Authors: Reid Mitenbuler
In 1895, Russell traveled to Washington, D.C., and began establishing the groundwork for a national version of the ASL that mimicked the
Ohio strategy. He met with leaders of the nation’s many different disorganized temperance groups and convinced them to come under the ASL’s umbrella. After joining he told them the new plan and established state chapters to begin working on the new national strategy.
Alongside grassroots organizing, Prohibitionists were masters of propaganda.
The Headquarters for Murders
was the bloodcurdling title of one pamphlet, which claimed, “The saloon is the resort of the underworld [whose] inhabitants swarm like maggots.” Another showed a leathery demon holding a drunkard over the burning pits of hell. This set the tone for an estimated one hundred million pamphlets that were distributed by the ASL’s dutiful army in the early years of the twentieth century. Other pieces of propaganda targeted peoples’ emotions with arguments that were dressed up to appear rational and scientific. One pamphlet claimed that alcohol could lead to spontaneous self-combustion. Another said that each year 10 percent of the population died because of drinking, and that 80 percent of America’s criminals came out of saloons. Sources for these “facts” were rarely provided. One group, the Scientific Temperance Federation, forced dogs to drink alcohol for a publicity stunt. Then it published pictures of puppies born dead or deformed as a result in a pamphlet titled
Alcoholic Dogs Had More Feeble and Defective Puppies
. No distiller countered by publishing a book titled
The Holy Bible Repudiates the Murder of Cute, Innocent Puppies.
In addition to using jerry-rigged statistics, Prohibitionists also stirred the race pot. Before the Civil War, temperance was strongest among northeastern Republicans who had also supported abolition. This kept the movement divided politically from southern supporters. After the Civil War, however, temperance gained steam in the South as a way to keep alcohol out of the hands of blacks. The movement joined with the KKK, which for its part published handouts portraying blacks as drunken fighters and rapists. “No prohibition law . . . would ever have been passed if it had not been for the negro,” the
New York Tribune
wrote in 1909.
The crosshairs also found their way onto other minorities. Temperance was a way to control the Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish
immigrants who had been arriving since the Civil War. Rural Republican strongholds like Wheeler’s Ohio feared these immigrants landing in coastal cities, taking up all the jobs, and then voting for Democratic candidates who were backed by political machines. The new arrivals increasingly came from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe that many Americans believed were politically radical. One Boston pastor claimed that immigrant drinking was anchored in “the reactionary tendencies” of “the free-and-easy drinking customs of Europe.” No mind was paid to statistics indicating that immigrant Jews and Italians had lower rates of alcoholism than the native-born American population, or that the United States was now actually drinking less per capita than it had been before the immigrant boom.
Alongside arguments for Prohibition from a social perspective, policy supporters also claimed it was better for the economy. Industrialists of the era claimed that alcohol ruined the productivity of workers, increased the threat of injury in America’s increasingly industrial workspace, and lowered profits. The auto baron Henry Ford, a vocal anti-Semite, even singled out the success of the distiller Joseph Greenhut, the biggest distiller in the world, as evidence that the whiskey industry was part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine American morality and business. Jewish involvement in the trade, Ford claimed, now meant that whiskey “ceased to be whiskey” and had become “rot-gut.” Alongside Jews and whiskey, he also blamed America’s fall into degeneracy on Hollywood.
But Ford’s haranguing was another of Prohibition’s many contradictions. The auto baron was a prime driver of America’s transformation into the newer and faster version of itself that he apparently so despised. The workers he relied on to create his machines were banned from drinking both on and off the job to ensure their morality and, more important, their productivity. Ford paid handsomely but he demanded that workers in his company live “wholesomely,” ensuring their compliance through a spy ring he named the “sociological department” to seek out drinkers and union agitators. Other industrial titans of the era—Rockefeller, Carnegie, McCormick, Du Pont—lined up behind
Ford to support Prohibition policies they also believed would boost productivity.
