Lessons Of The Alcohol Prohibition Era

Only The Crooks Have Learned Them [first draft preview]

This page is devoted to unpacking the most important aspects of governmental Prohibition and criminalization efforts directed at mind-altering substances. The most important historic example for Americans is alcohol Prohibition.

The phrase “Lessons of Prohibition” is often used by opponents of the War on Drugs, very often associated with a lament as to how they haven’t been learned, at least by the authorities. The criminals and the crooked have been the ones who learned the lessons, and put them to use for their special benefit and advantage.

Since I’ve never found an written outline of exactly what those Lessons are, specifically and in detail, I’m taking on the project myself. I’m just getting started with this page. I’ll be adding more Lessons in the weeks to come, along with as much reference support as I can find. The quoted passages on this page refer exclusively to the era of Federal Prohibition of alcohol, a law enforcement regime so unprecedentedly ambitious that it required the passage and ratification of a Constitutional Amendment- the Eighteenth Amendment, which went into effect on January 1, 1920. Since Federal Prohibition was a Constitutional Amendment, it could only be repealed with another Constitutional Amendment. The Twenty-First Amendment ended Prohibition, on January 1, 1934.

14 years. Fourteen years of Prohibition put American society through a dramatic set of changes. I’d argue that 14 years is nothing, compared to the societal and cultural changes associated with the still ongoing War on Drugs. But 14 years of history was sufficient to supply a template for the Lessons of Prohibition. It’s a tragedy that the people with the power to remedy our current drug criminalization disaster show no sign of learning them. Whether out of obduracy or cowardice. Or perhaps it’s just ignorance; maybe they just don’t know how corrosive Prohibition was to the civic order, public health, and the institutions of government. That’s what this page is for; it’s an attempt to enumerate those lessons, and document some of the history that bear those lessons out. This project requires that I do a lot of reference lookup and typing quoted text passages. I’m a slow typist, so bear with me. I’m not half done with this page.

For now, I’ll offer the first three lessons, and my first draft of reference support for my assertions.

Prohibition was unenforceable.

For one thing, the history of attempts to suppress and interdict the supplies of a forbidden commodity has historically always led to a failure over the long run, due to "the balloon effect”: push it in one place, and it expands somewhere else. (And there doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to pop, either.) There are always sanctuaries for the supply. In the era of the present-day Drug War, they’re found in source countries where the illicit trade provides on of the strongest economic sectors of the country. Sometimes they’re in remote regions of the countryside, “in areas beyond government control”. Sometimes law enforcement efforts are intensified to target a particular criminal organization and drug producing source region. But the illicit trade is so diversified geographically that it’s easily shifted from one recently fallow field to another.

During alcohol Prohibition the situation was very different: the “source countries” supplying the demand for the prohibited product in the United States were neighboring national regimes where the alcohol trade was quite legal. In some ways, the porous border situation has similarites to the current status of cannabis in the U.S.; a large amount of cannabis in the 38 states that enforce criminalization of recreational cannabis is supplied by unlicensed, unregulated- and still illegal- cannabis growing operations in the states that have legalized cannabis for commercial sale. The legal states have become oases of supply for illicit traffickers- precisely because, contrary to casual assumptions, cannabis has not really been legalized. State legalization only leaves the situation in limbo- as well as continuing to provide advantages for the career criminals running the illicit distribution networks in the majority of US states that still forbid a legal trade in cannabis. There’s little hope of effectively remedying that problem without Federal legalization.

So there are some significant differences between the current legal status quo of cannabis and the historic transnational trade in alcohol. Unlike the current situation of interstate trade in cannabis in the US described above, in the 1920-1933 alcohol Prohibition era, nations were the alcohol trade was legal had the legal ability to export and import wholesale quantities of liquor, much of which ended up in massive stockpiles within a few miles of the international border between Canada and the US, particularly in depots like Windsor and Manitoba, south of Winnipeg. Much of that warehoused product was exported from legal sources in the British Isles:

In 1926 [Sam] and Allan [Bronfman] made a trip that qualified as a pilgrimage. They sailed that year tothe Great Britain to meet the men who controlled the Scotch whiskey industry. The Bronfmans had been buying from the Scots since 1920, importing thousands and thousands of barrels, blending it with their own production, and marketing it as “highland whiskey.” Now they had a bigger idea; they wanted ti create a partnership on the western side of the Atlantic, with both parties sharing in the profits bottled up in the famous brand names that the Bronfmans wanted to import.

