Chapter 12
The day after announcing her resignation from the Republican National Committee, Pauline Sabin met with fifteen women to iron out their plan to end Prohibition; they needed to adopt a temporary name, elect officers, rent an office, outline a basic organization, and arrange for a meeting, a sort of national convention, in Chicago on May 28, 1929, barely a month away.1 Contacting the vast network of friends and political operatives she had cultivated over the past decade, Sabin got commitments from women in twenty-six states to establish state organizations and assurances from women in fifteen states that they would attend the Chicago meeting. Sabin and her friends, particularly in New York, began talking to their friends and friends of friends, drumming up additional support and publicity, generating pamphlets to spread the word of their aim: to “promote temperance and restore respect for law.”2 Almost as important to Sabin as ending Prohibition was letting men know that Ella Boole of the WCTU did not speak for all women, a claim she frequently made and which had been repeated in the press many times in the previous eight years.
At the meeting in Chicago, the women agreed on a name, the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Repeal (WONPR), a bit long, but reflective of their intent and origins. The group also adopted a structure, surely rooted in Sabin’s experiences on the Republican National Committee; they established a “skeleton organization” with a national advisory council composed of members from every state, with state advisory councils directing local efforts. Each state council would form committees on membership, publications, investigations (to compile statistics on Prohibition’s negative impact), and legislation (to attend hearings). The WONPR would assess no dues and all work would be conducted voluntarily. The WONPR presented no specific policies at the meeting, preferring to collect opinions and thoughts from its mushrooming membership, and reporting, “Women in all sections of the country are welcoming this opportunity to voice their protest and to help bring about the real temperance we all desire.” As if plucked from the WCTU or ASL literature of twenty years earlier, Mrs. Courtlandt Nicoll declared, “We stand at the cross roads today where one sign points to anarchy and demoralization of the very fibre of our national character, the other sign points to bring about a change in the law and the recovery of those principles on which the nation was founded.”3
Sabin understood “that we have a powerful group opposed to us in the W.C.T.U. and the Methodist and Baptist Churches. They have certainly put the fear of God into the Republican members” of the New York legislature and U.S. Congress.4
Sabin’s organization catered to women exclusively, because she saw women’s concerns at the heart of Prohibition, their actions over a long period bringing the law to fruition. For that reason, “surely, it is the duty of every woman to face the question fearlessly and to lend her part in its final judgment.” Taking that position made her appear to stand in opposition to her long-standing pronouncements that women needed to shed themselves of women-only issues and work from within the established parties, but Sabin saw things differently. Prohibition was “a problem which the American people, regardless of party or creed, must solve,” she reasoned. The WONPR was not a new party; it would work to increase the number of politically active women regardless of their party affiliations. Sabin knew that repealing Prohibition could not be accomplished by one party, or by women standing alone. However, many women had never yet cast a vote and thus were uncommitted to parties, politicians, or other anti-Prohibition organizations, like Charles Sabin’s AAPA, all of which had complicated relationships with one another and with public perception. The WONPR could step into the debate without baggage. “Temperance,” which had been the battle cry of the Prohibitionists, “must come from within,” charged Sabin, and the extreme of abstinence demanded by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act could not be compelled of people. Prominent among her critics was the WCTU, which of course had “Temperance” in its name rather than “Prohibition”; Sabin found it hypocritical of the organization to ignore the obvious contradiction of legislators voting dry but allowing themselves a drink. She found it difficult “to understand the frame of mind and the elasticity of conscience which can condone such obvious dissimulation.” Even if Prohibition could be enforced, at a great cost, Sabin said she would still oppose the law because it was “contrary to the spirit of our fundamental Constitution.”5
The WONPR’s earliest networking activities spread from women Sabin had known in the Republican Party to the women’s auxiliary branch of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA), to which Charles Sabin had belonged since its inception in 1918. Other members of the AAPA among Pauline Sabin’s circle of friends and political allies included Nicholas Murray Butler and James Wadsworth. The AAPA opposed the Eighteenth Amendment because it damaged the economy; the alcohol tax had brought in about 30 to 40 percent of all federal tax revenue prior to the amendment’s enactment, and personal income tax rates were raised to compensate for the lost revenue.
Much of the public, as a result, viewed the AAPA as a group of rich men devoted to lowering their taxes rather than to personal liberty or concerns about increased crime and alcoholism rates. The AAPA had made little progress, and its membership fluctuated wildly, from an alleged high of 770,000 in 1926 to a low of 11,000 in January 1929, after the group’s president purged the membership roll of anyone who had made little or no financial contribution.6 Charles Sabin’s involvement with the AAPA gave Pauline a window into its activities, informing many of her decisions on the WONPR’s organization and solidifying her determination to be inclusive of women from all backgrounds and every section of the country, encouraging local and state organizations in grassroots efforts, forgoing any required dues, making a far more democratic organization than the AAPA. Still, Pauline saw value in maintaining an association between the WONPR and the AAPA, and she sent her group’s declaration of principles and plan of organization to the AAPA leadership for comment. The AAPA’s leadership had one overarching recommendation, namely that the WONPR provide clear definitions of the organization’s intent and policies so that prospective members would be left with no confusion about what they were supporting: full and complete repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.7
Congress and Prohibitionist groups tried to assert a strong connection between the WONPR and the AAPA, citing the men’s group’s provision of an office and secretary to the WONPR when they began in 1929. But the WONPR’s rapid expansion forced them into bigger offices and a larger staff, which they arranged without AAPA involvement.8 Years later, Pauline Sabin was asked about a connection, specifically whether the AAPA provided any funding to the WONPR, but she refused to give an answer, saying financial matters were private and had long since passed being of interest.9 Regardless of any behind-the-scenes association, Sabin and the WONPR set their own agenda, secured new members at a rate never experienced by the AAPA, and extended their arguments deep into the middle section of the country, something never accomplished by their male counterparts.
