SEPTEMBER 2, 1933
After a twenty-year break, the racetracks in Detroit open again as a way of generating revenues and boosting the local economy that has collapsed. The car industry is the epicenter of the Great Depression, and Detroit struggles to support its homeless and hungry. In the city’s hospitals, people die of starvation. In a rare bright spot, 1933 sees the Eighteenth Amendment repealed and Prohibition end. Detroit, with its roaring economy in the 1920s and its strategic position on the border, had never been dry, but the thriving bootleg business exacted a heavy cost in terms of gang violence and corruption.
Twenty thousand people attended the opening day of the Michigan Farm and Industrial Fair on the State Fairgrounds. The people crowding the grandstand—including Governor William Comstock and a number of other state officials—were not there to look at machinery or cattle. They had come to enjoy the first day of legalized horse racing in Michigan, with eight races on the program. It got exciting right away: in the first race, Mayco, a 10-to-1 longshot, won by a head’s length. In the sixth race, the thoroughbred Gallant Sir, winner of eleven straight races, took the inaugural $2,500 handicap.
Gambling at the Fairgrounds was licensed under the pari-mutuel system: gamblers paid into a pot, and the winners were paid in proportion to their stake, with the operator taking a healthy slice. Licensees bid for the right to operate race days at the Fairgrounds, and the winning bidder guaranteed the state about half a million dollars.1
While horseracing had become popular across the United States by the 1890s, by 1910, a series of Michigan laws prohibiting lotteries, which covered gambling on horses, had effectively killed off the sport in Detroit.2 The city had put its stake in a different kind of horsepower—the State Fairgrounds hosted motor racing instead, promoted by the car manufacturers. In June 1933, the state legislature, with the governor’s support, passed a law that re-introduced horseracing to Michigan.3 The law would have passed months earlier had it not been for a battle between those who favored just the ponies and those who wanted to see dog racing as well. In the end, the dog racers lost out—an odd result, since the dogs would have raised a good chunk of revenue for the state, and revenue was the sole reason for the law to begin with.
In the midst of the Depression, the state needed any dollar it could get its hand on, and the races were an excellent opportunity to raise much-needed cash. The sport would prove extremely popular both in Detroit and in Michigan more generally. In that first year, there were thirty-one race days, yielding a total attendance of 101,000, with $4 million staked. The State Fairgrounds was the only licensed racetrack during the 1930s, and seeing its success, the number of race days was raised to around sixty-five.4 On Labor Day in 1936, Seabiscuit, possibly the most celebrated horse in history, won the Governor’s Handicap in front of a crowd of 28,000. The champion thoroughbred became a symbol of resilience during the Great Depression, and he stars in numerous books and movies.5 When he retired in 1940, he had brought in more money than any horse to date, and more than fifty thousand people came to visit him during his retirement years at Ridgewood Ranch.
By 1945, more racetracks had been licensed, and there were 142 race days each year, drawing 1.2 million spectators and $44 million in stakes. Between 1942 and 1995, Detroit racetrack crowds exceeded attendance at Tigers games every year, with the single exception of 1948. At their peak in 1971, almost 4 million people attended the races, four times as many as went to see the Tigers. Racing at the State Fairgrounds ended in 1950, when the Detroit Race Course in Livonia became the main venue, just beyond the western edge of the city. Other licensed racecourses included Hazel Park and Northville Downs. In the end, it was the state lottery that killed horse gambling: after the first state lottery was licensed in 1971, racetrack attendance declined.6 In April 2018, Hazel Park Raceway closed, effectively ending the era of thoroughbred horseracing in Detroit.7
1933 was a year in which the state decided to relax its control of human vice. Betting on the ponies became legal at the same time the state repealed restrictions on the sale of beer, as long as the brews contained less than 3.2 percent alcohol. The end of Prohibition was here. Roosevelt, newly elected, issued a call for the repeal of the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment—“the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.” Repeal required the passage of another amendment: the Twenty-First. Roosevelt had remained on the fence about repeal right up until his election in 1932; it had become increasingly popular in the country, but it could have cost him electoral votes in the more “virtuous” states. The fact that Eleanor Roosevelt supported Prohibition might have made it a tricky proposition as well.8
Prohibition had been a predictable failure. Colonel Ira Reeves, who led the New Jersey district federal Prohibition agency, was at first zealous in pursuing his enforcement duties, but later lamented the efficacy of his efforts. Instead of doing little to reduce supply, he explained, “I had raised the price of alcoholic beverages and reduced the quality.”9 While alcohol consumption fell dramatically at first, it quickly stabilized at around two-thirds of the pre-Prohibition level. The wording of the amendment did not help. The law made selling illegal, but not buying or possessing it. In 1919, wealthy Americans drinkers stocked up, and in some instances, their stocks lasted until repeal. The rest of the country had three main sources: kitchen-sink operations in the home, large-scale moonshine production and distribution, and cross-border smuggling.10 Detroit, a narrow river’s breadth away from Canada, was in an ideal location for the last of these.
