Chapter 1
As the first weeks of the new decade passed in January 1920, Americans believed they understood the consequences as Prohibition descended upon the land, closing breweries, distilleries, and saloons. Even as bootleggers, rumrunners, and moonshiners—men like Roy Olmstead—stepped up to seize the opportunity, organizing themselves into conspiracies to obtain, manufacture, and sell liquor to willing buyers, few Americans imagined that the Eighteenth Amendment would not be a permanent fixture in their lives. Women activists, the foot soldiers who had won the battle to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, were turning their attention to the impending ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote nationwide. These twin amendments seemed to offer redemption, two chances to perfect the American soul, correcting the sins of the past and opening a new chapter for those women willing and able to face the challenges.
Pauline Sabin, a New York socialite, and Mabel Walker Wille-brandt, the U.S. assistant attorney general, would not have characterized themselves as redeemers, but they understood the impor- tance of the moment and the public perception that forever defined Prohibition as a women’s issue. Prohibition’s success or failure would be measured in the public’s consciousness, often, by the success or failure of these two women, whose paths would cross only a few times, but whose impacts must be weighed together. The political education they received during the Prohibition era represented American women’s struggle to capitalize on their newfound power, as voters and as standard-bearers for Prohibition, and defined the means by which other women could exert their influence. In the process, Sabin and Willebrandt absorbed lessons from the men they encountered, some of whom assisted their efforts, others resisting, and still others serving as touchstones for measuring advancement. One man, Roy Olmstead, the cop turned rumrunner, never met either woman, but his experience would help them define their beliefs about Prohibition, the limits of constitutional authority, and the rightness of their paths, reaching two very different conclusions.
Mrs. Charles Sabin stepped lightly through the gilded reception hall of the Hotel Astor, greeting national political figures, renowned business leaders, and members of New York’s highest society, each a prospect to be cultivated in a few brief moments, a daunting task as the rush of top hats and fur coats swept in. She was too polished not to look composed, at home, despite being required to balance different constituencies as on a knife’s sharp edge. The guests, including Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., recognized Mrs. Sabin as one of their own by virtue of the political and business successes of her grandfather, father, uncle, and husband. Along with her fellow members of the recently created Republican Women of New York State, Mrs. Sabin welcomed as many guests as she could, directing them to the bar or the cloakroom, or helping them find their seats. The women’s club had produced the event, in early December 1919, to raise money for the party’s campaign war chest and to inaugurate their organization with a grand splash at the hottest spot in Manhattan, in the French Renaissance Beaux Arts–style hotel built just for them: the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous.
The absence of the senior U.S. senator from New York, the powerful Republican James W. Wadsworth Jr., generated talk. Senator Wadsworth had sent a telegram, to be read from the podium, explaining why he could not attend, a cover story fooling no one. The antagonism between Wadsworth and club women was years old and well-known. The leaders of the Republican Women of New York State had declared war on Senator Wadsworth because of his opposition to women’s suffrage, even as the proposed Nineteenth Amendment neared full authorization by the requisite thirty-six states.1 Wadsworth further damaged his appeal by his opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment, weeks away from implementation, which had been carried to fruition by many of the same women supporting passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Passage of the two amendments inspired “club” women to envision the next set of changes needed in government to improve society. Ousting Senator James Wadsworth seemed to many a logical step.
Like any apprentice activist at a key event, Pauline swung her head on a graceful swivel, offering a smile and a quick wave to Republican leaders, while keeping an eye out for members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and League of Women Voters (LWV),* people the hostess needed to greet and steer away from condemnations of Senator Wadsworth.* Criticism of New York’s senior Republican senator at a Republican fund-raiser, even one organized by a women’s group, would be vulgar, to Pauline’s way of thinking, and reflect poorly upon the group, endangering women’s relationship to the party. She intended to become a Republican Party insider, someone who sat in on the councils where policy was formulated. Like her mentor, Mrs. Arthur L. (Henrietta) Livermore, Pauline refused to be relegated to the shaky, hastily constructed “women’s divisions” being grafted onto the party apparatus.2 Her goal placed Pauline Sabin in a precarious position between the “club” women seeking to maintain a unified front and the male party leaders seeking loyalty to Republican candidates.
