Since the early days of the District of Columbia, people fretted about the drinking habits of its residents. The concern went beyond the intoxicated themselves. It was reasoned that if drunkenness were tolerated in the Capital, a hideous example would be set for the rest of the nation. So for more than its first 125 years, Washington was the initial target and prospective model for those who hoped to rid the nation of ardent spirits and their attendant ills.
Temperate people had legitimate cause for alarm. From its beginning as the new seat of government, Washington was a place where one was never more than a short walk from a stiff bolt. It is telling that the first recorded trial in the District was one in which a man named Jacob Leap was convicted of a liquor law violation. That was in 1801, when the city got its first drinking establishment, Rhodes Tavern. Within a few years, 250 new ones were in operation, which worked out to roughly one for every ninety residents.
By all accounts, early Washington was not only a hard-drinking community but one where there was scant appreciation for the weaker or subtler spirits. An English novelist visiting Washington in 1838 wrote in his diary that when one visits a Washington restaurant and “asks for pale sherry they hand you gin; brown sherry and it’s brandy; Madeira—whiskey.”
Drinking was rampant inside and around the Capitol building itself. Things reached such a state by 1833 that a committee of one hundred Congressmen and appointed officials took a public pledge of abstinence and immediately began plumping for a ban on liquor sales under the Capitol dome itself. The Senate banned liquor selling on its side in 1837, but it took the House seven more years to do the same.
Over time, those who would ban or restrict liquor sales gained in number if not strength. New groups were founded, church leaders became more active in the movement, and the city soon had its own large meeting place and monument to those who had taken the pledge. In 1843, the cornerstone was laid for Temperance Hall on the south side of E Street NW between 9th and 10th. (The building housed the Freeman’s Temperance Society and survived on the spot until shortly after Prohibition ended and was finally razed.)
Periodically, local groups united with national groups based in Washington and would attempt to get Congress to impose some form of prohibition on the powerless city. They met with little initial success, which is not to say that they did not make their presence known. A great prohibition parade staged on February 14, 1907, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, stormed the Capitol, and demanded and got an impromptu hearing. The pressure became a constant as the marches, rallies, and lobbying continued.
As the nation as a whole moved towards prohibition, it was all but inevitable that the District of Columbia would be pushed into prohibition early to serve as an example. The power required to impose prohibition on the federal city came through passage of the Sheppard Act, a special law introduced by Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas. Under this law, it became effective on November 1, 1917, more than two years before the rest of the country came under the Eighteenth Amendment and the enforcement power of the Volstead Act. Under the provisions of the Sheppard Act, the last of 269 legal retail liquor stores and bars within the confines of the city were shut down at the stroke of midnight.
Although the police were told to be prepared for fighting, rowdyism, and rioting, the night on which prohibition came to Washington was relatively peaceful, remarkably cheerful, and unquestionably noisy. Thousands thronged Pennsylvania Avenue and the other downtown streets where there were a number of saloons. Everything liquid was being sold either for immediate consumption or “take out,” and the more resourceful came downtown with wheelbarrows and pushcarts. It was also Halloween, and the idea had gotten around that costumes were in order to give the evening the look of Mardi Gras. The area’s barroom singers came out in force, addressing the question of “Where do we go from here?” and sometimes answering with “Over there.” For all its horrors, the free-spirited, booze-tolerant, European War zone took on sudden appeal as midnight drew closer.
Along “Rum Row”—the saloon-heavy area on and around F Street near the Treasury—many of the neighborhood’s more serious drinkers were not only out to say goodbye to John Barleycorn (at least in his legal incarnation) but to pay their respects to such institutions as Shoemaker’s, the Ebbitt, Hancock’s, and Denis Maloney’s. Most of the places in this part of town began running dry about 10:00 p.m. and started to close early. At the Ebbitt where there was nothing left to drink but water at 10:45 p.m., something remarkable happened that was not soon to be forgotten: several loyal customers who had feared such a moment unpacked precious private supplies of liquor, which were used to restock the bar. At midnight, when the bars closed, some diehards headed off in the direction of Baltimore. A mere forty arrests were made during the night.
The first phase of the “Great Experiment” was underway, but it began to falter within minutes as several of the just-shuttered gin mills quickly reopened with slightly inflated prohibition prices in effect. A few months later, there were twice as many illegal establishments operating inside the District as there had been legal ones before the act was passed.1
During Washington’s three-year head start on the rest of the nation, local residents learned how to spot a speakeasy, connect with a reliable bootlegger, and brew beer or fabricate gin at home. To the average middle-class Washingtonian, the cocktail hour was infused with new meaning and celebrated as a point of honor. “Folks seemed to imagine that if they didn’t serve cocktails, other folks would think they were obeying the law, and such a thought, to a liberty loving people, was naturally unbearable. So people served cocktails under prohibition who had never dreamed of serving them in their own homes before,” The Washington Herald recalled during the early days of the Sheppard era. “The grand fiasco of the prohibition experiment was already becoming apparent.”2
With the District of Columbia serving as vivid testimony to the fact that Prohibition could not be enforced, Congress passed the Volstead Act or National Prohibition Act on October 28, 1919, over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The Eighteenth Amendment had been pushed through Congress in 1917, and at high speed through forty-six of the forty-eight state legislatures in 1918 and 1919; Connecticut and Rhode Island were the only two of the forty-eight states to vote against it. The Amendment allowed one last year of legal drinking, with Prohibition beginning on January 16, 1920. Never before had so many states ratified an amendment to the Constitution; the Anti-Saloon League of America was not immodest in calling itself “the strongest political organization in the world.”