According to a study by the Detroit Board of Commerce, in 1928, the city’s trade in alcohol employed fifty thousand people and generated $215 million in annual sales, making it the second largest business in the city after the auto trade.11 By 1925, the Hiram Walker Distillery in Canada was shipping one hundred thousand cases of Canadian whiskey from Windsor to Detroit, allegedly for transshipment to Cuba. The Canadian government made no bones about its disinterest in enforcing U.S. laws on the other side of the border. Seagram’s whiskey made it all the way from Montreal across the river, and Detroit acquired another one of its many nicknames: “the City on a Still.”12
While much of the alcohol was supposed to be shipped to a second destination, Detroit kept a goodly amount for itself: the city had one of the highest consumption levels during Prohibition. By 1923, Detroit boasted an estimated 7,000 speakeasies or blind pigs; by 1925, there were 25,000.13 Nobody tried very hard to hide it, either. One wag wrote, “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink in Detroit unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.”14 During the Ossian Sweet trial in 1925, lawyer Clarence Darrow was easily able to obtain a bottle of whiskey to consume in the courthouse office while he waited for the jury to return its verdict.15
Darrow was a fervent opponent of Prohibition, and he saw a clear link between the Anti-Saloon League, which pursued vigorous enforcement of the law, and the rise of white supremacism in the North during the 1920s. “The father and mother of the Ku Klux is the Anti-Saloon League.”16 Supporters of Prohibition, predominantly Protestant, welcomed the vigilante enforcement that the Klan could provide, while the Klan was delighted to position itself as proudly upholding the law of the land.
It is certainly a fact that during Prohibition, Detroit saw a serious breakdown of law and order. Even before Prohibition, a gangland culture had been developing in the city, and mob murders had become a problem.17 In the Roaring Twenties, the enormous profits that could be reaped by bootlegging made Detroit one of the centers of American gangsterism. The Detroit River was the smugglers’ focus of operation, and the gangs soon established protection rackets.
Daniel Okrent recounts that “gun violence turned the Detroit River into a combat zone. ‘Indiscriminate shooting on the river’ caused a group of local yachtsmen to make a formal protest to Congress. At any given hour, as many as fifteen hundred boats were dashing one way or another along its eighteen miles, either laden with illegal cargo or returning to the Canadian side for more.”18
The River Gang, led by the Licavoli brothers from St. Louis, dominated much of the trade. They operated speedboats that would cross the river at night and offload cases of whiskey into cars waiting on the waterfront. They charged 25 percent of the retail price for the service; if you would rather run your own boats, they would let you do that—for a fee. Refusing to work with the River Gang was enough to get you murdered. While the border traffic was their main focus of operation, they also became involved in the operation of speakeasies.19
One way for the River Gang to avoid the city police was to operate along the river just to the west and to the east of the city limits. They might also have been keen to avoid the Purple Gang, a rival operation.20 The Purple Gang was the most violent of the Detroit gangs during Prohibition. Unlike many of the mobs that were dominated by Italians, the Purple Gang was Jewish—members hailed from the Black Bottom area of the city, which had not yet been become a predominantly black neighborhood.21 Their brutality was legendary. They would hijack shipments of liquor crossing the river and simply kill everyone on board. As a result, most of the traffic crossing the river within the city limits came under their control, and their speedboats became known as the “Little Jewish Navy.” After their consignments landed, they’d usually take them to warehouses to “cut”—that is, dilute—the merchandise, handsomely increasing profits. Like the River Gang, the Purple Gang gained control of a number of speakeasies.
The Purple Gang earned much of its reputation during what was called the “Cleaners and Dyers War.”22 In the early 1920s, the laundry business in the city was highly competitive. The president of the Detroit Federation of Labor, Francis Martel, saw the Purple Gang as a welcome means to limit competition and raise prices, and he encouraged them to set about extorting all the cleaners in the city. Rumor has it that they gained their name because of the purple dye they’d toss into a load of laundry as a first warning if a business refused to co-operate. The second refusal would get the business bombed. By 1928, they had established firm control, and the entire city’s laundry businesses were paying them protection money. And yes, prices rose, but any extra profit is more likely to have ended up in the Purple Gang’s coffers than in the businesses’ tills.