In London that year, careful men on the other side of the table had reasons to listen. The year before, the Distillers Company Limited, a combination f several family firms that had been in its existence since 1877, had finally brought back into its fold the five leading brands in the British whiskey industry: Johnny Walker, Dewar’s, White Horse, Haig & Haig, and Black & White. Upon completing what has been known as the “Big Amalgamation”, the DCI, by this point the world’s largest liquor company, controlled virtually all ofScotland’s distilling faculties, the most prominent brands, and several of the UK’s leading gin producers as well, including Tanqueray and Gordon’s. Operating in the way any healthy cartel would, it had quickly established a set of protocols- price fixing, brand allocation, quality control- governing sale to the illict American market…(Okrent, Last Call, 2010. p.155.)

British Caribbean colonies also provided a legal haven, particularly in the Bahamas and Bermuda, that was only a few dozen miles offshore of Florida. All of the other island nations and colonies of the Caribbean were similarly legal, not only providing wholesale storage space but also a tourist destination for upscale tourists and vacationers on cruises from the U.S. As if border interdiction weren’t beleaguered enough, during the Volstead Act era, the U.S. only claimed three miles as national waters (now it’s 200.) As a result, during Prohibition, huge freighters were docked all along the Atlantic Ocean outside of the three-mile limit; the ships served as “motherships” supplying the fast runabouts used to outrun the Prohibition blockade.

Meanwhile, within U.S. borders, Prohibition corruption spread far and wide. The source for much of the supply to provide for the forbidden illicit demand was found domestically.

Consider the case of Max “Boo Boo” Hoff, kingpin of the diversion of “industrial” ethyl alcohol trade in the industrial city of Philadelphia:

Operating as the Quaker Industrial Alcohol Company, the Glenwood Alcohol Wompany, and the Conso;lidated Ethyl Products Company, Hoff and his associates ran a vertical enterprise, beginning with the manufacture of alcohol, then managing its diversion to cover houses, its reformulation and repackaging as liquor in a cutting plant, and its wholesale distribution. Hoff and his confederates produced almost 1.5 glallons of undiluted alcohol in a philadelphia a single year- diluted to 80 proof, 3.375 million gallons of regular-strength booze. Philadepelphia alone couldn’t absorb this output; in one two-week stretch in 1925 Hoff and company sent forty loaded [rail] freight cars to St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul…

Hoff’s operation was so lucrative that it could afford to buy off the head of the police department’s Detective Bureau,hundreds of street cops, and thenecessary complement of federal agents. Agrand jury estimated the annual graft collected by members of the [Philadelphia] police department alone at $2 million. The bounty was so rich that it led to cops bribing other cops, most notoriously by paying for the privilege of assignment to the department’s elite enforcement squad, where the opportunities for payoffs are almost limitless. The political world was covered by Hoff’s choice of a lawyer: Congressman Benjamin Golder, a vital gear in the Republican machine that dominated Philadelphia politics.

Hoff’s reach extended into the city’s commercial establishment as well. His productive relationship with the Reading Railroad was built on a shipping agreement covering a territory stretching west to Minnesota and north to the Canadian border.He financed the expasion of his business through the otherwise respectable Union National Bank,, which laundered his cash flow by lending him money on no other collateral than the$10 million he kept under pseudonymous names names in fourteen separate accounts. Boo Boo Hoff, said a district attorney who tried (and failed) to put him in jail, was “like a giant spider in the middle of a great web with eyes in front and behind.” He was “a man who sees everything, knows everything, and controls everything of the underworld.”

The revelation of Union National’s complicity in Hoff’s racket led to the resignation of its president, Joseph S. Mc Culloch, and the sale of Union National to another bank…” (Okrent, Last Call, 2010, p.202-204.)

And then there’s Chicago.

There’s a commons misconception that the story of Prohibition in Chicago begins and ends with the Italians: Colosimo, Esposito, Torrio, Capone. (Sam Giancana was just making his bones in the Prohibition era.) It isn’t that simple. Al Capone was a flashy guy, and always good for a quote. He made fortune, for a while. But Capone was just one criminal profiteer of many in Chicago. How did they all get to do it?

“With an entire industry rendered illegal and forced underground, crime bosses and judges, law enforcement agents and politicians saw a main chance. Chicago politicians admitted that they knew of a “tremendous amount of graft being collected for the protection of bootleggers...police, judges, and the influence of state’s attorneys.”Mayor Thompson was only the most notorious. He gave the city, according the the Chicago Tribune, “an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, [and] unchecked graft.”