Mabel Willebrandt’s exit from office came so unexpectedly that an article written by her and published in the July 1929 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal still listed her as the assistant attorney general. She had prepared the article, “Smart Washington After Six O’Clock,” before resigning, never hinting in the piece that she would leave. In it Willebrandt discussed the changing social scene as the nation’s capital became increasingly devoid of alcohol, “the ribaldry of the cocktail shaker, the exchange of home-brew recipes and the florid eagerness for false stimulation” fading in inverse proportion to the ascendancy of Herbert Hoover and his strong moral influence. She allowed a glimpse into her private life, a mystery for much of the eight years she served in Washington, with stories of dinners hosted by Supreme Court justices and cabinet secretaries, where intellectual discourse proved more stimulating than alcohol, the absence of liquor at a party “a social achievement” establishing a “reputation for successful entertainment without cocktail, highball or liquors.” Willebrandt declared, “There is no such thing any more, if indeed society ever achieved it, as graceful drinking.” She knew of congressional get-togethers in the past where liquor was proudly served, but she doubted the practice continued. The wealthy and powerful had begun to see themselves as contributing to the crime and corruption necessary to bring liquor to their tables, realizing, “It may have been clever and smart to serve a thing forbidden and costly if the dregs in the glass were not so repulsive and disillusioning.”10
A month later, “The Inside of Prohibition,” a series of twenty-one articles written by Willebrandt, began appearing in newspapers across the country, in which the former assistant attorney general addressed the question that had dogged her since she took office in 1921: were the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act enforceable? She would “not discuss the wisdom of adopting Prohibition as national policy,” leaving others to determine the fate of the amendment; when “people are sure whether or not we can actually have Prohibition enforcement, then they will decide whether or not there shall continue to be a Prohibition amendment and Prohibition laws.”11 Throughout the series, Willebrandt offered specific instances—arrests, trials, conversations—where state and federal agencies failed to fully enforce Prohibition, either for corruption, ineptitude, or lack of effort. In making that argument, she returned to familiar themes. “Hundreds” of Prohibition Unit agents appointed through “political pull” put enforcement in charge of men “as devoid of honesty and integrity as the bootlegging fraternity.”12 During her tenure, she saw no change in the problem of corrupt agents, and she charged that the “government is committing a crime against the public generally when it pins the badge of police authority on and hands a gun to a man of uncertain character, limited intelligence or without giving systematic training for the performance of duties that involve the rights and possibly the lives of citizens.”13 The situation had improved slightly, she admitted, after 1927 when Prohibition Unit agents were put under civil service regulations, but problems at the administrative level, an area still governed by political appointments, had continued to hamper her efforts to establish training requirements for all agents. She charged Lincoln Andrews, the former assistant treasury secretary in charge of the Prohibition Unit from April 1925 until July 1927, with putting “in office men who were temperamentally and in every other way unfitted for the task to which he assigned them,” adding, “It will take many a day for law enforcement to recover from the setback it suffered under General Lincoln Andrews.”14 Corrupt or incompetent leadership, within the Prohibition Unit, the Department of Treasury, and Congress, made it easier to divert alcohol manufactured legitimately under permit to illegal distributors. Such leaders placed no restrictions on the number of permits that could be issued, the volume of alcohol that could be produced under permit, or the businesses that could purchase alcohol. Even when Prohibition agents suspected a purchaser might be involved in illegal trafficking of spirits, they had no legal authority to inspect the alcohol in question or inquire of its uses. Willebrandt believed these diversions to be the single greatest source of illegal alcohol in the country.15
She did not shy from accusing Prohibitionists, either, notably the Anti-Saloon League, of failing to support the Eighteenth Amendment; she accused them of having “rocking chair-itis,” leaning “back in complacent enjoyment” of past victories. The absence of “quiet, steady, forceful education on the value of temperance, community by community,” formerly promulgated by the ASL and WCTU, opened the door for anti-Prohibitionists to create doubt, focusing on the crime and corruption brought by Prohibition.16
Willebrandt had understood from the beginning that it would take time to clarify the laws of enforcement and establish permissible methods of search and seizure and the penalties to be assessed. When “harmony of interpretation could not be obtained in lower courts,” cases advanced to the Supreme Court, where she had argued nearly 80 cases and submitted certiorari (i.e., sympathetic) briefs in another 278. Several of those cases would have far-reaching implications beyond Prohibition. In U.S. v. Carroll, the court ruled that automobiles could be stopped and searched and incriminating evidence seized without a search warrant if law enforcement officers had sufficient reason to believe the vehicle’s occupants had participated in criminal activity. In U.S. v. Marron, the court ruled that business records could be seized without a warrant if thought to reveal illegal operations. Previously, such records were regarded as self-incriminating and, therefore, inadmissible as evidence. Crimes of omission came under scrutiny in U.S. v. Donnelly, where the court determined that federal agents and attorneys could be found guilty of violating the Volstead Act if they failed to pursue cases against known violators. The Grace and Ruby cases found British rumrunners guilty when two ships anchored in international waters allowed smaller boats to be lowered from the main vessels and used to shuttle liquor to shore with the aid of a boat sent from the mainland.17 Court rulings gave Prohibition agents and policemen more means to secure arrests and collect evidence, resulting in more arrests, but inadequate penalties did not prove a sufficient deterrent.18 The recent passage of the Jones Five and Ten Law, she believed, with its higher fines and longer jail terms, would go a long way to slowing bootleggers and rumrunners, giving courts the freedom to assess sentences commensurate with crimes.
