Prohibition in Portland and Oregon
History 469
Washington State University—Vancouver
Vancouver, Washington
by Ryan
LaMar
4 May 2005
Front cover cartoon: The Oregonian (Portland),
9
December 1928.
United States prohibition history has within it many
facets continually revisited by historians and social scientists. Two of the most common themes investigated
are social impact and crime, and the one historical text most referenced by
other social and historical studies, Herbert Asbury’s The Great Illusion: An Informal History of
Prohibition, investigates both. Asbury’s
book provides background information into the origins of the temperance and
prohibition movements through the “dry years” of national prohibition and the factors
that led to its repeal, and it investigates the corruption and controversies of
the era. It serves as an excellent survey
of America’s failed experiment, and because most scholarly
texts reference this source, it suffices as the master text of the period. Geoffrey Perrett’s American in the Twenties: A
History is another informative historical reference that places prohibition
in perspective with the political and social climate of the 1920s. With one chapter specifically devoted to
prohibition, it also serves as a brief overview.
There are several references that narrow the topic
down to the Pacific Northwest region. The
definitive text of the area is Norman H. Clark’s The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington. Although it focuses on the state of Washington, it does so because Seattle was the bootlegging capital of the Pacific Northwest. Where applicable,
it does branch out into Washington’s neighbors, giving relevant histories that tie British Columbia, Oregon, and Idaho to Washington’s history. This
is a good start in understanding how differently the west coast experienced
national prohibition, as opposed to the east coast.
Several sources narrow prohibition to Oregon and Portland, specifically, but none serve as a definitive
history of Oregon like Clark’s text does
for Washington. Jewel Lansing’s Portland: People,
Politics, and Power, 1851-2001 and
E. Kimbark MacColl’s The Growth of a
City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1915 to 1950 both offer a
survey of Portland history with references to the state as a whole, but they cover
very little prohibition history. Three
references are available that do. John
Edwards Caswell’s master’s thesis, “The Prohibition Movement in Oregon to the Adoption of Statewide Prohibition in 1914”
reveals the origination of prohibition and temperance in the state. The other two references specifically cover Portland and provide a sizeable amount of information
regarding law enforcement activities.
Kenneth D. Rose’s “The Labbe Affair and Prohibition Enforcement in
Portland” provides insight into Portland’s troubled history in enforcing
prohibition, and Doug Reed’s “The Violation of Prohibition Laws in the Pacific
Northwest: A study in Organized Crime, Enforcement, and Political Corruption”
adds information not included in Rose’s thesis, in addition to tying Portland
to the rest of the Pacific Northwest.
Rose’s thesis is the most informative reference
covering law enforcement in Portland
during the prohibition years, but he narrowly focuses on illegal search
warrants. Other elements of prohibition
enforcement in Portland and Oregon are inadequately covered or not covered at
all, such as comparisons to the rest of nation to give the city and state’s
history a perspective to the nation as a whole, criminal methods for violating
the laws, corruptions of the laws other than illegal search warrants, and
Portland’s unfairness in applying the laws based on socioeconomic and native
status. In this thesis, these topics are
covered.
Oregon and its most populous city, Portland, are historically touted as one of prohibition’s few
success stories. This, however, is not
entirely true. Though Portland had less
prohibition-related arrests and court cases per capita than most of the rest of
the nation, these numbers came not from fewer law violations, but from a lack
of aggressive enforcement. This was due
to two factors: a shortage of appropriate funds and equipment to combat incessant
prohibition violations, and an absence of integrity in enforcing these laws. Politicians, law enforcement authorities, and
social elites placed themselves above prohibition while the laws were
discriminately enforced against the rest of the populace, especially immigrants
and the working class—the very people that frequented the saloons that spawned
the temperance and prohibition movement to begin with.
As
Geoffrey Perrett aptly put it, prohibition came out of the saloon, which itself
came out of the frontier. As the railroad
industry developed the frontier, saloons followed in the path of the rails. In many booming towns, there existed blocks
where saloons outnumbered all other businesses combined. This
resulted in a growing concern for the physical and spiritual health of those
who frequented the saloon and their families.
As
early as 1785, with the publishing of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s essay critical of the
physiological effects of alcohol, medical professionals began to shy away from
prescribing alcohol as a medicine. By 1915, solid scientific evidence that proved
the malignant effects of alcohol was widely spread—alcohol is a depressant, it
constricts blood vessels (and thus, does not warm the body despite a feeling of
warmth), it impairs mental and physiological faculties, lowers resistance to
disease, and it is harmful to the kidneys and liver. Health officials also discovered that
intoxicated men were more likely to frequent prostitutes and contract and
spread venereal diseases. As
a result of these findings, neurologists and psychologists classified alcohol
as a poison. Realizing the medical malignancy of alcohol,
the American Medical Association, in 1918, declared its opposition to alcohol
consumption and made it known that it would “welcome national prohibition.”
