18, 2021, accessed January 23, 2023. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2021/03/18/first-lady-of-law-mabel-walker-willebrandt/
episode transcript
You Weren’t A Lady If You Went In
Prohibition became federal law in 1920, the same year women won the right to vote. But it wasn’t a particularly new idea in America. Many states had some form of “dry law” on the books long before 1920, due to the tireless efforts of the temperance movement, which had been around for as long as America had had a drinking problem…which is to say, quite a while. It seemed that the amount of alcohol being produced and consumed grew with every passing year. In 1830, it’s said that every American drank roughly 1.7 bottles of eighty-proof liquor a week: about three times as much as we drink these days. By 1850, Americans were drinking 36 million gallons of beer a year. By 1890, they were drinking 24 times that: around 855 million gallons. These figures account for every person in America, but we know most women and children weren’t drinking, which means that men were boozing overtime. And that meant more and more drunkenness.
Why were American men drinking so much? Well, most spent their days doing back-breaking labor for 12 hours a day and for very little pay, in a period where labor laws were few and far between. Many looked forward to quitting time, when they could get a drink or three at the local saloon, a male-dominated space where they could relax and forget their worries. Many were also first-generation immigrants, as massive numbers of German and Irish migrants settled in the US in the latter half of the 19th century. They opened saloons in their neighborhoods, as drinking was an integral part of their cultures. 80% of saloons were owned by first-generation Americans, which is why some temperance reformers encouraged Congress to restrict immigration. They thought it would curb drinking. Or were some of them just trying to keep foreigners off their shores? Xenophobia was rampant in the early 1900s, a reaction in part to the way immigration caused the US population to swell by more than 40% from 1890 to 1910. But most temperance reformers decided the saloon, not the immigrants that frequented them, as the target of their righteous wrath.
These dens of vice and sin were everywhere. There were an estimated 100,000 of them in the US in 1870; by 1900, there were almost 300,000. Saloons were social spaces associated with male camaraderie, and they offered male patrons a variety of vices to indulge in: alcohol, gambling, and consorting with women of the evening, giving them unsavory reputations. Instead of going home at dinner time to be with their families, men would drink away their paychecks and come home drunk, much to the chagrin of their wives. Most women hated saloon culture, as they’re the ones who paid the price for it. Alcoholism meant an increase in domestic violence, the spread of venereal disease, and even sometimes a husbands’ untimely death. But the most common and frustrating result of alcoholism was that a man’s family had to go hungry because he, as the main breadwinner, drank all his earnings. This was an especially dire situation given that American women legally couldn’t have their own bank accounts and didn’t make nearly as much as men. Your husband was in control of your family’s finances, and there was no way to stop him from spending all your money on alcohol, short of dragging his sorry rear end out of the bar yourself. Oh, wait. You couldn’t even do that.
Many saloons specifically banned women from entering to preserve the rowdy, rough and tumble “culture” of the establishment, and as a result, drinking in public became a gendered activity. After the American Civil War, most states made it illegal for women to serve alcohol, which meant they couldn’t work in or run their own saloons, and some states, like Colorado, Michigan, and Montana, passed laws banning women from entering such places altogether. The saloon wasn’t a place for delicate, upstanding females. They weren’t supposed to drink, and certainly not in public, surrounded by men. The prevailing fear was that if a woman spent too much time at the saloon, she might trip and fall into a life of prostitution. Stepping into a saloon as a woman was a surefire way to compromise your reputation. As Lillie Muentzer, a girl who lived above her father’s saloon in Denver remembered, “you weren’t a lady if you went in.” This notion was so strong that when temperance reformers entered saloons to record drinking habits for their research, they were often met with jeers and ugly names.
It was yet another example of the kind of antithetical gender roles that 19th century society loved to dote on. Men were strong, women were delicate. Men drank, women didn’t. This notion about boozing it up being unwomanly was rife in the leadup to the Twenties.
We ladies could technically buy alcohol. “You don’t have to leave but you can’t stay here” was a common policy among saloons regarding women looking for a tipple. They didn’t mind taking women’s money, as long as they didn’t take a seat at the bar. They’d often sell women bottles at the back door before shooing them away: go home, please. In states that hadn’t already banned women from entering saloons, they were still barred from the front, where the bar was. They were allowed to go to the back room to eat lunch with family or friends, especially in rural areas, where the local saloon often doubled as a restaurant and social club. These types of saloons still didn’t want ladies entering through the front door, though, so they created “Ladies’ Entrances” so their presence wouldn’t disturb the drinkers. How considerate.
