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Americans have always liked their liquor. In 1792 the young republic had about 4 million citizens, and consumed about 11 million gallons of booze (about 3 gallons per capita). By 1810 the population was 7.2 million and consumption was 33.3 million gallons (closer to five gallons per head). These figures are “official gallonage,” a combination of taxed domestic output and legal imports. Any homemade liquor—moonshine whiskey or ice brandy—is not part of the calculation.
As Herbert Asbury notes in his The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition, in the young republic everybody drank hard liquor: “The aged and infirm sipped toddies of rum and water—heavy on the rum; babies were quieted by copious doses of a mixture of rum and opium, and so spent their infancy in a happy fog; and able-bodied men, and women too, for that matter, seldom went more than a few hours without a drink. The occasional abstainer was considered a crackpot and generally shunned.”
Despite this early predilection to liquor, a temperance movement emerged. Its wellsprings predated the revolution. Liquor was banned from the new colony of Georgia between 1735 and 1742 by the colonial governors in London. When news reached the settlers, they immediately stopped creating a colony and began making homebrew moonshine (probably America’s first illegal stills).
The colony’s principal source of supply, however, was enterprising shipowners who sailed from South Carolina with casks of rum for the thirsty Georgians. This pattern would be repeated nearly two hundred years later when the entire country banned liquor and other daring entrepreneurs sailed in to satisfy a thirst.
Congress did not wake up one morning and decide to make the country “dry.” It reacted to more than a century of organized pressure groups. Shortly after the American Revolution, a collection of Connecticut farmers formed a temperance association to promote moderation in alcohol consumption. Not abstinence, but moderation.
This poster is from 1949, but the tone is identical to ones posted during Prohibition. Not only does it urge the public to report makers of untaxed whiskey, but it also has a secondary message—would you drink the product of these people? Courtesy Library of Congress.
As the nineteenth century began, more temperance groups were formed. After the Civil War, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was established. The WCTU did not want “moderation,” it wanted “prohibition.” As a tactic, it urged public education on the evils of alcohol. By the beginning of the twentieth century, every state had laws mandating “alcohol education” in public schools. The effort was closely monitored in the classroom by members of temperance societies.
Alcohol abuse was (and is) closely related to domestic violence. Nineteenth-century wives noticed their husbands beat them more frequently when the men were drunk. Other causes took up the banner of prohibition, viewing the high price of alcohol as one reason for widespread poverty. Alcohol was also viewed as a major incubator for violent crime.
Georgia came to the prohibition forefront again in 1907. The state legislature passed the first statewide “dry law” in the South, banning the sale of beer, wine and liquor at the urging of the Anti-Saloon League. Other Southern states quickly followed, including Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. But not Florida.
The dry wave crested with the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1919. It criminalized booze for the entire nation. Only two states—Rhode Island and Connecticut—refused to ratify the amendment.
At the beginning of Prohibition, the radio evangelist Billy Sunday said, “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.” Just as the abolition of slavery was an effort at social engineering to rid the country of a great evil, so was Prohibition an attempt to regulate society by action of law. The Volstead Act passed later in 1919 to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment and President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it. Congress passed it over his head by overriding the veto.
When national Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920, more than 180,000 saloons, 1,217 breweries and 517 distilleries closed their doors. The national population was 105 million, while the population of Florida counted by the census takers was 968,470. Less than one of every one hundred Americans lived in Florida. Miami was a small town of 30,000 souls and Tampa’s population was 52,000. But tiny Florida would soon become a liquor lifeline to the nation.
Four areas in the United States became the principal sources of smuggled alcohol. Two relied on land transport: Chicago and Detroit. Two relied on the sea: New York and Florida. Unlike the other three sources, Florida escaped the clutches of organized crime. The booze trade in Florida, like the marijuana trade that followed it, remained a hometown business.
This is the 1923 government chart used by all the rumrunners between the Bahamas and Florida’s east coast. The seventy-mile gap between the two countries is small, but not easy to navigate. The Gulf Stream can produce strong winds and high seas at any time of the year. Fifty years later, pot haulers and cocaine cowboys would use the same route. Courtesy University of South Florida.
The principal source of all the liquor was Grand Bahama Island, sixty miles from Palm Beach. In 1921 the Grand Bahama town of West End boasted nine liquor warehouses, and the government was reaping an excise tax of six dollars per case. In the harbor, forty or fifty speedboats waited for good weather to make their next dash to Florida. A small fleet of aircraft also waited at West End to make their deliveries.