To the
lay community, founders of the temperance movement, medical testimony was just
one more of a litany of reasons why mankind needed to be saved from “demon
rum.” Employers realized that alcohol
made workers inefficient and dangerous, and union
leaders noticed that workers would “escape” through alcohol instead of
improving their living conditions through collective organizing. These medical and social factors led Justin
Edwards of the American Temperance Society to make temperance a religious
movement, and by the 1830s, he gained the uniform support of the Protestant
churches.
With a united religious and secular front, the
temperance movement grew quickly in Oregon. While still
a territory in 1844, the legislature passed a law forbidding the sale of “ardent
sprits.” Even though Oregon repealed the law two years later, it did not deter
the temperance movement in the state. By
1873, a State Temperance Union formed to, once again, make legislative gains,
while praying women concentrated on the social arena by marching against
saloons in Portland. It was common not only to see women loitering
outside saloons, praying for patrons’ souls, but also women inside observing the patrons and taking
notes on their drinking habits and behaviors.
Almost forty years later, in 1912, Oregon enfranchised its women. It
was these newly enfranchised voters that played a pivotal role in the
temperance movement during the progressive era.
Only two years after being enfranchised, and only four years after voters
narrowly voted down a state prohibition referendum, women
overwhelmingly supported a state prohibition ballot measure, voting three to
one in favor—the
highest ratio of twenty-five ballot measures, including abolition of the death
penalty and the establishment of an eight-hour workday.
The 1914 Oregon prohibition law was not a “bone-dry” law. It focused more on the suppliers of alcohol,
such as distilleries, wineries, breweries, and saloons,
and the law allowed for home consumption and even small amounts of liquor importation. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and
the Anti-Saloon League deemed this law to be too lenient, and they made
additional efforts to push Oregon
towards the bone-dry column. In 1915, a
bone-dry referendum came up for vote, and it narrowly passed, fifty-one to
forty-nine,
with women voting in favor two to one
and Multnomah
County soundly rejecting the measure. On January 1, 1916, Oregon established itself as one of the nation’s
prohibition pioneers when the state officially went bone-dry. Portland’s Chief of Police, John Clark, realizing the profoundness
of the law, said, “While prohibition has a tendency to decrease certain types
of crime, we now have this law to enforce, which requires careful attention on
the part of police officers.”
Though Oregon was bone-dry, its neighbors were not. Opportunism through interstate trade by wet-state
entrepreneurs and Oregon’s dry customers challenged the feasibility and
constitutionality of the state’s law until the Supreme Court intervened. On January 8, 1917, the Court ruled that non-importation laws were
constitutionally valid under Congress’ Web-Kenyon Act of 1913, which granted
states interstate commerce police powers. Congress further protected dry states’
interests with an amendment to the Post Office Appropriations Bill of 1917,
forbidding interstate commerce of alcohol into dry states. At this point, prohibition officially became
national business, and with the outbreak of World War I, the national
government took an active role with its own prohibition legislation.
To conserve critical resources during the war,
Congress passed the Lever Act which prohibited the use of grain for brewing and
distilling,
and it later topped this with the Wartime Prohibition Act of 1918, prohibiting
the brewing of wine and beer on top of a previous prohibition act that forbidding
the brewing of spirits. With prohibition already enforced at the
national level as a wartime emergency and by thirty-three states out of their
own volition, the Eighteenth Amendment had little difficulty being officially
ratified on January 16, 1919.
One year after ratification, the Eighteenth Amendment
became national law. For bone-dry states
like Oregon, this law did not result in any significant social,
political, or economic changes to the status quo. In 1916, Oregon’s first year bone-dry, Portland Municipal Judge Arthur
Langguth exclaimed,
There has been a very marked decrease in the number
of arrests made by the police in the number of drunks; there is less thieving in the city; a remarkable decrease in the arrests
for prostitution, and the number of arrests made for violation for traffic
ordinances is far below what it was a year ago.
The cases of arrests for driving an automobile while drunk,
are very rare as compared with the number in former years… On the whole, the
moral conditions and conditions generally in the matter of violations of city
ordinances and state laws, are very much to be preferred as against conditions
as they were prior to the closing of saloons.
Police
and municipal records showed astounding decreases in crime the first year of Oregon’s state-imposed prohibition. Drunkenness arrests in Oregon in 1916 were 11,719, down from 20,417 the year
before—a decrease of 42.6 percent. Portland fared even better: from January 1st to September 1st
in 1915, there were 6,498 drunkenness arrests, and the same period of time the
following year produced 1,802 drunkenness arrests—a decrease of 72.3 percent. Judge Langguth
claimed there was a 50 percent decrease in all court cases since Oregon went bone-dry. These changes came partially from the mass
exodus of “underworld characters,” according to Portland Police Lieutenant
Harms, who reported that in the first year “25 notorious characters had left
town, and more are going all the time.” A 1916 survey of 180 former saloon keepers in
Portland showed that dozens of them moved out of the state to
stay in the business. With such impressive numbers, it was no
wonder that Mayor H.R. Albee confidently boasted that “social evil” “cannot
flourish without the assistance of liquor.” Prohibition in Portland and the rest of the state was off to a good start.
