Golding’s squad, calling a press conference to make the announcement.The Prohibition Bureau dismissed a handful of the special agents from the service and reassigned the rest.Two weeks later, Yellowley named Jamie as the acting special agent in charge and told him to build an entirely new team.
***
Just a few years before, prohibitionists even in their worst nightmares wouldn’t have been able to conjure up the need for someone like George Golding—or even Alexander Jamie. At first the federal prohibition force was primarily a PR outfit. Veteran temperance activist Georgia Hopley, hired by what was then the Prohibition Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, spent the first two years of the dry era on the road, heralding the Eighteenth Amendment. * She loved the assignment. The stout, stern-faced woman, always in her signature birdcage dresses, found herself inspired bythe transformation she was seeing everywhere: sober faces, healthy faces. America on the rise.At one stop in 1922 a reporter asked her if more women were drinking today than ever before. Hopley snorted, but with a smile, as if a child had said something funny. “A certain type, perhaps,” she said. “But not the backbone of the nation.”
Hopley saw what she wanted to see.She loved to quote “the highest authority of the Nation,” President Warren G. Harding, a personal friend, on the glories of dry America: “In every community men and women have had an opportunity now to know what prohibition means. They know that debts are more promptly paid, families better fed and clothed, and more money finds its way into the savings banks. The liquor traffic was destructive of much that was most precious in American life. In another generation I believe that liquor will have disappeared not only from our politics but from our memories.”
The president, of course, did not for a minute believe his own words. White House staff, if not President Harding’s good friend Miss Hopley, had seen the great man casually drinking alcohol in the Oval Office on more than one occasion. But even such a sight could not possibly have swayed the dusty-dry sisters and brothers of the movement. It made sense in those early years that Georgia Hopley would serve as the public face of the dry force. The prohibition movement had been founded and largely driven by women—women who had seen husbands, brothers, and fathers destroyed by drink, their weekly paychecks washed away, their children gone hungry.In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the movement began to pick up momentum, the typical American adult knocked back ninety bottles of 80-proof liquor every year. The rise in the popularity of spirits, thanks in part to modern distilling innovations, had created a new class of drunks: addled, unrepentant, irredeemable. Something had to be done. Righteous members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Hopley’s predecessors, sought to change hearts and minds by gathering in front of saloons to pray and cry.
Yet even decades later, after years of the WCTU marching through the streets of major cities, of the Anti-Saloon League declaring (and proving) that its sole purpose was “administering political retribution” against politicians who opposed prohibition, few Americans seemed to believe a booze ban could ever actually happen. When the Volstead Act—the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement arm—went into effect in January 1920, a full year after the constitutional amendment was adopted, the new realitycaught many by surprise, emotionally if not intellectually. “The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse,” Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane wrote in his diary the day before the liquor ban officially took hold. True enough, the world was now skew-jee, but prohibitionists, despite their astounding legislative success, proved to be deadly wrong about what would occur next. Most activists believed that removing the
***
Just a few years before, prohibitionists even in their worst nightmares wouldn’t have been able to conjure up the need for someone like George Golding—or even Alexander Jamie. At first the federal prohibition force was primarily a PR outfit. Veteran temperance activist Georgia Hopley, hired by what was then the Prohibition Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, spent the first two years of the dry era on the road, heralding the Eighteenth Amendment. * She loved the assignment. The stout, stern-faced woman, always in her signature birdcage dresses, found herself inspired bythe transformation she was seeing everywhere: sober faces, healthy faces. America on the rise.At one stop in 1922 a reporter asked her if more women were drinking today than ever before. Hopley snorted, but with a smile, as if a child had said something funny. “A certain type, perhaps,” she said. “But not the backbone of the nation.”
Hopley saw what she wanted to see.She loved to quote “the highest authority of the Nation,” President Warren G. Harding, a personal friend, on the glories of dry America: “In every community men and women have had an opportunity now to know what prohibition means. They know that debts are more promptly paid, families better fed and clothed, and more money finds its way into the savings banks. The liquor traffic was destructive of much that was most precious in American life. In another generation I believe that liquor will have disappeared not only from our politics but from our memories.”
The president, of course, did not for a minute believe his own words. White House staff, if not President Harding’s good friend Miss Hopley, had seen the great man casually drinking alcohol in the Oval Office on more than one occasion. But even such a sight could not possibly have swayed the dusty-dry sisters and brothers of the movement. It made sense in those early years that Georgia Hopley would serve as the public face of the dry force. The prohibition movement had been founded and largely driven by women—women who had seen husbands, brothers, and fathers destroyed by drink, their weekly paychecks washed away, their children gone hungry.In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the movement began to pick up momentum, the typical American adult knocked back ninety bottles of 80-proof liquor every year. The rise in the popularity of spirits, thanks in part to modern distilling innovations, had created a new class of drunks: addled, unrepentant, irredeemable. Something had to be done. Righteous members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Hopley’s predecessors, sought to change hearts and minds by gathering in front of saloons to pray and cry.
Yet even decades later, after years of the WCTU marching through the streets of major cities, of the Anti-Saloon League declaring (and proving) that its sole purpose was “administering political retribution” against politicians who opposed prohibition, few Americans seemed to believe a booze ban could ever actually happen. When the Volstead Act—the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement arm—went into effect in January 1920, a full year after the constitutional amendment was adopted, the new realitycaught many by surprise, emotionally if not intellectually. “The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse,” Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane wrote in his diary the day before the liquor ban officially took hold. True enough, the world was now skew-jee, but prohibitionists, despite their astounding legislative success, proved to be deadly wrong about what would occur next. Most activists believed that removing the
Similar Books
Last Woman
Jacqueline Druga
The Rebel of Rhada
Robert Cham Gilman
Beyond Eighteen
Gretchen de la O
Beautiful Criminal
Shady Grace
Crime & Punishment
V.R. Dunlap
Professor Cline Revealed
J. M. La Rocca
One Handsome Devil
Robert Preece
Nightrunners 03 - Traitor's Moon
Lynn Flewelling
Love Inspired Historical June 2014 Bundle: Lone Star Heiress\The Lawman's Oklahoma Sweetheart\The Gentleman's Bride Search\Family on the Range
Jessica Deborah; Nelson Allie; Hale Winnie; Pleiter Griggs