In 1917, before Prohibition began, the islands imported about 50,000 quarts of liquor. In 1923, the Bahamas imported 10 million quarts and received revenues of more than £1 million. The Bahamian excise tax was plowed back into the island chain for roads, schools, water supplies and other civic improvements. Prohibition was the biggest boon the Bahamas had ever seen. The islands became, for a time, the major source of booze for the eastern seaboard.
East of Miami lies Bimini, another liquor supply point, except here the booze was held on barges with living and sleeping quarters for guards. Another fleet of speedboats, often built in Miami and powered with army-surplus Liberty airplane engines, waited to make the two-hour crossing. The U.S. Coast Guard had nothing fast enough to catch them.
Florida’s west coast participated in the booze bonanza too. “For 16 years scores of ‘black ships’ operated off the coast of Tampa Bay bringing in unlawful liquor,” wrote Frank Alduino in the Journal of the Tampa Historical Society in November 1990. “Skillful sea captains, financed by both legitimate business concerns and criminal organizations, risked possible arrest and the impounding of their vessels for high profit yields. The main source of Tampa’s liquor supply came from Cuba and especially the Bahamas.”
Waiting ashore was “the key man,” sometimes a local businessman and sometimes a gangster. He recruited local boaters to bring the booze ashore and with friends and associates loaded the contraband into cars and trucks. “One former Tampa bootlegger recalled that in order to avoid suspicion, he and his cohorts borrowed trucks belonging to a local merchant. Bootleggers were well paid. The ‘Key Man’ usually received a dollar a case for his services, while his associates were given about $25 a night,” Alduino wrote.
James Carter wrote in the January 1969 Florida Historical Quarterly, “The citizenry of the state consumed its fair share of the liquid, but most of it was destined for northern cities. Often it was camouflaged as fish, citrus fruit, or vegetables. Such traffic was difficult to suppress; it was impossible to search every car and truck on the highways.”
In addition, like their brethren across the nation, Floridians set up their own stills but with a key advantage. Sugar cane grows well in south Florida, and sugar is an essential ingredient in moonshine.
“The sons of the plume hunters were moonshiners and rumrunners, including the old Chokoloskee preacher. The moonshine was made from locally grown sugarcane. The rum came from the Bahamas; it was wrapped in burlap packages called hams and transferred from offshore mother ships to the fishermen’s small boats, then brought inland for distribution,” Totch Brown recalled in his autobiography of growing up in Everglades City. Once the hams reached the railroad, they were repackaged in tomato crates and dispatched to points north. By the beginning of Prohibition in 1920, the railroad ran down the west coast of Florida all the way to Everglades City.
The hams were the creation of Captain William McCoy, one of the two iconic figures of Prohibition (Al Capone is the other). McCoy was a tall, handsome, teetotaling Miami sailor. He was born in upstate New York and came to Florida in 1898. By 1920 he and his brother ran a line of marginally profitable powerboats and coastal freighters. They sold their boats and bought a fishing schooner named Henry L. Marshall.
In February 1921, Bill McCoy left Jacksonville aboard his ninety-foot fishing boat and sailed to Nassau. There he loaded the boat with 1,500 cases of prime liquor. The booze was purchased by a merchant, who promised McCoy ten dollars per case if he could deliver. At West End, McCoy paused to reregister the boat to sail under the British merchant ensign. He left in a gale, bound for St. Catherine’s Sound, south of the Savannah River near the Florida–Georgia border.
The schooner arrived at night and was soon met by smaller boats. The Marshall was unloaded and soon McCoy was back in Nassau, $15,000 richer. He sold Marshall and bought something bigger, then bigger and then bigger still. Over the next four years, he would run 175,000 cases of illicit liquor and land a place in history.
His first contribution to rumrunning was devising how to repackage all those bottles. The booze came in wooden crates, which were awkward to stow and difficult to transship to smaller boats at sea. McCoy devised what was known as a ham or burlock. Straw was put at the bottom of a burlap bag and three bottles were set inside; two more bottles were added upside down; a sixth bottle was put on top, right side up. More straw was added and the bag was stitched shut. You could carry three times the number of bottles as “hams” as you could in wooden cases. This was a major boon to productivity and the bottles actually were safer in straw and burlap than in crates.