When
the nation attempted to follow suit, it ran into some problems early on. The vagueness in the Eighteenth Amendment’s
language sparked two controversies: debate over what is an “intoxicating”
liquor, and if the prohibition of the sale of such liquors equated to a
prohibition against the purchase of the same.
The Volstead Act answered the first issue. Any beverage with an alcohol
content greater than 0.5 percent by volume was defined as “intoxicating” under
Congress’s enforcement statute. However,
many legislators considered this to be too extreme. They felt a 3.2 percent limit was more
reasonable, and so as to achieve a compromise, the Volstead Act authorized the
personal production of consumable alcohol for the home without the 0.5 percent
alcohol limit—but still left room for limiting alcohol abuse by allowing juries
to decide on a case-by-case basis if a homemade beverage was intoxicating or
not.
The
logical tie that illicit sales of alcohol, by default, made purchases of the
same unlawful was denied in the Volstead Act. In the hopes of making enforcement against
the suppliers easier, the act allowed for the purchase of alcohol so as to
induce buyers to give testimony against the suppliers caught in the act of
selling. This clause was challenged in the Supreme
Court in 1930, in the case of U.S. v.
James E. Farrar, but the Court upheld it as lawful.
The
Volstead Act made it clear that the intent of the 18th Amendment was not to
prohibit the consumption of alcohol, but merely to curb consumption excesses by
eradicating the saloon and the rest of the liquor industry. The national intent was much in the vein of Oregon’s intent in its own law in 1916. Like Oregon’s law, the Volstead Act allowed for the production
of alcohol for non-intoxicating purposes, such as for medicine, religious
purposes, and general industrial usage. And, not surprisingly, these loopholes led to
the same abuses on the national level that Oregon had started to experience
shortly after enacting its own laws in 1916.
It did
not take long for alcohol to skyrocket as one of the top prescription medicines
in the nation. In 1921, doctors
prescribed 8 million gallons of alcohol—a 1,000 percent increase from
pre-prohibition numbers. In 1916, Portland saw a similar increase: drug stores went from
selling 334 prescription bottles of ethyl alcohol in January to 4,740 bottles
in September,
with one drug store leading the pack with a 1,040 percent increase in sales
from fifty-four bottles to 1,102 bottles in the same period of time. Not all of these prescriptions were
legitimate. Many doctors’ orders were
forged or obtained through bribery. An Oregon newspaper deduced that the state’s drunkenness
arrests would have been even less during its first
year of prohibition if not for drug store alcohol sales.
The legal production of wine added to this mess. More wineries existed than were needed to
make legal, sacramental wine
or to produce vinegar. Many of these institutions could not have
stayed profitable if not for illegal sales on the side, and this was especially
the case with breweries. Only 164 of the
1,392 pre-prohibition breweries in the nation were still in business after the
nation repealed prohibition. Larger breweries stayed afloat by making
“near beer,”
a process by which real beer is made and the alcohol is extracted until there
is only 0.5 percent or less left. They then destroyed the extracted alcohol or
sold it for industrial or medicinal use, though, often a brewery would sell the
alcohol on the side along with the near beer so that drinkers could re-insert
the alcohol and make what was known as “needled beer.”
Because lackluster sales limited the near beer
market, breweries branched out into other ventures. Anheuser-Busch brewed a variety of
non-alcoholic drinks called Bevo, Kicko, Buschtee, and Cafo. Likewise, Portland’s Weinhard’s Brewery created its own non-alcoholic
beverages: a “beery” drink called Luxo, a raspberry drink named R-Porter,
and two nectar drinks—Golden Nectar and Amber Nectar. Weinhard’s Brewery further branched out by
acquiring soda contracts for bottling and supplies. Though Portland Mayor H.R. Albee claimed that
the Weinhard’s Brewery was “running at top notch” having retrofitted the
brewery for non-alcoholic beverage production,
the profit margin was not enough.
Weinhard’s took advantage of the fact that the Volstead Act did not
forbid the sale of alcoholic beverage raw ingredients by selling fermentable
syrups. Anheuser-Busch acted less discreetly—the St. Louis brewery sold Budweiser Barley Malt Syrup and
Budweiser yeast. Grocery stores, hardware outlets, and
pharmacies in Portland and throughout the nation also exploited the
Volstead Act loophole by selling raw ingredients and the tools necessary to
make alcohol in the home.
Homebrewing was the most common and cheapest method
of acquiring alcohol. It also proved to
be a bane to the Portland police department.