Most women didn’t want into the saloon anyway. A HUGE number of ladies wanted to ban the sale of alcohol altogether. They saw these dens of vice as the root of many of their problems. So they did the same thing that many angry women had before them…stopped waiting around for men to solve the problem and started a club so they could fix it themselves.
Agitate-Educate-Legislate
The temperance movment was full of, and fueled by, American women. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (or WCTU) was founded in 1874, and it would become the biggest political organization run and made up of women in America’s history. It wasn’t the first temperance organization in America. Religious reformers had long been advocating for temperance, and what with their position as society’s religious and moral leaders, women had always gravitated toward the cause. Before the Civil War, most people fighting for temperance were men looking to curb utter drunkenness. But women didn’t just want people to stop getting sloshed – they wanted them to abstain entirely. Moderation and self-control were the guide words of the day. The notion that women had a distaste for drinking was rife in America. As one contemporary said of the American gentleman, he “thinks it ungallant to drink anything stronger than water in a lady’s company.” Some women were so married to temperance that they’re turn a suitor away if he drank: it was a deal breaker. As a popular saying from the turn of the century had it, “lips that touch alcohol will never touch mine.”
Advocating for temperance was often one of the only acceptable avenues through which women could become involved in politics. In the 19th century, suffrage and temperance were deeply entwined. A lot of the women who joined the fight for the vote did it because they wanted to get temperance on the political agenda.
The temperance movement had made some moderate gains before the WCTU came along. Maine passed the first state prohibition law in 1846, for example, and the political party known as the Prohibition Party was founded in 1869… but the WCTU changed everything. With a platform based on tackling public health issues such as prostitution, alcoholism, and consumption (or tuberculosis), the WCTU’s purpose was to create a “sober and pure world” through abstinence, temperance, and evangelical Christianity. If this mission statement makes you think of quiet, churchgoing housewives, you’re in for a rude shock. The WCTU was borne from some seriously pent-up female rage that erupted into violence during the summer of 1873. In what came to be called “The Women’s Crusade,” masses of fed-up women took to the streets to call for temperance in more than 900 communities in 31 states around America. They marched in front of saloons, preaching about the evils of alcohol and praying for the souls of the male patrons inside them. Anna Gordon, who is President of the WCTU when Prohibition starts, will remember the large scale protests by saying, “as if by magic, armies of women- delicate, cultured, home women- filled the streets of cities and towns of Ohio, going in pathetic procession from the door of the home to that of the saloon, singing, praying, and pleading with the rum sellers with all the eloquence of their mother-hearts.” These women were so desperate to convince men that alcohol was destroying families that they broke societal conventions, left their homes, and began publicly admonishing them.
Before long, they realized that prayers weren’t doing much of anything, and they decided to see if weapons could prove more effective. In hundreds of communities, women began pelting saloons and the men inside them with rocks and sticks to make their feelings crystal clear. Then they realized that axes might be an even better way to get their point across. When a courthouse in Washington, Ohio, finally closed two saloons thanks to the pressure of the local crusaders, contemporaries wrote that, “axes were placed in the hands of the women who had suffered most, and swinging through the air, they came down with ringing blows, bursting in the heads of the casks, and flooding the gutters of the street.” Have we got your attention now, gentlemen?
One temperance reformer made a career out of wielding a hatchet. Carrie Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation’s first husband died of alcoholism after only a year of marriage, leaving Carrie a widow and a single mother at the age of 22. She was a passionate woman with fierce religious convictions, and the two things she hated most in this life were corsets (she refused to wear one), and alcohol. She spent her time in church, running her hotel, housing and feeding the needy, and volunteering as a jail evangelist. Spending time with the men in lockup brought home to her just how big an issue alcoholism was. It was illegal to make or sell intoxicating liquors in her home state of Kansas, and yet most proprietors served alcohol as they pleased, simply paying the monthly fine of $100. The law was letting them down – someone needed to go further. She began her own chapter of the WCTU, even speaking with the state attorney general, to no avail. That’s when Carrie decided to put down her pen and pick up her hatchet.
