Days of Wine and Four Roses
As the clock ticked toward midnight one chilly evening fifty years ago, District of Columbia Commissioner George E. Allen waited in the studios of Washington radio station WJSV, watch in hand. At his side was William C. Murphy, the president of the National Press Club, who was on a mission of the utmost importance.
In a few moments, Murphy would take possession of a piece of paper that he, along with hundreds of his colleagues, considered vastly more important than a page-one exclusive: District of Columbia Liquor License No. 1.
As they waited, the first big Hopfheiser truck rumbled out of a warehouse on 12th Street, N.W., carrying precious cargo: Washington’s first legal liquor in more than sixteen years. A fleet of delivery trucks left the Abner Drury Brewery, loaded, for a change, with the real stuff: 6 percent beer, not the 3.2 variety that had become legal nearly a year earlier, nor the anemic “near beer” whose principal utility was to render straight alcohol drinkable.
At one minute past midnight on March 1, 1934, Commissioner Allen made everything official. Julius Reiners, the National Press Club’s manager, swung into action as a post-Prohibition field general, directing that the club’s first case of legal liquor — MacNair’s Special Reserve Pure Scotch Whisky — be broken open and served.
From Washington precinct houses, policemen set out by foot on a mission of mercy: delivering the remaining 199 liquor licenses.
Soon Washington would be afloat in booze — good booze, and plenty of it.
And all over the city, the beer and liquor trucks methodically made their rounds. Cheering crowds awaited them at virtually every stop. But as the trucks completed their deliveries, the crowds moved off the streets and into the bars, where they belonged.
Prohibition in the nation’s capital was over.
The Underground Economy
Washington was declared a dry zone on November 1, 1917, more than two years before the Eighteenth Amendment and its enforcement machinery, the Volstead Act, became law.
KING BOOZE QUITS CAPITAL THRONE, trumpeted the Evening Star.
And Washington stayed dry longer than the rest of the nation. Utah ratified the repeal amendment on December 5, 1933, ending what President Herbert Hoover had called “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive.”
But Congress — then the District’s city council, in effect — adjourned for the holidays without allowing “King Booze” to reign again in the nation’s capital. Washington had to wait almost three months longer to welcome back legal liquor.
The wait might have been torturous except for one simple fact: Prohibition did not work.
Washington succeeded admirably in assembling an underground economy in alcohol. But while Prohibition bred new brands of organized crime and political corruption in other cities, violating the Volstead Act in the capital was usually a genteel — and gainful — profession.
Booze flowed freely into Prohibition-era Washington. The government-bonded Maryland warehouses that stored nearly five million gallons of liquor leaked liberally. Every day, thousands of gallons of moonshine and its mutations made their way into the District from Maryland and Virginia stills. Bathtub gin — diluted and doctored alcohol — was mixed, cut, and bottled in Washington’s basements.
Premium brands of liquor were shuttled in from the docks of Baltimore and Philadelphia by high-society bootleggers whose upper-crust customers would accept no less. Some liquor shipments came from as far away as Pittsburgh. Members of Congress returning from overseas junkets smuggled liquor back into the country by claiming immunity from baggage inspection. And from Washington’s diplomatic black market came the revered “embassy stuff.” (Usually, however, customers found they were paying for good bottles and lousy liquor.)
In Washington, as nearly everywhere else, the Prohibition Bureau gave no evidence of making much headway in its battle against bootleggers, rum-runners, and others of their lawbreaking ilk. The local police were slightly more visible, if only because they ceremoniously dumped confiscated liquor into the Potomac River behind the Lincoln Memorial.
There was good reason for the Prohibition Bureau’s ineffectiveness. Its employee turnover was worse than any other federal agency’s: in its six years, ten thousand men held three thousand jobs. This sorry record induced one higher-up to observe that the bureau was running “a training school for bootleggers.”