The gala ended successfully for Pauline, with a request from Will Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to join the party’s Ways and Means Committee for New York City, raising money for the 1920 campaign.3 Her work would focus on bringing other wealthy women onto the committee, using their endorsements to woo women voters. Pauline hoped exposure from her new position would impress the Republicans in and around Southampton, the community near the tip of Long Island, New York, where the Sabins’ summer estate was located, and where she planned to convince the Suffolk County Republican Party to select her as one of its delegates to the party’s state committee meeting in February 1920. For the first time, women would be permitted to vote in the party primaries, allowing them to help choose party leaders and frame party platforms, opening up new avenues of advancement within the party structure.
She was introduced formally as Mrs. Arthur F. Willebrandt at the many political clubs and civic organizations she joined, although she would push past the necessary formalities as quickly as politeness would admit and establish herself as Mabel Walker Willebrandt. The day she walked into the Hotel Stowell, headquarters of the Republican Party in Los Angeles, and announced her intention to volunteer, the party hacks sat behind their desks, smoke rising from the ashtrays, typewriters clacking, and sized her up. Ignoring her credentials as a lawyer, they noted her dark suit, white blouse opened at the collar, and short hair, sure signs of a politically active woman. They calculated their response not by her dress, however, but by the fact that her husband was a political unknown and therefore she could be ignored. Mrs. Willebrandt knew how to acknowledge their hostility, delivering every word with a charming insouciance, while any man who addressed her received a leveled stare, her mind intently drinking in the words as if committing them to memory, an unnerving and ultimately unforgettable quality.
The indifference of the party men to female activists, however, ran deep.4 Since women had won the vote in California in 1911, they had joined with progressives to push the City of Los Angeles to crack down on brothels and prostitution and outlaw saloons, and, at the state legislature, they had overcome two failed attempts at passing statewide prohibition. Yet their political demands had only grown, a trend many men found irksome.5 Worse, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt’s request to get involved in the party’s organization, especially at the start of a presidential-election year, took a level of self-assertion most Americans of both genders found offensive. A lady was not supposed to work in offices alongside strange men, although exceptions were made for young women employed as teachers or stenographers. Political campaigns inhabited the rough-and-tumble world of men: cutting deals, attacking opponents, sacrificing principles for political or personal gain; in politics, im- morality abounded. The Republican Party headquarters, housed in the twelve-story Hotel Stowell, in Los Angeles’ downtown, was no place for a lady.* The rebuff expected, Willebrandt could afford them a gracious smile, one carrying a silent message: if you think my attempt to volunteer here is audacious, you haven’t seen anything yet.