McCoy’s second innovation—at least he took credit for it—was the creation of “Rum Row” offshore of Manhattan. As long as the rumrunners stayed beyond the three-mile limit, they were immune from interference by the U.S. Coast Guard. The British registration was a further deterrent, as the U.S. government did not want to create an international incident on the high seas.
Off the coasts of New York, New Jersey and to a lesser extent San Diego, rows of mother ships would park outside the three-mile limit and wait for wholesale customers to tie up and shop. The mother ships would load up in Nassau or ports in Cuba. “In fact, the whole West Indies was dripping with booze, most of which was eventually smuggled into the United States,” wrote Asbury. As ships ran empty, they were replaced by ones with full cargoes.
The coast guard caught many of the smaller, slower boats circulating between Rum Row and the shore, but the speedboats were untouchable. In keeping with the times, there were shootouts, daring escapes and general excitement on the water as the coast guard and local police attempted interceptions.
Drinkers viewed the Rum Row ships with pleasure, thinking they were getting prime booze, but that wasn’t the case. Asbury estimates for every gallon aboard, ten gallons were produced by cutting the real product with industrial alcohol. An enterprise emerged to create fake bottles—with fake labels and even fake tax stamps—and fill them with strange and even noxious mixtures aboard the Rum Row ships.
A common question for any boat owner is, “How many will she sleep?” In the case of this Prohibition-era skipper, the question takes a different meaning. Transferring booze from Rum Row to shore was the task of any number of vessels, from rowboats to the sleek yacht seen in this cartoon “150 Cases” by John Conacher in Life magazine. Courtesy Library of Congress, Conacher Collection #87.
In this undated photograph, a young Al Capone leaves the Federal Building in Miami with his attorney Abe Teitelbaum. With his sunglasses, flashy tie, Havana cigar and straw boater, Capone looks every inch the wealthy tourist. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Capone was an organized crime pioneer in several respects. His early appreciation of Florida, for example, paved the way for Miami to become a “neutral ground” for organized crime. In Miami, crime bosses from all of America’s major cities could relax and enjoy themselves without fear of reprisal or retribution by rivals. One of the places they could relax was Big Al’s estate on Miami Beach. Courtesy Library of Congress.
But McCoy would have none of that. His business hallmark was fair dealing and led to the term “the real McCoy.” Bill’s booze wasn’t watered or re-labeled. It was what it proclaimed itself to be, and people started calling it “the real McCoy”—his third contribution to American history.
(Like many Prohibition stories, this “real McCoy” is open to debate. It is likely the term originated with Elijah McCoy, a Canadian who invented a self-lubricator for steam engines, both railroad and marine, in 1872. Railroad men began to ask if lubricators were “the real McCoy.” Without question, Bill McCoy also used the term for his uncut liquor.)
McCoy somehow managed to escape the coils of organized crime. While he would sell freely to the bootleggers, he never paid any protection money to them or favored one over another. In John Kobler’s Ardent Spirits, he quotes McCoy as saying, “Dealings of that sort would have killed the sport of the game for me.”
In 1923 McCoy was indicted by a federal grand jury, tried in 1925 and served nine months in Atlanta Federal Prison. Upon release, McCoy surveyed the market and decided he didn’t want to compete with the major crime syndicates that consolidated all the business. In addition, in 1924 the United States and Britain agreed that the coast guard could search British-registered vessels. So McCoy returned to Florida, began a successful real estate business (what else?) and died of a heart attack in 1948.
The big profits during Prohibition were not made by the smugglers, but by the shoreside organizations that handled the cutting, repackaging, distribution and eventual retail sale. There were hundreds of these organizations. Often they would cooperate, but sometimes conflicts were settled with .45-caliber solutions.
Each outfit was run as a business, with staffs for sales, marketing, bookkeeping, transport and management. But there was one difference: every one also had a political department to furnish bribes to an enormous number of public employees. City police and their chiefs, mayors and their aldermen, revenue agents, FBI agents, customs agents, state policemen and their officers, judges, prosecutors, coastguardsmen—everybody was on the take.
