1920 (21 page)

In various other parts of the South, “people wet their whistles and scorched their esophageal linings with White Mule, a form of clear moonshine so named because it could do as much damage to the unsuspecting as a flying pair of the creature's back legs.” There was a ritual attached to the consumption of White Mule, which began with storing the liquid in a fruit jar.

The experienced drinker kept the fruit jar tightly closed until he was ready to drink. Then he held his breath while he unscrewed the lid and quickly lifted the jar to his lips, gulped the clear liquid, replaced the lid and screwed it tightly into place again. Only then did he attempt to breathe. Frequently this was difficult. For a few moments he coughed and shuddered violently. Slowly, his breathing began again, his eyes opened, and the strained, anxious expression on his face was replaced by an equally strained and anxious smile. He wiped the fusel oil from his lips and, if it was then possible for him to speak, said: “Boy, that's got a kick—and how!”

“Farm hands in the Midwest,” writes the estimable historian Herbert Asbury, “drank a fluid drawn from the bottom of a silo, where silage had rotted and fermented for perhaps several years. No viler beverage can be imagined.” Unless it is Old Crow whiskey, which had been legally bottled and sold under that name for many years. But then, after the Eighteenth
Amendment was passed and bootleggers got their hands on the stuff and cut it with their various industrial decoctions, it was suddenly known as Old Corrosive. Ingredients not known, name sufficient.

“I call it legalized murder and the Government is an accessory to the crime,” thundered Edward I. Edwards, a United States senator from New Jersey. His was a lonely voice, and often ridiculed—but as early as 1920, when Prohibition was as new as the latest pay cut from Andrew Carnegie for the men who worked the infernos called blast furnaces, it spoke the truth.

AND THEN THERE WAS JAMAICA
gin, or, simply, Jake: 180 proof, which is to say ninety percent alcohol. In some states, Jake could be obtained with a prescription because, in minute doses, it could relieve an upset stomach. Bootleggers, of course, managed to pilfer more than minute doses, and in such cases Jake concentrated its wrath on the extremities of the victim's body, leaving the stomach as upset as it had been before.

In the July 26, 1930 issue of
Collier's Weekly
, journalist William G. Shepard described the effect of Jake on the tippler.

The victim of “jake paralysis” practically loses control of his fingers. … The feet of the paralyzed one drop forward from the ankle so that the toes point downward. The victim has no control over the muscles that normally point the toes upward. When he tries to walk his dangling feet touch the pavement first at the toes, then his heels settle down jarringly. Toe first, heel next. That's how he moves. “Tap-click, tap-click, tap-click, tap-click,” is how his footsteps sound.

The calves of his legs, after two or three weeks, begin to soften and hang down, the muscles between the thumbs and index fingers shrivel away.

Jake-steppers, they were called, or Jake-trotters. At one time there were said to be 800 cases in southern Tennessee, a thousand in Louisiana, and, according to national estimates, between 15,000 and 20,000. No one ever died from Jamaica gin, but no one ever recovered, either. “In
fact,” I learned in working on
Spirits
, “so vicious a poison was it that, in researching its origins, government scientists learned some of the principles that would lead their German counterparts to develop nerve gases in World War II. It is an appalling thing to say about a substance that human beings willingly, and so frequently, put into their bodies a couple of decades earlier.”

Sometimes Jamaica gin and other forms of lethal liquid found their way into the most elegant speakeasies, as well as into the finest stemware at the most soigné of private parties. Anyone, at any time, could be fooled by a venal bootlegger. Thus even the more cautious of high-end drinkers, not always trusting their sources, would on occasion add safe ingredients to their alcohol, just in case. The result was the blending of newly conceived mixtures, some of them ad-libbed as the host for the evening's revels went along, depending on what was in his refrigerator or cupboard.

In his study of the upper crust at the time, Stephen Birmingham, who made a career of writing about different elements of different upper crusts at different periods, wrote as follows about 1920 and the years immediately following: “Recipes were invented, sampled, and quickly passed around. Into the shakes went whites of eggs, yolks of eggs, milk, honey, Worcestershire sauce, orange-flower, wines, herbs, spices, and mixes of every and the most incomparable variety. Weirder grew the drinks, scarcer got the real stuff, and higher went its price. Still people cried, ‘Come for cocktails.'”

Some who have written on the twenties have concluded that thus was the cocktail born. Not so. A few cocktails, most made with rum, existed as early as colonial times: the Rattle-Skull, the Bombo, the Mimbo, the Sillabub, and the Whistlebelly. They were never, however, very popular, sometimes a last resort when one did not have enough liquor to fill his glass. It was during Prohibition that the cocktail first became the rage—not because some Americans found them tasty so much as because they were survivable. For the former reason, of course, people have been drinking them in enormous amounts ever since. In other words, what started out in life as a precaution has since become a staple for those who prefer alcohol rather than other forms of liquid refreshment.

IN THE OCCASIONAL DRUG STORE,
wood-alcohol milkshakes were whipped up behind the counter, a bizarre mixture of innocent sweets and poisonous libation. Straight wood alcohol was also sold, without the presence of a mixer, and referred to in Connecticut and parts of New York as a Coroner's Cocktail. It is inconceivable to think of someone seating himself on a barstool and asking for a drink with such a buyer-beware name, yet during a single four-day period in 1928, thirty-four people died in New York City from placing orders for Coroner's Cocktails. Just four days. Just Manhattan. Just wood alcohol. “In 1925, a reported 687 New Yorkers went to their eternal rewards long before they had intended because of venomous beverages; a year later, the total climbed to 750. It seems fair to assume that comparable percentages of the population became fatalities in other cities.”

