By Michael A. Lerner

At the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920, national Prohibition arrived in the United States. The day before, a front-page New York Times headline reported that the federal efforts to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, “WILL FOCUS ON BIG CITIES.” Fifty additional Prohibition agents had been assigned to New York in a symbolic show of force. Regardless, the sentiment in the city, according to the Times, was, “Oh, prohibition will never really be enforced here!” [1]

Contrary to the predictions of many, the city appeared to go willingly into the dry era, at least on that first night. The Times reported that the wild parties that had been forecast for the final nights of legal alcohol had largely failed to materialize. Still, the lobbyists and organizers of the Anti-Saloon League had no illusions that New York City would abide by the dry mandate forever. The city, William Anderson of the Anti-Saloon League declared, would be the “center of nullification and seditious activity designed to prevent the enforcement of the Prohibition amendment.” New York State, he continued, was the “danger point in the whole nation.”[2]

What followed in New York City over the next thirteen years was a prolonged struggle between New Yorkers determined to resist Prohibition and a dry movement determined to break that resistance. Dry leaders believed that if Prohibition could be made to succeed in New York, it could succeed anywhere. As Reverend Dr. Rollin O. Everhart of the Anti-Saloon League told local reporters in 1919, “Successful administration [of Prohibition] here will be an answer for all time to those who say, ‘it can’t be done.’”[3]

What was clear, even before the dry amendment went into effect, was that Prohibition was about much more than alcohol. The single-minded focus of drys on cities like New York was a sign of their deep-rooted anxiety about who lived in American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century—Catholics, Jews, blacks, and the foreign-born. Throughout the campaign for Prohibition, drys had made little effort to hide their disdain for “Dagos, who drink excessively,” Germans, who “drink like swine,” the Irish “ugly drunk,” and the “ignorant and vicious” immigrants teeming in New York City. Prohibition was in many regards a campaign to reform “these people” and bring them in line with “American” ideals.

In essence, Prohibition was a “culture war” that pitted two contrasting visions of America against each other, one representing the Protestant values espoused by the core of the dry movement, and another that saw a more urban and more ethnically diverse society emerging in the United States in the early 20th century.

If the debate over Prohibition was indeed a “culture war,” however, it was a paradox of the 1920s and the early 1930s that its outcome had ostensibly been decided. While Americans argued about the merits and costs for the next decade, Prohibition had already been embedded in the Constitution. As no amendment in U.S. history had ever been repealed, many Americans were resigned to it as the indefinite law of the land. Chief Justice William Taft, despite his personal opposition to the dry mandate, reflected this thinking when he said, “There isn’t the slightest chance that the constitutional amendment will be repealed. You know that and I know that.”[4] He urged its enforcement solely for the sake of preserving the rule of law. Frederick C. Whitin of the Committee of Fourteen, a prominent anti-vice group in New York City, similarly dismissed any notion that Prohibition would go away. “It cannot be undone,” he remarked in 1926, despite the widespread evidence of its failure in New York and elsewhere in the nation.[5]

That Prohibition was a failure in New York City is not open to debate. By the mid-1920s, attempts to enforce Prohibition had flooded the courts with tens of thousands of liquor cases, and had filled the jails to capacity. Judges expressed frustration and demoralization, and the officers of the NYPD resented being dragged into federal Prohibition enforcement efforts. Bribery and graft inserted themselves into the routine of enforcement, as did outbursts of violence stemming from the illegal liquor trade. From a public health standpoint, the evidence was also damning. After an initial decline at the outset of Prohibition, admission to alcoholism wards in the city increased steadily, as did arrests for public intoxication. Deaths from the ingestion of poisoned alcohol numbered in the hundreds, and reports of children passed out drunk on city streets caused more consternation. To add to the toll on the justice system and public health, New Yorkers of all walks of life plainly saw hypocrisy in the class disparities of how Prohibition was enforced. The Irish World noted in 1929, “up to present, the Prohibition law has been a law for the poor and a joke for the rich.” It continued, “let it be a law for all, and then we can all laugh.”[6]

Despite the clear failures, it was not until well into the 1920s that New Yorkers began looking to look for a political path out of the dry experiment. In 1925, Emory C. Buckner, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the man responsible for prosecuting federal Prohibition cases in New York, expressed his growing frustration with the status quo. He voiced his sympathies for those who disobeyed the dry laws, saying, “such a man, presumably, is dissatisfied with a particular condition imposed upon him by society, and is making his protest against it.” “As long as he is frank about it,” Buckner added, “I have no quarrel with him.”[7] At a speech to the Rotary Club in 1925, he urged New Yorkers to come clean. If they truly supported Prohibition, they should push for more aggressive measures to enforce it. If they did not abide by it themselves, they should make their position clear and work to end it. He insisted the time had come for New Yorkers to live by the slogan: “Vote as you drink.”[8]

