Dutch Courage: A History
of Booze in America

(continued)

By Joan Schonbeck

Even before either Carry Nation or Henry Ford, other Americans had been reaching the same conclusions. As early as 1846, the year Carry was born, Maine had become the first state to vote in prohibition, though it later repealed it. By 1869, the Prohibition Party had become a viable American political entity. Particularly in World War I's decade, 1910-1920, prohibition and women's rights seemed to run in tandem, gaining strength, as one state after another gave women the vote and banned booze. From the scientific community came yet another blow. Alcohol, always classified as a stimulant and regularly prescribed by physicians, was discovered to actually be a depressant. In 1914, American psychiatrists and neurologists took it one step further when they declared alcohol a poison.

"Goodbye, John (Barleycorn)... you were God's worst enemy... Hell's best friend!" jubilant preacher Billy Sunday thundered from a stage in Detroit on January 16, 1920. The National Prohibition Act, better known as the Volstead Act, was passed by a zealous Congress, vetoed by seriously ill Woodrow Wilson, and enacted when Congress overrode that veto. (This may be the most powerful argument against the rumors that Edith Wilson ran the country in those years). As noted, it was far from the first time that booze had been banned in America. For three-quarters of a century, individual states had voted in, and then repealed, prohibition. Native Americans might have predicted its future. From nearly day one of their association with whites, they had been denied the right to legally drink. For them, three hundred years of prohibition had produced a people with an alcoholism rate disproportionately higher than that of their non-Native American neighbors. But no matter. In 1920, most thought prohibition was here to stay.

By 1922, the Detroit River, a natural divider between the United States and Canada, literally had a "navy" of federal, state and local lawmen operating on its waters, trying to stanch the flow of booze out of Canada. "Importing" liquor was a definite growth industry. In Canada, during U.S. prohibition, distilleries accounted for one-fifth of the country's GNP! Rum running began as a Mom-and-Pop enterprise, with entire families smuggling whiskey out of Canada. They brought it across the Detroit River in everything from rowboats, high-powered launches and tugboats to cables across the river's bottom. In winter, cars chanced the frozen river, often with fatal results. The police chases, when the ice didn't crack, were worthy of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Overland trips featured high-speed cars capable of (shades of James Bond) emitting smoke screens and even deadly mustard gas as rum running became more "professional."

Bootlegging had become the second biggest industry in Detroit! Ecorse, Michigan, directly across the river from the Canadian distilleries, transformed itself from a sleepy little town into Michigan's Barbary Coast, a mecca for silk-shirted hoods and assorted characters dedicated to quenching America's thirst: for a healthy profit. One Ecorse woman earned $30,000 transporting booze in 1924. (Contrast this with the lawmen enforcing prohibition, whose annual salary was below $2,000).

Big money gave birth to gangs with colorful names like the East Side, Oakland Sugar House, and Purple Gangs, the Jewish Navy and Peajacket's Navy. Most of them were garden-variety criminals, but Peajacket's Navy was an exception. "Peajacket" was actually John Wozniak, an entrepreneur in his early twenties. He and twenty-five "sailors" worked out of Ecorse throughout the Twenties. They carried no guns, and succeeded mostly through bribery or outwitting the law. Wozniak's love of sports proved his undoing. Peajacket's Navy put together their own football team, which gained a certain amount of fame in the area. Unfortunately, police took to attending all of their games to familiarize themselves with the gang members. Wozniak was arrested in 1928, and shortly sold off his fleet of boats and turned honest. In later years he ran an automobile dealership, and continued to have his football team.

Many weren't as peaceful as Peajacket's Navy. Bodies washed up on the shores of the Detroit every morning, victims of rival gangs or the law. Frustrated law officers (those who weren't "on the take") often reacted with indiscriminate savagery to the bootleggers. A Twenties bumper-sticker read, "Don't shoot! I'm not a bootlegger." Famed social worker Jane Addams noted, "What prohibition needs first of all is disarmament!" Before Prohibition was repealed in 1932, 144 civilians and 60 lawmen had lost their lives in the "Battle of the Booze."

Family-run stills had once again become a profitable cottage industry, producing hooch with names like "Detroit White Lightning." The quality of the liquor sold varied from rotgut that could kill to high-quality liquor sold by a man named Willie McCoy, who gave us the expression, "The real McCoy." "Old Log Cabin" was another much-sought-after Canadian whiskey that Detroit's Purple Gang smuggled in for Al Capone. It was the hijacking of a shipment of this "Old Log Cabin" by the Bugs Moran Gang that brought about Chicago's St. Valentine's massacre in 1929.

America's great social experiment, begun with such high hopes, deteriorated into a nightmare of violence and crime. Bootleggers introduced their product to college students and grade-school children, in shocking similarity to drug dealers today. There were other similarities. Family life deteriorated, with child abuse and desertion increasing, as Prohibition continued. One-third of all federal prison cells held Prohibition-related offenders. The train to the Detroit House of Correction was nicknamed "the Moonshine Special." In spite of Elliot Ness and others like him, Roy Vanderbrook, Michigan State Police commandant, faced reality: "As long as people maintain their present attitude toward Prohibition, the law is unenforceable."

Henry Ford, who had touted the '20s boom years as proof that it did work, lost his best argument with the stock market crash. By the time FDR drove the final nail in its coffin, most Americans had no doubt that Canadian distilleries and bootleggers had gained the most from Prohibition.