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Philip Spiess
PROHIBITION REVISITED: A Story of North College Hill and Elsewhere in Ohio
On national Prohibition: “Under the old local-option plan a community decided whether or not it would have liquor; under the new [plan] it decides whether or not it will have the law.” -- Samuel Hopkins Adams (1921).
Leading up to the national Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution (the 18th, ratified January 16, 1919, and going into effect January 16, 1920), Republican Ohio was the leader in the prohibition of alcoholic beverages movement, being the home of the Anti-Saloon League (founded at Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893), which gained more members and greater political power than even the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). It literally elected Senators and Representatives to the U. S. Congress for years throughout the “Roaring Twenties” – and, under the guidance of Wayne B. Wheeler, who took over the Ohio Anti-Saloon League’s legal office in 1898 and became its head in 1902, effectively controlled Congressional voting on Prohibition (“Vote Dry”) issues. In 1909 the League opened a printing plant in Westerville, Ohio, twelve miles from Columbus on land donated by the town; there, eight presses ran constantly, producing more than forty tons of prohibitionist propaganda each month.
Cincinnati had, of course, been generally opposed to this movement, given the heavy beer-drinking German population, the numerous (particularly Jewish) whiskey distillers, the plentiful local “family-oriented” beer gardens, etc. After all, 80% of America’s bonded whiskey was stored in distillery warehouses within three hundred miles of Fountain Square – as “King of the Bootleggers” George Remus had duly recognized [see my WHHS Forum Post #3780 (12-30-2018)].
Ohio, which, through the Anti-Saloon League, had often led the country in “creative” applications of “dry” legal practice as Prohibition forced its way onto Americans, pursuing the so-called “wet” lawbreakers (of which there were many – most? – throughout the country), finally achieved a first in entrepreneurial legal legerdemain in Hamilton County. Under Ohio law, small towns and villages were authorized to operate “liquor courts” that were run by local officials (few of them judges); the law also directed that more than half the revenue from levied fines was to be paid out to the presiding official and the town. [Anyone see a problem here?] But this was not all: in Ohio there was a provision in the law that granted each “liquor court” jurisdiction – not just within its own village limits – but also anywhere in its county.
Thus the then tiny community of North College Hill, a Cincinnati suburb of 1,104 in the early 1920s (a populace about the size of my undergraduate college, Hanover College in Indiana), could commandeer legal authority over the heavily German, and therefore thoroughly “wet,” very large city of Cincinnati, which was its neighbor in the county. And so it did – Mayor A. R. Pugh personally led North College Hill’s raids into adjacent jurisdictions, netting more than $20,000 in revenue for his village and himself in a period of less than eight months. Mayor Pugh knew he could count on the cooperation of his town prosecutor, as well as the town’s judge – because he held both of those positions, too!
Meanwhile, the Prohibition director for the Ohio region, former congressman Joshua E. Russell, preached to the Sidney Baptist Church that “we are now engaged in a struggle with the forces of lawlessness in an effort to sustain the majesty of the law” – all the while that he and his top aide were in the process of diverting 22,416 gallons of alcohol from a distillery in Troy, Ohio. [Note: By 1927 the number of states still spending any money on Prohibition enforcement at all together in toto appropriated less than 15% for that purpose than the amount they allocated for the enforcement of fish and game laws. But then alcohol goes nicely with dinners of fish and game.]
Indeed, Ohio's "Native Son," Warren Harding, the first President to preside over Prohibition America, publicly supported it, but at home at the White House he hosted whiskey and poker parties for his cronies (and had open whiskey on the golf course). (Andrew Mellon, who, as Harding's Secretary of the Treasury was supposed to oversee Prohibition enforcement -- them "revenooers," you know -- was cool to these duties.) And our own homegrown boy, Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft, former President and later Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, once called by the Anti-Saloon League “the huge, beer-swilled Taft,” had, as President, vetoed the Webb-Kenyon Act, which restricted the interstate shipment of liquor. Not only did he declare Prohibition to be “unenforceable,” but he also believed it “would put on the shoulders of the Government the duty of sweeping the doorsteps of every home in the land. If national prohibition legislation is passed, local government would be destroyed.”
Moral lesson (if it is one): national Prohibition radically increased the amount of drinking in the United States, including that of women publicly; produced many local crime waves; inspired general corruption of local law enforcement, and indeed politics and politicians, who became serious hypocrites; brought about a disrespect for government institutions; and, because of really cheap – and therefore bad – homemade (or worse) alcoholic beverages, often with poisonous ingredients (from which a good number of persons died), thereby created a wealth of new cocktails, mixing new flavors with spurious gins, whiskies, etc., in order to cover over really inferior-tasting products. Ergo, Prohibition somersaulted the country from trying to be dry into being really wet – in other words, “Bottoms up!”
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