Prohibition New York City: An Interview with David Rosen
Interviewed by David Huyssen
Today on the blog, editor David Huyssen speaks with David Rosen, independent writer and historian, about his new book Prohibition New York City: Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls and More (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), his third book on transgression in American life, and second focusing on New York City.
Who was Texas Guinan, and how did someone named "Texas" become such an important figure in New York City history?
Texas (1884-1933) was a film actress, theatrical performer and, during the 1920s, host of some of the New York’s most notorious speakeasies. Born Mary Louise Cecelia Guinan in Waco, Texas, she was nick-named “Texas” as a kid. She learned to ride astride a horse (instead of sidesaddle) and could shoot a six gun with both hands.
Prohibition New York City: Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls & More
By David Rosen
The History Press, 2020
192 pages
Her film career was short but impressive. She started out as the first female cowgirl acting with William S. Hart, the leading western movie star during the silent film era. She made a total of 35 films, most 1- and 2-reel silent films but three of them talkies.
Tex arrived in New York in 1907, found a place to live in the Village and got her first acting gig performing in The Girls of Holland; Variety panned her performance. Over the next decade-and-a-half she performed in films, plays and stage shows, but with moderate success. In 1922, she was invited to the opening of a new speakeasy and was asked to take the stage. She mixed song with storytelling, and the patrons wouldn’t let her stop!
A lifetime in entertainment led to a night when this big, brassy and bottled blond — and 39 years old! — changed her life and the city’s nightlife.
So did she remain a kind of performer-impresario, or did she transition into more of an ownership and management personality?
Broadway theaters in the 19020s. United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.
As Prohibition evolved, Texas’s role evolved. She started as a host-performer at Larry Fay’s El Fey Club, welcoming customers with her famous saying, “Hello, Sucker!” She’d invite a customer up the stage to chat with her and then, with a small musical combo behind her, introduce the scantily-glad dancing showgirls, the Guinan Graduates.
Over time, she broke with Fay and ran her own “wet zone” clubs but continued as the impresario — and with the financial backing of mobsters, notably Owney Madden.
What was your biggest surprise in the process of researching the book?
My biggest surprise was just how widespread were illegal alcohol production, distribution, sales and consumption. Many, many New Yorkers broke the law, undercutting the viability of Prohibition.
Of course, New York City’s law enforcement apparatus had long been notorious for its corruption, and they had to work with federal officers during this period as well. What kind of relationship did speaks have with law enforcement?
Speaks and law enforcement operated on two levels. Federal agents and NYC police were officially responsible for enforcing the Volstead Act imposing Prohibition. However, they largely failed, with many agents and police officers receiving payoffs and other kickbacks.
In a 1929 report, the Treasury Department found that 900 federal agents had been dismissed for lack of funds and various offenses. It noted that although 170,000 stills had been closed since Prohibition was established, this represented only 10 percent of total operating throughout the country.
More troubling, it estimated that five to 10 million gallons of hooch was smuggled into the country and that 20 million Americans were producing homebrew moonshine. In New York, stills operated in anywhere people could find the space, including apartments, basements and storefronts.
Did any of these speaks have run-ins with urban reform groups, holdovers from an earlier era of quasi-vigilante social and moral surveillance like the Committee of Fourteen? The scolds must have been outraged!
The New York Anti-Saloon League established the Committee of Fourteen in 1905 to abolish Raines law hotels and, by 1911, most of the saloons had been closed. It didn’t play a real role in the Prohibition enforcement as its emphasis had shifted to suppressing prostitution.
Its efforts were superseded by such groups as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
What were the racial dynamics of speakeasies? Were they segregated sites of socialization, or did the atmosphere of transgression extend beyond flouting Prohibition and challenge New York’s prevailing discriminatory nightlife patterns?
Racial segregation defined the speakeasy scene. Texas’s clubs, along with nearly all wet-zone and most Greenwich Village speaks, did not permit Black patrons. However, some sophisticated midtown nightspots hosted Black entertainers like Roseland (featuring Louis Armstrong) and the Kentucky Club (where Duke Ellington got his start).