After the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, one group that felt singled out and punished by the law were the veterans, still returning from France and the Great War in large numbers when it was passed. One man who felt this way was an outgoing twenty-five-year-old veteran named George L. Cassiday. Born in West Virginia of a mother who was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and a teetotaling father, his first taste of liquor was near the front during the War. He was still overseas when Congress passed the bill: “I believe my attitude toward Prohibition was no different than that of most of the American boys who went overseas. We saw liquor being used in all the allied countries and when we were at the front, detailed with French troops. I received rations of cognac along with the other men.”
“The Man in the Green Hat,” George L. Cassiday.
He served with the 321st Light Tanks, a heavily decorated unit that returned in late 1919 on a transport ship carrying 2,200 American troops. “We took a straw vote on Prohibition just before the ship docked in New York,” Cassiday wrote. “All but 98 of the men aboard voted against it.”3
George Cassiday soon had larger worries than Prohibition. When he returned to his home in the District of Columbia, he tried to regain a railroad job he had held briefly before going overseas. But he was turned down because of a physical disability he had incurred in France. He got married and entered the new decade without steady work. By the summer of 1920, when he had become desperate in his search for the means to support his family, Cassiday heard from a friend that good brand-name liquor brought top dollar from members of Congress who were no longer content with the novelty of corn liquor or “white lightning” easily trucked in from back-country stills of Maryland and Virginia. His friend insisted that somebody could make a decent living slaking the thirst of Capitol Hill. Two days later, that friend met him in a hotel lobby and introduced him to two members of the House of Representatives—both of whom had voted for Prohibition in 1919—who placed an order with him.
Cassiday was learning what the rest of the nation would soon learn: congressmen and senators would be elected who voted Dry, drank Wet, and slept with a clear conscience. He obtained good liquor and was soon filling many Congressional orders, launching his illegal career. At the suggestion of a member of the House of Representatives, Cassiday set up a bootlegging operation inside the Old House Office Building. He had an office, storeroom, and lavatory—all supplied at taxpayer expense—and was soon serving scores of congressmen and their constituents, spending, as he would later brag, “more time there than most of the Congressmen.”4
Soon he was making twenty to twenty-five deliveries a day to members of both houses, Republicans and Democrats, Drys and Wets. Because of the nature of the material he delivered and the need for discretion, he was given the keys to many Congressional offices. His first regular source of high-quality bonded liquor was an operation on Seventh Avenue near 34th Street in Manhattan, a source he was led to by a former agent of the Treasury Department, the agency in charge of enforcement.
After five years of smooth sailing, a sudden squall nearly capsized Cassiday’s lucrative business. A Capitol police officer, whom Cassiday believed to be sympathetic, arrested him for delivering six quarts of whiskey to a House member. This so-called “Green Hat incident” received wide press attention, resulting in Cassiday being known as the Man in the Green Hat. The incident also prompted the House to ban Cassiday from the Old House Office Building (now known as the Cannon House Office Building). Undeterred, the bootlegger shifted his operations to the Senate Office Building (now the Russell Senate Office Building) and continued undisturbed for another five years from 1925 to 1930 when, under instructions from Vice President Charles Curtis, a zealous and resourceful Federal prohibition agent named Roger Butts finally arrested him.
Cassiday was sentenced to eighteen months in jail, but he created a major scandal when he sold his memoirs to the New York World and The Washington Post in which, among other things, he said he had the keys to more Capitol Hill desks and offices than any person in history. In this memoir, Cassiday estimated that he was keeping 80 percent of the House and Senate in drink. “If they got a kick out of it with no bad side effects, they were well satisfied,” he wrote. The initial series ran October 24–29, 1930. The final article ran exactly one week before the midterm election day.
In the persona of the Man in the Green Hat, Cassiday became a national symbol on two levels—as a symbol for the stunning hypocrisy of Prohibition, and also as the embodiment of the dilemma of the World War I veteran. The Man in the Green Hat was a disabled vet who got direct help from Congress, not because it was right, but because they were thirsty. “It is true that I served more Republicans than Democrats and more drys than wets,” he proclaimed in his newspaper memoir, “but that was only because the Republicans and the drys have been an overwhelming majority in both branches of Congress during the period.”