Other, more conventional mob business activities included brothels and gambling. Prostitution thrived in Detroit during Prohibition. African American sex workers tended to search for clients in Black Bottom, while their white colleagues worked just west of the downtown, out toward Navin Field and Corktown.23 Soliciting on the streets was generally accepted, and in 1964, one woman recalled the era wistfully: “A very popular girl then could earn with tips over two hundred dollars in a twelve hour period…. The prostitute now makes far less than her older sister of the roaring twenties.”24
Gambling by and large took the form of lotteries, banned in Michigan by a law passed in 1835, the same law that prevented gambling on horses. The illegal numbers games were called “policies,” and runners would distribute tickets around the neighborhood, advertising odds of 300 to 1 or 500 to 1 (though the real ratio was more like 6,000 to 1). The operator would take up to 80 percent of the revenues generated, and with daily betting turnover estimated in the region of $50,000, this was a very profitable business.25 As the gangs generated revenue, hired muscle, and paid off law enforcement while running the bootlegging business, they were able to extend their empires into these other illegal businesses.
Most of the murders those days involved either criminals killing each other, police shooting criminals, or criminals shooting police, although all these murders made the city an extremely dangerous place, and innocent bystanders could easily get shot by accident. The city government and police were either unwilling or powerless to do anything about it. In July 1926, the Rockefeller Foundation issued a 150-page report describing Detroit as “the vilest city on the continent.”26 The report claimed that law enforcement had being corrupted by the bootleggers, an accusation that was widely seen as plausible. In addition, Prohibition simply wasn’t popular in Detroit, and so the effort to stamp out illegal drinking was half-hearted. “Local judges yawned at the liquor laws,” writes Okrent.27 More sinister were the bribes that the Purple Gang and others paid the police and city officials, payoffs that enabled the gangs to conduct their business with impunity, and more or less in the open.
Even before Prohibition ended, however, the era of the Purple Gang was drawing to a close. Charles Bowles, who in 1924 had almost won the mayor’s office with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, actually succeeded in getting himself elected in 1929. He had distanced himself from the KKK, not because of its violent racism, but because the city’s large Polish community did not countenance its faith in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon Protestants—and they voted accordingly. When Bowles took office at the beginning of 1930, he immediately began handing out jobs to friends and associates. He instigated a reform of the police department, which was clearly overdue, but crime rates immediately increased.28 Rumors circulated that he had funded his campaign with contributions from gangsters and that, in return, he was letting them run the city without interference.
That May, while Bowles was away attending the Kentucky Derby, Police Commissioner Harold Emmons arranged a series of raids and arrested a number of well-known criminals. When Bowles returned, he demanded that Emmons resign—he refused, and Bowles fired him. That move turned out to be ill-advised—in the first successful recall campaign in a major U.S. city, Bowles was kicked out of City Hall, even after his supporters spent $100,000 opposing the recall campaign. The vote took place on July 12, 1930—Bowles had been in office for little more than six months. A key figure in the recall’s success was Gerald Buckley, a journalist and radio broadcaster who had denounced corruption in general and Bowles in particular for some time. The day after Buckley announced the result on the radio—with considerable satisfaction, one imagines—he was gunned down in the LaSalle Hotel on the corner of Adelaide and Woodward. Growing disgust at bootleg-related murders was an important factor in bringing an end to Prohibition.
Indirectly, Prohibition had led to some beneficial infrastructure investment. In 1929, the Ambassador Bridge had opened, which was followed, in 1930, of the opening of the Detroit-Windsor road tunnel—also known as “the funnel,” since it enabled Prohibition-era Americans to cross into Canada where they could drink legally.29 The demand for crossings was so large that both projects could be privately funded. One reason was the passage of the new immigration laws in 1921 and 1924: passengers were now required to produce some kind of proof of identity, and ferry businesses were struggling with long lines. But then the Great Depression hit.