The Harlem scene was structured along three tiers. The first consisted of the high-end speaks like the Cotton Club that catered to a nearly all-white clientele and featured spectacular Black revues. (Only when Ellington was the toast of the Cotton Club did he secure a small table near the kitchen for special Black guests.) The second was made up of nightclubs like Smalls Paradise that catered to a mixed but often predominantly African American clientele and offered popular entertainment. Finally, a third tier consisted of the innumerable, and essentially Black-only, speaks like the Sugar Cane Club that pushed the limits of acceptable morals. All featured illegal alcohol and other inebriants.
How about class? You note that a lot of celebrities and wealthy socialites frequented the speaks. Were there working-class joints as well? Did those places endure the same level of law enforcement harassment? Less? More?
There were clubs in all five boroughs spread throughout nearly all neighborhoods and as varied by class, race, and ethnicity as the city itself. No one knows the true number of speakeasies operating in the city during Prohibition. One 1925 estimate speculates that there were over 100,000; in 1929, the police commissioner reported only 32,000 “resorts” serving alcohol throughout the city.
One gets a glimpse of this variety of speaks from those in Harlem and in the Village. In the Village, speaks included old-time saloons, restaurants and bars as well as cordial shops and “blind pigs” that appealed to customers along class lines (e.g., working-class, college students, bohemians) but also racial (e.g., Black), ethnic (e.g., Irish, Italian) and sexual orientation (e.g., gay men and lesbians).
You profile some incredible characters who passed through the New York speakeasy scene. Who are some of your favorites?
My two favorites are Texas Guinan, the “Queens of Speakeasies”; and Owney “the Murderer” Madden, a mobster who backed Guinan’s speaks as well as the Cotton Club, the Stork Club and Madden No. 1, a beer that Stanley Walker fondly recalled as “a fine brew.”
Among other characters I consider are Carl Van Vechten, a New York Times critic who wrote the influential and controversial 1926 novel, Nigger Heaven, acted as a judge at drag shows, and served as the white publicist of the Harlem Renaissance and nightlife; A’Lelia Walker, daughter of the first African American female millionaire, Madame C.J. Walker, who hosted famous “sex circuses”; Al Hirschfeld, a caricaturist, who visited numerous speaks and left great descriptions; Willie “The Lion” Smith, legendary pianist at Pod’s and Jerry’s club; and “Gentleman” Jimmy Walker, a regular at Texas’s speaks and mayor.
What led you to your interest in the history of New York speaks in the first place?
I’ve long been fascinated by periods of social disruption and how they help refashion American society. I came of age during the tumultuous 1960s and was part of the radical struggles that challenged — and changed — US political policy and social life.
Ten years ago, I wrote a book, Sex Scandal America: Politics, Morality & the Ritual of Public Shaming (2009), becoming fascinated by the 1920s and the role of speakeasies as the epicenter of social disruption. In my follow-up study, Sex, Sin & Subversion: How What Was Taboo in 1950s New York’s Became America’s New Normal (2016), I came to understand how efforts to suppress social disruption can lead to their opposite like the rebellion of the ‘60s.
What do you hope your readers will get out of the new book? How do you think their picture of New York City might change (or be confirmed)?
Prohibition went into effect a century ago and I wonder how people remember it today. Popular entertainment did much to fashion the popular image. Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club and The Godfather saga as well as TV shows from the Untouchables to Boardwalk Empire and Ken Burns’s PBS series Prohibition cultivated an image of the ‘20s in all its slick, over-the-top wildness, its Weimar-on-the-Hudson sensibility. And, like Germany’s Weimar Republic, the decade was an era of social delight and looming crisis.
My book is more limited and, hopefully, more illuminating than other works. It is not a general overview of the 1920s. As the subtitle informs readers, it’s about “Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls and More.”
I discovered Guinan when I wrote Sex Scandal America, finding her a compelling if forgotten character. She serves as a keyhole through which to tell a selective tale of the social disruption that defined Prohibition. It will, hopefully, remind readers that disruption was at once a contestation over what was considered illegal as well as what was judged illicit.
The History Press limited the word count to 50,000 but allowed me to incorporate about 75 black and white photos. I think this is enough to give readers a taste or feel for how Gotham roared during Roaring ‘20s.
David Rosen is the author of three books, as well as extensive journalism and commentary. His writing has appeared in AlterNet, Black Star News, Brooklyn Rail, CounterPunch, Filmmaker, The Progressive, and Salon, among other publications.
David Huyssen is Senior Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of York, UK, and a contributing editor for Gotham.