Willebrandt reminded her readers that only 305 out of 2,540 counties nationwide had declared themselves “wet,” making repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment “almost an impossibility.” Only thirteen state legislatures would need to oppose repeal to keep the amendment in place should a serious opposition movement arise. Willebrandt admitted gains in anti-Prohibition sentiment as demonstrated by the repeal of state enforcement laws in New York, New Jersey, Montana, Nevada, and Wisconsin, but saw a reinvigorated effort at education and resistance from traditional temperance and Prohibition organizations during Al Smith’s presidential campaign. Women’s interest in sustaining Prohibition had been revived, in particular, though Willebrandt observed a difference between single and married women: the “modern girl” was willing to share a flask with her escort, but “the moment that girl marries, she likely will, whether consciously or not, become a supporter of Prohibition, because she will always be unwilling to share any part of her husband’s income either with a bootlegger or saloon keeper.”19 If women were not enough to hold Prohibition in place, the American people’s characteristic desire to “accomplish the impossible” would.20
Enduring his time on McNeil Island, subjected to the penitentiary’s rigid structure, Roy Olmstead had begun to change. The desires and goals that once had driven him had begun to drop away. He had become interested in the Christian Science religion. Into his contemplations of its tenets—including the belief that the material world is an illusion blinding humans from the truth of spiritual reality—about a year into his sentence, stepped an unexpected guest. Entering the visitors’ room, Olmstead saw Tom Revelle waiting. The former district attorney had just learned of the bribes the rumrunner had paid to Clifford McKinney, Revelle’s former assistant, and he wanted to make sure Olmstead knew that he had never known about the transactions. Revelle admonished Olmstead not to tell him anything now, or anyone else, for that matter, warning that additional charges could be brought against him. As the conversation ended, Revelle buried his veiled threat by proclaiming, “God bless you, my boy, you don’t know how I’ve suffered for you. I’ve thought of this many, many times and I want to see you out of this trouble.”21 Olmstead made Tom Revelle not a single promise.
The October 4, 1929, headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read, “Mysterious Investigation of Seattle Prohibition Office” in large block letters across the top. The investigation had been announced by none other than J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Assistant Attorney General Howard T. Jones, “temporarily filling the position left by the resignation of Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt,” stated that “many complaints from the Seattle district have been forthcoming for a long time.” The news surprised Roy Lyle, but he would not back down, declaring, “I am not afraid of anything—there is nothing here to investigate.” Going on the offense, both he and Whitney attributed the investigation to the work of locals “seeking to discredit enforcement of the Prohibition law here,” aided by imprisoned bootleggers seeking pardons. Al Hubbard, whose work with Olmstead and then with Lyle “had brought him considerable publicity,” according to the newspaper, had furnished the FBI with a great deal of information. Lyle cautioned readers to remember, “Hubbard is a dismissed Prohibition agent,” but the account mentioned that Hubbard had been “exonerated” by a federal grand jury before concluding with a reminder of the two previous investigations of the unit by the Internal Revenue Bureau’s Intelligence Unit, whose report “was never acted upon,” leaving readers to ponder why.22
Privately, Lyle and Whitney were furious, considering the latest investigation unfair and even ridiculous, based as it was on “the alleged evidence” from prejudicial and criminal sources. While this “fake investigation” would subject them again to “the personal discomforts and injury and serious interruption of our work,” the real issue was attacks on honest and efficient officials by “the unscrupulous and treacherous opposition of an enemy, not without but within the very government itself.” These forces were intent upon destroying enforcement of the Volstead Act “through discrediting the efforts of the personnel.” This point was echoed by many drys throughout the country. Failing to maintain the dignity of the office and the confidence of the public, agents of the Prohibition Bureau would lose the ability to gather evidence and tips from the public, and to win cases in front of juries.23
Along with the anger, there was great pain for both leaders of the Twentieth District. As Lyle put it to Senator Jones, “I am very resentful and bitter, as I feel I am justified in being because of these unwarranted attacks, yet in my own conscience I feel gratified in having had the privilege of doing my bit for my country in what I honestly believe to be one of its greatest contests and its greatest crises.” Whitney made it plainer, telling Jones, “It does seem more than passing strange that we can get no action on such matters, but when any scoundrel and crook or Prohibition violator goes to any unit that can possibly investigate the Prohibition office a statement of the crooks are excepted [sic] as facts and they immediately start to harass Prohibition enforcement officers.”24
Pressing upon Whitney as much as his perceived enemies was the very real possibility that the Prohibition Bureau would be transferred from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice, home to the FBI now investigating him. Senator Jones had received assurance from President Hoover that the bureau’s leadership supported the transfer, leaving Whitney “dumbfounded.” He believed Mabel Willebrandt and Alf Oftedal, both of whom had resigned after only six months under Hoover’s presidency, had clouded the president’s thinking.25 Whitney assaulted the notion that moving the bureau into the DOJ would somehow make everything “Lily white.” Exhibit A was the DOJ’s investigation into his own office. Swinging wild punches, he asserted that the U.S. Attorneys and Marshals had been the source of more corruption than the “carefully selected and civil service administrators,” the garbled syntax an attempt to paper over his own problems.