The Prohibition Commissioner, Roy Asa Haynes, was no model of propriety himself. For one thing, he handed over sheaves of withdrawal permits (which allowed liquor to be removed from the warehouses) to his cronies in the Harding administration’s Ohio Gang. Haynes also instructed Prohibition agents to deliver confiscated liquor, twenty cases at a time, to a green Victorian townhouse at1625 K Street, N.W. Twice a week or so, in broad daylight, armed guards would roll up to the little house in Wells Fargo Express wagons and haul in the hooch.
Supply and Demand
Bootleggers openly worked the southwest corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., right across the street from police headquarters. A customer would drive by and shout for the bootlegger of his choice, who would then climb on the running board and direct him to a clandestine cache (one of which was the shrubbery outside the White House fence).
With an estimated five thousand bootleggers plying their trade in and around Washington as early as 1922, Prohibition agents and police found that putting a serious dent in the business was like wrestling with an octopus.
Isadore “Izzy” Einstein, a Prohibition agent of enormous imagination and talent, once kept track of how long it took him to buy a drink in twelve major cities. New Orleans was the easiest (elapsed time: thirty-five seconds); the nation’s capital, however, finished dead last in his survey.
“Washington is a tough nut to crack,” Einstein observed. “I was about to decide that the capital was dry as a bone. Then I went into a barbershop for a shave, and the barber asked me if I wanted bay rum. I told him I preferred real rum. He put me in touch with a twelve-dollar bottle.”
Einstein’s elapsed purchase time: two hours, eight minutes.
But most Washingtonians could get their hands on booze with a single telephone call. The city’s high-class bootleggers shied away from public assignations, preferring to do business by phone.
The best of the lot had eminently respectable clients, whose numbers they increased by keeping a stock of liquor in storage. When the police finally managed to arrest Raymond “Razor” Gray in his apartment, they found five hundred quarts of liquor and detailed account books listing his upper-crust customers, who were awaiting deliveries for the forthcoming Christmas season.
Gray was taken to the station house of the second precinct, where a handful of the city’s most prominent lawyers soon arrived to offer their personal checks as bond. One threatened to call up Attorney General Harry Daugherty if the police even hesitated to release Gray. They didn’t hesitate.
Washington’s rum-runners took to equipping their automobiles with reinforced springs (to disguise the weight of their cargoes) and smoke-screen units (to blind and choke police in pursuit). Police strategies included elaborate blockades of roads near the Pennsylvania and Anacostia bridges with the aid of borrowed army trucks. But twenty-four highways led into Washington, and the police could cover only a few at a time. So the moonshine kept flowing in.
Foremost among these indigenous specialties was Panther Whiskey, heavy with esters and fusel oil (a knockout punch in three rounds). Old Stingo, a marginally superior product, was often rebottled as Old Lewis Hunter Rye, a first-rate pre-Prohibition brand. From Virginia came Jackass Brandy, purportedly made from peaches, which was peddled for four dollars a quart.
In Maryland, the brand of last resort was Old Horsey, a whiskey with a decidedly equine aroma. The locally distilled Scat Whiskey, which sold for five or six dollars a bottle, was laced with traces of lead.
Those with more modest appetites for alcohol had a respectable, if more expensive, alternative. Liquor was legally available by prescription, one pint at a time, and delighted Washington physicians found themselves dealing with an epidemic of aching backs, sore necks, and various illnesses of unknown origin. For a two- or three-dollar office visit fee, patients could walk away with a prescription for bonded booze.
The capital city was fortunate enough to have some of the best and brightest bootleggers in the nation — the politest and gentlest,” a writer for Collier’s magazine concluded in 1929. “No rough stuff. No racketeering. Quiet, prompt service and plenty of it. That’s Washington.”
Market Acceptance
Speakeasies were a different matter altogether. They were slow to catch on in Washington and never acquired the cachet or class of their counterparts in other cities. In Prohibition’s early years, most Washingtonians confined their drinking to their homes and offices.
But by the mid-1920s speakeasies were springing up everywhere: in lunchrooms and tearooms, barbershops and beauty parlors, billiard parlors, and even laundries.
By the end of the decade, there were more than a thousand of them, ranging from altogether elegant establishments to fleabag joints where a quarter would buy a shot of recooked denatured alcohol liberally laced with liquid soap.
