Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America by Edward Behr Page A

hypocrite and a toper. The ASL’s refusal to enter into a political alliance with either party turned out tobe one of its key assets; it was well aware of the failure of the Prohibition party to make its mark on voters, even those highly sympathetic to the cause. One of the ASL’s pamphlets was its “Church in Action Against the Saloon,” a question-and-answer document modeled on the catechism and devised for the guidance of ASL instructors addressing schools and meetings. One of its questions was: “May the League, at any time, be identified with any one political party for the accomplishment of its purpose?” The answer was: “No. The League is under solemn promise not to form affiliations with any political party, nor to place in nomination a ticket of its own.”
    This crucial ideological plank was bitterly opposed by William Jennings Bryan, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, later President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, a fanatical dry — and, in his public utterances, an unspeakably boring, flatulent windbag, who early on in his political career had made the fatal mistake of arguing that the Democratic party should become the official dry party.
    Myron T. Herrick, governor of Ohio, was among the prominent politicians whose careers Wheeler destroyed virtually single-handedly. Herrick, the Republican governor of a staunchly Republican state, seemed unbeatable when he ran for reelection. But Wheeler first got the ASL to endorse the Democratic candidate, John M. Pattison, from Cincinnati, a strict churchman and dry. “We had a hard job making the people see that they were not giving up their religion when they voted Democratic,” Wheeler said later. 6 “That was especially true in the rural sections, where they always voted a straight Republican ticket. I used to tell them that Lincoln wasn’t running that year.” Pattison won. Herrick did, subsequently, reap his reward for lifelong service to the Republican party: he was appointed U.S. ambassador in Paris, and was on hand to greet Lindbergh after his historic flight across the Atlantic (1927). Prohibition was in full swing by this time, and Wheeler wondered what Herrick and Lindbergh, a staunch Prohibitionist, had had to say to each other in private.
    Soon, under Wheeler’s effective direction, Ohio became — long before Prohibition — one of the driest states in the Union. As he proudly noted in 1908, 57 of its counties had gone dry under County Local Option laws. Various other dry measures instituted since he had begun working full-time for the ASL affected most of the other counties as well, so that by 1908, 60 percent of Ohio’s population, and 85percent of its territory, was under “dry legislation,” though its large towns, especially Cincinnati, remained almost aggressively wet. The Ohio legislators, for all their “prohibition correctness,” were well aware of the revenues liquor brought into the state coffers. Saloon licenses, introduced in 1896, first cost $350 a year, then — in 1906 — $1,000. In 1908, there were 7,050 saloons in Ohio, and 690 more opened in 1911. The ASL’s position was that licensing saloons was immoral, but this challenge failed, and a licensing law gained a substantial majority. Wheeler’s rearguard action was to make life more difficult for saloon keepers by prohibiting saloon operations within 300 feet of a school-house, forbidding “loitering by minors” there, compelling Sunday closings, and denying licenses to noncitizens and those of insufficiently good “moral conduct.”
    Wheeler was helped, indirectly, by the blatant political immorality of the times. License commissioners in Ohio and elsewhere were known to take bribes and favor friendly candidates, and many were in league with the major breweries, which in most cases were the saloons’ real owners (they also maintained close relations with owners of the technically illegal speakeasies). In the course of his work, Wheeler — who