When Cassiday was forced to drop his profession in 1930, Congress still had many bootleggers working its halls and offices. Bootleggers were operating in front of police headquarters, in the Justice Department itself, and across the street from the White House. When Washington Post reporter Edward T. Folliard ducked out to buy a pint of gin from his favorite bootlegger, he found the supply had just run out. He jumped into the bootlegger’s car and drove to the White House, where a large burlap bag was retrieved from the hedge. He took out a half dozen bottles of gin and returned the rest. The bootlegger told the reporter that the White House hedge was as safe a place as any to stash booze because nobody would expect anyone to hide their liquor there. Folliard told the story in a short whimsical Associated Press piece, unabashed that he had admitted his involvement in an illegal act.5
A citizen criminal class was, in fact, being created in Washington. In 1929, 5,217 were arrested for Volstead violations, and 14,056 under the much stricter provisions of the Sheppard Act—roughly one of every twenty-seven District residents was arrested that year for alcohol-related incidents. Since all drinking was illegal, there was no legal drinking age and so no incentive to screen minors. Women who had not been welcome in the old saloons were accepted in the new speakeasies, and the local smart set hung out at places like Le Paradis on Thomas Circle. For this reason, the Washington Herald termed Prohibition the “hand-maiden of woman’s suffrage, of equal rights—of the single standard.”6
Atop the heap of illegal bars and restaurants in Washington was the Mayflower Club at 1223 Connecticut Avenue, reputed to be the swankiest speakeasy in the city during the Dry Years. It offered gambling as well as illegal booze, and catered to what was then called high society. The club featured a thirty-foot bar and was decorated in a Halloween motif. The murals on the walls focused on famous people playing jazz, so one could find likenesses of the teetotaling Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw tooting the clarinet and Mahatma Gandhi playing the piano. The speakeasy was enjoyed by the young social set of the city. Champagne was ten dollars a quart—that is, until the establishment was raided in November 1933, a month before Repeal.*
Prohibition had turned the Capitol City into a tragicomic melodrama where ironies, contradictions, and hypocritical behavior were occurring at such a rate that it took a really rich item to attract attention. A drunken policeman was no longer news, but the fact that Evalyn Walsh McLean, the fabulously rich heiress to a Colorado mining fortune and owner of the incomparable Hope Diamond, could brag that she had her whiskey—actually only the choicest liquor and best champagne—delivered to her Washington mansion by police escort was newsworthy, as were her lavish, zany, and boozy parties staged with her husband, Washington Post owner Ned McLean.7
Then there was the celebratory and widely advertised Bootleggers’ Ball staged smack dab in the middle of Prohibition and held at the city’s Auditorium. The enforcers showed up in force, led by the city’s plainclothes police. As the Washington Daily News later reported, “The ball was a feint to get the highways leading into Washington uncovered, so that huge consignments of Baltimore and Jersey liquor could be run in.”8
In 1977, a group of young investors opened a restaurant on Capitol Hill called the Man in the Green Hat, which survived for more than a decade. My wife and I were involved as part owners of the restaurant. The night before the restaurant opened, we were getting it ready and an elderly man knocked on the door. He identified himself as Roger Butts, the former Treasury agent who had arrested George Cassiday in 1930. He let us know in no uncertain terms that we had chosen to name our restaurant after a man who had broken the law. In 2012, the first post-Prohibition distillery, New Columbia Distillers, began operating in Washington, D.C. Its first product was Green Hat Gin.
From the standpoint of the nation, the view of Prohibition in Washington would be all-important. In the end, it would provide the example that ultimately led to Repeal. In one important respect, Washington was fortunate in that Prohibition did not foster the violent gangsterism of other large cities. There were no gang wars, and no significant subclass was being created to support the liquor trade, as was the case in Chicago or New York City. There were few real heavies, let alone anyone approaching the outlaw status of “public enemies” on the order of Al Capone, Legs Diamond, or Dutch Schultz.
It was not all fun and games. In February 1924, Senator Frank L. Greene went out for an evening stroll on Pennsylvania Avenue with his wife. The couple walked right into a gun battle between a bootlegger and a Prohibition agent. The Senator was seriously wounded when a bullet hit him above the right eye. He survived, but more than a dozen bootleggers, several innocent bystanders, and at least one District policeman were killed before Prohibition was over. Many more people were injured in gunfights and car chases in and around the city.
Outside the Capitol, folks found they could distill their way out of the worst effects of rural poverty and ultimately the Great Depression. The “blessed day” was the name given to the day Prohibition was ratified. January 16, 1919, was the day in which some coastal areas were lifted to, as Fred Tilp put it in his history of the Potomac River, “glory and prosperity.” Tilp alluded specifically to the tidewater lands of the Potomac, where small farms were turned into profitable wineries and distilleries. Local grain was used in making mash for whiskey stills. “Rye was the favorite,” Tilp wrote, “followed by bourbon and corn.”9
Making moonshine out in the country and selling it downtown was a largely colorblind pursuit. A policeman in a Virginia city was quoted in 1925: “White men used to get rich selling whisky to Negroes, but in these days the Negroes are getting rich selling whisky to white men.”10
* Today the site is occupied by a spacious bar that pays homage to The Mayflower. It is called MCCXXIII—1223 in Roman numerals.