Bourbon Empire (18 page)

Rectifiers weren’t thrilled with the decision, but they accepted it. Wiley, on the other hand, was infuriated. His input on the matter had been snubbed by Taft and he took it as a kind of betrayal, its sting made worse by the suggestion that his powerful influence was eroding. For more than a decade he had enjoyed considerable prestige and national attention. Countless magazine profiles had called him a noble warrior of consumer rights and “father of the Pure Food and Drug Act.” He sensed that it was all drifting away.

Then, adding insult to injury, Roosevelt denied him any credit for his accomplishments. The two men had never gotten along very well—Wiley had strong opinions on many matters, and had publicly disagreed with the president about parts of his Cuba policy. Roosevelt didn’t once mention Wiley’s name in his autobiography when he wrote about the landmark pure food and drug legislation. Wiley retaliated in his own autobiography, downplaying Roosevelt’s role, but it’s not hard to guess which autobiography sold more copies and how the history would eventually be written.

Wiley resigned from government service in 1912. Disenchanted, he reconsidered his views on alcohol. As war unfolded in Europe and discussion of America’s involvement turned loud and thick, he advocated wartime rationing, arguing that grain should be used to feed soldiers.
He fell in step with Prohibitionists calling to ban alcohol entirely, but not for the same moral reasons as the policy’s other supporters. His reasons were populist. “I am not a prohibitionist from principle, but for policy,” he explained. Speaking of the rectifiers, he said, “They have validated the adulteration of all whisky. . . . There is not much danger of drunkenness in pure whisky. In fact, it is too expensive except for the well-to-do. Under present conditions with adulterated and poisonous whisky freely sold it would be better to have prohibition.”

But before Wiley could tumble completely into obscurity he pursued another track that would also make an impression on American life. After leaving his government post, he soon married Anna Kelton, a woman half his age, and had two sons. The move helped lift him out of his lifetime battle with depression, which he once described as an “awful ennui of the soul.” He traveled the world, giving lectures and receiving awards, including the French Legion of Honor. Popular with consumers, he was made a contributing editor at
Good Housekeeping
magazine, and ran the magazine’s famous product testing lab. If a product met Wiley’s demanding standards he would bestow it with another of his legacies: the coveted
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval.

D
uring the early 2000s Prohibition returned to America in a surprising form. Many of the hippest bars in the country modeled themselves after speakeasies from the 1920s, requiring reservations and secret passwords at the door—if you could even find the door. One place in Washington, D.C., marked its entrance with only a single blue light. Another spot in New York was entered through a phone booth along the side of a restaurant serving hot dogs. Gaining admission often required explaining oneself to a grim-faced hipster staring through a peephole.

The Prohibition era has slowly begun to muscle aside the frontier as a wellspring of whiskey marketing. In 2013, when Heaven Hill opened the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, a multimillion-dollar tourism destination in Louisville to promote the distillery’s flagship brand, the facility included a tasting room styled after a speakeasy (the trend had finally migrated from the coasts). Tours began with interactive displays of Evan Williams arriving at the frontier and opening a distillery, but ended with a visit to a tasting room pumped full of jazz music. Many whiskey brands created after 2000 have followed suit by focusing on Prohibition-era themes: Heaven Hill’s Larceny Bourbon, Speakeasy Bourbon, Smuggler’s Notch, and countless other brands named after
bootleggers like Jack “Legs” Diamond, Al Capone, and bootlegging-legend-turned-NASCAR-celebrity Junior Johnson.

The Prohibition era lasted thirteen years beginning in 1920, and its appeal is easy to recognize. Crimes committed around bootlegging and speakeasies crackle with subversive glamour. Drinking became a symbolic gesture of fighting against the tyranny of a moralizing minority, and while the act technically might have been a crime, few really thought it
criminal.
Even President Warren Harding drank from a private stash of bourbon while in the White House, effectively sanctioning the rebellion and giving it a stamp of approval that would eventually help transform the era into marketing gold. Prohibition even helped birth NASCAR, a sport whose earliest stars learned to drive while evading the law. Their outlaw appeal created NASCAR’s success even though the association’s owners battled to scrub it into a clean form of family entertainment.

It was an odd series of events and full of contradictions. So how did it all even come about, and what happened to whiskey?

 • • • 

Despite Prohibition’s glamour, the era’s liquor was notoriously bad. All those Prohibition-era cocktails so popular in today’s reimagined speakeasies were created because the hooch needed disguising. The kind of consumer protection regulations and labeling requirements that Edmund Taylor Jr. and Harvey Wiley had just finished fighting for were abandoned as the entire industry was driven underground by a policy that a majority of Americans never supported in the first place.