Finally, on November 1, 1929, President Hoover named his replacement for Mabel Willebrandt: C. A. Youngquist, the attorney general of Minnesota and a friend of Attorney General William Mitchell and Andrew Volstead. On assuming the mantle, Young-quist said, “I am dry politically and personally, but I am not a fanatic on the subject,” a clear sign of change in the government’s approach to Prohibition.26 At the same time, Mitchell hinted at moving all functions under the Department of Justice’s umbrella, an idea long advanced by Willebrandt. As the legislation came before Congress, a House committee asked Willebrandt to appear and offer her comments on the proposal. She asked to be excused from the proceedings, saying, “Out of courtesy to those who are discharging the responsibility of enforcing the law I would prefer that you hear their views rather than mine.”27 Congress relented and Willebrandt did not appear before the committee.
Without the crushing demands of her former position, Mabel Willebrandt could give time and voice to the plight of professional women, a subject which had greatly influenced her acceptance of the job as assistant attorney general. In late September 1929, she had given a radio address advising women on how to achieve success in business or professional endeavors. She advised women not to yield their feminine sexuality to mannish appearance or allow men to exaggerate women’s successes or failures using misperceptions about their defining characteristics. Willebrandt assigned some blame for those misperceptions to “self-conscious” behaviors that led women to believe failures resulted from conspiracies or prejudice against them rather than the typical mistakes or bad judgment of a novice. Neither did Willebrandt excuse men from needing to grant young women the same “right to make mistakes” as young men and for believing that women harbored inferiority complexes preventing them from reaching greater heights.28
In a magazine article printed in February 1930, Willebrandt went further, declaring: “Women have no fair chance in the business world yet. To say that they have is just ‘Pollyana talk.’” Beyond doing her job well, a woman must “walk the tight-rope of sexlessness without the loss of her essential charm,” pursuing “an impersonal fight against constant efforts to sidetrack her.” Willebrandt granted, “Every woman wants a home,” but men couldn’t “sympathize with the pioneer spirit of the modern girl he marries,” couldn’t allow her to work outside the home without fearing questions or ridicule from his peers. Women could not overcome such prejudices without the help of a husband committed to preserving his wife’s freedom, self-respect, intellectual acumen, and economic independence. Doing so, Willebrandt asserted, would produce a true “home” instead of the “outgrown ‘manly’ theory of ‘my wife can’t work for a living!’” Without a job, or some other outlet outside the home, she foresaw only desperation and anger for a woman. Even in instances where women, on their own or with their husbands’ blessings, entered the workforce, they must be prepared to have their credentials and capabilities challenged by male bosses and colleagues. Maintaining “a subtle attitude of confidence and resourcefulness, revealed through quiet, restrained and womanly dignity” would slowly melt “stubborn prejudice.” She expressed great hope for the future, but warned, in the interim, the successful woman was “bound to look back with yearning and perhaps with regret at dead hopes—the boy she loved but rejected because in his masculine egotism he demanded without understanding her free spirit’s sacrifice—the children she could have had—the companionship she missed.”29
If readers could have glimpsed the past ten years of Willebrandt’s diaries they would have seen the roots of every declaration she made in the article. Her struggles with Fred Horowitz’s ego coupled with the social stigma of a divorce and remarriage had convinced her to remain alone, seeking contentment in her career. Mabel Willebrandt would have great success in her professional life, achieving the financial stability she craved, and a certain amount of fulfillment with Dorothy’s adoption, but her failure to find a sympathetic companion, a desire for which she expressed many times in her diaries and personal correspondence, served as the unstated example in her article.
As President Hoover’s National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (better known as the Wickersham Commission after its chairman, George Wickersham) began its investigation into the effectiveness of federal Prohibition enforcement, several members of the U.S. House of Representatives, feeling empowered by potential change, advanced a series of proposals to amend the Constitution in relation to the Eighteenth Amendment. The proposals, variously, would have allowed the federal government to regulate the manufacture, sale, transportation, import, and export of alcoholic beverages; created a federal permitting system allowing manufacture and sale of alcohol; returned the decision to manufacture or sell alcohol to the states, individually; set a date for a referendum on repeal; or repealed the Eighteenth Amendment.30
On February 12, 1930, Pauline Sabin appeared on the first day of hearings on yet another proposed amendment to modify the Volstead Act. She came “to refute the contention that is often made by dry organizations, that all the women of America favor national Prohibition.” She believed women had been significant in securing enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, but their hopes of strengthening a weak will had not worked as desired: “They have seen an alleged moral reform debauch public and private life.” Increases in crime, government expenditure on enforcement, prison population, death from alcoholism, and drinking among teens, Sabin declared, brought increasing dissatisfaction with the law. Worse were the lawmakers, in Congress and state legislatures, who were “notoriously wet in their personal conducts, but continue to vote under the whiplash of that political cabal called the Anti-Saloon League.” Sabin called for the end of the hypocrisy that was “rapidly becoming our national characteristic” and “remedial” legislation to “replace the present era of lawlessness, corruption, hypocrisy, and killings with honesty, temperance, and sobriety.” The assembled gallery applauded.31
After dozens of women, claiming to represent millions of women, had spoken against any modification of the Volstead Act or the Eighteenth Amendment, Sabin requested a chance for rebuttal, which was granted, but she could not appear on the appointed day because she was in Cleveland attending to the details of the WONPR’s national conference, so she sent Elizabeth Harris, prominent in the Washington, D.C., chapter of the WONPR, in her stead. Harris took issue with the women favoring Prohibition and claiming they represented a majority of women throughout the country. She refuted claims by Mrs. Henry Peabody, president of the Women’s National Committee for Law Enforcement, and Mrs. John Sippel, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, who said they represented twelve million women, by saying, “That Mrs. Jones is a member of a reading club, of a women’s club and parent-teacher association does not make Mrs. Jones three women with three votes for or against Prohibition!” Harris reported on the receipt of numerous complaints sent to the WONPR and to newspapers across the country from women, many associated with clubs Peabody claimed for Prohibition, stating their offense at the suggestion that any of the groups in question had polled its membership regarding Prohibition. Returning to a familiar WONPR theme, Harris concluded there could be no response “to those who confined their statement to excited declaration that never, while the nineteenth amendment stood, could the Eighteenth be repealed.”32