The forces of Prohibition were a political crazy quilt: liberal reformers from the Northeast, suffragists, the KKK, and industrialists like Ford. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
In 1905, the ASL’s strategy started reaching a groundswell when it effortlessly ousted Ohio governor Myron Herrick, a Republican who had been elected just two years earlier with the largest plurality in the state’s history. Ohio started going dry. “Never again,” Wheeler crowed, “will any political party ignore the protests of the church and the moral forces of the state.” Prohibitionists in other states jolted awake at what had just happened in Ohio, largely the result of two grassroots organizers working on salaries of less than $2,000 per year.
Two years later, the ASL succeeded in pushing through another round of state Prohibition laws, which sparked yet another groundswell of increased support for broader Prohibition. After falling a few votes short of passing national Prohibition through a constitutional amendment, the ASL doubled down in 1916 and successfully moved more dry legislators into office. The constitutional amendment was reintroduced the following year and easily passed both chambers of Congress.
As that legislative victory unfolded, the United States prepared to enter World War I. This gave Wheeler another tool he could use: anti-German sentiment. German books were burned in Wisconsin and the playing of Beethoven was banned in Boston. America’s liquor trade, both in beer and whiskey, had been a foothold for many German immigrants, and Wheeler turned this against them. He declared that “the liquor traffic aids those forces in our country whose loyalty is called into question at this hour,” while another ASL pamphlet called German Americans involved in the booze trade “the chief hope of the Kaiser in his plot to enslave and Prussianize this land.” In 1917, dry advocates managed to push through the Food and Fuel Control Act, also known as the Lever Act, which banned the use of grain for distilling or brewing as a wartime emergency food conservation measure.
During the American Revolution, America’s switch to whiskey had been considered a patriotic move. Now, almost 150 years later, the opposite was true.
The writing was on the wall. Prohibition would eventually pass, and thirsty Americans began making plans to evade the impending legislation. In 1918, Sears, Roebuck & Co. started advertising home distilling equipment in its mail-order catalogs.
After the amendment to ban alcohol was passed by Congress, it moved to the states. Thirty-three had already voted themselves dry under Wheeler’s local-option strategy, and had seven years to convince a total of thirty-six to agree. The wets continued not to fight, perhaps from disbelief that states would actually tinker with the U.S. Constitution. Or as historian George Ade wrote, “The non-drinkers had been organizing for fifty years, and the drinkers had no organization whatever. They had been too busy drinking.” In less than a year, thirty-six states signed (forty-six states eventually did so, with only Connecticut and Rhode Island declining).
Congress quickly passed the Volstead Act. On January 16, 1920, it went into effect, decreeing that any American involved in the production, sale, or transfer of alcoholic beverages would go to jail and have his or her property confiscated. It was the end of bourbon production in America, and it was captured perfectly by one story that circulated around Lexington, Kentucky, after the law’s passage. Town lore claimed that one soldier returning home from World War I could only stare fretfully at the “Born with the Republic” slogan emblazoned across the shuttered James E. Pepper distillery as he passed into the city. Turning to his companions on the train he sighed, “Born with the Republic, died with democracy.”
• • •
Henry Ford may have hated liquor, but it helped make his fortune. After the Volstead Act passed, bootleggers selling moonshine needed fast cars to outrun the police. Ford’s cars were their favorites, and when his
company upgraded from the Model T to the Model A in 1927, bootleggers clamored for the zippier version, leaving Prohibition agents wondering whose side Ford was really on.
The engineering of Ford’s cars was superior, making it easy for tinkering mechanics to add upgrades. The cars’ exteriors were deceptively plain, the engines inside anything but. Gear ratios were altered and extra batteries added so the entire power of the engine would go to the driveshaft and not be wasted on the generator. Extra carburetors were lined up on the engine head, delivering more gasoline when speeds zoomed over 100 miles per hour. Expanded cylinders fit larger pistons so the cars wouldn’t pant so hard when the extra fire was fed into their bellies. Headlights were rigged to turn with the wheels, making it easier to see at night as drivers whipped around curves. The upgrades were so effective that police had to use cars confiscated from bootleggers to even chase them. It was an arms race, and the constant demand for increased speed and durability led to one of the automotive industry’s most fertile periods of innovation.