At six feet tall, Carrie cut an imposing figure when she started traveling to saloons across Kansas to dole out her particular brand of vigilante justice. Often wearing a black and white gown that looked as though she’d stolen it from a nunnery, she’d march into a saloon and greet the barkeep with a “Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls.” How’s that for an entrance? Then she’d startswinging her hatchet, creating utter chaos, singing hymns all the while. “I smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it,” she wrote, “picked up the cash register, threw it down; I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bung of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me.” Carrie was arrested more than 32 times, and she was physically assaulted more than once. In San Francisco, she even got into a street fight with a saloon owner’s wife, who started hitting Carrie with a horsewhip after she wrecked her husband’s establishment. One newspaper helpfully included a cartoon of the incident, possibly because two women brawling in the street was so unheard of in 1901 that they felt readers needed a visual. The media loved Carrie and her newsworthy antics, and she cleverly turned her celebrity into a speaking gig, touring the country on the lecture circuit and selling mini replicas of her hatchet.
Most women, though, realized that violence wasn’t going to get the job done. The second president of the WCTU, Frances Willard, had bigger plans than local saloon wrecking. She was aggressive about temperance, calling it “a war of mothers and daughters, sisters, and wives.” At age 35, Willard helped found the WCTU, and at age 40, she became the president of what was probably the most effective political action group of her era. She grew the WCTU into a national, 250,000-member organization. At its peak, she had an army of 766,000 members reporting to her: more than the women’s suffrage movement. Willard was a brilliant leader, speaker, and organizer, and she was incredibly gifted at mobilizing women and positioning temperance as a women’s issue. Under the deft eye of Willard and her “Do Everything” policy, the WCTU began mobilizing to advocate for prison reform, temperance education, and reformed labor and child welfare laws. By 1890, more than half of the counties in the US had a WCTU chapter, all of which operated under the national slogan, “Agitate-Educate-Legislate.” Willard had become the second most well-known woman in the world, after Queen Victoria.
Part of what made the WCTU so successful was that it was one of the only national organizations that both black and white women could join. Although the WCTU’s leadership was primarily white, many black women joined, and, for the same reason white women did- they wanted to prevent alcoholism from causing their families to slide further into poverty. Several black women emerged as leaders, including Lucy Thurman, the WCTU’s only black founding member. Early on, she established the WCTU’s National Department of Colored Work, where she worked alongside other black temperance activists like Frances Harper. However, despite the progressive inclusion of black women, the WCTU was still divided along the color line and plagued by racism, at a time when racial violence and segregation were rampant. Lucy and Frances had to fight continually for funding and support, and they often faced difficulty in getting white women to help organize black WCTU chapters. President Willard herself was taken to task by none other than anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells after Willard made a series of racist comments about how inebriated African American men posed a potential threat to the safety of white women. Willard made the comments as a part of her efforts to garner more WCTU support in the South, and Wells publicly admonished her for spreading negative stereotypes. In a period when the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a major rebirth, Ida B. Wells documented and publicized hate crimes and lynchings, and pushed the WCTU to pass a series of anti-lynching resolutions. Nonetheless, the WCTU compromised on the race issue more than once to garner the support of southern white women, and they allowed southern chapters to segregate based on race, although the national convention sat black and white delegates equally. And while Frances Harper continued to push for white and black women to work together, she also recognized that many black women of the WCTU preferred to do their work without the “help” of their white colleagues, so they wouldn’t have to navigate racism in the workplace.
The WCTU had some early successes: they petitioned state representatives to enact organization sponsored bills, many of which involved enacting county “dry” laws, or establishing educational mandates that schools should teach children about the evils of alcohol. Anna Gordon, Willard’s private secretary, firmly believed that educating the youth was the key to temperance, and she wrote popular songs and children’s books on the topic, selling thousands of copies to help fundraise. This was impressive political activism for a group of people who couldn’t yet vote. But Willard was convinced that only some form of legal prohibition would make temperance a reality, and no such prohibition would ever be achieved without the votes of women. Willard wasn’t alone: many temperance activists recognized the importance of suffrage to their cause. Carrie Nation told the Kansas legislature, “You refused me the right to vote, and I had to use a rock,” and Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women’s suffrage movement, and a supporter of temperance, believed “the only hope” for Prohibition was “putting the ballot into the hands of women.”