Away from the hearings, the WONPR attacked—if the use of statistics and hard questioning could be regarded as attacking—the WCTU and other women’s Prohibitionist groups, challenging their assumptions that Prohibition was succeeding. At a forum headlined by Ella Boole and Pauline Sabin at the Women’s National Republican Club, Boole shied from the obvious failure to slow the liquor trade, saying success could be measured by the “disappearance of the saloon,” downplaying the existence of speakeasies as solely a New York City phenomenon.33
The Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform’s first national conference in Cleveland in April 1930 created a “Declaration of Principles” labeling Prohibition as “fundamentally wrong.” National Prohibition destroyed “the balance” between state and federal authority, ignored the fact that only “moral sense and the community conscience” could promote abstinence, and produced “disastrous consequences in the hypocrisy, the corruption, and the tragic loss of life and the appalling increase of crime which attended the abortive attempt to enforce it.” The WONPR called for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment and the enactment of state regulations “forbidding the return of the saloon,” driving “crime-breeding speakeasies” into extinction. Noting that the Eighteenth Amendment had been enacted by votes in state legislatures, the WONPR urged Congress “to submit to conventions of the people” (a nod to Jim Wadsworth’s failed amendment), ensuring a true mandate would be heard.34
While Pauline Sabin had pulled the WONPR’s initial membership from her extensive political and social contacts, most of the women lacked any experience in political organizations. Typical of the membership was Bessie Gardner du Pont, former wife of Alfred du Pont. Bessie attended the convention in Cleveland as part of the Delaware delegation, “utterly unprepared . . . for the responsibility we were entrusted with.”35 She had never attended a convention of any kind or belonged to a women’s club, and she knew little of the convention’s purpose beyond what she had learned in reading the newspapers and “from a short morning’s study” in the local library. She was exactly the kind of woman—previously uninvolved, her opinion not registered—that Sabin hoped to attract to the WONPR.
Sabin followed the convention with a radio address, explaining the identification of the WONPR as a “wet organization.” She had no objection to the term for the purpose of distinguishing between her members and those who were satisfied with the current Prohibition Law, but said, “Literally, our organization is as far from being wet as many of our so-called Prohibitionist legislators are from being dry. Our organization stands for temperance, for wise and honest government, for better social conditions, and for the protection of the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Editors at the New York World, a publication with Democratic Party leanings, applauded Sabin’s clarification, advising its readers to discard old definitions of wet and dry, and to understand that a “wet to-day is a man or woman who is opposed to national Prohibition.”36
Sabin submitted to almost any request, from wets or drys, to speak about the dangers of Prohibition and of liquor; she hoped to illuminate the WONPR’s calls for repeal without a return of the saloon, a distinction that escaped many people. She proposed that after repeal, national Prohibition would remain in effect for one year while state legislatures passed bills to regulate liquor traffic within their boundaries and devise laws “forbidding the return of the saloon.” She believed “the people” in each state knew what measure of Prohibition or restrictions best suited their desires. The organization had members who “never have drunk intoxicating beverages,” and, “undoubtedly,” there were members who did.37 That divide did not obscure the group’s objection to the Eighteenth Amendment, which infringed on personal liberty and did more harm than good. Responding to the charge that Prohibition had not been given a “fair trial” in New York, a WONPR representative cited government statistics to demonstrate that law enforcement had done little to curb drinking or the illegal traffic in liquor, even in states where the law had been supported. Between 1920 and 1930, federal expenditures increased from 3.7 million dollars to nearly 29 million dollars, seizures of stills had increased nearly twentyfold, seizure of illegal liquor had grown from 153,000 to 32,000,000 gallons, deaths from alcoholism had increased 300 percent, and arrests for alcoholism had risen 125 percent, but none of those factors had stemmed the tide of liquor washing over the country or the burgeoning criminal enterprises needed to keep the booze flowing.38
On May 14, 1930, Senator Jones informed William Whitney that the attorney general had decided to empanel a grand jury to determine whether indictments should be handed to Whitney, Lyle, Revelle, or any other Prohibition Bureau staff for bribery and corruption.39 As the grand jury convened, the U.S. Senate passed the transfer bill, placing the Prohibition Bureau within the Department of Justice. Whitney’s worst fear had come into being. Not only did his job now reside in the department accusing him of wrongdoing, but with all the attorneys employed by the DOJ, his position might be unnecessary.40
On May 26, 1930, the grand jury indicted Lyle, Whitney, Clifford McKinney, and two others for conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act and for conspiracy to violate the statute against accepting bribes. Former U.S. Attorney Thomas Revelle was not named. Whitney, always the main target, faced an additional indictment for the crime of perjury. All men were suspended from duty, effective immediately.41 “We never had a chance,” lamented Whitney. “It [the investigation] was never intended to give us a chance.” The coldest indignity came when Whitney was held in the city jail for want of a five-thousand-dollar bond. Lyle, ever the saintly figurehead, had been released on his own recognizance. McKinney’s whereabouts were unknown, Revelle’s former assistant having fled more than a year earlier, leaving his wife and children behind.42 The following day, yet another disgrace befell Whitney when Senator Jones, his confidant and fellow Prohibition champion, stated he would allow repeal or modification of the Volstead Act if that was the will of the people, a statement unthinkable a few years earlier.43
The government had had years, as many as sixty investigators and agents, and tens of thousands of dollars, Whitney charged, to create its case. He and his codefendants had “scarcely a dollar.” With all the negative publicity, the local newspapers aligning against Prohibition, “we cannot get a fair trial.” Whitney estimated he needed three months to prepare for the trial, seeing not only his personal reputation at stake, but the larger import of this trial, and declaring, “This case will be tried on the wet and dry issue.” If the forces arrayed against Whitney succeeded in getting him convicted, he concluded, “then the future of Prohibition is utterly hopeless.”44 According to Whitney, if he could be convicted, every “vigorous official” would be intimidated by the forces within law enforcement as much as from without, and begin to relax enforcement lest they incur the same wrath.