The Oregonian editorialized
that because of homebrewing, “prohibition enforcement stops short of
impracticable and impossible.” Fourth Amendment privacy rights and the
lawful production of personal consumption quantities of alcohol under the
Volstead Act made it easy to subvert prohibition laws. Even if a patrolman could smell the aroma of
mash brewing, it was not enough cause for a search warrant.
Oregon Governor Walter Pierce hoped to reduce such
limitations to police powers as he called for aggressive enforcement of
prohibition laws. In an annual banquet
of the District Attorney’s Association of Oregon, he argued that “time has
modified the old adage that every man’s home is his castle and sanctuary,”
and he suggested that Oregonians should welcome prohibition agents to inspect
their homes at will. The federal prohibition director, J.A.
Linville, rebutted, saying that “a man’s home is his castle and we don’t
deviate from the constitution in that regard in any manner.” Portland Chief of Police Leon V. Jenkins
re-iterated the federal position, saying, “We have no right to invade [a man’s]
house without a search warrant. We have
to follow the law.”
Despite Chief Jenkins’ rhetoric favoring privacy
rights, Portland police and state prohibition agents, by their
actions, seemed to favor Governor Pierce’s stance for a more vigorous
enforcement of prohibition. The
Oregonian reported on March 25, 1925 that ninety-five illegal raids on homes had been
conducted since February. This was nothing new: illegal raids were a
hot topic in the Portland media for over a year already. On January 5, 1924, The Oregonian
reported that “evidence of wholesale and indiscriminate issuance of search
warrants by local courts came to light… when attaches of the district court
revealed the record of warrants issued to state prohibition agents.” Under oath to the court and without any concrete
evidence, agents obtained search warrants for fifteen homes they claimed were
hiding illicit liquor. However, after
conducting their searches, agents found alcohol in only two homes. Additionally, The Oregonian reported that agents made dubious claims for warrants
on fictitious persons at fictitious addresses, and the court freely granted the
warrants solely on the word of the agents.
One such address proved to be a vacant, snow-swept lot, and another, if
it had existed, would have been found “in the center of the Willamette river [sic].”
Part of the exuberance by authorities to raid homes
came as a result of the abuse of home privacy rights. Families often created alcohol in their own
homes to supplement their income, either as an independent small business or
under contract to larger bootleggers. Other families used their homes as storage
facilities. A year before media exposure
of the search-warrant debacles, Portland police raided the home of Walter E. Brown and found
108 cases of liquor valued at $13,000.
Additionally, speakeasies took advantage of home
privacy laws, masquerading themselves as legally-protected homes by outfitting
a back room with a bed, clothes, and other personal effects, including signs
that read, “home.” When a customer visited,
the proprietor would go in the back to his “home” where he stored the alcohol,
and then return with the liquor of choice and serve it at the bar. Though selling alcohol out in the open at the
bar created some risk for the patron and proprietor, this method still reduced
the overall risk as compared to a speakeasy without a “home.” If law enforcement authorities chanced upon a
prohibition violation in the bar, they still would have to obtain a search
warrant to enter the “home” area, leaving the proprietor enough time to remove
the evidence before agents could procure a search warrant.
Not surprisingly, many saloonkeepers retrofitted
their establishments to related businesses after prohibition. A survey of 180 former saloonkeepers revealed
that eighty-eight re-established their saloons as pool rooms, soda fountains,
and restaurants. As public businesses that served beverages to
their customers, it was easy for them to subvert prohibition laws. In fact, prohibition laws were so often
“frequently and flagrantly violated”
by these establishments that law enforcement authorities resorted to tougher
measures. At first, Portland Mayor George
Baker warned businesses that the city would revoke their licenses if they
continued to violate prohibition laws,
and when that did not deter violations, law enforcement resorted to
“padlocking”—closing down establishments under chain and lock for a year. Taking it up a notch, the Portland vice department formed a “‘sledgehammer squad’ for
the purpose of smashing known bootlegging places which could not be stopped by
ordinary methods.” Fifteen times, police raided a former saloon
retrofitted into a soda fountain before sending in the “sledgehammer
squad.” The squad left the place “a
complete wreck; bar turned over and demolished, secret hiding places ripped
open, barred doors battered down and all visible aids to the bootleggers
destroyed.”
