Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (26 page)

Every twenty feet or so we’re interrupted by a friendly “Hey, Herb!,” and when one resident comes up to buttonhole him, I slip away for a moment to photograph 594 Congress Street, where the H. H. Hay & Co. drugstore used to be. Now it’s a Starbucks.

Herb rejoins me and we walk a few blocks down to a massive square plaza with a giant monument in the middle. “This must be Monument Square,” I observe astutely.

“Yes, but it was Market Square in Dow’s day.”

“Didn’t the old city hall used to be in the middle?”

“That’s right.”

“And it was in the basement that Dow was storing the rum?”

“Right again.”

For almost twenty years, Dow had antagonized no end of anti-prohibition businessmen, legislators, and residents who were rather fond of their spirits, so when word leaked that Dow himself had hidden
below city hall an estimated $1,600 worth of alcohol, a hefty bar tab even today, it was retribution time. To rile up anti-Dow sentiment, his adversaries disseminated the following circular:

Hoisted by his own petard, as it were.

By the afternoon of June 2, 1855, more than one thousand men and women had amassed around city hall. A local judge issued a warrant for the alcohol’s seizure, and the expectant crowd—many of whom hoped to intercept the bounty—started growing impatient. They were also growing in numbers, and the municipal police force was overwhelmed. Dow called in the militia, which only heightened tensions. When the mob threatened to rush city hall, both the local sheriff and Neal Dow read them the Riot Act and ordered everyone to disperse. They responded by hurling rocks, and that’s when Dow instructed the militia to open fire. People ran screaming as bullets flew in every direction. Minutes later the square was deserted, save for a lone dead body on the ground. Twenty-two-year-old John Robbins was killed in the mêlée. Seven other men were shot but survived.

Dow was hauled before a grand jury, accused of manslaughter. A lengthy investigation exonerated Dow of any responsibility for Robbins’s death and further cleared him of wrongdoing for stockpiling the rum. The Maine Law explicitly allowed the sale of liquor for
medicinal and industrial uses, and an authorized municipal committee had approved the alcohol’s importation and storage specifically for these reasons. Once tempers cooled, nobody really believed that Dow, the lifelong teetotaler, sought to create a bootlegging empire. Self-righteous, uncompromising, and meddling, perhaps. But a greedy, rum-dealing crook, no.

Dow’s reputation nevertheless took a dive, and with it down went the Maine Law, which was abolished in 1856. That same year Dow wisely decided against running for mayor, and in 1857 he sailed overseas for six months to rally his abstemious counterparts in Great Britain. Dow rebounded in 1858 when he was elected to Maine’s legislature, but in 1860 he had to weather another political firestorm when a close associate he’d campaigned for turned out to have been embezzling state funds.

Redemption came again in April 1861; at fifty-six years of age, Dow volunteered to fight for the Union during the Civil War. He was appointed a colonel, and his Thirteenth Maine (Temperance) Regiment served under General Benjamin Butler and helped capture New Orleans. Dow was promoted to brigadier general in April 1862 and sustained multiple wounds on May 27 during the battle for Port Hudson. Five weeks later, the still-recuperating Dow was nabbed by Confederate soldiers and held for well over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp. On February 25, 1864, he was exchanged for one of the Union Army’s most prized POWs—General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of General Robert E. Lee.

“In mid-April 1861,” Herb tells me, “a theater group was in town performing Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. One evening, people were gathered in this square, buzzing about the attack on Fort Sumter, when the official announcement was made that the Union had declared war on the South. Everyone burst into cheers—except a lone southern actor who was conspicuous by his silence. And he was right here in Market Square on that momentous night.”

“Wow,” I say. “That’s incredible.”

Herb and I stand there for a minute savoring the story.

Something occurs to me. I turn to Herb and ask, “We are talking about John Wilkes Booth, right?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Just checking.”

While Herb goes off to speak with another constituent, I wander Monument Square taking pictures and thinking about Maine’s tumultuous five years banning spirits and how aptly they foreshadowed the capital-P Prohibition movement to come more than six decades later. Far from casting alcohol and its associated evils out of society, Dow’s crusade made otherwise respectable folks feel like common criminals forced to sneak into secret “grog-taverns” and similar establishments. People feared being tattled on by their neighbors or having policemen barge into their homes in search of stockpiled liquor, fostering suspicion between citizens and resentment toward government and its agents. And violence ensued. Nothing like the street-fought tommy-gun battles that erupted during the 1920s and ’30s, but enough to convince Maine voters in 1856 to repeal their law. (At least for a while; Mainers amended their state constitution twenty-seven years later to outlaw booze once again.)

Obstinate to the end, Dow ran for president in 1880 on the Prohibition Party ticket. He lost spectacularly but relished the opportunity to barnstorm the country preaching the gospel of sobriety and rallying apostles eager to wage holy war against Demon Rum.

Victory for the prohibitionists came in January 1920 with the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, followed one month later by the Volstead Act, which made it illegal to “manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor” in the United States. Neal Dow had died twenty-two years earlier, on October 2, 1897, having outlived his wife and five of their nine children. Venerated in his own day as the Napoleon of Temperance, Dow was all but forgotten when Prohibition became the law of the land. Better known to most Americans were Wayne Wheeler, de facto leader of the Anti-Saloon League; Carrie Amelia Nation, the hatchet-wielding
barroom smasher who altered her name to Carry A. Nation; and federal agents Eliot Ness and Richard “Two Gun” Hart.