Some mechanics simply resorted to guise and guile, transforming hearses into whiskey haulers because they assumed the police would be less likely to stop a funeral procession. The best mechanics of the era, however, put all their efforts into speed. Red Vogt, who would go on to become a legendary NASCAR mechanic during the sport’s early years, spent his days ripping up engines, tweaking stock parts, adding hot-rod accessories ordered from catalogs, and machining other pieces of gear he invented himself. He kept a secret workshop behind a false wall of his Atlanta garage where he worked on cars for the bootleggers Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, who would also go on to become early racing stars. Bootlegging in souped-up cars thrived in the decades after Repeal, and some drivers had double careers—Seay didn’t quit until he was shot dead by his cousin in 1941 after a dispute about their sugar supply.
The liquor splashing around inside the cars was responsible for giving NASCAR’s first generation its keen driving skills. Two hundred gallons of sloshing moonshine does mysterious and deadly things to the physics of a car that’s hurtling down dirt roads and slicing through
hairpin turns. Unstable and leaky small kegs were quickly abandoned for the wide-mouth Ball and Mason jars that soon became ubiquitous for moonshining. They didn’t leak and could be packed more easily. One-gallon rectangular tin cans were also popular because they could be filled at an angle to eliminate what drivers called the “gurgle,” meaning the slippery air bubble that allowed the liquid’s weight to shift and alter the car’s center of gravity. The gurgle could push a driver off the road while he was hauling tons of flammable liquid.
Driver Junior Johnson—who did jail time for bootlegging, and many years later was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan—claimed that driving with moonshine practically gave him a master’s degree in racing before he ever even hit the track. “I had did all them spinning deals sideways and stuff like that. It just made my job so much easier,” he later told one reporter.
Eventually, bootleggers wanted to show off their skills and make a little money by betting on their abilities against other drivers. Makeshift racetracks were carved out of deserted pastures and the South found a new hobby, led by a freckled and bucktoothed cavalry of men with names like Red, Buck, and Fireball. Slowly, the crowds grew and a few gifted drivers became celebrities. By the 1940s, a man named Bill France—whom older racing fans might know from his megaphone-amplified voice during races—realized the sport’s commercial possibilities. He became NASCAR’s first president and eventually bought out the league’s other stockholders to become its owner—the entire league is still family-owned. France saw a workingman’s sport with “distinct possibilities for Sunday shows. . . . We don’t know how big it can be if it’s handled properly,” he once said.
The sport had huge potential, but France’s biggest obstacle was NASCAR’s moonshine-drenched past. It stood in the way of the sort of scrubbed-clean family image he coveted. For instance, a driver named Buck Baker once poured booze into a douche bag rigged with a drinking tube so he could drink
while racing.
Tim Flock once won the 1953 Grand National with a rhesus monkey dressed up in a racing suit riding next to him in the passenger seat (the monkey was retired after it
ferociously attacked Flock’s head during a pit stop at a later race). Curtis Turner was enough of a superstar that he could afford his own airplane, which he once landed on a residential street in Easley, South Carolina, so he could pick up a bottle of whiskey from a friend’s house. When he took off again, he hedge-hopped a row of parked cars and took out a telephone pole while a police officer watched. (He died in a plane crash years later.) As France worked to clean up the sport’s misfit image, drivers and mechanics were blackballed if they drew too much attention to the bootlegging heritage. France “transformed an unruly hobby into a monopoly, then rewrote the past,” according to NASCAR historian Neal Thompson.
Today, NASCAR has over eighty million fans and is a multibillion
-
dollar industry that is followed by Americans of all stripes. The first racers were farm kids without any other options for how to spend their weekends—they souped up regular production (stock) cars that anybody could buy and raced them. Today, however, the cars have become so sophisticated that you need millions of dollars before even thinking about starting a team. In 2006, NASCAR president Mike Helton told reporters that the “redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence.” An outcry from offended fans caused him to backpedal, saying NASCAR “was proud of where we came from.” The
Washington Post
later commented that the sport appeared to be “shedding its past as if it were an embarrassing family secret.”