While enforcement tactics like the “sledgehammer
squad” and padlocking establishments violating liquor laws seemed to effectively
control liquor supply in Portland,
in reality, they did not. Arrest dockets
and court records give a false indicator of prohibition successes in Portland. Comparisons
of different national surveys, regarding drunkenness arrests, show that Portland was not in tune with the troubles of the nation as a
whole. In 1917, before national
prohibition, law enforcement agencies in the nation registered approximately 170
arrests per ten thousand persons,
while Portland, in its second year of state prohibition, registered
forty-eight per ten thousand. In 1927, the nation was at almost
pre-prohibition numbers with 140 to 150 drunkenness arrests per ten thousand,
yet Portland remained stable with 101 per ten thousand—which was
roughly the same number per ten thousand it had throughout the 1920s. These numbers suggest that law enforcement in
the nation as a whole was losing ground on eradicating “the liquor problem” and
returning to pre-prohibition drunkenness arrest numbers, while Portland, though
it, too, had difficulties eliminating its liquor problem, seemed to have the
liquor issue under some amount of control.
Court
records also give the false indication of prohibition enforcement success in Portland in comparison to the nation. From 1922 to 1929, 51.7 percent to 66.2
percent of all criminal cases in the
nation involved violations of prohibition laws,
overwhelming the court system. Paling in comparison, a representative year
in Portland, 1920, shows that drunkenness and prohibition
violation cases made up 18.6 percent of all court cases in Multnomah County, and at its worst point from 1916 to 1929, Portland drunkenness and prohibition violation cases probably
never exceeded 30 percent of total court cases. Portland Municipal Judge Arthur Langguth claimed that although prohibition “greatly
increased the number of jury trials,”
it brought on a 50 percent reduction in all kinds of court cases.
Less arrests per capita and less court cases meant that Portland did not experience overcrowded prisons and
jails. By 1924, the federal prison
population had doubled,
and by 1930, more than a third of the space reserved for long-term prison
sentences were holding prohibition violators.
In fact, by 1931, more prisoners were serving long-term sentences for
prohibition violations than all other long-term sentences combined in 1921. Overcrowding was not a problem for Portland or the rest of the state, and as Portland arrest dockets show, the precincts always had room
to hold suspects caught by federal and state agents.
By the numbers, Portland law enforcement seemed to be doing well enforcing
prohibition laws. But, these numbers do
not reveal the whole scope of how problematic enforcement was. Portland’s arrest records and court cases include habitual
offenders. While states like Michigan doled out harsh sentences to prevent repeated
crimes, such as sentencing criminals to a life imprisonment with hard labor for
four felony convictions, Portland enabled crime by not enforcing state laws of harsher
punishments for repeat offenders
and only imposing light sentences and fines.
In 1923, liquor possession fines ranged from $5 to $100,
yet failure to give the right of way while driving a vehicle netted W.H. Penny
a $25 fine in the case of City of
Portland v. W.H. Penny. When liquor possession often netted a lesser
fine (and no jail sentence) than a traffic violation, it amounted to roughly
the equivalent of a slap on the wrist and did little to deter repeat
violations. Although court cases
involving selling or transporting illicit liquor in 1924 ranged from $150 to
$500, the profit margin for selling alcohol and the few and brief jail
sentences
made it a worthwhile risk for many bootleggers.
The Oregonian reported that the
“big profits of the business” attracted many violators, and they often were
back in business after paying fines or serving jail sentences.
Roy Olmstead was one such bootlegger who believed the
payoff made the risk worth it. Although
his famous bootleg empire mostly serviced the greater Seattle area, he likely was involved with importing alcohol
into Portland,
which was not very difficult. Despite the
fact that much of the liquor in Oregon was made by and for Oregonians,
those who sought high quality liquor found it fairly easy to get Canada’s best. With
markets from Vancouver, British
Columbia to San Diego, the
Pacific Coast
had its own small version of the Atlantic seaboard’s famous “Rum Row”—a
seemingly limitless line of boats along the coast that smuggled Canadian and Caribbean liquor into ports. Along the Oregon coast, bootleggers commonly purchased liquor from
rum-runners and Canadian suppliers anchored outside the three-mile limit, and
in turn they would make a remarkable profit as middlemen by selling it to
fishermen nearby. Also taking advantage of the three-mile
enforcement limit at sea, an Oregon entrepreneur made plans to create a floating saloon
out in the Pacific Ocean to service Oregonians desperate enough to sail out
for a drink.
Smuggling in liquor along the Oregon coast proved to be relative easy as the Coast Guard
focused more of its efforts and resources along the California coast, leaving Oregon’s coast virtually neglected. On the occasion the Coast Guard discovered a
bootlegger transporting liquor, the smaller, faster boats common along Rum Row
usually outpaced the Coast Guard’s slower vessels. Because of the Coast Guard’s ineffectiveness
controlling liquor smuggling, Portland received a steady supply of liquor from Astoria and nearby ports in Rocky Point, Columbia Beach,
Ross Island, and Sand Island,
or directly shipped into its own docks. Once in Portland, the inept Harbor Patrol, consisting of only one
harbormaster and three patrolmen,
did nothing to enforce prohibition laws.
In all of the city’s annual reports from 1916-1929, the Harbor Patrol
reported zero arrests for prohibition
violations.