By the mid-1920s, New York would become the headquarters of political resistance to Prohibition as a generation of political leaders took increasingly public positions against the dry amendment. Mayor James J. Walker, a 45-year old dandy who embodied the cosmopolitan air of 1920s New York, was one such figure. In a profile in the American Mercury, Walker was described as “a native New Yorker, [who] smokes cigarettes continuously, has a vast contempt for the Volstead Act, and reads nothing but the sporting pages.” Even better, reporter Henry Pringle noted, “he knows the speakeasies, the hotels and the nightclubs.”[9] Walker was celebrated by New Yorkers of the 1920s as the “Nightclub Mayor,” and his outspoken opposition to Prohibition, which dated back to his time in the New York State Senate, was a central part of his political appeal. Unlike his predecessor, the staid and unremarkable Mayor John F. Hylan, who offered initial support for Prohibition enforcement only to pull back when public resentment grew, Walker was boldly and proudly against every aspect of the dry experiment. As Mayor, Walker removed Police Commissioner Richard Enright, and directed that the NYPD stay out of Prohibition enforcement. His public feud over Prohibition enforcement with Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, delighted New Yorkers. (“Regrettably as it may seem,” Walker chided Willebrandt, “the 18,000 policemen [of New York] are not… available at all hours of the day and night to cope with the flood of illegal beverages prohibited by the Volstead Act.”[10])

New Yorkers were delighted both by Walker’s style, which embraced the jazz age culture of the city, and his political outspokenness on Prohibition. His refusal to be bullied by either the drys of the Anti-Saloon League or the leaders of federal Prohibition enforcement efforts endeared him to New Yorkers tired of what Prohibition had wrought. Even when corruption scandal forced Walker from office, he remained beloved as the “Nightclub Mayor” who supported the cultural and political opposition to Prohibition that had become rooted in the city.

Even more notable was the rise of Governor Alfred E. Smith, who became the most prominent national political figure to stake his position as an opponent of Prohibition. Smith, a far more capable and honest leader than Walker, was a product of the immigrant culture of the Lower East Side. After losing the governorship to a dry opponent, Nathan Miller, in 1920, Smith retook the office in 1923 in part because of his open opposition to Prohibition. Once back in office, Smith took steps to reign in Prohibition enforcement in New York, most notably repealing the Mullan-Gage Law which called for local law enforcement agencies in New York to work with federal officers to enforce Prohibition. This move greatly curtailed the most aggressive attempts to enforce Prohibition in the city.

Smith emerged as a contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1924. As a candidate, he pushed the issue of Prohibition onto the national stage. Though Smith failed to win the nomination in 1924, by 1928 opposition to Prohibition had strengthened nationally and Smith had successfully branded Democrats as the party of repeal. A Smith presidency, one supporter wrote, would mean that “we may yet be able to think as we please and drink without being hypocrites.”[11]

Smith’s candidacy in the 1928 presidential election put repeal at the top of the national political agenda. While his loss to Herbert Hoover in the election is often described as a debacle, it was in large part due to the dry movement’s attacks on Smith for his Catholicism, which were directly meant to undermine his campaign against Prohibition. Drys pulled out all the stops as they attacked Smith, warning that a vote for Smith was a vote for “the cocktail president,” while claiming Smith would turn the country over to “the Italians, the Sicilians, the Poles and the Russian Jew.” Dry leader Bishop James Cannon, Jr. added, “that kind has given us a stomache-ache.”[12]

Despite the prejudice and the defeat, Smith managed not only to make repeal a national possibility, mobilized and unified the enormous, formerly inactive urban, ethnic voter ‘bloc’ around the Democratic Party by, in part, openly supporting the ‘lost cause.’ He drew nearly twice as many votes as the previous two Democratic presidential candidates, won all of the nation’s twelve largest cities, and got all of the fifty largest counties in the United States. In New York City alone, 500,000 newly registered voters turned out for Smith, many of them urban ethnic voters and Catholics. With repeal as the central issue, Smith had redefined the Democratic Party as the party of the urban worker and reshaped the American political landscape.

While Smith would never again have the political prominence he did in 1928, Fiorello LaGuardia was the next New Yorker to rally the wet cause. A native New Yorker of Italian and Jewish ancestry, LaGuardia embodied immigrant New York just as much as Walker or Smith. His political leanings differed, as he was a Republican who opposed the Tammany Hall machine with fervor, but like Walker and Smith, LaGuardia was vocal in his opposition to Prohibition. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, LaGuardia’s represented the ethnically diverse 20th District in East Harlem. He knew his constituents despised Prohibition, and LaGuardia was unafraid to share his own contempt for the Prohibition experiment at a time when few members of Congress were willing to challenge the dry lobby. From the very beginning of the era, LaGuardia expressed fears of what he thought would be the inevitable effects of Prohibition. In 1919, he warned his fellow members of Congress, “this law will be almost impossible of enforcement… it will create contempt and disregard for the law all over the country.”[13]