One typical Washington speakeasy, in the 1100 block of 18th Street, N.W., gave every indication of being a cigar store. Selected patrons were shown through the rear of the store into a back room that was fitted up with a brass rail, engraved mirrors, and a few pictures of nude women.
“What’ll it be, gents?” the bartender asked entering customers.
More often than not, “gin-bucks” — at twenty-five cents apiece — was the reply.
Washington’s speakeasy era ended, more or less, late in 1933, when a twelve-man police squad closed the Club Mayflower, an elite fourth-floor establishment at 1223 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. For sheer swank, the Club Mayflower had no peer in Washington. A thirty-foot mahogany bar graced its tastefully appointed main room, which contained about two dozen tables, what the police called “deluxe drinking equipment,” and an assortment of gambling paraphernalia.
The Club Mayflower’s extensive menu featured seventeen cocktails priced from fifty cents to one dollar; a shot of gin or a bottle of beer cost a quarter. The club also carried an admirable selection of imported and domestic brandies and wines.
Diplomatic Immunity
One slice of Washington society was completely immune from the sanctions of the Volstead Act: the ten thousand or so individuals connected with foreign embassies and legations, who were free to import unlimited quantities of spirits.
A foreign distillery was found to have delivered some thirteen thousand quarts of whiskey within a three-month period, which, by the calculation of one senator, was enough to supply every Washington diplomat, family member, and attaché — and every maid, cook, laundress, chauffeur and janitor enjoying diplomatic status — with twenty quarts apiece.
For a brief time after the adoption of the 1929 Jones-Stalker “Five and Ten Law” (so dubbed for its penalties, five years in prison and a $10,000 fine), the flow of diplomatic liquor into Washington from the Baltimore docks slowed to a mere trickle. The State Department ruled that truck drivers without diplomatic status could be arrested and advised diplomats to drive the trucks themselves. Few were so inclined.
But when frequent confiscations of liquor en route to the Siamese legation in Washington nearly created an international incident, the State Department relented. It held that embassy liquor could be transported by U.S. trucks and drivers, but only if an accredited diplomat was aboard.
Word of “leaky” embassies spread around town. Even President Hoover, a staunch dry in public, was said to stop by the Belgian embassy a couple of times a week for a martini or two.
There was even a burgeoning black market in empty liquor bottles left over from embassy parties and receptions. Such coveted labels as Haig & Haig, Dewar’s, Beefeater, and Remy Martin were painstakingly collected by embassy employees and sold to bootleggers, who filled them with bargain-basement booze and sold them to unwitting customers at handsome prices.
Acts of Congress
Capitol Hill, whence Prohibition came, was an oasis of liquor.
It always had been, in fact. Fifty years before the nation went dry a Chicago Tribune editorial noted: “When our senators and representatives come reeling to their desks in a state of intoxication and when all avenues of political life are crowded with debauchees, it is idle to hope that prohibitory laws could be enforced.”
Within the Capitol itself, Senator John Nance Garner of Texas and Representative Nicholas Longworth of Ohio operated their own speakeasy of sorts: a small, inconspicuous room furnished with comfortable chairs, an empty desk, and book-lined shelves that hid ample stocks of liquor.
It was “Cactus Jack” Garner’s gracious custom to summon a few reporters, bring out a bottle, and offer the first toast: “Let’s strike a blow for liberty, boys.”
Some members of Congress even became small-time bootleggers, including a few drys who apparently were closet wets. Representative M. Alfred Michaelson of Illinois, who had voted for stiffer Volstead Act penalties, stood trial for violating the act. On his retum from a Caribbean cruise in January 1928, Prohibition agents had discovered that his leaking luggage contained thirteen bottles of whiskey and ten gallons of West Indies rum. (Michaelson escaped penalties when his brother-in-law swore the baggage belonged to him.)
But congressmen were not obliged to import illicit liquor. Bootleggers roamed Capitol Hill with near impunity; some even were said to maintain clandestine basement storage rooms there in order to give their best customers prompt service. Prohibition agents were advised by their superiors that no search warrants for federal buildings would be issued.