Foreign vessels took advantage of this and federal commerce laws which allowed
them to dock in U.S. ports while carrying liquor as long as the liquor was not sold on U.S. soil. So often did foreign vessels subvert U.S. prohibition laws that in 1925, the U.S. asked Canada and Mexico, two of the main suppliers of illicit liquor in the
states, to withhold liquor cargo clearances unless export declarations were
submitted and reported to the U.S. Still, this
failed to slow liquor exports into the states since authorities usually received
declarations reports too late to intercept any contraband cargo.
Law enforcement had just as much trouble with liquor
smuggling via land transport. A sizeable
amount of Portland’s imported liquor came from Astoria in trucks
and from Canada on rail lines and trucks by way of Washington State. Vehicular transport became such an issue that
Portland Chief of Police Lee V. Jenkins claimed in 1921 that “the foot patrol
method” of law enforcement was “becoming obsolete.” Clever bootleggers insured their illegal
cargoes against seizure under their automobile policies until the state
attorney general made this practice unlawful. Still, it was hardly a loss to the typical smuggler
in Portland since law enforcement focused not on smuggling, but
on sales and possession.
Part of the reason law enforcement could not control
liquor smuggling into Portland
was the lack of adequate funds. This
would not seem the case with Oregon being one of eighteen states appropriating funds for
prohibition enforcement
and it consistently placing in the top ten in the nation for how much it
appropriated. Although these monies helped keep Portland from being “a Chicago, New York, or Detroit,” as Portland vice squad Lieutenant Floyd Marsh claimed, it
was not enough to eliminate the illicit liquor trade. Oregon routinely ran short of funds—in fiscal year 1924,
state agents used up the year’s budget, approximately $25,000, in nine months. National enforcement within the state was
even worse—Oregon received a disproportionately low amount of the $2
million set aside for all forty-eight states in 1920. Nine years later, federal budgeting for
Oregon was just as abysmal, with the 20th District, consisting of
Oregon, Washington, and Alaska receiving only $34,000 for a sixteen-month
period. An early federal prohibition director, James
Doran, claimed $300 million a year was necessary to properly enforce the
Volstead Act, yet all federal prohibition expenditures never even approached one-sixth
of that total at their height. Congress was reluctant to raise taxes high
enough to give prohibition laws the teeth they needed in order to be
effectively enforced.
Such budgeting shortages made appropriate enforcement
difficult. The federal Prohibition
Bureau never had any more 4,200 employees,
and only 1,520 of these were enforcement agents—roughly one federal agent per seventy
thousand people. In Oregon, the ratio was worse, with only eight federal agents
for 831,339 people, or roughly one per one hundred thousand. In addition to manpower shortages, lack of
equipment constrained field agents.
Because the Prohibition Bureau did not appropriate any aircraft, watercraft, or automobiles, agents had to borrow
these vehicles form local and state agencies. Making matters worse, the Prohibition Bureau
moved the 20th District headquarters from Portland to Seattle, leaving Portland as the only major city in the United States without a federal prohibition enforcement office. All of these factors contributed to Oregon ranking fortieth in the nation in illicit liquor
seizures with only forty-eight gallons per ten thousand persons, and ranking thirty-seventh
in the nation in seizing distilling apparatuses with only 5.2 pieces per ten
thousand persons. Despite Federal Prohibition Director J.A.
Linville’s claims that “comparison of the reports of the prohibition directors
of other states show that Oregon
is in the lead for enforcement of the prohibition law,” Oregon actually struggled to enforce prohibition laws.
This was also evident in Oregon’s largest city, Portland. Early on,
the Portland Police Department realized the need for additional manpower and
vehicles to combat flagrant prohibition violations. With only thirty-nine patrolmen specializing
in prohibition enforcement, Chief of Police Lee V. Jenkins formed and trained
special squads of local businessmen with their own cars and gave them police
power to assist in prohibition enforcement efforts. But, this additional help was not enough, not
only because the two to three hundred professional bootleggers in Portland outnumbered them, but
also because federal, state, and local law enforcement officers contributed to
the prohibition problem by violating the laws themselves.
Prohibition Bureau agents continually stole headlines
by causing countless scandals. Not only
had a severely inadequate budget destined the agency for failure from the start,
but so did making employment a part of the political patronage system. With an agent’s salary set at a paltry $1,680
to $2,000 a year,
it was easy for many agents to be drawn into accepting payoffs. In fact, because the lucrative nature of
payoffs made it possible to earn a year’s salary in a single day, many
sought political appointments to the bureau to cash in. Corruption was so rampant in the Prohibition
Bureau that there was a high turnover rate as agency leaders continually tried
to clean out the criminal elements plaguing it.
In its first year, the agency fired one thousand agents, attorneys, and
clerical workers,
and these high firing numbers continued until the repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment in 1933. A total of 1,587
field agents alone were fired for “just cause”—violations of their appointed
duties to enforce prohibition laws.