From his seat in Congress, LaGuardia kept a close watch on Prohibition enforcement efforts, exposing their ineffectiveness, ballooning costs, and the bigotry that often drove them. He made a laughingstock of the Bureau of Prohibition for running the Bridge Whist Club, a lavish midtown speakeasy designed as a sting operation to catch bootleggers. Despite incurring $45,000 in expenses (such as alpaca coats for bartenders) and selling liquor to patrons, the operation managed to catch just one trafficker. Exposing the whole escapade, LaGuardia blasted the Bureau in the press for reckless spending and incompetence, putting the leadership of the Bureau of Prohibition on the defensive.[14]

LaGuardia’s protests against the dry laws sometimes took on a theatrical bent. He demonstrated how Americans could make legal beer at home by mixing up a batch in his Congressional office. Using “near beer” and malt tonics, LaGuardia argued, “if the Prohibition people think it is a violation of the law to mix two beverages permitted under the law and that a person doing so can be arrested, I shall give them a chance to test it.” He later repeated the demonstration in his home district, setting it up in front of Leo Kaufman’s drugstore in Harlem and daring a nearby police officer to arrest him. (The officer declined.)[15]

LaGuardia’s outspokenness antagonized drys who saw him as standing up for the very people they wanted to reform – the ethnic urban masses. One critic from Maine attacked him, saying, “He’s from New York, where there are few real Americans.” He continued, “he has the commonest of all foreigners for his constituents—Italian wine-bibbers who have sent him to Congress to recover for them their lost beverage.”[16]

Together, Walker, Smith, and LaGuardia made opposition to Prohibition a viable political position. Instead of conceding as Chief Justice Taft and so many other political leaders did, they fought to expose the dry movement’s bigotry and the impossibility of Prohibition enforcement.

A final, lesser known, and more surprising figure helped bring the national movement for repeal to its conclusion. In 1929, Pauline Sabin, a New York socialite and former member of the Republican National Committee, organized the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR). Though a lifelong Republican, Sabin broke with her party when it failed to take a stand against Prohibition in the 1928 election. In the aftermath of that race and the drys’ attacks on Smith, she made WONPR a political vehicle for women to come out against Prohibition without fear of appearing disreputable. By presenting the organization as the voice of “true temperance,” Sabin argued that women who wanted a sober, more temperate society would be best served by working for repeal. The only way to address the crime, corruption, and hypocrisy fostered by Prohibition, she argued, would be a return to a legal and regulated alcohol trade.

Sabin and WONPR offered a highly visible and effective counter to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which for decades had claimed to represent the women of America. Bringing together women across class lines and from all over the nation, WONPR became one of the largest forces for repeal in the nation, eventually reaching 1.5 million members. (The WCTU by comparison had only a third as many members.) From 1929 on, the group campaigned tirelessly for repeal, vowing to support any candidate who came out for repeal, regardless of party. With WONPR’s support, repeal candidates started shifting the tide in Congress. With WONPR’s support, repeal candidates began pushing out drys, even in dry strongholds. When asked about gains for repeal candidates in the 1930 midterm elections, Sabin commented, “I do think our little organization did something to perfect this wet landslide.”[17]

Momentum for repeal accelerated greatly after the stock market crash of 1929, and concerns over Prohibition continued to dominate the national agenda, even in the midst of the Depression. It would fall on another New Yorker, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to usher in repeal in 1933, but FDR was a reluctant wet compared to his predecessors, who took on the repeal mantle only when pushed by the rest of his party. The true groundwork for repeal came from the combined efforts of Walker, Smith, LaGuardia, and Sabin, New Yorkers who each worked to make opposition to Prohibition a political stance, not just a form of cultural rebellion. In a sense, they all proved that the dry’s fears were true all along… that New York would be Prohibition’s undoing.

Michael A. Lerner is the principal at Bard High School Early College. He received his Ph.D. from New York University. His publications include Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City.

[1] New York Times, January 16, 1920, 1.

[2] New York Times, January 17, 1920, 1.

[3] New York Times, January 17, 1919, 4.

[4] David Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979),

32.

[5] NYPL, Committee of Fourteen Papers, Box 83, Folder “Prohibition,” Statement by Frederick C. Whitin, c. 1926.

[6] Irish World, April 13, 1929, 4.

[7] New York Times, November 14, 1925, 7-8.

[8] New York Times, July 3, 1925, 3.

[9] Henry F. Pringle, “Jimmy Walker,” American Mercury, November 26, 1925, 272.

[10] James J. Walker Papers, Box 43, Folder “Office of the Mayor – 1928,” Undated draft of letter to Mabel Walker Willebrandt.

[11] John J. Raskob Papers, File 602, Box 1, Folder “Democratic National Committee – 1928, I-O,” Letter from Charles Keck to Raskob, dated July 12, 1928.

[12] Robert A. Hohner, Prohibition and Politics: The Life of Bishop James Cannon, Jr. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 227.

[13] Congressional Record, 66:1, August 20, 1919, 4071.

[14] New York Times, October 24, 1927, 4.

[15] New York Times, June 20, 1926, 1; July 18, 1926, 8.

[16] Duff Gifford, “LaGuardia of Harlem,” American Mercury, June 1927, 153.

[17] Literary Digest, “The Democratic Landslide,” November 15, 1930, 9.

“Vote as You Drink”: How New York City Brought Down Prohibition