Whitney prepared for the trial just as his opponents had. He sought out the inmates at McNeil Island Penitentiary, hearing a great deal of damning hearsay about the work of the FBI investigators. Unnamed sources told him that bootlegger Chris Curtis had been paroled five days before the grand jury to induce his testimony. Curtis was willing to testify to any accusation made against Whitney and his colleagues, including the charge that Curtis had paid a six-thousand-dollar bribe to Lyle, through Hubbard, with the money directed to Senator Wesley Jones’ 1926 campaign fund.45 Confirming Whitney’s suspicion that former assistant attorney general Mabel Willebrandt had always been out to get him, Jones confided, “I think that the reason why Curtis was paroled was because the department felt that it was under obligation to do so because of a promise made by Mrs. Willebrandt in connection with some trial about the same time when he was indicted.”46 While Whitney had always blamed Willebrandt for a significant portion of the attacks against him, he now hedged a little, accusing former U.S. Marshal Ed Benn, Alf Oftedal, and the warden at McNeil Island Penitentiary of intentionally misleading Willebrandt to further their own ends. She, in turn, had spread that prejudice throughout her department, including the FBI, which had produced the report used to indict Whitney and his colleagues. Summing up his predicament, Whitney wrote, “This case actually simmers down to this: not only must we prove ourselves innocent, but we have got to convict the very government itself. It’s a pretty big task.”47
The most embarrassing, painful, and egregiously unfair period of Whitney’s life, his trial for conspiring with Roy Olmstead, began on Monday, August 11, 1930. Entering the courtroom where he had spent so much of the past eight years trying to convict bootleggers, rumrunners, and moonshiners, this time as the defendant, was to know betrayal—a perfidy capable of twisting his years of hard work into the end of his career, while all of Seattle and most of Washington State watched. Alfred Hubbard, whom Whitney had trusted, befriended, and ultimately staked his own career upon, arrived with great fanfare in the courtroom, mingling with bootleggers, Prohibition agents, and gawkers alike; smiling and backslapping; wearing his unofficial designation as “one of the most important government witnesses” like a crown. Whitney filed through the crowd alone, without his codefendants in tow, leaving them to find their places in the defendants’ chairs while he took his customary seat at the counselors’ table, though this time for the defense, not the prosecution.
Called as the first witness, Hubbard approached the stand. The years of lavish meals and abundant alcohol showed in his rounded face and thickened frame; the years of playing fast and loose in his flashy attire, a gaudy, rakish style favored by successful bootleggers across the country. He had dressed, according to one observer, “as fastidiously as a theater usher,” his panama hat ringed with a red band, his black-and-white shoes setting off his dark suit. Hubbard reveled in the spotlight, having sought it since he had metamorphosed from a kid hawking lies about his inventions in radio, X-ray machines, and other electrical wonders into a double agent in 1925, freeing him to make large sums of money by playing both sides, a freebooter living on a knife’s edge, the last great pirate of Puget Sound. Still identified as “a former inventor and electrical wizard,” Hubbard viewed the trial as his path back into the big leagues, fancying his testimony worth an appointment to one of the federal agencies overseeing Prohibition. His greed for cash, power, and notoriety was never more apparent than when he began unwinding the most outrageous reinvention of himself and of Olmstead, Whitney, and the other defendants, mixing into this new version of history a slew of bald-faced lies intertwined with dashes of truth, told utterly without conscience, without concern for the damage he was wreaking upon men he had called his friends.48
Hubbard’s testimony about bribes, their amounts, and dates, came tumbling out haphazardly, clearly made up as he went along. He claimed he had collected a total of $140,000 to $170,000 to bribe Whitney and his alleged coconspirators, reserving a 10 percent commission for himself. Reporters, upon hearing the volume of liquor passing through Olmstead’s network, calculated the revenue that should have been generated for Olmstead, and asked the perfectly obvious question, as one headline put it: “Where did all of the millions of dollars supposed to have been handled by Olmstead and other liquor rings go?”49 In the coming days’ testimony, Hubbard would step over his “facts” repeatedly, unconcerned that dates, places, and amounts did not jibe with earlier testimony. At one point, he claimed to have built radio stations upon Whitney’s direction, “presumably for Prohibition work, but really to tip off the boats about the Coast Guard.”50 Whitney had implied as much about Elsie Olmstead’s broadcasting station in the first Olmstead trial, to little effect. If the witness was recycling and repackaging old charges to give shape to his new conspiracy tale, no one seemed to notice.