It was possible because despite the utmost efforts of the Temperance lobby, Prohibition was massively unpopular. Thus it was not seen as a crime to help provide a commodity the public desired. Or as the biggest, baddest bootlegger of all, Al Capone, said, “I make my money by supplying a popular demand. If I break the law, my customers are as guilty as I am. When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it’s hospitality.”
The impact of Prohibition on Florida was immense. Capone came to Miami from Chicago and bought property. He often returned on vacation. Top public officials became enmeshed in corruption. The public at large seemed to favor rum over the law.
What Eliot Ness was to Chicago, Colonel L.C. Nutt tried to be in Miami. Nutt came to town in 1922, heading an anti-smuggling task force of navy ships and aircraft, coast guard boats, undercover cops and federal prosecutors. After weeks of investigation, on March 20, 1922, Nutt sent eight squads on surprise raids that proved not very surprising. John Rothchild, in Up For Grabs, describes what happened:
The real surprise was that the Nutt forces nabbed anybody; they only managed to arrest 20 people. ‘Prohi Raids Prove Failure,’ the [Miami] Herald headline said. Those arrested were not overly concerned even then—the entire federal effort on land, sea and air resulted in six convictions. The New York Times reported that Col. Nutt retreated from Miami: ‘before he was laughed out of the state but not before the snickers were audible.’
The forces of law and order pressed ahead. In South Jacksonville, virtually the entire city administration—the mayor, the chief of police, the president of the city council, the city commissioners and the fire chief—was indicted by a federal grand jury for Prohibition-related activity.
In Fort Lauderdale, nineteen people, including the sheriff, the assistant chief of police and seventeen policemen and deputy sheriffs, were arrested on charges of conspiracy.
And in Tampa, one retired policeman told Alduino in an interview, “Bootleggers made no bones of their business, smiled when arrested, paid up immediately, and continued to defy authorities.”
Two small but important footnotes must be added to the rumrunner story. The smugglers used the new medium of radio in their enterprise, and the U.S. Coast Guard set up radio interception stations in New York City, San Francisco and Florida in 1927. The rumrunners were already aware radio broadcasts could be overheard, so they began using codes and cryptography. Elizabeth Friedman was hired as a code breaker. Although the code breakers went through many bureaucratic evolutions, she and the coast guard were the genesis of the National Security Agency (NSA or “no such agency”) that became the nation’s official multibillion-dollar home for eavesdroppers and code breakers.
The second addendum concerns the use of aircraft. The First World War jump-started the “world of flight” by training large numbers of pilots and producing large numbers of aircraft. Smugglers were among the first to make commercial use of the new transport. Across both the Florida Straits and the U.S.–Mexican borders, aerial smugglers contributed to the flow. It is another example of smuggler innovation—air freight.
The first Florida land boom was just beginning when the early rumrunners set sail. As John Rothchild so vividly describes, the two activities were soon linked.
National Prohibition was imposed at the beginning of the Florida boom. Miami was a mud town, and less than ten years connected it to the nation via Flagler’s train. With no industry to which the virtues of pluck and luck applied, the model for economics was real estate, and land had gone from $10 an acre to $10,000 an acre in a matter of months. The only substance besides land that offered a similar return was illegal liquor, which first sold for less than $10 a quart, and then rose to more than $100 a quart, diluted.
Aircraft were still a novelty during Prohibition. That did not prevent their use in smuggling. In this undated photograph we find Customs Officer W.B. Evans with an aircraft and automobile he seized as the driver and pilot were in the process of transferring six kegs of bootleg whiskey. Courtesy Library of Congress.
By modern standards, the illicit Miami booze trade was pedestrian, compared to what was to come sixty years later, when new mother ships and faster speedboats would again dominate headlines. The 1920s were a time of wild growth, as the first Florida land boom was fueled with money from the alcohol trade. The land boom wilted after a 1924 hurricane, and withered after another hurricane in 1928. When Prohibition ended in 1934, the land boom had already collapsed, as had the national economy and the public’s faith in its leaders.
As Asbury wrote, “It must be remembered, however, that the fourteen years from 1920 to 1934 were not only the era of unparalleled crime and corruption; they were also the era of the Big Lie. The drys lied to make prohibition look good; the wets lied to make it look bad; the government officials lied to make themselves look good and to frighten Congress into giving them more money to spend; and the politicians lied through force of habit.”
It would take another wave of smuggling to pick the Florida economy back up and propel it to new heights. And greater lies.