In 1920 her law practice, her pride and joy, was four years old, situated just a few blocks from the Stowell, in an office she shared with a friend from law school, Fred Horowitz. While Los Angeles was bursting with waves of new inhabitants, new businesses opening, and real estate being developed for miles in all directions, the idea of a female attorney had yet to take hold there. The census of 1920 identified 1,738 women, nationally, in the category of “lawyers, judges and justices,” representing .0002 percent of the more than 8.2 million women in the workforce.6 Yet Willebrandt had managed to build a practice successful enough to allow her to quit her part-time teaching job at a local high school and to eschew divorce cases, the primary source of work for female attorneys. Having a male colleague certainly had helped land cases in the early days, but a growing list of victories in court, including securing one client an award of ten thousand dollars in damages, boosted her reputation.7
For years she had served as an assistant in the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office, created in 1912 by progressives of the Republican Party to ensure effective legal representation for those who could not afford to purchase it. While the U.S. Constitution mandated a defendant’s access to representation, it had become a farce in practice.8 The public defender received compensation; the assistant public defender did not. But it was a demonstration of Willebrandt’s merit, and brought her into contact with the District Attorney’s office, judges, and her peers at the bar—although she was relegated to a special Woman’s Court, advocating for, she later explained, “beaten wives and fallen women.”9
One afternoon, as Assistant Public Defender Willebrandt looked upon an assembly of women arrested for prostitution, she learned that no effort had been made to arrest their clients. It lit a fuse inside her. The next day she dynamited the case against the prostitutes by proclaiming “the impossibility of bringing to justice but one person for an act which constituted a crime only when it implicated two.”10 The judge sustained her motion to dismiss, and the “originality” of the victory reportedly “won her recognition among many of the legal profession who hitherto had probably thought of her only as a woman aspiring to law.”* Neither the first to name the “double standard” nor the last, Willebrandt hated what it represented: biased and unfair characterization of each gender, which led to the rigid roles society defined for males and females.11 Her victory changed little, though. Around the Los Angeles courthouse, as across the land, men were “just being men” when they paid for sex, but society had no compassion for the women whom various circumstances had forced into prostitution. Women who violated the moral code would not be tolerated.
As a spokesperson for the women she represented, Willebrandt was not fighting to restore the status quo ante, which consigned women to the kitchen and the nursery, as espoused by the WCTU; she was trying to tear down the barriers to women’s equality, an aim some women political activists shared. Of course, she never stated her goal in quite those terms, especially at this phase in her career and at a time when leaders and spokeswomen for national organizations were commonly disparaged publicly for allowing their club activities to divert “[their] attention from their domestic responsibilities,” but her actions clearly set her apart.12
A year earlier, she had transitioned from volunteering in the public defender’s office to the role of legal advisor for several women’s clubs, most notably the Women’s Legislative Council, an organization claiming to represent 187,000 female California voters through its affiliation with state branches of the WCTU, LWV, and many other groups.13 Focused on issues in California, the Women’s Legislative Council fought to put women on an equal footing with men beyond voting rights, most notably with the Community Property Law, which the legislature passed in the spring of 1919.14 The version signed into law by the governor was a pale imitation of initial proposals, which would have granted wives rights equal to their husbands’ in all decisions affecting a couple’s community property. Hostile legislators winnowed it down, though one still complained, “These bills originated among foolish and ignorant persons who thought they would please women by passing them. Subservient males listened to the call.”15 As passed, the Community Property Law provided a woman with testamentary rights, including the right to bequeath her half of the community property to whomever she designated, so long as her husband approved, though she was permitted to bequeath her share to her children without permission.16 The same rule applied to the husband, preventing him from willing his half of the community property to anyone other than his wife without her consent.17
The new law had generated a violent backlash from the business community, thoroughly upsetting merchants, bankers, the Los Angeles Times, and the state bar association, these groups uniting to “Avert Dire Peril,” as one spokesman defined it. Angry men spent the summer and fall of 1919 securing the signatures necessary to force the legislature to prevent enactment of the new law until a ballot initiative was held.18 They succeeded; in late 1919, at almost the same time as the state legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, the Community Property Law was suspended, its fate placed on the ballot for the November 1920 election.
The Community Property Law represented one action of many advanced by the Women’s Legislative Council and their legal counsel, Mabel Willebrandt, toward overturning laws denying a wife’s right to make financial decisions about the money she earned, to build a career, or to protect her valuables, challenging the male’s position as the head of the household in all respects.19 A husband’s domination kept wives in submission, if not in outright jeopardy. Willebrandt had suffered such indignities at the hand of her own husband and had witnessed them in the cases she handled as an assistant public defender. Establishing a woman’s ownership of half of a couple’s assets was a baby step, but a step nonetheless, toward revolutionizing the relationship between husband and wife.