Just as much corruption plagued Portland’s police force.
Vice Squad Lieutenant Floyd Marsh admitted in his memoirs that as Portland operated as a central distribution point for
Canadian liquor and moonshine from the nearby woods, bootleggers and smugglers
paid $100,000 in protection money a month to protect their enterprises. Smaller sellers and bootleggers often
operated unmolested by offering free liquor to beat cops. Approximately one hundred
speakeasies and about as many beer and wine parlors in Portland thrived by paying off or supplying
liquor to politicians and police officers. Though not
everyone in City Hall or on the police force was corrupt, there were enough
crooked leaders to bring down the effectiveness of the whole system.
Lieutenant Marsh was on the mark when he said that
social elites got away subverting the laws while the ordinary citizens,
especially “ethnic” peoples, paid the price of law enforcement. Instead of focusing on the bootleggers and
smugglers, Portland police focused on the ethnic poor and the places they
patronized,
mostly in the North End—the “vice” district.
Rare was the case when law enforcement seized sizeable caches of liquor
or arrested main suppliers. The federal
prohibition director for Oregon,
Johnson S. Smith, claimed there was a “liquor conspiracy of big proportions” in
Portland when agents caught the former president of the Queen Bee Honey Company
with $10,000 worth of wine and Portland’s Municipal Court allowed him to be
tried hours after the arrest, leaving the prosecution no time to establish any
conspiratorial links. In another case, police raided Walter E.
Brown’s home and seized 108 cases of liquor valued at $13,000, in addition to
confiscating information about his customers—many of which the police reported
to be “prominent citizens.” Immediately after the raid, several of these
customers called the police headquarters in an attempt to “cajole or intimidate
police officials into dropping the case against Brown.” Portland’s social and civic elites had little interest in
enforcing the law against their own kind.
Part of this problem came from elite attitudes that
prohibition laws were designed for the good of the working classes and poor,
and that these laws did not apply to Portland’s upper crust. Confiscated liquor often “disappeared” during
or after a trial, either taken by the police force for personal use or given as
gifts to city officials. Lieutenant
Marsh found himself caught in the middle of these illegal activities, having
reluctantly complied to orders from his superiors numerous times to deliver
confiscated liquor to the city’s “big boys,” including the city commissioner. Although he was never caught, others were: state
courts convicted three Oregon
state agents in 1926 for selling confiscated liquor.
While Portland police abetted elite subversion of prohibition laws,
they enforced them on Portland’s
minorities and working class to maintain a façade of aggressive enforcement. Although 18 percent of Portland’s population was foreign-born,
foreigners made up 25 to 30 percent of all drunkenness and prohibition arrests. Around the time of national prohibition, the
Ku Klux Klan infiltrated Portland
and recruited 150 of the approximately 375 officers on the police force. Police Chief Lee V. Jenkins claimed that
prohibition crime came from the “inability of America to assimilate and Americanize the huge horde of
immigrants that have come into the country.” The
Oregonian agreed—in an editorial it declared foreign prohibition violators
to be the “scum of Europe” and “a polygot rabble who have neither desire nor
intention to become American citizens,” and that they “had better be shipped
away to their own home ports like the cattle they are.” National prohibition director for Oregon,
J.A. Linville, singled out Russian immigrants, saying that “Bolshevik whisky,
as well as Bolshevik propaganda and soviet ideas, is being smuggled into
America” and that after three drinks of vodka, “the drinker is ready to fight
the police force, the bears at the city park, and a half dozen bob-cats thrown
in for good measure.” Not surprisingly, a survey of docket records
from January 3, 1920 to March 3, 1920, shows that “laborer” was the most common arrestee
occupation, making up fifty-eight of 144 total prohibition and drunkenness arrests—almost
six times the amount of arrests of the next highest occupation, which was
“housewife.” None of these arrests
included social elites, and only six arrests—4 percent of the total—involved
occupations that could be considered above working class, such as “landlord” and
“restaurant proprietor.”
Such discriminating enforcement contributed to the
decline in popular support for prohibition.
Oregon’s vote to go bone-dry in 1916 narrowly passed fifty-one to
forty-nine and over Portland’s resounding rejection of the measure,
proving that Oregonians and especially Portlanders
contested prohibition from the start. In
1921, Portland police registered only eighteen citizen complaints about
prohibition violations, and this number declined every year down to two complaints
in 1928—and zero the year before. With a population of approximately three
hundred thousand registering three thousand drunkenness arrests and 1,500
prohibition violation arrests every year, a “high” of eighteen citizen complaints
makes as much of a statement about Portland’s popular consensus of prohibition
laws as the arrests themselves. Violations
of home privacy rights eroded any support for prohibition laws. Based solely on an anonymous tip, Portland police raided John Doe Dingman’s
home three times in five months, and each time found nothing. Dingman voted for
prohibition because he “thought the country would be better off,” but after his
third raid, he displayed second thoughts:
If I can’t have a little privacy in my home, if my
women folks have to insulted and ordered around like convicts, if a gang of
strange men can come wandering through my house mussing things and making a
public spectacle out of me before my neighbors, if I must stand all these
things to have prohibition, then I am going to have to vote for whisky again.