The scale of the economic collapse in Detroit was staggering. At the peak of 1929, Ford employed 128,000 workers; by 1931, the number had fallen to 37,000. By October 1930, 123,000 of the city’s workforce were unemployed (18 percent), and by January 1931, unemployment stood at 32 percent. By the end of 1932, it was estimated that half of the city’s working population was without steady employment.30 In a city so dominated by a single industry, the collapse in demand for its product was catastrophic. The human misery was numbing. As during all major recessions, people did not simply lose their jobs, they frequently lost their homes as well. Owners defaulted on loans, renters were evicted for non-payment. It was not just men walking the streets looking for jobs; during the Depression, an estimated two hundred thousand children across the country were homeless, and many of them lived in Detroit. Workers who remained employed saw their wages cut. While the prices of goods fell about 20 percent, the average wage for autoworkers fell by 50 percent. In Inkster, a small city fifteen miles west of Detroit settled by African Americans trying to get out of Black Bottom, the city government ran out of money, closed the schools, and laid off the entire police force, while the power company disconnected all electricity.31 It was a deadly time. According to Dr. John Ryan of the National Catholic Welfare Council, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, “a physician in one of the hospitals in Detroit reported not long ago that, on the average, four persons a day are brought to that particular hospital too far gone from starvation to be saved.”32
We have already mentioned the many forms of ethnic and racial prejudices that thrived in the era—against African Americans, Jews, Poles, Italians, and so on. But one of the groups hardest hit was the Mexican community. As employment in Detroit and Michigan started to collapse in 1930, Hoover decided to mass deport not just Mexican immigrants but Americans of Mexican descent. Journalist Diane Bernhard writes: “The program, implemented by Hoover’s secretary of labor, William Doak, included passing local laws forbidding government employment of anyone of Mexican descent, even legal permanent residents and U.S. citizens. Major companies, including Ford, U.S. Steel and the Southern Pacific Railroad, colluded with the government by telling Mexicans they would be better off with their own people, laying off thousands.”33 Detroit’s community was hit hard, particularly migrant workers in the rural areas surrounding the city.
Organizations such as the Communist Party played a significant role in providing relief and bringing attention to the plight of the unemployed and marginalized. The magnitude of the crisis certainly appeared to support their anti-capitalist theories, which called for a system of worker control and a planned production process that would avoid the wild gyrations of the market system. They organized protest marches demanding that the factory owners and other capitalists contribute their conspicuous wealth to relieve the misery of the hungry and the homeless. On March 7, 1932, around four thousand demonstrators assembled in west Detroit at Fort Street and Oakwood with the intention of marching on Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn. Ford had long organized his own paramilitary security under Harry Bennett. They recruited from both the police force and from released criminals, whom Ford claimed he could rehabilitate. Members of Ford’s “Service Department” were difficult to distinguish from the Dearborn police force. On that day, both stood together waiting for the protesters to arrive. As the marchers approached, police and Ford’s thugs alike drew their guns and opened fire. Four demonstrators were killed, and sixty were injured. No one was ever brought to trial for these crimes. Instead, Dearborn and Detroit police raided Communist Party offices and arrested sixty “suspects”—including two who had been shot and wounded and were chained to their hospital beds.34
The events of that day reverberated around the country, and it was catastrophes such as these that set the stage for Roosevelt’s election and the New Deal. To be sure, some thought that the Communist threat was real and had to be suppressed by all means necessary. More, however, concluded that shooting hungry unemployed workers was unjustifiable, and that radical change was required. The mayor of Detroit, Frank Murphy, faced significant criticism from the Communists, who accused him of complicity with the owners. Murphy threaded the needle—he acknowledged that the march, being unsanctioned, was illegal, but he also claimed that he was not opposed to the march. Most Detroiters were sure where his sympathies lay.35
Frank Murphy had been elected mayor after the recall of Charles Bowles, and then re-elected in 1931. He campaigned as a friend of the working class and called for radical change to provide a safety net for the poor. A devout Catholic, he was not opposed to capitalism, but he did think a significant safety net was necessary. Unlike Father Coughlin, he was not an anti-Semite, and unlike Bowles, he was not a segregationist. As a result, he won overwhelming support in the city. One of his first acts as mayor was to create the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee, which distributed relief funds as long as the city had money.36 His advice also helped Roosevelt to craft the New Deal and programs such as the WPA, which provided federal relief to Detroit. In 1933, Roosevelt appointed him governor-general of the Philippines, and in 1937 he was elected governor of Michigan. The president appointed him as attorney general in 1939 and to the Supreme Court in 1940, where he remained until he died in 1948.
When Hank Greenberg was a nineteen-year-old rookie with the Detroit Tigers, the Purple Gang, then in their pomp as rulers of Detroit, sought to befriend him. They were regular and visible patrons of Navin Field, and they must have been particularly pleased to see a Jewish kid playing for their team. By 1935, most of the gang were dead or behind bars. Then again, the gangsters of the area pretty much ran the prisons, so it was not unusual to find convicted criminals at the ball games in Detroit—incarcerated Purple Gang members were seen at both the 1935 and 1945 World Series games. In 1941, Abe Bernstein, one of the gang’s leaders, personally arranged for Greenberg to play an exhibition game at Jackson State Prison. Greenberg played for the prison squad, and his two home runs led them to victory.37