In the early 1920s, dry Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas led efforts to sweep bootleggers off the Capitol grounds. But even as Curtis was announcing that vendors soliciting orders would henceforth be arrested immediately, a waiter in the Senate dining room allowed a rum bottle to crash to the floor.
None of the enforcement efforts on Capitol Hill worked. David Lawrence, a Washington correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association, estimated that five hundred bootleggers served the nation’s lawmakers.
As George Lyons Cassiday casually walked up the marble steps of the Senate Office Building in November 1929, a particularly alert policeman stopped him after noticing a small bulge under his coat. The officer found a pint of whiskey on Cassiday’s person and other bottles stashed in his car nearby.
Cassiday had narrowly averted trouble three years earlier, when, as he was making his appointed rounds in the House, his liquor-laden briefcase fell to the floor. As Cassiday fled, he left witnesses with a glimpse of what was to become his trademark: a bright green hat.
Cassiday was soon identified as the notorious “Man in the Green Hat” who had outsmarted the police for years, although he was wearing a conservative gray fedora at the time of his arrest.
Senator Wesley Livsey Jones of Washington, a leading dry and author of the Five and Ten Law took strong exception to suggestions that Cassiday was doing business with his colleagues.
“There was nothing to show,” Jones gamely offered, “that he was delivering liquid to a senator.”
A Final Accounting
Pennsylvania Avenue was once affectionately known as the Street of Magnificent Distances because it was possible to travel from the foot of Capitol Hill to 14th Street without missing a watering hole in any block along the way. There were, in all, nearly fifty of them, including Shoomaker’s, Ebbitt’s, Hancock’s, Maloney’s, Mullany’s, Engel’s, and, appropriately, the Last Chance.
Prohibition put them out of business, and almost none returned.
The Washington chapters of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance League applauded the saloons’ demise, of course, but their zeal masked part of Prohibition’s real story as told by D.C. Police Department statistics for the Twenties. Arrests more than doubled. The D.C. Jail contained more than three times as many prisoners. The police force increased by at least fifty-five men, and its cost jumped by nearly $1.8 million.
By 1932, Brigadier General Pelham D. Glassford, Washington’s altogether unconventional superintendent of police, was ready to surrender. Less than twenty-four hours after President Hoover had asked Congress to pass a bill providing for warrantless searches in the District, Glassford said that the Washington police department simply was unable to enforce Prohibition. He asked that all enforcement be turned over to federal Prohibition agents. Per capita expenditures for Prohibition enforcement in the District already were greater than in all but two states — Wyoming and Utah.
Even the Five and Ten Law, with its stiffer penalties for Volstead Act violations, only succeeded in improving the local liquor market. Although at first stocks dwindled and prices doubled, price and service wars soon brought Washingtonians greater quantities of better liquor at cheaper prices.
Glassford’s successor as police superintendent, Major Ernest W. Brown, adopted a tolerant attitude toward Prohibition enforcement during the period between national repeal and repeal in the District. Liquor had gone on sale at three Montgomery County dispensaries, in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Rockville; Brown said no attempt would be made to halt the flow of liquor from nearby Maryland as long as buyers “behaved themselves.”
With Washington’s return to wetness in 1934, speakeasies, rum-runners, bootleggers, and the other products of Prohibition disappeared from the landscape.
But the District imposed a curious set of rules on its drinking population. Washingtonians could only drink liquor at a table in an establishment that sold as much food as spirits. They could drink beer and wine only while sitting on a barstool, never while standing. They could not, under any circumstances, pick up their glasses and travel to another table.
The most bizarre rule of all required that bartenders stay out of view while mixing drinks; they were forced to retire behind screens, leading customers to suspect they might be victims of a bait-and-switch routine.
These oddities, though, were little more than nuisances. Prohibition, which had settled “like a blight upon the entire joyous side of human existence,” as Maryland Senator W. Cabell Bruce put it, was gone, once and for all. Happy days were here again.
Sidebar: Here’s Mud in Your Eye
This article originally appeared in the December/January 1984 issue of Regardie’s Magazine.
Bill Hogan