Mabel Willebrandt’s career success and her political beliefs represented a violation of the unspoken code, of the expectations imposed upon her gender, as did the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Although Prohibition, the suffrage movement’s parallel achievement, was one of the main goals of the women’s movement, Willebrandt ignored it, advocating instead for changes she believed would do more good for women. She saw nothing in the destruction of the saloon or the outlawing of liquor that would strike at the foundations of the problem of abusive men and fallen women.20 Little did she know her advocacy for protecting women would bring a spotlight upon her, requiring that she make her position on Prohibition known.
Pauline Sabin’s decision to seek office as a Republican Party delegate would have been a controversial choice within the women’s movement, whose members debated the merits of remaining nonpartisan versus the benefits of joining a party.21 The choice came freighted with concerns over women’s role in society, feminine identity, and the perceived evils of partisanship. Driven to become involved in the issues of the day and having abandoned meaningless social engagements, which she derisively referred to as the “pink tea parties” of her youth, Pauline made the obvious choice.22 The leadership of the most important women’s organizations had solidified long ago, allowing little upward mobility, nor could she stand before the public in an election, having effectively disqualified herself years earlier by virtue of her divorce.
In 1907, at the age of twenty, Pauline had married an appropriate match, a graduate of Harvard University named J. Hopkins Smith, in a ceremony in the stunning grandeur of Saint Thomas Church in Manhattan; it was a massive affair attended by all the right people. In the following years, she gave birth to two sons, but, by 1914, being the heart of the Smith household was no longer enough for her. Unlike most women in this situation, Pauline had options. She had inherited millions of dollars from her father.* Fabulous wealth gave her the ability to support herself and her sons and, therefore, the ability to divorce Mr. Smith. Had she chosen to devote her time to the women’s movement, she might have begun to ascend the ladder of club leadership. Instead, she had opened an interior design busi-ness.
Of this period in her life, as a single mother and businesswoman, Sabin never wrote, and for good reason. Most Americans conside-red her divorce shameful, an unforgivable disgrace, a sin casting her forever from the Episcopal Church to which she belonged. In wrecking her home, living alone in the big city, and running a business—in defiance of tradition, propriety, and decency—the former Mrs. Smith encapsulated all that was wrong with the moral direction of twentieth-century America. Even in New York, with its high tolerance for deviancy from social norms, a divorcée—actually, any single woman going out to dinner with friends—was subjected to rumors of immoral activities and to labels such as “floozy,” “chippie,” or worse.
Then came Charles H. Sabin, her darling “Charlie.” Twenty years her senior, Charlie gave her the connection of equals for which she had been looking. Their commitment may have been strengthened by the improbable road he himself had traveled. The president of the Guaranty Bank, the nation’s second largest, Charles, a man of astonishing wealth and towering influence, had started his career not in college, but as a clerk, then a teller, then a cashier, and on and on—climbing every rung.23
Married outside of their faiths in December 1916, at the Reformed Church in Bedminster, New Jersey, in front of a few dozen friends and relatives, the power couple then proceeded to take on World War I. Mr. Sabin worked with his fellow titans of Wall Street to raise a billion dollars and more in war bonds. Mrs. Sabin rolled up her sleeves and worked on many committees, with many different women’s groups, sponsoring street fairs and special events to raise money for hospitals and disabled veterans at home, for war refugees and reconstruction abroad. Their personal donations to causes, usually to the Red Cross but also in war bond purchases, were also impressive. While others won the right for women to vote in New York State during the same period, Pauline Sabin’s involvement in the suffrage movement remains unknown; perhaps it was as vigorous as she later claimed.24 Newspaper accounts chronicled her war efforts, but the knowledge gained in how groups of women formed, found leaders, crafted plans and priorities, and created positive outcomes went unreported.