America remained a whiskey-drinking nation, but thirteen years of Prohibition caused people to forget what it should taste like. Stolen stocks of aged bourbon, alongside smuggled stocks of scotch and Canadian spirits from abroad, were stretched thin and diluted with the same adulterants that had defined Gilded Age whiskey. One bottle of straight whiskey often became four or five after the addition of industrial alcohol, which tripled in production between 1920 and 1925. It then
doubled again by 1930 to 150 million gallons—and not because it was being used for its intended purpose.

But thinned-out alcohol was the least of drinkers’ problems. Much of the industrial alcohol making its way into Prohibition whiskey was made poisonous on purpose. In 1906, Congress had passed the Tax-Free Industrial and Denatured Alcohol Act at the request of companies arguing that industrial spirits shouldn’t be taxed the same way as beverage alcohol. The U.S. government agreed, but required that alcohol used for industrial purposes be “denatured” with toxins so people wouldn’t drink it. Washington approved seventy-six denaturants ranging from soap (tastes bad, but won’t kill you) to formaldehyde (carcinogenic, will kill you eventually) and sulfuric acid (used in insecticides and antifreeze, will kill you immediately). Capable chemists could usually strip out the denaturants, but capable chemists weren’t always available. Eventually, denatured alcohol began seeping through the cracks into people’s cocktails, pushing alcohol-related deaths from a little over a thousand in 1920 to more than four thousand by 1925.

During Prohibition, American whiskey regressed back into its dark past. Once again, when people bought booze they had no idea what they were getting. The majority of the drinking population suffered, and only the thinnest of the upper crust was getting anything you might consider good.

And it wasn’t even
that
good. Today, bottles of Prohibition-era whiskey can occasionally be found in the personal stashes of whiskey collectors. As they drink the rare whiskies or send samples to friends, these collectors funnel the liquid into increasingly smaller bottles to limit the amount of air trapped inside. Unlike wine or beer, whiskey in a bottle will last indefinitely, largely unchanged, as long as excessive air is kept out of the container. This prevents unwanted oxidation, which can slightly alter the whiskey’s flavor over the years, although not nearly as much as it affects wine. If a bottle of whiskey is mostly full, it will keep, but if an inch of whiskey sits at the bottom of a standard-size bottle, covered by a cushion of air, it’s time to either drink it or move it to a
smaller bottle. The rough edges of a sample of Prohibition-era whiskey I once tried from a small vial were clearly covered up with prune juice added for color and sweetness, and carried an overwhelming flavor resembling celery salt. Nevertheless, the sample also showed the efforts of a careful blender trying to make the best of a bad situation. It’s no wonder sales of ginger ale, which was widely used as a Jazz Age mixer, tripled between 1920 and 1928.

Considering the incredible gains whiskey had made during the nineteenth century, and all the seemingly lopsided battles that people like James Crow, Edmund Taylor, George Garvin Brown, and James Pepper had won in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion, tasting this disgusting whiskey begs one question: how did the powerful whiskey industry ever let something like Prohibition happen?

 • • • 

Calls for an outright ban on alcohol had steadily increased during the decades following the Civil War, but whiskey makers only heard them once they reached a fever pitch, and by then it was too late. It wasn’t until 1910 that George Garvin Brown, by then a leading industry figure, single-handedly made one of the few attempts on behalf of the industry to fight the encroaching ban. Prohibition advocates were claiming that distillers were pumping poison into America, and the creator of Old Forester responded by self-publishing a book titled
T
he
Holy Bible Repudiates “Prohibition.”
In 104 pages, Brown printed every verse from the Bible that mentioned wine or drinking, alongside his own interpretation of the passages. He pointed out that alcohol, consumed in moderation, was a blessing. In fact, he observed, the Bible had worse things to say about eating “hog-meat” than drinking booze. He asked why nobody wanted to ban pork as well.

Prohibition never had majority support in the United States, but it succeeded through brilliant organization and ruthless politics. Its arguments stirred Americans’ worst fears about race, class, and religion, all while manipulating scientific studies. Whereas Brown self-published a slim book of measured arguments, the Prohibition movement flooded
the nation with pamphlets covered with pictures of intoxicated demons and dead puppies, telling America that alcohol was the cause of both of them.

The whiskey industry’s effort to battle Prohibition was disorganized. After passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, lingering resentment remained between producers like Edmund Taylor and his rectifying counterparts, which effectively took an industry that should have been working as a cohesive whole and divided it into bickering factions. The balkanized distillers also suffered from rifts with beer brewers that prevented the two groups from working together. In the immediate decades following the Civil War, the two industries had periodically joined to fight the federal alcohol tax, but as the temperance movement hardened into calls for outright prohibition, they drifted apart as brewers began thinking of distillers as competition rather than allies. Beer’s strategy was to preserve itself by throwing whiskey, its more potent cousin, under the bus. Brewers used their own separate lobbying machinery to argue that beer was a “temperance” beverage because it was so low in alcohol compared to whiskey. The brewer Adolphus Busch claimed that distillers produced “the worst and cheapest kind of concoctions,” whereas brewers made “light, wholesome drinks.” Busch ultimately died of liver cirrhosis, which didn’t help his argument, not that Prohibitionists agreed with it anyway.