Thus, suffrage was one of the many causes the WCTU advocated for, as they recognized that a woman’s right to vote was intrinsic to fighting for temperance, and they argued that a woman should be able to vote for her family in case her husband was too drunk to do so. The WCTU felt so strongly that the vote was the key to prohibition that they were one of the first organizations to employ a professional lobbyist in Washington, and their tactics seemed to be working. The President of the National Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association so feared Willard and the political power of the WCTU that he announced, “Gentlemen, we need fear the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the ballot in the hands of women; therefore gentlemen, fight woman suffrage!” All I can say is: good luck with that.
THE DRYS HAVE IT
The WCTU laid the groundwork for prohibition, but it wasn’t the organization most responsible for the 18th amendment. That distinction lies with the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893, which quickly overshadowed the WCTU’s power. The ASL used a combination of fundraising, campaigning, intimidation, and backroom deals to push their prohibition agenda. They focused primarily on placing dry Congressmen in office and employed a PR department to spread their message nationwide. Their publishing arm cranked out 250 million pages of material a month. They were also supported by the deep pockets of wealthy industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, many of whom supported prohibition. They believed alcohol slowed down their workers and they wanted to maximize profits, and they thought that if workers were no longer able to spend their money on alcohol, they wouldn’t keep pushing for higher wages. Yep, that sounds about right.
At the dawn of the 1900s, the idea of national prohibition was gaining momentum. This was the progressive era of widespread social activism and political reform, and plenty of people were blaming the saloon for America’s many problems. By 1916, some form of dry law was on the books in 23 states, and more than 50% of the US population was under some sort of alcohol prohibition. But federal prohibition still seemed far off, largely because the government relied so heavily on the taxes alcohol brought in. It was only with the ratification of the 16th amendment, which authorized a federal income tax, that prohibition became a real possibility… until America entered the Great War in 1917. National sentiment turned against German Americans, which was worrying for the country’s biggest breweries. The beer industry was huge in America, producing some 900 million barrels a year, and the highest ranks of the industry were dominated by German American “beer barons” like Adolphus Busch. The government began pumping out anti-German propaganda to aid the war effort; shunning beer became patriotic. The WCTU and ASL were thrilled. The ASL seized this opportunity to market prohibition as “American,” and calling for a temporary wartime ban on alcohol, ostensibly as a way of rationing and conserving national resources… and the government listened, thanks in part to Anna Gordon. Gordon had become the fourth President of the WCTU in 1914, and she now had the ear of President Woodrow Wilson. She was instrumental in helping the ASL persuade the President to take baby steps toward prohibition, such as prohibiting the use of food for the manufacture of alcohol, which cleared the way for the passing of the Wartime Prohibition Act in September 1918. The Act was a federal law that barred the manufacture of beer and wine after May 1919, and prohibited the sale of beverages with greater than 2.75% alcohol after July 1919. Ironically, the “so-called war time” act didn’t pass until 10 days after the war ended… but hey, no take backs.
After that, the ASL moved quickly. They drafted the 18th Amendment and helped usher it through both houses of Congress in December of 1917. Now that the amendment had been passed by the Senate and the House, the final step was to have it ratified by at least 36 states. (All constitutional amendments must be ratified by a 3/4ths majority among states before they can be enacted.) Thanks to the ASL’s years of installing dry politicians in positions of power across the country, on January 16, 1919, just over a year later, the 18th Amendment was ratified. Nebraska was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, with 10 more states following within two months. Only Rhode Island and Connecticut rejected ratification, but unfortunately for them, the majority had it. It read:
“After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the expiration thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.”
And thus, the most ambitious attempt to regulate morality and behavior in America officially became law.
DOING THE VOLSTEAD
Temperance reformers were elated. Anna Gordon remarked, “All of us everywhere— men, women, youths, maidens, boys and girls, may pull together toward the goal of a world made wider for women, happier for humanity, safer for little children, a world commercially more prosperous, a world with better health and bigger wealth, a world in which prohibition, purity and peace eventually shall triumph over discord, disease and death.” Some black leaders were cautiously optimistic as well, as they saw Prohibition as an opportunity to earn greater equality. Others were less pleased, as many Black Americans worked in the nightlife, entertainment, and restaurant industries that depended on alcohol sales. Plus, they hadn’t forgotten that the ASL had forged an alliance with the KKK to gain votes. Many Americans were upset because they saw the law as an infringement on their personal freedoms, with one New York Herald correspondent writing, “there never has been a greater wrong perpetuated on the American people.” And yet, for all the angry Americans who felt blindsided by the 18th amendment’s sudden passage, there wasn’t enough organized resistance to fight it. As George Ade lamented, “The Non-Drinkers had been organizing for fifty years and the Drinkers had no organization whatever. They had been too busy drinking.”