Law administration, enforcement, and every level of urban politics was shot through with the influence of what became colloquially known as “boozedom.” Polticians of “good repute” unabashedly attended weddings, baptisms, and christenings of organized crime kingpins. They were “not ashamed to deal with criminals”, remarked the Chicago Tribune; indeed, “they are compelled to deal with it if they were to remain successful politicians.”Senator Charles Deneen, tellingly, attended the christening of “Diamond Joe” Esposito’s child in 1925 along with a number of judicial officials. And when the assitant district attorny of Cook County was shot to death in a hail of bullets in 1928, it was not because he sought to crack downon the industry, but because he allied himself with one gang faction that was attacked by another. “He drank with them, rode with them, entered speakesies with them.” Such connections between governments and organized crime were a harbinger of the relationship between government and organized crime were a harbinger of the relationship between state officeholders and drug cartels in drug-supplying countries today.

Corruption’s stain touched politicians at all levels from United States senators down to judges, justices of the peace, and the policemen on the beat. The Chicago Commons Settlement Houses reported that “liquor [was] obtainable directly under the protection of police.” One neighborhood establishment “benefited fromt he protection of the police precict next door” with patrolmen making “deliveries [of liquor] into automobiles…” (Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol, 2016. p.55-56.)

I’ll stop there. But Lisa McGirr is just getting started…

And then there’s the Federal level of corruption, from the Prohibition Bureau to the Capitol. Daniel Okrent again, from Last Call:

…one didn’t need to explore McMullin’s murderous mind, Young’s deep thuggishness, or Blood’s loathsome racism to locate the rotten core of the Prohibition Bureau in its early days. That could be found, as the hallowed phrase would later have it, where the money was. Emory Buckner, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the $1,800 a year paid to Prohibition agents wasnot a living wage in his jurisdiction, yet “men clamor for jobs.” It was as if the willlingness to accept a meager salary (equivalent to slightly more than $20,000 in 2009) guarnateeedyou the lucky number in a fabulous sweepstakes. The universal prize: a piece of the millions upon millions in bribes and blackmail that even a moderately adept agent could extract from the lawbreakers operating within his jurisdiction. New York editor Stanley Walker said most Prohibition agents “were fairly decent fellows, and their demands…were never extortionate.” They didn’t need to be; there was more than enough dirty money for everybody.

So evident was the corruption that saturated the Prohibition force from the very bieginning that President Harding was moved to say, “There are conditions relating to the Volstead Act’s enforcement which savor of nation-wide scandal. It is the most demoralizing factor in our public life.” Coming from Warren G. Harding, this was saying a lot. (Okrent, Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition. 2010. p.137.)

Prohibition converted rights into privileges that were chiefly enjoyed by the upper class and the politically powerful. (And also, in some sense, the ranks of career criminals, whose ranks soared in the Prohibition era .)

…In Washington, [President] Harding could get his drinks from Taylor, his manservant at the house he kept near the golf course at the Chevy Chase Club, who kept it stocked with bourbon and Scotch; from his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, who had larged quantities of seized liquor delivered by Justice Department employees to his infamous den of iniquity, the Little Green House on K Street; or from his friend Representative Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, Teddy Roosevelt’s son-in-law, “who did not have the slightest intention of complying with the Eighteenth Amendment and never pretended to.” That was the verdict of his wife, Alice, who believed that the family’s butler made “a passable gin.” The Longworth cellars also made a passable beer that won compliments from Arthur Balfour when the British diplomat visited Washington for the 1921 Disarmament Conference…

…The president [Harding] set the tone when he arranged to have $1,800 worth of liquor that he’d purchased before January 16, 1920, transferred to the presidential living quarters from his home on Wyoming Avenue. (Going in the other direction, Woodrow Wilson had his persona supply relocated from the White House to his home on S Street.) Harding provided liquid hospitality to guests ranging from Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, to the floating cast of characters who took part in his regular poker games…(Okrent, Last Call, 2010. p.129-130.)

Industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who did not employ men who drank but who had long owned an interest in the Old Overholt rye distillery, thoughtfully began to distribute his own reserves of Overhole to his pals while it was still legal; Senator Philander C. Knox of Pennsylvania, who had voted in favor of the Eighteenth Amendment, took receipt of twenty cases. (Okrent, Last Call, 2010. p.113.)