Many distillers ignored the Prohibition debate because few took the threat seriously. Before the personal income tax went into effect in 1913, alcohol taxes were a core component of government revenue and distillers knew that Washington wouldn’t snip its own purse strings. Confident in that protection, they failed to take initiatives to clean up dirty corners of the industry’s image lingering from days of the Whiskey Trust and of blatantly false advertising. Instead, they left very real problems to fester: there were few institutions addressing alcohol abuse and the rampant domestic violence that slithered out of it; saloon culture was notoriously linked with prostitution and gambling, which sparked more violence; and an industry that had grown large on the backs of rectifiers suffered from image problems in general. For all the distillers who had
put their names in lights and trumpeted their brands, many others decided to hide from the industry’s long-running shabby reputation. Many industry leaders would humbly list themselves as farmers in business directories rather than proudly declare they were whiskey merchants.

In 1911, Kentucky distiller Peter Lee Atherton wrote a letter to his friend Congressman Henry Watterson suggesting ways the whiskey industry might lobby its way back into the nation’s better graces. Perhaps whiskey makers should support “reasonable and enforceable laws to abate the evils of intemperance and condemn any interference by the liquor interest or any other interest in politics for selfish purposes,” he wrote. Atherton also suggested that distillers support schools, tax reform, and public infrastructure. It was an honest and well-meaning missive, but written more than a decade after the Prohibition movement had already whipped itself up into gale-force winds. Like Brown’s book, the effort was a day late and a dollar short.

Bourbon distillers like Brown and Atherton were up against a juggernaut named Wayne Wheeler. A religious farm boy from Ohio, Wheeler traced his hatred of alcohol to a farming accident that occurred when he was stabbed in the leg by a pitchfork wielded by a drunken farmhand—a poetic beginning to his legacy. Wheeler was a tireless, around-the-clock crusader with a disarming, likable appearance. When he died in 1927 from exhaustion, at the age of fifty-seven, his elderly mother told reporters, “Wayne always was a good boy.”

Compared to Prohibition zealots like Carrie Nation, who captured headlines by storming into saloons and smashing bottles with a hatchet, Wheeler was just so . . .
reasonable.
He made it easy to forget that what he stood for—a constitutional amendment banning alcohol and legislating Americans’ moral behavior—was so radical. He was a household name, his influence so great that the
Baltimore Sun
wrote, “Nothing is more certain than that when the next history of this age is examined by dispassionate men, Wheeler will be considered one of its most extraordinary figures.” But the
Sun
’s
prediction never bore out and Wheeler’s name would largely be forgotten. The template he created for single-issue lobbying, however, remains stronger than ever.

Wheeler found his way into the Prohibition crusade after graduating from Oberlin College in 1894, when he answered a job advertisement from the Ohio Anti-Saloon League looking for “a spirited self-sacrificing soul who yearns to help the other fellow.” The ASL was run by a man named Howard Hyde Russell who years earlier had realized that Americans would never immediately support a full ban on alcohol—it would be too much, too soon. He instead directed public attention against the much easier target of crime-infested saloons, which would be the first stage of getting Americans to Prohibition with baby steps. It was grassroots organizing at its best—by taking on bite-size chunks and slowly building a string of limited successes, the ASL managed to attract uncertain supporters and increase its funding. Russell was building his base, and Wheeler was his first full-time employee. Once Wheeler was on board, the men worked eighteen-hour days canvassing Ohio and delivering antidrink sermons. In his few spare minutes, Wheeler got a law degree from Western Reserve University.

Wheeler and Russell’s ASL was single-minded, focused only on the alcohol issue. This was a break from other temperance leaders, whose various organizations had become distracted. For instance, Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had folded a stable of other reform measures—vegetarianism, postal policy—into her organization’s platform. But by trying to go everywhere, the WCTU effectively went nowhere. When Wheeler became the ASL’s legislative director, he avoided Willard’s error and kept the ASL focused only on nonpartisan support for Prohibition. Working through church networks the ASL focused on swaying large blocs of voters to whatever candidates were dry, Democrat or Republican. In Ohio, the strategy ousted seventy sitting legislators from both parties, effectively giving Wheeler, who many now considered a political kingmaker, control of the state legislature. With his army of lawmakers in place, Wheeler then introduced a local-option bill allowing separate communities to vote on banning alcohol. Victory was assured.