To buttress Hubbard’s testimony, the prosecution introduced key documents: Lyle’s letter authorizing Hubbard to use any boat he chose as part of his undercover investigation; and two letters from Whitney, one that began, “Dear Al, I guess you are still my pal . . .” and describing Hubbard’s bust in the Zev case as “the most spectacular and bravest thing ever done in US in Prohibition enforcement.” Another seeming nail in Whitney’s coffin was the glowing letter of recommendation he had provided Hubbard after Hubbard’s termination. Whitney skipped over his doubts about Hubbard, touting his “initiative and ability as an investigator,” which had resulted in “some of the largest and most important conspiracy cases ever tried . . .” The praise went to ever loftier heights. For example, Whitney had written, “I have known him quite intimately, and I have not known him to do a dishonest act, but have found him always actuated by a desire to assist the government in to [sic] run down the criminal.”51
The moment the government prosecutors stepped back from the bar, announcing the end of their questioning of the witness, the defense attorneys sent their best interrogator, A. R. Hilen, to destroy Al Hubbard. In his hands, Hilen held transcripts from previous trials at which Hubbard had testified. Terse and intense, Hilen fired questions at Hubbard, allowing only no-nonsense answers, quickly revealing that every piece of testimony offered by Hubbard in earlier trials stood in direct opposition to the story he had just spent days telling. Using the witness’s own words like a hammer, Hilen forced Hubbard into a series of confessions. Admitting to perjury, the witness explained, “No, I wasn’t telling the truth then. I was wearing Whitney’s collar at that time—but I’m not anymore.”52 The defense team turned, at last, to Hubbard’s motivation for making these charges, asking him if he had been pushed by Ed Benn, one of Whitney’s nemeses. Provoked at last, Hubbard, with some heat, “insisted that Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the only person who urged him to tell his story.”53 There was nothing else to ask, the statement hanging in the air as proof of Whitney’s years of suspicion, though Willebrandt was not called to testify to the claim and never commented upon it. Hubbard was excused and left the courthouse a free man despite having admitted to years of graft, bribery, and rum-running.
Whitney took the stand nearly a month into the trial, anxious to unravel the specious case against him and his comrades. Led by his attorney’s questions, he disproved many of Hubbard’s specific allegations using official expense reports and time sheets to explain how money came and went and to verify his whereabouts on days in question. Whitney mocked other charges as “a figment of his [Hubbard’s] imagination.” He admitted paying for a speedboat for Hubbard’s use and investing in a radio station, but he said friendship, not conspiracy, drove him to put the boat title in his own name and help with the station, both more expensive than Hubbard could manage on his own. Ultimately, Whitney had to admit that, regrettably, he had trusted Hubbard to an exceptional degree. That trust had created a tangled mass of hearsay and lies and half-truths. Whitney’s trust did not equate to duplicity, but his faith in Hubbard did call into question his judgment. Whitney described the moment in April of 1929 when he had finally shown Hubbard the door after the boy wonder had offered him a bribe to let a load of liquor slip through. Wrapping up, Hilen gave Whitney a chance to conclude his days of testimony with a flat, unequivocal denial that he had “received a penny of corrupt money” from Hubbard, the “pay off man for the Olmstead organization.”54
Thomas Revelle, next on the witness stand, supported Whitney’s version of events in quick order, but the prosecution was anxious to put the former district attorney in the hot seat, hoping to reveal him as another link in the conspiratorial chain, even though Revelle was not on trial. The questioning began with Revelle’s trip out to McNeil Island to see Olmstead and warn him not to tell reporters he had paid protection money to Clifford McKinney, Revelle’s former assistant. Revelle admitted he had gone to meet Olmstead, but confessed nothing more about their conversation. Hoping to lead Revelle into a trap, the prosecution read from Olmstead’s affidavit recalling the conversation, in which the former bootlegger quoted Revelle: “God Bless you my boy, you don’t know how I’ve suffered for you . . . I want to see you out of this trouble.” The audience burst into laughter.
The government prosecutor questioned Revelle about the wisdom and legality of allowing the Prohibition Unit to be complicit in smuggling huge quantities of liquor. Despite the prosecution’s attempts to portray each of Revelle’s affirmative replies as shocking, Revelle calmly explained that the ends justified the means.55 He and Whitney had needed a man on the inside, and having one came with risks. They had used their best judgment and won several large conspiracy cases because of it.