Corruption and ineffectiveness of prohibition laws,
in addition to their lack of popularity, especially in Portland, were the key catalysts in Oregonians overwhelming
voting to repeal national and state prohibition in 1933. As early as 1921, W.J. Herwig of the Oregon
League said, “The greatest need in Oregon is to get the people to co-operate with the
officials. Where officers derelict their
duty, we hope to bring the pressure of public sentiment to bear upon such officials
and compel them to act.” The problem was that neither wanted to
cooperate—“public sentiment” lent little support for the laws, and officers and
agents freely acted “derelict” in their duties.
With all the subversion of the laws and the corruption
in enforcing them, it seems that nobody felt the law was intended to apply to
themselves. Portlanders of all classes
frequently violated the laws by patronizing bootleggers and smugglers, or by
engaging in those two enterprises themselves.
Law enforcement officers could only do so much to curb incessant violations
of the law, and where resources did not limit them, their own lack of integrity
did. Although Portland and the rest of Oregon registered less arrests and court
cases per capita than many other parts of the nation during prohibition, the data
showing who was arrested belie these accomplishments—Portland
maintained a façade of decreased prohibition violations by not strictly
enforcing the laws and by putting on an enforcement show by mostly applying the
laws to immigrants and the working class.
The fact remains that prohibition enforcement, and the decrease in crime
as a result, was a greater success in Portland and the whole state when compared to most of the
nation, but like in the rest of the nation, prohibition enforcement failed to
be effective. Had law enforcement
authorities in Portland and the rest of Oregon held themselves and the social elites amenable to
the laws, Portland and the rest of the state could have been the lone
success story of a failed chapter in U.S. history.
FINIS
APPENDIX
Portland Police and
Court Records
|
Year¹
|
Total
Arrests
|
Drunk
Arrests
|
Prohib.
Arrests
|
Prohibition
Complaints
|
Total Court
Cases
|
Drunk
Cases
|
Prohibition
Cases
|
|
1916
|
12,046
|
2,337
|
264
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
208
|
|
1917
|
9,932
|
1,259
|
405
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
1918
|
17,986
|
1,350
|
757
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
1919
|
17,026
|
1,720
|
832
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
1920
|
18,445
|
2,476
|
873
|
—
|
18,400
|
2,694
|
726
|
|
1921
|
30,409
|
2,904
|
967
|
18
|
—
|
—
|
934
|
|
1922
|
25,007
|
3,761
|
1,468
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
1,546
|
|
1923
|
21,217
|
3,099
|
1,602
|
15
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
1924
|
—
|
—
|
1,444
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
2,253
|
|
1925
|
23,580
|
2,816
|
1,400
|
8
|
—
|
—
|
1,544
|
|
1926
|
23,037
|
3,200
|
1,653
|
2
|
—
|
—
|
1680
|
|
1927
|
33,805
|
3,223
|
1,621
|
0
|
19,342
|
—
|
1639
|
|
1928
|
23,770
|
3,642
|
1,519
|
2
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
1929
|
39,336
|
—
|
1,741
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
¹ 1929
was the last year of comprehensive annual reports made by the mayor and city
agencies.
|
Portland Police
Records By Ethnicity
|
Year¹
|
Native Drunk Arrests
|
Foreigner Drunk
Arrests
|
Native Prohibition
Arrests
|
Foreigner
Prohibition Arrests
|
Total Percentage,
Native
|
Total Percentage,
Foreigner
|
|
1925
|
—
|
—
|
970
|
430
|
69.3%
|
30.7%
|
|
1926
|
—
|
—
|
1115
|
538
|
67.5%
|
32.5%
|
|
1927
|
2,403
|
820
|
1205
|
416
|
74.5%
|
25.5%
|
|
1928
|
2,734
|
908
|
1087
|
432
|
74.0%
|
26.0%
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
¹
1925-1928 were the only years the annual reports made by the mayor and city
agencies broke down arrest numbers in this pattern.
|
Works Cited
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___.
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___. “The Cost
of Prohibition and Your Income Tax.” Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1929.
Albee, H.R.
Memorandum. 27 September
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___. “Mayor’s
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___. “Mayor’s
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___. “Mayor’s
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“Mr. Churchill’s Compilation of Alcohol Sales by
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73. Oregon Historical Society.
Wessinger, Paul to George L. Baker, Mayor. 9 July 1917. City of Portland Municipal Archives.
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The Wrecking of the Eighteenth
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