Pauline enrolled herself in the Republican Party in 1918, one year after New York enfranchised its female citizens. The following year she won her first attempt at becoming a member of the Suffolk County Republican Committee. The locals knew Mr. and Mrs. Sabin resided in Manhattan, but their summer estate, recently built, was the county’s largest and most expensive, set into the Shinnecock Hills and featuring an expansive view of the island’s inland waterway, Great Peconic Bay.25 The residents of Southampton had heard of the Sabins’ patriotism during the Great War, some of Pauline’s volunteerism having occurred in the village, but of her declaration of independence from tradition, likely nothing. If her rebellion had not engendered enough press to remain in public memory six years later, if even her peers thought twice of talking indiscreetly about the wife of one of the giants of high finance, if her remarriage had returned her to respectability, the effects seemed clear: Pauline Morton had reinvented herself as Mrs. Charles Sabin.26
Winning her place in the local party’s leadership had required her to gain the support of her neighbors, and specifically those who were enrolled party members, not the general public. Working with small groups played to her strengths; having been raised to be ladylike in all circumstances, to be a thoughtful hostess, she knew how to move gracefully, chat appropriately, and listen carefully as she showed off the elaborate gardens of Bayberry Land—the name she had chosen for her country estate—all while taking mental notes about her guests’ politics.
Making female allies took tact and a readiness to acknowledge the insurgency expressed by so many club women. They intended to make their votes count, a sentiment she could agree with. When the other great female victory, Prohibition, became the topic of conversation, Pauline found common ground in her social stratum’s hope that the Eighteenth Amendment would destroy the saloons clogging the streets of Manhattan; for without saloons, the infamous party hacks of Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party’s corrupt political machine, would be shorn of their preferred venues for soliciting, organizing, and directing the hordes of immigrants’ votes. Club women agreed on the attractiveness of this outcome, either because of an inherent bigotry or because countering the immigrant vote, a vote sold cheaply in saloons, was an important argument used by the women’s movement to convince men to vote for suffrage.
Winning friends among the men required a different approach. In a conversation involving economics, politics, or other subjects regarded as in the male domain, a smart woman knew better than to call into question a man’s reason or judgment, lest he feel antagonized. Men were commonly believed to be the rational gender, contrasted against irrational or emotional women. Subtle questions and suggestions disguised with deference, charm, or sociability prevented the confrontations provoked by some leaders of the women’s movement; such subterfuge was an art designed to establish rapport with male politicians.
A few weeks after the successful fund-raiser at the Hotel Astor, in mid-January 1920, the storm Mrs. Sabin wished to avoid for as long as possible flung itself at Senator James Wadsworth. The League of Women Voters’ New York chapter followed through on its earlier threats. “I don’t like a fight,” said its chairwoman, Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, “but my office leads me to direct the women of this organization against Senator Wadsworth’s re-election. Did he represent the state when he voted ‘No’ on the Federal Prohibition amendment and did he represent them by his votes on the League of Nations and the Peace Treaty?” Vanderlip, a woman Sabin knew because their husbands had worked together, called Wadsworth “obsolete, a thing of the past.” The WCTU joined this anti-Wadsworth campaign, with the statement that the state chapter’s fifty thousand women were “absolutely opposed to his re-election.”27 The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), a male-dominated organization aligned with many of the same church groups as the WCTU, was delighted to back the LWV’s insurrection against “a wet United States Senator” in a state where political commentators believed that a majority of the people agreed with Wadsworth’s opposition to Prohibition, a judgment all the more important because accurate polling data did not exist.28
Pauline’s mentor, Mrs. Henrietta Livermore, also chose mid-January to reiterate the demand for equality with the Republican Party, a powerful statement from the chairwoman of the Women’s State Executive Committee, but not nearly so radical as the other demands. Livermore reminded party leaders that a half million women in New York still had not enrolled in either party, and these women would join the GOP if given the proper incentive. She intended to hold the party to Chairman Will Hays’ admonition not to relegate women to “auxiliary, supplemental or ancillary” membership.29 Pauline Sabin’s party had contorted itself in the past few years, offering women a place alongside men in lower-level municipal and county organizations while separating them from men at the state level and above. It was less than the Democrats were doing. Nor did it satisfy the more conservative women in the party, such as Livermore and Sabin, who continued to urge, quietly, in party meetings, equal representation by doubling the number of seats on any given committee. Still, as the presidential election of 1920 took shape, New York Republicans had registered about 1.5 million women.30
Neither party could ignore the doubling of the electorate, but some of what Republican women were demanding was anathema to the leadership. The faction led by Henrietta Livermore, however, sought to work within the party, not take it on like Miss Hay and Mrs. Vanderlip. The way to translate those potential votes into positions of authority, she assured Pauline Sabin, was to prove to the leadership that women could be trusted, starting by accepting Wads-worth, whom party bosses had made clear they had no intention of discarding.