Hoping to cast a wider net around the alleged conspiracy, the prosecution presented correspondence between Revelle and Willebrandt, revealing Revelle’s shifting confidence in Hubbard’s motives and veracity. In August of 1927, then U.S. Attorney Revelle had tried to block an investigation into Hubbard and had sent a series of telegrams to Willebrandt explaining that an inquiry would do harm to the DOJ and Prohibition enforcement as a whole. In one missive, he pled that suspending Hubbard would have weakened the Olmstead conspiracy case, which had been built largely with tips and information provided by Hubbard. Revelle had begged Willebrandt to recall him to Washington, D.C., so he could provide further explanation to her and Hubbard’s superiors in the Treasury Department. Willebrandt had reminded him she had no authority over the Treasury Department and their possible suspension of Hubbard, but offered, “Our office will back you in all steps that may become necessary to trial . . .”56 Revelle had followed up with his boss on September 10, 1927, citing rumors that “Hubbard and Fryant have accepted bribes and have been interested parties in [the] smuggling of whiskey,” the truth of which Revelle could only guess.57 A month later, he had changed his view, confessing to his boss in Washington, “Personally, I am very strongly convinced from our experience here in the last two or three weeks, that even though Hubbard and Fryant took money, yet there is no possible hope of ever successfully trying them for the same.” This correspondence, which Revelle acknowledged, contradicted his earlier testimony that he had not believed reports of Hubbard’s improprieties when they were first made known to him.58 Revelle told the court he would not have put Hubbard on the witness stand in the second Olmstead case if he had had any doubts of his honesty, but his correspondence with Willebrandt recorded something different.
The prosecution had proven that Revelle, and by implication Whitney, had conspired to keep Hubbard out of jail long enough to use him as a key witness in several big conspiracy trials even though they knew he was deeply compromised as an agent, his testimony unreliable and largely unverifiable. The two had violated their oaths and the law. To have their sordid business on display, for the public to learn how they had been duped by Hubbard and allowed him to blossom into a freebooting pirate, must have caused the former district attorney and the former assistant director of the Prohibition Unit in Seattle the ultimate embarrassment.
After additional witnesses impugned the reputation of Hubbard, it appeared the defense would move to its summation, but Hilen had one more trick up his sleeve. He called Senator Wesley Jones to the stand, causing a clamor from the crowd. Although the senator’s prominence had been tarnished at the recent Republican state convention, where participants had openly mocked him for his shifting stance on Prohibition, he still held the respect of most people in the state and certainly the court’s curiosity. The prosecution wanted to know his role in the hiring of Hubbard as an undercover agent. “My advice was sought,” Jones recalled, and “I was asked to see if it could be done.” Jones had seen the value in having a man inside the Olmstead organization, though Lyle and Whitney had told him they “didn’t know if they could depend on Hubbard, but they thought they could and he couldn’t do any harm anyway.” Jones testified that he went to see Roy Haynes, Prohibition commissioner at the time, but “I can’t say that I recommended the appointment”; he had merely explained the request and “left it up to Haynes,” a transparently disingenuous claim. How could he have gone to the commissioner’s office and explained the plan without Haynes concluding this was an idea the senator endorsed?59 Jones’ support of the men he’d chosen to run federal Prohibition enforcement but disavowal of their hiring of Al Hubbard left most Seattleites questioning either the senator’s judgment in tapping Whitney and Lyle or his involvement with Hubbard, a predicament epitomizing the prosecution’s assertions of ineptitude, confusion, and duplicity among Seattle’s federal Prohibition forces.
Closing statements began with the prosecution’s lead attorney, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Salter, declaring, “It was impossible to entertain the theory that Hubbard could have hoodwinked either man [Roy Olmstead or William Whitney] and that it was therefore apparent that an alliance had existed between Olmstead and the law-enforcement officers.” Hubbard was a “callow youth,” Olmstead a “master mind of bootleggers,” William Whitney an “astute attorney.” Salter reminded the court of the “undisputed evidence that vast quantities of liquor had been brought into Seattle during the period of the conspiracy . . . [many of the] circumstances . . . admitted by the defendants themselves . . . ,” but he offered no specific facts or documentary evidence, relying on the “he said, she said” litany of witness testimony.60 Charles Moriarty, another defense attorney, reminded the jury of the contradictions strewn about by the prosecution’s witnesses, leaving a trail of so-called evidence so convoluted that finding a conspiracy amidst the tangle would be impossible.61 Moriarty seized upon a key point conceded by the prosecution: Roy Olmstead, the King of the Bootleggers, currently resided in a cell at the McNeil Island penitentiary.62 The defendants had convicted Olmstead in one of the most significant cases in Prohibition history and had indicted him twice more, obtaining a second conviction—hard facts to reconcile with the prosecution’s insistence that Whitney and Lyle conspired with the man they sent to prison. Moriarty believed Whitney and Lyle had become “victims” of anti-Prohibition sentiments sweeping the city of Seattle, the state of Washington, and the entire country, which was increasingly wet and intolerant of the rigid law enforcement practiced by the Prohibition Unit in Seattle.63 The defense got a little extra help when the judge instructed the jury to carefully weigh the testimony of convicts, ex-convicts, coconspirators, and those admitting previous false testimony. Judge Norcross took particular aim at “witnesses for the government [who] admittedly were co-conspirators,” their testimony “a polluted source to be viewed with suspicion.”64 After only a few hours, the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” for all defendants, ending the last piece of business begun by Mabel Willebrandt before her departure from government service.
Despite his exoneration, Whitney would not return to work for the Prohibition Unit. The trial had revealed all his faults—poor judgment, rash decision-making, distrust of his superiors—which when combined with his lack of remorse left the commissioner of Prohibition no alternative but to fire him.65 Lyle, Whitney’s boss in name only, was seen as subordinate to Whitney and was spared, the government offering him a position as a liquor permit inspector.66 Always seeking the last word, Whitney opined that his banishment came because “perhaps I have taken this work too seriously,” and the absence of serious people, he predicted, would prove the undoing of Prohibition.67