Of course, what happens when you announce a popular store’s going under? People crowd around for that Everything Must Go sale. In the year before national prohibition went into effect, the US went on a crazed bender, drinking to excess, purchasing home brewing kits, and hoarding bottles in basements to prepare for the dry years ahead. It was perfectly legal for private homes and clubs to keep any alcohol purchased before the law took effect. J.P. Morgan, for one, purchased a thousand cases of French champagne to “wait out the law.” Even Warren G. Harding, who will become president in 1921, and who had only been a Prohibition supporter to win votes, purchased $1,800 worth of liquor (about $26,000 today), and regularly offered drinks to visitors in the presidential living quarters. After all, the 18th amendment didn’t say anything about the legality of drinkingintoxicating liquors.
As we foxtrot out way into the 1920s, Prohibition is a federal law. But laws don't mean much without enforcement, do they? So the Volstead Act is passed, mostly to empower the government to enact and enforce the 18th amendment. It details the specifics of what prohibition will look like on the ground. It’s by the ASL, who are intent on making it as strict as possible. President Woodrow Wilson vetoes it, calling it too extreme, but the ASL-backed Congress overrides him. It defined “intoxicating liquor” as any beverage containing greater than ½ of 1% alcohol and outlines penalties for law breakers. The maximum penalty for first offenders caught manufacturing, selling, or transporting alcohol is six months in prison and a $1,000 fine, with greater punishments for repeat offenders. It also makse the Treasury Department responsible for enforcing the law, as they were already responsible for collecting alcohol taxes, and the Bureau of Prohibition was created as a division of the IRS.
The Volstead Act contains three glaring loopholes that people immediately exploited. The first is that farmers are allowed to manufacture fruit juices into alcohol to preserve their crops without having to pay taxes. This means that people can legally produce up to 1,000 bottles of hard cider or wine for home consumption a year. Grape producers jump on the bandwagon, creating dehydrated concentrates of crushed grapes and compressing them into a solid known as a “grape brick.” You can purchase it to make grape juice, which is why it’s still technically legal, but most people are buying it to make wine at home. One company’s brick package even includes a hot tip in the form of a warning label that reads, “After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, because then it would turn to wine.” Oops! From 1925 to 1929, Americans drink 679 million gallons of homemade wine…totally by accident. Obviously.
The second exception involves sacramental wine. The law allows congregations with licenses to distribute 10 gallons of alcohol to each adult per year. Some people pose as priests or rabbis of fake congregations to get their allotted 10 gallons, while others decide that now might be a very good time to find the Lord: many congregations saw their numbers skyrocket in the ‘20s.
The third exception is for alcohol made for medicinal purposes, even though in 1917, the American Medical Association discouraged the use of alcohol in medicine, stating that it had no real value. And yet, Yet many doctors were still recommending it for everything from the flu to heart disease. Licensed doctors can still prescribe wine, whiskey, and other distilled spirits to patients if they believe “in good faith” that it is necessary. This alcohol is manufactured for pharmacies by government-approved distilleries, and all you have to do is go to the doctor to get some. Many build successful side gigs writing prescriptions for fake illnesses, which you’d then take to the pharmacist, pay $3 (a little over $40 today), and collect your allotted 1 pint of liquor every 10 days. Refills aren’t allowed, but many pharmacists make bank by conveniently forgetting to cancel prescriptions. Sometimes doctors simply write separate ones. No wonder Walgreens had 525 locations by 1929, despite having only 20 stores in 1920!
These three loopholes aren’t the only problem with the Volstead Act. It called for anyone accused of any violation to undergo a jury trial, which drowns the federal court system in a veritable flood of petty cases. The ASL also grossly overestimated the cooperation of state and local law enforcement. The Treasury department is expected to police the borders to prevent smuggling, make raids and arrests, license the manufacture, storage, and distribution of legal industrial alcohol, and monitor the dispensation of medicinal and sacramental liquor. All on a tiny first-year budget of $4.75 million. Throughout the 1920s, agents consistently complain about how hamstrung they feel by the lack of funding, with one New York agent saying, “it will take a great deal more money than the Government will ever consent to make it dry.” But Congress refuses to supply the Bureau with more money; they don’t want to raise taxes, and have already lost a ton of money in forfeiting the revenue booze taxes used to bring in.