In his history of the twenties,
That Jazz
, Ethan Mordden says, “In 1927, the death toll from the imbibing of ‘liquor' containing poisoned alcohol stood at 11,700.”

It seems the final judgment on Prohibition's first seven years. Further, it appears to point to the enormity of Prohibition's eventual tally, and the proportions of plague that it almost achieved. Both statements are false.

To begin with, common sense alone tells us that both popular perceptions and a number of historians are erroneous; there
had
to be less drinking during Prohibition than before. Consider: For some people, after January 1920, alcohol was simply too expensive. For others, it was too hard to get. For yet others, those who made their own booze at home, it was too much work for too inferior a product. For others still, it was too lethal. And finally, there were those afraid of the penalties that the law brought with it or the respect that they still maintained for the principle of law—even, somehow, this one. (See the figures provided by law enforcement agencies and cited at the beginning of this chapter.)

Thus, hundreds of thousands of people who could take booze or leave it, to whom we today refer as “social drinkers,” would simply have given up the stuff, drinking not at all or, more likely, on far fewer occasions than they used to. It would not have been worth the money, the trouble, or the gastric peril.

More specifically, with regard to Mordden's figure of 11,700 deaths in seven years, although it may well be true, it does not take into account the mistake that so many students of the twenties have made, which is to
consider the lives that Prohibition saved. Yes, the law was impossible to enforce. Yes, it was contrary to human nature. But also yes, it had a salutary effect on many Americans. The number of people who were spared illness or death surely does not compare to the number of victims, but all stories have two sides, and, as is usually the case, the second one casts a different light on the first.

For some reason, it was not until a half century had passed that the truth of Prohibition was finally established, and one of those responsible was the historian David Kyvig. In his book
Repealing National Prohibition
, published in 1979, he provides the following figures. As you read them, you must keep in mind that no numbers are available for the years during which the Eighteenth Amendment was in effect; since alcoholic beverages were illegal then, the government was not able to keep figures for purposes of taxation and measurement of economic patterns.

During the period 1911 through 1915 … the per capita consumption by Americans of drinking age (15 years and older) amounted to 2.56 gallons of absolute alcohol. … In 1934, the year immediately following the repeal of Prohibition, the per capita consumption measured 0.97 gallons of absolute alcohol distributed as 0.64 gallons of spirits, 0.35 gallons of wine, and 13.58 gallons of beer (4.5 percent alcohol after repeal). Total alcohol consumption, by this measure, fell by more than 60 percent because of national Prohibition. Granting a generous margin of error, it seems certain that the flow of liquor in the United States was at least cut in half.

Prior to that, in 1976, another historian, Norman Clark, “reviewed the literature and concluded that estimates that placed the annual absolute alcohol consumption rates at between 50 and 33 percent less than those of the preprohibition years were essentially correct.”

Economist Jules Abels used a different method to arrive at the same conclusion. From the Census Bureau, he obtained figures on gallons per capita consumption before and after Prohibition—compressing his findings into the following table.

“Obviously,” Abels sums up, “drinking declined during Prohibition, since in 1935, the year after repeal [Abels is in error here; 1934 was the year after repeal], per capita drinking was far below that of 1914, and even though it picked up five years afterward, except for wine it was still below the 1914 level.”

Yet another means of gauging the efficacy of Prohibition is by an examination of the nation's health records.

In 1943, Forrest Linder and Robert Grove compiled mortality figures for the Census Bureau in
Vital Statistics Rates in the United States
. They found that from a high of 7.3 deaths from chronic or acute alcoholism per 100,000 population in 1907, the rate fell gradually (possibly as a result of prohibitory laws and war prohibition) to 1.6 per 100,000 in 1919 and then to 1.0 in 1920, the first year of National Prohibition. The rates then climbed slowly again, probably reflecting the gradual increase in illegal (and often poisonous) liquor supplies … peaking at 4.0 per 100,000 in 1927—although in 1932, the last full year of Prohibition, the figure was down once again to 2.5.

Anecdotal evidence also supports the case for the Eighteenth Amendment's being beneficial to the health of a significant number of Americans. Hospitals reported fewer cases of cirrhosis of the liver and fewer admissions as a result of alcohol-related violence. College administrators found their students to be more sober, more often, than they used to be, and business executives reported to those conducting surveys that their employees “seemed more clear-headed and quick-witted after lunch than had previously been the case.”

In addition, sales of Coca-Cola and Canada Dry ginger ale soared during Prohibition, as did sales of grapefruit and orange juice. “The Welch Grape Juice Company,” historians Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin tell us, “sold a million more gallons of juice annually during the 1920s than it had in 1914.” Almost totally, these increases can be attributed to the rising popularity of cocktails, which means that alcoholic beverages were watered down to an extent never known before. Far fewer people drank their whiskey straight; it was simply too perilous. Their glasses might have been filled to the top, but a lot of that liquid was fizzy and bubbly and, save for the vast amounts of sugar it contained, absolutely harmless.

The Anti-Saloon League, although not aware of this information at the time, began to make outrageous claims on behalf of the Eighteenth Amendment. It boasted that few Americans were drinking any longer and, because of the great national abstinence, they were saving more money than they ever had before, while spending a higher percentage of disposable income on necessities—food, shelter, and clothing, rather than beer, wine, and whiskey. It further stated that bootleggers were going out of business at a prodigious rate, that they were finding it almost impossible to obtain either good liquor or poisonous forms of alcohol for use as bases. Yet when asked to provide either numbers or sources for this information, the League could do neither.