Genuinely good intentions drove many Americans to lobby for a dry USA, free of booze-related crimes. But this idyllic, sober paradise was not to be. In its wake, Prohibition left thousands dead, either burned alive in home-still explosions or poisoned by denatured alcohol. Drug use soared. Political corruption grew rampant, exacerbated by an increasingly formidable Mafia syndicate that was once little more than a loose affiliation of street thugs. And billions of dollars in potential tax revenues were lost. On the plus side, jazz flourished in speakeasies across the nation, and NASCAR was born on Appalachia’s back-country roads after bootleggers learned how to outrun Johnny Law in souped-up automobiles, and then later raced one another for kicks.

America’s “Noble Experiment” ended in December 1933 with the Twenty-First Amendment, the only constitutional amendment passed to fully repeal a previous one.

Another of Prohibition’s most enduring legal legacies—a watershed change in how law enforcement conducts investigations—is its most overlooked. A hint of this transformation is evident in the anti-Dow circular that grumbled about city authorities on a mission to hunt down “the poor man’s cider, and [who] often push their search into private houses.” This isn’t how the system originally worked.

Up until the 1850s, police officers rarely initiated searches of a suspect’s property or person. The victim did. (With murders, coroners often requested the investigation.) Authorities didn’t start poking about until after the aggrieved party appealed to a judge or magistrate for a search warrant. Many American communities didn’t even have a full-time police force, which, to a citizenry wary of centralized power, reeked of a standing army. And since selling or owning unlicensed alcohol was considered by most to be a victimless crime, constables didn’t run around aggressively raiding establishments or individual homes.

Neal Dow set out to change all that. Five years before the 1851 Maine Law was passed, his state enacted a “prohibitory” bill that restricted alcohol sales. But it had no teeth, and Dow resolved to give the
new legislation fangs. Along with hitting violators with stiff fines and prison terms, Dow inserted rules permitting the local “sheriff, city marshal or deputy” to “search the premises described in said warrant, and if any spirituous or intoxicating liquors are found therein he shall seize the same.” So long as they were voters, any three individuals could stand before a judge and assert that they had “probable cause” to believe malfeasance was occurring. That’s all it took. (To Dow’s credit, he also changed the law so that at least one of the complainants had to attest that he’d actually witnessed a crime. He couldn’t just say he
suspected
it, he had to swear under oath that he had seen it. This was a major change that raised the evidentiary standards in all search-and-seizure procedures.)

When other states modeled their prohibition laws after Maine’s, they established similar measures, and police raids into private residences became standard practice nationwide. While this might seem to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, the Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government; states weren’t bound by it. A series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings over the years gradually reined in local authorities, culminating with
Mapp v. Ohio
in 1961, when the Court firmly applied the exclusionary rule to the states.

Herb Adams and I head back to Neal Dow’s house, and before hitting the road I say good-bye to Rob, who’s still giving a tour to the folks from Portland.

From here it’s off to North Carolina to see the correctional facility where a Prohibition-era moonshiner named David Williams was locked up after fatally shooting a sheriff’s deputy who had charged onto his property. The crime itself wasn’t particularly historic; deadly encounters between bootleggers and law officials were common during the 1920s. But while in prison, Williams invented a weapon that, according to General Douglas MacArthur, helped U.S. forces win the Pacific ground war in 1945. Williams created the patent-winning innovation under the noses of the prison’s warden and security guards. He designed it, in fact, with their blessing.

SEVERAL SHOTS SEEMED
to come out of nowhere. One bullet whizzed past Sheriff N. H. McGeachy’s face, almost nicking his nose, and another clipped Deputy Bill West’s ear. McGeachy had seen at least three men with guns scurry toward a wooded area when he drove up to David Williams’s moonshining operation in Godwin, North Carolina, but they had all disappeared into the trees before opening fire. As McGeachy and West dropped to the ground, Deputy Al Pate, still standing, suffered a direct hit and died within seconds. Later that night McGeachy found Williams’s father, a respected and prosperous member of the community, and encouraged him to surrender his twenty-year-old son. David Williams denied shooting Pate but admitted to running the illegal still and gave himself up.

“Mr. Pate was about 60 years of age and leaves a widow and four children,” the
Fayetteville Observer
wrote on July 23, 1921, the day after the evening raid. “One of the saddest features of his death is the fact that his daughter, who was married last week, is off on her honeymoon.” Residents were grief-stricken and outraged, and they demanded swift justice for the deputy’s murder.

Although the evidence fingering Williams as the shooter was weak and mostly circumstantial, his legal team felt the safest strategy was for him to plead insanity. They submitted the letter written two years earlier by his brother the Reverend J. Mack Williams, stating that David was clinically paranoid, and asked the reverend to testify in person. The Reverend Williams obliged, reiterating his fears about David’s mental health and his “mania” for guns going back to his childhood days hunting in the backwoods of Godwin. It was a risky legal strategy (Williams himself wasn’t too pleased about being called mentally unhinged), but a single juror remained stubbornly convinced that Williams was indeed insane, and the judge declared a mistrial. Williams agreed to lesser charges and received a thirty-year sentence. He maintained his innocence but knew that if he attempted a second trial and lost, he could face life in prison or the electric chair.