Meanwhile, Senator Wadsworth conceded that the time for debating Prohibition and suffrage had ended. The first was part of the Constitution and the latter would soon be.31 He would not oppose either one. When asked if he supported suffrage, though, he replied, “Well, I haven’t been converted to it yet, but it will soon be in the same position as Prohibition. I opposed both reforms, but I believe in upholding the Constitution. I voted for the Volstead Enforcement act because I believe that, having passed Prohibition, Congress should have the power to provide for its enforcement.” Despite this change of heart, long-term suffragists and Prohibitionists continued their opposition to Wadsworth’s candidacy.
In February, Sabin went to Carnegie Hall for the state Republican convention, technically an unofficial meeting, yet important for establishing the candidates and ballot measures to be voted on later, in the party’s state primary.32 Much of the discussion centered on opposition to the Treaty of Versailles while supporting creation of a world court, smaller government, and lower taxes, but New York Republicans found time to endorse “speedy ratification of the suffrage amendment.” The conventioneers did not debate the plank, but merely ratified it, in a style of governance women found offensive.33 For her part, Pauline Sabin served on the Committee on Delegates; she was the only woman in a room with forty-one men, selecting the people who would represent New York at the Republican National Convention in June. The committee nominated four of the state’s leading GOP politicians. The choice of James W. Wadsworth Jr. as a delegate-at-large, “to be voted for at the Primary Election April 6, 1920,” brought three cheers from the crowd; it was a boisterous vote by the party faithful. Henrietta Livermore was named an alternate delegate-at-large; obvious to all, it was a choice designed to placate women, but at least it gave women, and their causes, a voice amongst a sea of men.34 Henrietta’s selection also granted her the position of chair of the Women’s Executive Committee of the Republican State Committee.
Following the convention, the women got to work. As a vice chair of the Republican Ways and Means Committee, Sabin traveled around the state, holding classes to educate women on the important issues and the stances of the candidates, hoping to persuade her audiences—most of whom remained uncommitted to either of the two national parties—to join the GOP.35 Only enrolled party members could vote in the primary and therefore play a critical role in the election. She had to avoid any hint of partisanship and try to convince her audiences of her party’s commitment to their issues, running the gamut from social justice, social welfare, and public health to international peace. The needs of her party trumping her personal beliefs, she would have to cite the successes of her party’s progressive wing without letting her eyes roll. Ironically, the sublimating, compromising nature of being a party member was one of the main reasons many women feared political parties. Women’s clubs were altogether different, went this way of thinking, and thus the prickliest questions directed at Sabin would come from members of the LWV, the Congress of Mothers, the WCTU, or one of the other national women’s clubs. Rather than address the unique concerns of each group, Sabin advocated for party unity, focusing on her main goal: raising campaign funds.
Meanwhile, the New York legislature began debate over its light-beer-and-wine bill, which would allow the manufacture and sale of those products, in defiance of the Volstead Act, which detailed the agencies and mechanisms for enforcement of national prohibition and the penalties for violation. After a little more than a month of debate, the light-beer-and-wine bill passed on April 24, but sat in limbo awaiting decisions from the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Eighteenth Amendment and the possible limits of its restrictions.36 New York was not the only state where people thought the Volstead Act should be amended. So far as public opinion can be determined in an era before scientific polling data, most Americans had thought that voting for the Eighteenth Amendment would eliminate saloons, that scourge on society and family life—not their right to have a drink.37