The Bureau was also seriously understaffed. In its first year, it only has 1,500 agents and 1,500 administrators. Eventually, the Bureau grew, but thanks to the Volstead Act, political appointees, not civil servants, are required to enforce Prohibition. The ASL did so their “dry” Congressmen could appoint ASL-friendly agents. In practice, it meant that agents are not experienced law enforcement personnel- just people with friends in high places. They’re issued guns despite not having been trained or passed the Civil Service exams. And they’re hugely underpaid, and in a job in which they were being showered with bribes from bootleggers and speakeasy owners. No wonder corruption is so rampant amongst them. Agents can make anywhere from 50 to 500 dollars, as club owners pay them to look the other way or to get tips in advance of raids. The problem is so extensive that on nights before raids were scheduled, Bureau headquarters cut off their outgoing telephone service to prevent tips from being phoned out.
Many prohibition agents quickly learn that there was even more money to be had from going dirty and working the system than from simply accepting bribes. Some agents seize liquor in a raid from one club, and then sell it to another. Others seize the liquor, then sell it back to the original owners for a wildly marked up price. A few agents even switch sides entirely. When the San Jose Bar in San Francisco was raided, a police officer’s service revolver was found, leading investigators to believe that local cops had been running it. Another agent quit the Bureau to open his own speakeasy in Greenwich Village, after having learned the trade firsthand.
That’s not to say they didn’t kick some butts and take some names, though. From 1928 to 1929, the Bureau confiscated 11,416 stills, 15,700 distilleries, and 1.1 million gallons of alcohol. These were often selling alcohol to speakeasies, the illegal underground bars and clubs that popped up after Prohibition was enacted. New York had over 30,000 speakeasies and nightclubs serving alcohol. Which gave the Bureau a great idea: let’s open a fake one of our own! The Bridge Whist Club was one such speakeasy, meant to bait bootleggers so the feds could penetrate the network of smugglers who supplied New York City. It doesn’t catch any criminals, as they knew the score, but it did accidentally make quite a bit of money selling cocktails…oops!
Turns out creating fake speakeasies wasn’t the best way to enforce Prohibition. So most agents simply go undercover at real ones, pretending to be patrons and asking for a drink. This means donning disguises: dressing in white coats and posing as doctors to frequent a speakeasy near Mount Sinai Hospital, or carrying legal books to walk into a club popular with lawyers. Lady agents can slip on a shimmery dress and simply look ready to have themselves a good time. They sneak the content of whatever they’ve been served into a small funnel or bottle hidden in their vest or purse, which will be used as evidence in court. Then they flash their badge and arrest the person who just served them.
Raids are flashy, and they’re fairly common. Our flapper friend Lois Long frequently witnessed them in her work as The New Yorker’s cabaret reviewer. Of one particular raid, she told her readers, “it wasn’t one of those refined, modern things, where gentlemen in evening dress arise suavely from ringside tables and depart, arm in arm, with head waiters no less correctly clad, towards the waiting patrol wagons. It was one of those movie affairs, where burly cops kick down the doors, and women fall fainting on the tables, and strong men crawl under them and waiters shriek and start throwing bottles out of windows.”
But raids rarely result in the closures of speakeasies. Most owners just pay cops and agents off to avoid raids in the first place. Others find it cheaper to simply get arrested, pay the fines, and get back to business. In San Francisco, the Eiffel Tower nightclub was raided on New Year’s Eve and reopened a half hour later. Trying to close speakeasies in the 1920s is like playing a losing game of whack-a-mole.
WOMEN GET IT DONE
Of course, men aren’t the only ones working at the Bureau of Prohibition and going raiding. Women got in on the action, too. Hannah Brigham was one such woman. Most of Hannah’s work centered on inspecting medicinal liquor permits, but she also occasionally went on raids, even leading one herself to bust a “silk stocking flapper flask” party at a women’s college.
The very first female agent sworn into the Bureau was Georgia Hopley, in 1922. Her new position made national headlines, and she led public relations for the department. She traveled the country, speaking in favor of prohibition. She was especially critical of female bootleggers, telling a Boston Sunday Globe reporter, “There you have the worst problem for prohibition officials. [Women] resort to all sorts of tricks, concealing metal containers in their clothing, in false bottoms of trunks and traveling bags, and even in baby buggies… their detection is far more difficult than that of male lawbreakers.” Hopley’s comments and stellar performance encouraged local law enforcement to hire more women. The Massachusetts Prohibition Director Elmer C. Potter said, “I believe the presence of a woman on the enforcement staff will have a most salutary effect in bringing about strict observance of the law and contributing to more faithful work in enforcement.”
One of the most famous female agents working in law enforcement was Daisy Simpson, known as “Lady Hooch Hunter” and “the Woman with a Hundred Disguises.” Daisy had spent her youth rather wildly, doing drugs and hanging around with gangsters. Ironically, during WWI, she joined the “morals squad” of the San Francisco police department, and after the war, she joined the Bureau of Prohibition. Her unseemly past made Daisy a fantastic agent, as her criminal contacts and knowledge of gang hideaways meant she knew just where to find all the illegal speakeasies springing up.
While most female field agents weren’t doing the fun stuff – their job was limited to taking field notes or photographs after raids - Daisy’s creativity and daring helped her to become a successful undercover agent, and she often worked on special assignments across the country. Her MO was to feign illness outside speakeasies, and bust proprietors when they offered her a restorative sip of liquor. Daisy quickly became a media darling, as the newspapers loved detailing the undercover exploits of Bureau agents. Unfortunately, in 1925, a San Francisco Treasury Department official banned women from field agent work, and so Daisy resigned, unwilling to work as a secretary. A year later, she was picked up in Texas on drug charges, and unable to make bail, she shot herself in the stomach with a gun she had smuggled into prison. She survived the suicide attempt and received a suspended sentence, before disappearing from the public eye.
But one woman didn’t think much of targeting saloons and speakeasys: Mabel Walker Willebrandt. She remarked, “There’s one way it can be done – get at the source of supply.” And she had the authority to do it. In 1921, at 32 years old, Mabel was appointed by the president to the position of assistant US Attorney, and thus became the highest-ranking woman in the federal government. She wasn’t thrilled with the job: she wasn’t even personally support Prohibition, and she resented being so intricately linked with it. But she was a hard worker who liked a thing done properly. “Give me the authority and let me have my pick of 300 men,” she said, “and I’ll make this country as dry as it is humanly possible.” Which she did so ferociously that she featured on the cover of TIME with the rather interesting nickname: Mrs. Firebrand. In her opinion, they needed to go after the bootleggers, rumrunners, and tax evaders. “I know them, and I know how they could be cut off. I have no patience with this policy of going after the hip-pocket and speakeasy cases. That’s like trying to dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a blotter.”She argued more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court, presided over a staff of 100, and was involved in 600,000 federal prosecutions from 1920 to 1933.
She successfully argued that income made in the course of illegal activities should be taxed, which enabled her to bring tax evasion cases against gangsters such as Al Capone. She was frustrated by a lack of resources and coordination, but she still made bootleggers tremble. When Collier’s magazine published a profile of Willebrandt in 1924, it read, “I know a way to make a ‘wise’ bootlegger in the United States shiver in his boots. How? Easy! Just slip up behind him and whisper, ‘Mrs. Willebrandt is after you.’”
But despite being called the “First Lady of the Law” by Prohibition supporters, Mable deeply sympathized with many of the female bootleggers and speakeasy hostesses that she was arresting, and she often argued that they were only doing it out of financial necessity. And we’ll meet some of them in our next episode, when we dive into the women who went up against the law.
conclusion
Women, then, were one of the driving forces behind Prohibition. The ladies of the temperance movement, and women like Daisy Simpson and Hannah Brigham actively supported Prohibition, as they believed that if Americans drank less, it would heal families and society. The thing is… for every woman that supported Prohibition, there was another who didn’t. Many women drank during Prohibition, sipping cocktails at speakeasies, and many others openly engaged in criminal activity, serving as moonshiners, bootleggers, and speakeasy owners. And as the decade went on, some women who had previously been in favor of Prohibition even started turning against it.
Today, we met some of the women who supported Prohibition and saw what a big role they played in it. Next time, we’ll hang out with some of the women who defied it. We’ll learn how to get into a speakeasy, what 1920s women were sipping on, and find out how prohibition encouraged many women to drink, and even played a part in their liberation.